The Robert Bellah Reader 9780822388135

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The Robert Bellah Reader

THE

Robert Bellah READER

Edited by Robert N. Bellah and Steven M. Tipton

D U K E U N I V E RS I T Y P R E S S

Durham and London

2006

© 2006 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Times Roman with Univers display by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Contents

Preface

vii

Introduction

I

C O M PA R AT I V E A N D T H E O R E T I C A L 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

II

19

Religious Evolution 23 The Five Religions of Modern Italy 51 To Kill and Survive or to Die and Become 81 Stories as Arrows: The Religious Response to Modernity Max Weber and World-Denying Love 123 Durkheim and Ritual 150 Rousseau on Society and the Individual 181 The History of Habit 203

9 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

377 The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry 381 19 Class Wars and Culture Wars in the University Today 402

UNIVERSITY AND SOCIETY 18

107

221 Civil Religion in America 225 Religion and the Legitimation of the American Republic 246 The New Religious Consciousness and the Crisis of Modernity 265 The Kingdom of God in America: Language of Faith, Language of Nation, Language of Empire 285 Citizenship, Diversity, and the Search for the Common Good 303 Is There a Common American Culture? 319 Flaws in the Protestant Code: Theological Roots of American Individualism 333 The New American Empire 350 God and King 357

AMERICAN RELIGION 10

III

1

vi

Contents 20

Freedom, Coercion, and Authority 410 21 The True Scholar 421 22 Education for Justice and the Common Good 434

IV

451 On Being Catholic and American 457 Religious Pluralism and Religious Truth 474 Texts, Sacred and Profane 490 Epiphany: ‘‘Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit’’ 504 Pentecost: ‘‘Beginning in the End of Times’’ 510 All Souls Day: ‘‘The Living and the Dead in Communion’’ 515

S O C I O LO GY A N D T H E O LO GY 23 24 25 26 27 28

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah 523 Index

543

Preface

Although this Reader includes pieces that have appeared in various times and places, it has taken on a more coherent form than we had at first imagined. The introduction shows that understanding the problem of modernity in the context of the whole history of the human species is at the heart of Bellah’s scholarly preoccupations. Each section of the Reader spells out an aspect of this central concern. Part I puts modernity in theoretical and historical context, drawing from major figures in social science, historical and contemporary. Part II applies the insights of part I to the United States, in some respects the type case of modernity, in others the most atypical of modern societies. Part III attacks the modern assumption that the cognitive–evaluative divide is absolute, not arguing that the cognitive and evaluative are identical but that they overlap more than modernity usually admits. Part IV criticizes modernity’s faith–knowledge divide, usually affirmed even more fervently than the fact–value divide. Again this section does not argue for the identity of faith and knowledge but for a major overlap between them, an overlap obvious in all premodern societies and not missing, though denied, in modernity as well. In short, this Reader attempts to provide resources for thinking about many of our deepest social and cultural quandaries, quandaries that put modernity itself, with all its immense achievements as well as serious defects, at risk. Many of the chapters in this book were originally given as lectures on various occasions or were invited contributions to collective volumes. The kindness of those who arranged these occasions or edited these volumes is much appreciated. The four coauthors of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society read and responded to most of the chapters in the book, that is, those written in the last twenty-five years, and thereby significantly improved them. The most attentive readers of Bellah’s work throughout his lifetime have been his wife, Melanie Bellah, who has read everything he has written, and his friend, Eli Sagan, who has read most of it. Bellah’s work on this volume was supported in part by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Bellah wrote the introduction to the volume and Tipton drafted the section introductions, which Bellah revised. We wish to thank Reynolds Smith of Duke University Press for inviting this volume and seeing it through to publication. For their generous

viii

Preface

support of this work we are grateful to Emory University and its Candler School of Theology, to Dean Russell E. Richey of Candler, and to Virginia Shadron and Rosemary Hynes of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. We are indebted to Fred Kim for his timely help in preparing the manuscript, and to Matthew Bersagel-Braley for his care in proofreading and indexing this book.

Introduction

This book contains a selection from my work published over the last fifty years; at first glance it appears to be quite a heterogeneous collection, including a variety of subject matter and a variety of genres, including some essays whose genre is blurred.1 It is a collection that reflects my work and my life: my scholarship in sociological theory and in a variety of cultures and societies; my engagement, not only in the life of the university, but also in ethics, politics, and religion. To try to give in very condensed form the overall direction of my life in scholarship, which the pieces included here and those not included here in one way or another all exemplify, I can say that it is an effort to understand the meaning of modernity.2 I would argue that the emergence of sociology itself, at the end of the nineteenth century, was an effort to make sense of modernity, so that it is no accident that it was in the field of sociology that I found my professional identity. Although I began at Harvard as an undergraduate major in the Department of Social Relations with a concentration in social anthropology and took my doctoral degree, also at Harvard, in sociology and Far Eastern languages with an emphasis on Japan, it was the encounter with Talcott Parsons that had the greatest influence on my professional identity. It was fortunate for me that Talcott viewed sociology as including the world and its contents so that I never was taught that my discipline had tribal boundaries that it would be fearful to cross. Indeed, the Department of Social Relations, which I experienced as an undergraduate, a graduate student, and a professor, made a virtue of boundary crossing—it included social anthropology and clinical and social psychology as well as soci1 Steven Tipton and I, as coeditors, have decided to include only articles and chapters from edited books, so there are no excerpts from books authored or coauthored by me, almost all of which are still in print. Brackets set off footnotes, parts of footnotes, and revisions of footnotes that postdate the original publication of some pieces, and their style of documentation has been standardized to fit this volume. A bibliography of my work appears toward the end of the volume. 2 See my festschrift: Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, eds., Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). My epilogue to that book is in a different way also an effort to get at my deepest and most lasting concerns.

2

Introduction

ology—thus going against the trend toward ever greater specialization in the academy and perhaps thereby sealing its own ultimate fate.3 The modern society that I most needed to understand was my own, but for a long time I avoided doing so directly. Ambivalence toward the Southern California culture in which I grew up was part of what sent me to Harvard in the first place, as different and as far away in the continental United States as I could get, and it was ambivalence about America that made me study tribal cultures as an undergraduate,4 and East Asian civilization as a graduate student.5 It seems that I could make sense of the apparently chaotic society in which I lived only by taking triangulations from distant positions. Distance came not only from the study of dramatically different cultures, but also from theoretical abstraction, from immersion in the great minds who had founded my field and had thought most deeply about the nature of modernity. Here again I was fortunate to have had Talcott Parsons as a teacher. I soon learned that he was carrying on in his head a daily conversation with Max Weber and Emile Durkheim and that I needed to know their work if I was to participate in the enterprise. Since the 1960s Karl Marx has joined Durkheim and Weber as one of the three ‘‘classical’’ sociological theorists (though Marx never identified himself as a sociologist), but he was not an important figure for Parsons in the early 1950s when I was a graduate student. There was a third major theorist for Talcott, but it was Freud (whom I also studied intensely), not Marx.6 But as a political activist in my undergraduate years, the late 1940s, I had read a lot of Marx long before it was popular to do so. My interest in non-American, indeed non-Western, cultures took an3 The Department of Social Relations was founded in 1946, and one year later I declared my undergraduate major in it. In the years after I left Harvard for Berkeley in 1967, the department gradually collapsed, beginning with the withdrawal of sociology into its own department in 1970, then the departure of social anthropology, rejoining the Department of Anthropology soon after, although it was not until 1986 that the Department of Psychology and Social Relations became, simply, the Department of Psychology. 4 Bellah, Apache Kinship Systems (1952). This was my senior honors thesis. 5 Bellah, Tokugawa Religion (1957). This was my doctoral dissertation. 6 It is curious that sociology, taught in the department where university disturbances around the world have most frequently originated, and often viewed as a haven for radicals, should be the one field in the social sciences with a well-defined canon of what I believe can be called sacred texts. The canonical figures now are three, though the texts are many, and Ph.D. candidates, at least in the universities with which I am familiar, know or at least pretend to know them well.

Introduction 3

other turn when in 1955 I accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Islamic Studies at McGill University, at that time headed by Wilfred Cantwell Smith. For two years I immersed myself in Islamic history and religion in an institute where half of both faculty and students were Muslims, adding the study of Arabic to my previous study of Chinese and Japanese. I think it significant that my formal training was from the beginning in tribal cultures, East Asian civilization, and Islam. Aside from some exposure to the Western humanities as a Harvard undergraduate, disciplined study of ‘‘Western civilization’’ or even of American studies came late and was largely self-directed. (After the publication of ‘‘Civil Religion in America’’ I had to give myself a crash course in things American in order to answer the many questions that came my way.) If I brought Western presuppositions to the study of the non-West it was not because of lengthy study of Western or American culture, but because I brought the theoretical questions raised in the work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud, each of whom, with varying degrees of success, tried to transcend a purely Western understanding of human cultural development. But for me the West, and America in particular, were never the type cases against which all others were to be measured, but the problematic cases that could only be understood in the broadest comparative perspective. It was at McGill while I was a postdoctoral fellow in Islamic studies that I tried to bring all my interests together in a paper that turned out to be a first draft of what in 1964 was published as ‘‘Religious Evolution.’’ 7 But why religion and why evolution? I had grown up in the milieu of mainline Protestantism since childhood, but it was not until high school that my exposure to the Hebrew prophets and their concern with social justice made a significant impression on me, sufficient that my college Marxism seemed only a more contemporary version of themes already familiar. It has long been pointed out that Marxism is a version of biblical sacred history (Heilsgeschichte), with an idyllic Eden without private property preceding the ‘‘fall’’ into class society to be followed by an apocalyptic future, a new heaven and a new earth, ‘‘after the revolution.’’ If biblical Heilsgeschichte was mediated to Marx through Hegel’s historicism, so was Hegelian historicism the deep background of both Durkheim’s and Weber’s quasi-evolutionary framework. Both of them left apocalypticism behind, although at moments Weber’s dark view of modernity approached that of an apocalypse without salvation. If Marx believed that the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism, he still did not fully own up to 7 Bellah, ‘‘Religious Evolution’’ (1964), chapter 1 of this volume.

4

Introduction

the degree to which his whole project was a continuation of biblical religion by other means. Durkheim and Weber, on the other hand, while holding personal religious commitment at arm’s length, believed that religion was at the center of any understanding of human society. Thus when I wrote in The Broken Covenant that ‘‘religion is the key to culture,’’ 8 I was only summarizing what I had learned from the classical sociological tradition. And although I wrote about ‘‘civil religion’’ in that book, I argued there that the deep structure of American culture is Protestantism, and that the Protestant pattern of conversion and covenant, with all its secular permutations, including revolution and constitution, is the key to American culture. But from all my teachers, including especially Max Weber, I knew that Protestantism is itself situated in history and unintelligible outside it. Protestantism is a radical expression of themes already present in what Karl Jaspers called the axial age (the first millennium b.c.), when first Israel broke the presuppositions of archaic and tribal societies and then Christianity carried a version of Israel’s axial breakthrough to the ends of the earth. Parallel developments with parallel consequences occurred in ancient Greece, India, and China in the same period. Yet, again, the problematic idea of ‘‘breakthrough’’ requires a knowledge of what was broken through: tribal and then archaic religions and societies needed to be understood in their own terms, especially since, as I came to see, ‘‘nothing is ever lost,’’ and the whole of human cultural and religious history is still with us. So, while the abiding concern was the understanding of modernity, and most immediately, American modernity, from very early on I knew that modernity was a mere fragment of the whole, that the idea that what went before could be forgotten is a fallacy, and that only coming to terms with the whole would serve us in facing the present and the future. Thus the lifelong preoccupation with religious evolution. Although Parsons wrote only a few essays on religion, the sociology of religion was one of his favorite courses: I took it as an undergraduate and cotaught it with him for some years after I joined the Harvard faculty. Thus it was clear to me from the beginning that Parsons, the quintessential Weberian, was not a sociological ‘‘functionalist’’ who reduced everything to the functioning of ‘‘the social system.’’ For him ‘‘ideas,’’ in Weber’s sense, what we would now more readily call culture, were always partially independent variables in the understanding of society—they could never simply be read off from the social ‘‘base,’’ as Marxists and even the early Durkheim believed. Indeed the danger was to consider religion too radi8 Bellah, The Broken Covenant (1975), 162.

Introduction 5

cally independent from the rest of society, so that an ‘‘idealist’’ understanding would simply replace a ‘‘materialist’’ one. But, as any acquaintance with Weber beyond The Protestant Ethic (or even a close reading of the final paragraphs of that essay) would indicate, Weber was not replacing a materialist understanding with an idealist one, but developing a more complex understanding of society in which several dimensions would have to be taken seriously, and Parsons followed Weber in this regard. I cannot in this brief introduction attempt to replace the truncated and largely caricatured version of ‘‘Parsonianism,’’ that has become standard in the secondary literature, but I do want to indicate something of the complexity of his general theory of action because I internalized it at an early stage and it is expressed in all my work, though seldom referred to explicitly. Over the course of the years I was at Harvard and continuing after I went to Berkeley in 1967, Talcott moved from a primary concern with the social system to what he called a general theory of action. The action system is composed of four subsystems of which society is only one, the others being culture, personality, and the behavioral organism. The behavioral organism is the human body insofar as it is capable of interacting with the other subsystems, in effect insofar as it is capable of learning, that is, of such things as bodily skills, both utilitarian and expressive, gesture, and physical deportment. None of these four subsystems can be reduced to one of the others—they all have a degree of autonomy. On the other hand, they are not only interactive, they are interpenetrative—one could even say that they mutually constitute each other. That is, for example, society cannot operate without cultural norms, personality orientations, and physical skills. Action systems are not, then, concrete entities with closed boundaries, but nodes of organization within a system of action that is simultaneously cultural, social, psychological, and biological. Parsons’s conception of the action system excludes any kind of unicausal explanation, because all the subsystems of action are involved in any causal process. They are ordered, however, in what he called the cybernetic hierarchy, with culture and society more oriented to providing the steering mechanisms, and the behavioral organism and personality to providing the energy to run the system.9 I came to see that Parsons’s general theory of action was not itself explanatory but rather what he called a ‘‘conceptual 9 The most convenient access to Parsons’s general theory of action as I have described it is to be found in chapter 1 of Talcott Parsons and Gerald M. Platt, The American University (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973). See especially the chart on p. 31.

6

Introduction

scheme,’’ useful for understanding and interpretation, for reminding the analyst of all the dimensions that have to be taken into account, an essential precondition for explanatory hypotheses. Parsons’s approach was important for my thinking about religion because, even though religion is always concerned with problems of meaning, and therefore primarily cultural, it is always also social, personal, and embodied. Beliefs and symbols are important, but so are the social forms in which religion is practiced and transmitted as well as the relation of those forms to the rest of society; the personal orientations that it evokes and the habits it inculcates; and the bodily forms in which it is expressed. Religious beliefs and narratives must always be taken seriously, but ritual and its accompanying bodily discipline and emotional expression can never be ignored. Though the very act of taking religion seriously in a period when the study of religion had long been marginalized in sociology could be seen as part of the ‘‘cultural turn,’’ I never saw religion as exclusively cultural or ‘‘symbolic’’ but always as embedded in the whole range of human action. Seeing religion as involving all the dimensions of human action is only the beginning because religion is not timeless and unchanging; it can only be understood in historical perspective—the relation between the dimensions has changed markedly over time. The very object of study, ‘‘religion,’’ is historically constituted. It is worth remembering that in its modern usage, the term ‘‘religion’’ is only about two hundred years old. In premodern societies religion is a dimension of the whole of life, the conscious expression of a way of life. In many societies it remains so to this day. That religion is basically a private belief system and that churches are voluntary associations of like-minded believers is a modern and Protestant idea. It is unfortunate from this point of view that Religionsgeschichte (history of religion) and Religionswissenschaft (science of religion) in their most influential forms emerged in Protestant Germany and were immediately intelligible in the culturally Protestant United States. We have tried for a hundred years to de-Protestantize the study of religion, and we’re not there yet. My teacher Wilfred Cantwell Smith, in his The Meaning and End of Religion,10 argued that the term should be dropped altogether. That is easier said than done, and no one has really tried to do it, including Wilfred himself. I am, however, consciously trying to use the term ‘‘religion’’ to describe the narrative self-interpretation and ritual forms of all premodern 10 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1962).

Introduction 7

cultures, and only marginally the private and the ‘‘spiritual’’—important as those aspects have become in recent times. But if religion is centrally the narrative self-interpretation of human cultures, then its history is our history, for we are still embedded in it more deeply than we consciously imagine, from tribal peoples to the present. It is in this sense that I have taken seriously Hegel’s words, ‘‘Those moments which the spirit appears to have outgrown still belong to it in the depths of its present. Just as it has passed through all its moments in history, so also must it pass through them again in the present.’’ 11 And it is for this reason that I have devoted so much of my life, even though this collection gives only glimpses of it, to the study of the evolution of religion. Even though my 1964 essay on religious evolution provides a framework, much of which I think is still valid, my thinking has developed significantly over the years—I am now well into what will probably be the first of a two-volume work on the subject. Here I can only give a brief outline of my current thinking.12 The 1964 essay argues that social complexity and cultural complexity have evolved together, but it does not take into account the remarkable contributions to the understanding of the evolution of consciousness that developmental and evolutionary psychologists have made in recent decades. As early as 1966 I had to rethink my ideas about religion in the light of a book published by Jerome Bruner and his colleagues: Studies in Cognitive Growth.13 Bruner described stages of cognitive growth in the child that struck me as descriptive of important classes of religious representations. It was much more recently that I came across the work of the evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald who has developed the idea of three stages in the evolution of human consciousness and culture: mimetic, mythic, and theoretic, that turn out to be remarkably cognate with Bruner’s categories.14 11 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 151. 12 Although a number of the chapters in this book touch on the theme of religious evolution, the most obvious example of my recent thinking is probably chapter 17, ‘‘God and King,’’ but chapter 5, ‘‘Max Weber and World-Denying Love,’’ and chapter 6, ‘‘Durkheim and Ritual,’’ are also relevant. 13 Jerome Bruner et al., Studies in Cognitive Growth (New York: Wiley, 1966). Bruner, in turn, was drawing from the work of Jean Piaget. 14 Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). He has developed his argument further in A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human

8

Introduction

All three types of representation are important in religious life. For those of us who grew up in mainline Protestant denominations, incessant verbalism and an emphasis on belief, that is, theoretic culture, may seem to be the essence of religion, but any knowledge of non-Western or premodern religion, or even Catholicism as it is actually practiced, would disabuse the observer. In the deep history of religion, embodied, nonverbal (mimetic) practices are fundamental. Dancing, eating and drinking, processing, kneeling, gestures such as crossing oneself, have all been formative of religious life. One need only visit a Pentecostal church in the United States to observe that the most intense moments of the service are the ones most embodied in the believers. And, important as conceptual thinking is in theology and its equivalents in non-Christian religions, it is almost always narrative (mythic culture) that tells the believing community who it is and what it is here for. How did members of the genus Homo communicate and express themselves during the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years before language? With their bodies. As Donald points out, early humans learned quite sophisticated practices, such as how to make delicate stone tools, a process that modern archaeologists have great difficulty learning, entirely by mimetic example. And solidarity in these early human groups was almost certainly enhanced by their capacity to ‘‘keep together in time,’’ 15 which was, we might argue, the beginning of ritual.16 No one has argued more persistently than Randall Collins, following Durkheim and Erving Goffman, that even now daily life consists in endless ‘‘interaction ritual chains.’’ ‘‘Ritual,’’ he says, ‘‘is essentially a bodily process.’’ He argues that ritual requires bodily presence, and asks, rhetorically, whether a wedding or a funeral could be conducted by telephone or videoconferencing. His answer is, clearly, no. One could videotape a wedding or a funeral, but without the physical presence and interaction of the participants, no ritual could occur.17 Consciousness (New York: Norton, 1999). Bruner’s stages are, adapting his terminology slightly, enactive, symbolic, and conceptual. 15 See William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 16 For a more extended view of my understanding of ritual see my essay ‘‘The Ritual Roots of Society and Culture’’ (2003). 17 Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 53–54. He also argues, convincingly to me, that genuine learning requires the physical presence of teachers and students, so that ‘‘distance learning’’

Introduction 9

Mimetic (enactive, embodied) culture does not just continue to exist alongside theoretic culture: it reclaims, so to speak, some of the achievements of theoretic culture. Hubert Dreyfus has shown in detail how skills learned with painstaking attention to explicit rules, through becoming embodied and largely unavailable to consciousness, are in the end far more efficient than they were at the beginner’s stage.18 His examples include driving a car and expert chess playing. In such cases the experienced practitioner knows ‘‘instinctively’’ what to do in challenging situations. ‘‘Critical thinking’’ (theoretic culture) at such moments would only disrupt the flow and produce serious mistakes. If we imagine that ‘‘moderns’’ live in a ‘‘scientific world’’ and have left behind such primitive things as ritual, it is only because we have not observed, as people such as Goffman, Collins, and Dreyfus have, how much of our lives is lived in embodied rituals and practices. Our embodiment and its rhythms are inescapable. And for the tens of thousands of years since humans attained full linguisticality, myth has been the dominant mode of cultural representation. Theoretic consciousness of a practical sort developed early on, but it was only with the beginning of literacy that matters previously explained by myth began to be opened to conceptual examination. At the most general level of cultural self-understanding, myth in the sense of ethically and religiously charged narrative was the unchallenged form of consciousness until only a few thousand years ago—I would argue that even though challenged by theoretic claims, cultural self-understanding at the most general level is mythic to this day. It is worth remembering that in early Greece the words logos and mythos were virtually synonymous—both meaning an account or a story. It is only with Plato that logos came to mean reason and mythos a story that is not true, though even he ended up making his own myths, which he claimed were true or ‘‘something like’’ the truth.19 If mimetic culture has interacted vigorously with theoretic culture once the latter has appeared, such is also the case with narrative culture. There are things that narrative does that theory cannot do. Some psychologists have come to see that narrative actually constitutes the self, that ‘‘the self is ersatz at best. Goffman’s most relevant work is his Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (Chicago: Aldine, 1967). 18 Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, Mind over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Age of the Computer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986). 19 Luc Brisson, Plato the Myth Maker (1994; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

10

Introduction is a telling.’’ 20 Not only do we get to know persons by sharing our stories,

we understand our membership in groups to the extent that we understand the story that defines the group. Once theoretic culture has come into existence, stories can be subjected to criticism—that is at the heart of the axial breakthroughs—but in important spheres of life stories cannot be replaced by theories. Because stories really have been replaced by theories in natural science, some have come to believe that such can occur in all spheres. Though efforts to create a science of ethics or politics or religion have rendered critical insights in those spheres, they have not succeeded in replacing the stories that provide their substance.When Aristotle, surely one of the greatest theorists of all times, begins his Ethics he asks the question, what do people consider the highest good?, and finds that the common answer is happiness. In short, he starts from opinion, from the stories people tell about what leads to happiness, and though he criticizes those stories, he doesn’t reject their substance. Aristotle agrees with the common opinion that happiness is the highest good—he brings his critical insight to bear in seeking to discern what will lead to true happiness. He seeks to improve the common story with a better story, not with a theory. Narrative, in short, is more than literature; it is the way we understand our lives. If literature merely supplied entertainment, then it wouldn’t be as important as it is. Great literature speaks to the deepest level of our humanity; it helps us better understand who we are. Narrative is not only the way we understand our personal and collective identities, it is the source of our ethics, our politics, and our religion. Narrative thought is, as William James and Jerome Bruner after him assert, along with analytic or logicoscientific thought, one of our two basic ways of thinking.21 Narrative isn’t irrational—it can be criticized by rational argument—but it can’t be derived from reason alone.22 Mythic (narrative) culture is not a subset of theoretic culture, nor will it ever be. It is older than theoretic culture and remains to this day an indispensable way of relating to the world. 20 Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 111. 21 Jerome Bruner, in his Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 11–43, argues that the two basic forms of thinking are analytic and narrative, and quotes a passage from William James saying the same thing (xiii). 22 ‘‘Reason’’ is a term with a long history and multiple meanings. Narrative is often rational and, indeed, logical. It is only when theoretical consciousness seeks to abstract the rules of logical argument from any narrative context that, I would argue, it loses the capacity to generate an ethic than can actually be lived.

Introduction 11

One way of putting it would be to say that each of the new developments in the axial age were instances of the radical reformulation of myth in the light of theoretic criticism, but that theoretic culture purged of mythic content did not appear until the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. The great proliferation of theory in modern times, particularly in mathematics and natural science, had its indispensable religious prelude in the antiritualism and antisacramentalism of the Protestant Reformation, which in a sense pushed God to such transcendent abstraction that the world became available for unrestricted logicoempirical inquiry. But modernity has been no more able than the axial cultures to abolish myth, in the sense of socially charged narrative, as basic in the spheres not only of religion but also of ethics and politics. All the energy spent on rational criticism in these realms has not succeeded in creating a politics or an ethics within the bounds of reason alone, much less a religion within such bounds—at least no politics, ethics, or religion that could actually be lived, rather than merely contemplated by intellectuals.23 Here we come to a central crux in the understanding of the relation of meaning and modernity. Modernity seems to signal the final triumph of theoretic consciousness, and yet we humans remain inexorably mimetic and mythic creatures. Freud posed the problem in his own terminology when he said, ‘‘Where id was there shall ego be.’’ But how can we abandon the id, which in his own scheme is the source of our energy and our creativity? Similarly we cannot reasonably say, ‘‘Where mimetic and mythic culture were, there shall theoretic culture be.’’ We are embodied, storytelling animals, and it is a ‘‘myth’’ in the pejorative sense to imagine otherwise. Weber’s way of thinking about the problem of modernity was to see the development of modern rationalism giving rise to competing life spheres, each with its own logic, not necessarily compatible with the other spheres.24 Jürgen Habermas has rethought the problem of modern ratio23 Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), has described the inability of modern philosophical ethics to reach any kind of even temporary consensus, such as is found in natural science. My point, however, is that though individuals, particularly intellectuals, have found personal ethical meaning in, say, Kantian ethics, no modern philosophical ethical system has been effectively institutionalized beyond small groups of educated devotees. On the other hand, Kantian ethics probably had narrative implications that Kant himself did not recognize, so that Kantian themes have become part of our ethical practice even when their theoretical roots have not been recognized. 24 See ‘‘Max Weber and World-Denying Love,’’ chapter 5 of this volume, for a discussion of Weber’s value polytheism.

12

Introduction

nalism in his monumental two-volume Theory of Communicative Action.25 There he affirms what he calls ‘‘the magnificent ‘one-sidednesses’ ’’ of modern expert culture, where science, secular ethics, and autonomous art each goes its own way, and sees this differentiation as the very triumph of modernity, in no need of any philosophical grounding or overarching worldview. Even so, he finds ‘‘the radically differentiated moments of reason’’ seek somehow to find unity. Habermas would fear that a unity at the level of ‘‘worldview’’ would be an irrational regression, yet he suggests the possibility of a unity ‘‘that might be established this side of expert cultures, in a nonreified communicative everyday practice.’’ 26 Perhaps we could paraphrase Habermas as saying that this side of the expert cultures that are or are attempting to be purely theoretic, daily life goes on in its usual embodied (mimetic), narrative (mythic) way, and that that is what ‘‘nonreified communicative everyday practice’’ really is. Whether one regrets the ‘‘fragmentation’’ of modern life, as Weber often seemed to do, or celebrates its ‘‘differentiation,’’ as Habermas usually does, it would seem that the most fundamental fact behind this central feature of modernity is the radical autonomy of the logicoempirical methodology of natural science and its prestige as the only valid road to truth.27 Other spheres are then reduced to a search for their own ‘‘theory,’’ cognate with that of natural science, in order to give them legitimacy. In spite of efforts to derive morality from purely rational presuppositions, ‘‘moral reason’’ has never gained the consensus that cognitive reason has attained. In the realm of art the analogy with cognitive reason becomes even fainter and the basis of ‘‘rational criticism’’ even more contested. It would seem then that the undoubted triumph and prestige of modern natural science,28 serving as a model for the other value spheres, has not been recreated with entire success in any of them. Expert cultures have arisen but have lacked the secure self-understanding of natural science and have sought in a variety of ways to bring their fields closer to the scientific model with only moderate success. It is in this situation that Habermas proposes a unity ‘‘this side’’ of expert cultures in ‘‘everyday communicative practice.’’ 25 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981; Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 [vol. 1], 1987 [vol. 2]). 26 Habermas, Theory, 2:398. Italics in the original. 27 Although Weber’s central concept of ‘‘rationalization’’ has a complex set of meanings, I believe it is rooted in the modern understanding of the primacy of scientific, that is theoretic, inquiry. 28 The autonomy of even the natural sciences has been challenged by the emerging and still controversial field of science studies.

Introduction 13

Social science is squarely faced with this modern problematic: it often takes natural science as its model, but it has succeeded in emulating natural science only very partially, and much that it actually achieves is on ‘‘this side’’ of expert cultures, that is, it contributes rather directly to everyday communicative practice. But let me try to rephrase the problem of modern cultural fragmentation or differentiation in an effort to get beyond what in different ways to Weber and to Habermas seems a nearly insoluble conundrum. While not denying the fact that theoretic culture is the most recent and in some ways the most powerful form of human consciousness, we might avoid thinking of it as the ‘‘highest form,’’ and consider it rather as a powerful supplement to the mimetic and mythic cultural forms that remain fundamental to us as human beings. Habermas seems to sense that ‘‘modern reason’’ cannot simply forget the realm of myth, but the very way he formulates the issue is highly problematic. He says that ‘‘a theory of rationality with which the modern understanding of the world is to ascertain its own universality would certainly include throwing light on the opaque features of mythical thought, clarifying the bizarre expressions of alien cultures, and indeed in such a way that we not only comprehend the learning processes that separate ‘us’ from ‘them,’ but also become aware of what we have unlearned in the course of this learning.’’ 29 If I am right that not only religious but also ethical and political thought can never be simply theoretic but are always also indelibly mythic and mimetic, then it is not only ‘‘opaque features’’ and ‘‘bizarre expressions of alien cultures’’ that we need to understand, but our own modern, partially disguised, mythic and mimetic practice. And we must not only be aware of what we have unlearned, but, in many instances, of the necessity consciously to relearn it. Although none of the essays in this Reader spells out in greater detail what I have somewhat cryptically outlined in this introduction, many of them illustrate what I have been saying. Essays in every section of the Reader, even the sermons, about which I will have more to say in a moment, draw on the expert culture of social science, make claims on the basis of evidence and argument that can in principle be disconfirmed, or if not disconfirmed, at least be superseded by better accounts.While some of the essays in parts I and IV (‘‘Comparative and Theoretical’’ and ‘‘Sociology and Theology’’) are primarily theoretic in orientation, virtually all of the essays in this book, particularly the ones written for oral delivery, take place ‘‘this side of,’’ or could we say ‘‘in front of,’’ the expert cultures, and 29 Habermas, Theory, 2:400. Italics in the original.

14

Introduction

are directly addressed to everyday communicative practice. But, I would argue, just to the extent that they are so addressed they draw on a disciplined use of mythic and even mimetic cultural traditions, not only rightly so, but inescapably so. I would argue that Habermas himself, particularly when writing about current political and ethical controversies, but also at more than a few places even in The Theory of Communicative Action, does the same thing, while always also bringing to bear his theoretic resources.30 Let me illustrate the problem with the essays in part II, on American religion. The part begins with ‘‘Civil Religion in America,’’ the most frequently reprinted article I have ever published. It was written for an issue of Daedalus on American religion, to which I was persuaded, somewhat unwillingly, because ‘‘it wasn’t my field,’’ to contribute. It had the unintended consequence of pulling me into the study of American society for many years—I am still most often asked to speak on American subjects— even though, as I have noted, I was not trained as an Americanist. As a good Durkheimian it seemed obvious to me that any society, however secular, would have some sort of common religion. Durkheim not only believed there was such a thing in France, he worked to give it shape—for him it was the special mission of France to promote a general Religion of Humanity, and I dutifully ended my essay with reference to a possible world civil religion.31 But in the context of the Vietnam War (the essay was first published in 1967, but written in 1966) I not only described the civil religion, I invoked it as a source for opposition to the war.32 That is, I put American civil religion in a powerful, ethically charged, narrative perspective. I found that when I gave my essay as a lecture in a sociology of religion course I 30 Several tendencies in twentieth-century philosophy can be seen as reactions against an exclusively theoretic approach. One thinks of Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy on the one hand, and Heidegger, at least as interpreted by Hubert Dreyfus, on the other. 31 Durkheim’s most extensive discussion of the Religion of Humanity, which he defines as an ethical, socially institutionalized individualism, and its central role in French culture, is an essay he wrote during the Dreyfus Affair, ‘‘Individualism and the Intellectuals,’’ first published in 1898 and translated in Bellah, ed., Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society (1973), 43–57. My introduction to that volume describes in some detail Durkheim’s views of religion in the context of modern society. 32 As Durkheim did in World War I, though he was supporting the French war effort, not opposing it as I was doing. See Durkheim’s wartime pamphlet, L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout: La mentalité allemande et la guerre (Paris: Colin, 1915).

Introduction 15

was teaching at Harvard at the time, some of the students and one professor who happened to be present, were quite moved. Thus, though the essay has theoretic content, it was also mythic, and when delivered in person, mimetic as well. Furthermore, the reactions to it once published were not solely ‘‘academic,’’ but quite visceral in both positive and negative form. For example, Daedalus received two requests to cancel subscriptions from readers who found that my article ‘‘violated the separation of church and state.’’ While by far the most common reactions were favorable, and led to spin-off articles about civil religion in the United States and all over the world, the negative response was quite vitriolic, the harshest charge being that civil religion is the worship of the state. That latter response was so persistent, though in my view so erroneous theoretically and so repugnant to me politically and ethically, that I decided after a while to drop the term ‘‘civil religion,’’ though I have continued to discuss the issues raised in my initial article up to the present, as the selections in part II indicate. Every one of them involves a mythic as well as a theoretic dimension as I am using those terms, and, where they were delivered orally, a mimetic, often powerful, interaction with the audience. The essays in part III on the university and society show the same mixture of mythic and theoretic approaches, for I am not just describing what the American university is, but asking the value question, what is the university for? I am not only describing but also defending the value core of the university in a historical moment where that core is increasingly difficult even to understand, much less defend. It will probably be part IV of this book, on sociology and theology, that some readers may find most problematic. Here I cross boundaries that are usually not crossed in American academic life.33 I even include some sermons. Am I not violating Weber’s harsh injunction against preaching in the classroom? Although I do believe that in the classroom a teacher needs to be more circumspect than in a public lecture, where the issue is clearly value-laden, I also believe that clarity about the teacher’s value commitments is essential to honesty in the classroom. But Weber is one of my role 33 It might be worth recalling that my first faculty appointment at Harvard in 1957 was one-quarter in the Divinity School (specifically in the newly founded Center for the Study of World Religions) and three-quarters in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (even there I was split three ways between the Social Relations Department, the Center for East Asian Studies, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies). Boundary crossings indeed. Also, ever since I came to Berkeley in 1967 I have been an adjunct professor at the Graduate Theological Union, adjoining the Berkeley campus, and served on dozens of doctoral committees there.

16

Introduction

models: I consider his ‘‘Science as a Vocation’’ and ‘‘Politics as a Vocation’’ to be two of the most eloquent sermons preached in the twentieth century.34 Weber believed that theoretic work had to be based on and defended with evidence and argument and, in that sense and only in that sense, ‘‘value free.’’ But both the choice of what to study and what to do with the results of one’s study are not, should not, and cannot be value free. These are just where values—that is, mythic elements, in the terms I am using in this introduction—are appropriate and inescapable. Finally, do sermons preached in church belong in a scholarly book? The decision to include three examples was made with some hesitation, but in the end I decided to include them. They give evidence for what I think modern, especially academic, culture has tried very hard to unlearn: that all serious discourse is to some degree mythic as well as theoretic, and, if presented in a face-to-face situation, mimetic as well. My friend Peter Berger is more rigorous than I when he speaks of ‘‘taking off my sociological hat and putting on my theological hat.’’ I don’t have two hats. Even when I preach in church I am a sociologist, as the sermons included here evidence. At the same time, I am taking responsibility for the narrative tradition of the Christian church of which I am a member, interpreting and applying it as every generation has always done. Critical reason is not lacking in these sermons, but they are basically ways of taking seriously the ethical and religious themes of biblical narrative, seeing them as still relevant for contemporary society. If by ‘‘worldviews’’ one means the mythic dimension of culture, we cannot avoid them when we stand ‘‘this side of’’ expert cultures and engage in communicative practice. In the contemporary world there is, inevitably, a multiplicity of worldviews; any attempt to coerce uniformity would be ethically repugnant. But mythic culture is inescapable—without it we wouldn’t know what to do ethically and politically, much less religiously. So what we need is an effort to understand our own sometimes implicit worldview and the many worldviews held by others, and to find common ground where great issues of the common good, such as the future of the environment, the justice of the economy, or matters of war and peace, are concerned. 34 See H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946): ‘‘Politics as a Vocation,’’ 77–128; ‘‘Science as a Vocation,’’ 129–156. Both were given originally as speeches at Münich University in 1918. See also the closing paragraphs of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where Weber characterizes modernity as an ‘‘iron cage.’’

Introduction 17

The task then, as I see it, is to situate modernity in the context of the history of the human species, to find meaning again in the entire human biosociocultural experience, and to critically reappropriate its mimetic and mythic dimensions in a constant dialectic with the theoretic. Only thus could we avoid a situation in which a mythic culture lacking in the capacity for theoretic self-criticism in a strange alliance with a technological culture ungrounded in a mimetic and mythic lifeworld, could lead us, as it already seems to be leading us, to an early extinction.35

35 The essay in this volume closest to the themes of this introduction is chapter 8, ‘‘The History of Habit.’’ A reader who finds what I have said here overly cryptic might turn to that essay for further elaboration.

Part I C O M PA R AT I V E A N D T H E O R E T I C A L

The essays collected in part I, although published over a period of nearly forty years, combine to make a sustained argument about the intrinsic relation between social theory and the historical comparison of societies. Implicitly or often explicitly, in every essay the organizing idea is that social theory at its most fundamental level draws from comparative historical data and makes sense only through the interpretation of such data. A lifelong effort to grasp the ‘‘big picture,’’ both theoretically and empirically, is evident throughout this section. What these pieces suggest is that evolution, the central theoretical framework for modern biology, is equally central in the social sciences. Such an idea, largely taken for granted by the ‘‘founding fathers’’ of sociology—Marx,Weber, and Durkheim—fell out of favor in much of twentieth-century social science. Quite rightly it firmly rejected certain dogmatic views about social evolution common among nineteenth-century thinkers but marginal to the sociological founders, such as determinism (often based on some single-factor theory), unilinealism (often combined with a triumphalist notion that the modern West is the pinnacle of evolutionary progress), and teleology (that all historical development, unless ‘‘blocked,’’ has headed in a single direction). The result, however, was the proverbial throwing out of the baby with the bathwater. Social evolution, conceived flexibly as contingent, multilineal, and leading to no single fixed outcome, has returned in recent decades as a central organizing framework in many disciplines: archeology, historical anthropology, and evolutionary psychology among others. The essays in part I do not make a full-scale theoretical defense of the new evolutionary approach as an essential framework for social theory, but they do illustrate its usefulness.1 Every chapter in part I integrates the work of one or more major theorists with topics viewed in comparative evolutionary perspective. This is particularly clear in the opening essay, ‘‘Religious Evolution,’’ first published in 1964. This essay draws from and extends the historical framework 1 Such a theoretical defense will be included in a work in progress tentatively entitled ‘‘Religion in Human Evolution.’’

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with which Max Weber organized his treatment of every social sphere. He began with societies organized in terms of kinship and neighborhood, then moved to large-scale agrarian societies organized politically by patrimonial, feudal, or bureaucratic mechanisms, and concluded with what he called ‘‘modern capitalism,’’ which is really his way of referring to modernity generally. ‘‘Religious Evolution’’ expanded Weber’s kinshipneighborhood phase into ‘‘primitive’’ and ‘‘archaic,’’ named his treatment of large-scale agrarian societies ‘‘historic,’’ and divided his modern capitalism into ‘‘early modern’’ and ‘‘modern.’’ Although ‘‘Religious Evolution’’ does consider changes in the social division of labor as an important factor in the evolutionary process, a careful reading should make it clear that the essay focuses on the changing symbolism of ultimate reality and the implications of those changes for society and personality. In the light of work in progress on religious evolution, this essay is in need of nuance at many points. In particular, the description of ‘‘modern religion’’ requires radical revision. In broad outline, however, it still provides the framework for the forthcoming work. ‘‘The Five Religions of Modern Italy’’ (chapter 2) considers the relation between religion and politics in Italy since the founding of the modern state in 1861. It is related to the concern with civil religion illustrated more fully in the essays collected in part II, and so shows the theoretical influence of Rousseau and Durkheim, but is included in this section because of its implicit evolutionary implications. Of the five religions, the ‘‘ground bass’’ pre-Christian strand suggests the persistence, even in modern societies, of what was called archaic religion in the essay on religious evolution; Christianity represents the historic phase; the early modern is largely absent in Italy because of the failure of the Reformation there; but modernity is represented by liberalism and socialism viewed as all-encompassing, and therefore quasi-religious, worldviews. Perhaps the most interesting suggestion in the essay is that Italian fascism, though distinctly a child of modernity, showed a tendency toward deep regression even into the archaic past, a point developed more extensively with respect to Japanese fascism in the introduction to my 2003 book, Imagining Japan. Chapter 3, ‘‘To Kill and Survive or to Die and Become,’’ takes off from the life cycle theory of Erik Erikson to discuss the relationship of the active life and the contemplative life in a variety of cultures over the course of history. ‘‘Stories as Arrows’’ (chapter 4) is grounded theoretically in a friendly argument with Jürgen Habermas, continued in the final pages of the Introduction to this Reader. ‘‘Max Weber and World-Denying Love’’

Part I. Comparative and Theoretical 21

(chapter 5) considers a central feature of what Weber called ‘‘world religions’’ (the ‘‘historic religions’’ of chapter 1), namely Liebesakosmismus, which is translated diffidently as ‘‘world-denying love’’ and which is related to, though not identical with, the contemplative life considered in ‘‘To Kill and Survive or To Die and Become.’’ Chapter 5 considers why Weber thought this phenomenon so central for a major set of historic religions, but so difficult to retain in the modern world, a matter of more than a little personal regret for him. The difficulty arises, in Weber’s view, from the emergence of value pluralism, what he sometimes called ‘‘value polytheism,’’ which characterizes modern culture, and leaves little room for religious experience except in purely private settings. ‘‘Durkheim and Ritual’’ (chapter 6) draws centrally on Durkheim’s theory of ritual as the basis of social life, but then develops the theme in evolutionary perspective, drawing on neurophysiology, evolutionary musicology, and history, as well as anthropology and sociology, concluding with Roy Rappaport’s maxim ‘‘Ritual is humanity’s basic social act.’’ Chapter 7, ‘‘Rousseau on Society and the Individual,’’ draws out the evolutionary framework of Rousseau’s political theory, and discusses in this context his tendency to absolutize both the individual and society, leading to radically conflicting interpretations of his thought. ‘‘The History of Habit’’ (chapter 8) starts with the modern proclivity to oppose habit and individual initiative, but argues that habit and innovative thinking should be seen rather as vitally complementary than as in a zero sum relation. Here the chief theoretical resource is Mary Douglas, arguably the most influential living Durkheimian. These essays, preoccupied as they are with the way social theory and comparative analysis reinforce each other, also reflect the belief, so important for Weber and Durkheim, and returning again in recent times, that religion is the way premodern societies have become conscious of themselves, and so is a key to understanding both the similarities and the differences of such societies. Further, it has become increasingly apparent that modernity itself has not escaped the fundamental problematic of religion, to which it keeps returning in a variety of forms. How this has worked out in America is the subject of the essays in part II. Finally, though the subject matter of the essays in this section varies widely in time and space, in every case there is an element of application to our present reality—every one of them raises the question, what does this mean to us? The first task in understanding the different, the foreign, is to grasp its meaning in its original context, but understanding is not com-

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Part I. Comparative and Theoretical

pleted until we try to see what it is saying to us. The project of modern social theory, like that of comparative history, is finally in the service of our contemporary need to understand ourselves and our situation. In this effort these essays both draw on expert cultures and attempt to ‘‘stand in front of’’ them, as the volume introduction puts it.

1 Religious Evolution

Time in its aging course teaches all things. —Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

Though one can name precursors as far back as Herodotus, the systematically scientific study of religion begins only in the second half of the nineteenth century. According to Chantepie de la Saussaye, the two preconditions for this emergence were that by the time of Hegel religion had become the object of comprehensive philosophical speculation and that by the time of Henry Thomas Buckle history had been enlarged to include the history of civilization and culture in general.1 In its early phases, partly under the influence of Darwinism, the science of religion was dominated by an evolutionary tendency already implicit in Hegelian philosophy and early-nineteenth-century historiography. The grandfathers of modern sociology, Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, contributed to the strongly evolutionary approach to the study of religion as, with many reservations, did Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. But by the third decade of the twentieth century the evolutionary wave was in full retreat both in the general field of science of religion and in the sociology of religion in particular. Of course, this was only one aspect of the general retreat of evolutionary thought in social science, but nowhere did the retreat go further or the intensity of the opposition to evo[First published in the American Sociological Review, 29, no. 3 (1964): 358–374. Used by permission. Part of this essay was given as a lecture at the University of Chicago in October of 1963. Some of the ideas were worked out in a seminar on social evolution, which I gave with Talcott Parsons and S. N. Eisenstadt at Harvard University in the spring of 1963. The basic conception, however, goes back much further. A long, unpublished paper on this subject was written in Montreal in 1956 while I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. In a sense the essay contains the precipitate of my early involvement with Marxism in that it attempts to sketch a broad meaningful pattern of social development, even though its theoretical presuppositions are very different from historical materialism.] 1 Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manuel d’histoire des religions, French translation directed by H. Hubert and I. Levy (Paris: Colin, 1904), author’s introduction.

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Religious Evolution

lution go deeper than in the field of religion. An attempt to explain the vicissitudes of evolutionary conceptions in the field of religion would be an interesting study in the sociology of knowledge but beyond the scope of this brief essay. Here I can only say that I hope that the present attempt to apply the evolutionary idea to religion evidences a serious appreciation of both nineteenth-century evolutionary theories and twentieth-century criticisms of them. Evolution at any system level I define as a process of increasing differentiation and complexity of organization that endows the organism, social system, or whatever the unit in question may be with greater capacity to adapt to its environment, so that it is in some sense more autonomous relative to its environment than were its less complex ancestors. I do not assume that evolution is inevitable, irreversible, or must follow any single particular course. Nor do I assume that simpler forms cannot prosper and survive alongside more complex forms. What I mean by evolution, then, is nothing metaphysical but the simple empirical generalization that more complex forms develop from less complex forms and that the properties and possibilities of more complex forms differ from those of less complex forms. A brief handy definition of religion is considerably more difficult than a definition of evolution. An attempt at an adequate definition would, as Clifford Geertz has recently demonstrated, require an essay in itself for adequate explanation.2 So, for limited purposes only, let me define religion as a set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence. The purpose of this definition is to indicate exactly what I claim has evolved. It is not the ultimate conditions, or, in traditional language, God that has evolved, nor is it man in the broadest sense of Homo religiosus. I am inclined to agree with Mircea Eliade when he holds that primitive man is as fully religious as man at any stage of existence, though I am not ready to go along with him when he implies more fully.3 Neither religious man nor the structure of man’s ultimate religious situation evolves, then, but rather religion as symbol system. Erich Voegelin, who I suspect shares Eliade’s basic philosophical position, speaks of a 2 Clifford Geertz, ‘‘Religion as a Cultural System,’’ in Michael Banton, ed., Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (New York: Praeger, 1966), 1–46. 3 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958), 459–465.

Religious Evolution 25 development from compact to differentiated symbolization.4 Everything

already exists in some sense in the religious symbol system of the most primitive man; it would be hard to find anything later that is not ‘‘foreshadowed’’ there, as for example, the monotheistic God is foreshadowed in the high gods of some primitive peoples. Yet just as obviously the two cannot be equated. Not only in their idea of God but in many other ways the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam involve a much more differentiated symbolization of, and produce a much more complex relation to the ultimate conditions of human existence than do primitive religions. At least the existence of that kind of difference is the thesis I wish to develop. I hope it is clear that there are a number of other possible meanings of the term ‘‘religious evolution’’ with which I am not concerned. I hope it is also clear that a complex and differentiated religious symbolization is not therefore a better or a truer or a more beautiful one than a compact religious symbolization. I am not a relativist and I do think judgments of value can reasonably be made between religions, societies, or personalities. But the axis of that judgment is not provided by social evolution, and if progress is used in an essentially ethical sense, then I for one will not speak of religious progress. Having defined the ground rules under which I am operating, let me now step back from the subject of religious evolution and look at a few of the massive facts of human religious history. The first of these facts is the emergence in the first millennium b.c. all across the Old World, at least in centers of high culture, of the phenomenon of religious rejection of the world characterized by an extremely negative evaluation of man and society and the exaltation of another realm of reality as alone true and infinitely valuable. This theme emerges in Greece through a long development into Plato’s classic formulation in the Phaedo that the body is the tomb or prison of the soul, and that only by disentanglement from the body and all things worldly can the soul unify itself with the unimaginably different world of the divine. A very different formulation is found in Israel, but there too the world is profoundly devalued in the face of the transcendent God with whom alone is there any refuge or comfort. In India we find perhaps the most radical of all versions of world rejection, culminating in the great image of the Buddha, that the world is a burning house and man’s urgent need is a way to escape from it. In China, Taoist ascetics urged 4 Erich Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 1, Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), 5.

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Religious Evolution

the transvaluation of all the accepted values and withdrawal from human society, which they condemned as unnatural and perverse. Nor was this a brief or passing phenomenon. For over two thousand years great pulses of world rejection spread over the civilized world. The Qur’an compares this present world to vegetation after rain, whose growth rejoices the unbeliever, but it quickly withers away and becomes as straw.5 Men prefer life in the present world, but the life to come is infinitely superior; it alone is everlasting.6 Even in Japan, usually so innocently worldaccepting, Shotoku Taishi declared that the world is a lie and only the Buddha is true, and in the Kamakura period the conviction that the world is hell led to orgies of religious suicide by seekers after Amida’s paradise.7 And it is hardly necessary to quote Revelation or Augustine for comparable Christian sentiments. I do not deny that there are profound differences among these various rejections of the world; Max Weber has written a great essay on the different directions of world rejection and their consequences for human action.8 But for the moment I want to concentrate on the fact that they were all in some sense rejections, and that world rejection is characteristic of a long and important period of religious history. I want to insist on this fact because I want to contrast it with an equally striking fact, namely the virtual absence of world rejection in primitive religions, in religion prior to the first millennium b.c., and in the modern world.9 Primitive religions are on the whole oriented to a single cosmos; they know nothing of a wholly different world relative to which the actual world is utterly devoid of value. They are concerned with the maintenance of personal, social, and cosmic harmony and with attaining specific goods— rain, harvest, children, health—as men have always been. But the over5 Qur’an 57, 19–20. 6 Qur’an 87, 16–17. 7 On these developments see Ienaga Saburo, Nihon Shisōshi ni okeru Hitei no Ronri no Hattatsu: The Development of the Logic of Negation in the History of Japanese Thought (Tokyo, 1940). 8 Max Weber, ‘‘Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,’’ in Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946). 9 One might argue that the much-discussed modern phenomenon of alienation is the same as world rejection. The concept of alienation has too many uses to receive full discussion here, but it usually implies estrangement from or rejection of only selected aspects of the empirical world. In the contemporary world a really radical alienation from the whole of empirical reality would be discussed more in terms of psychosis than religion.

Religious Evolution 27

riding goal of salvation that dominates the world-rejecting religions is almost absent in primitive religion, and life after death tends to be a shadowy semiexistence in some vaguely designated place in the single world. World rejection is no more characteristic of the modern world than it is of primitive religion. Not only in the United States but through much of Asia there is at the moment something of a religious revival, but nowhere is this associated with a great new outburst of world rejection. In Asia apologists, even for religions with a long tradition of world rejection, are much more interested in showing the compatibility of their religions with the developing modern world than in totally rejecting it. And it is hardly necessary to point out that the American religious revival stems from motives quite opposite to world rejection. One could attempt to account for this sequence of presence and absence of world rejection as a dominant religious theme without ever raising the issue of religious evolution, but I think I can account for these and many other facts of the historical development of religion in terms of a scheme of religious evolution. An extended rationale for the scheme and its broad empirical application must await publication in book form. Here all I can attempt is a very condensed overview. The scheme is based on several presuppositions, the most basic of which I have already referred to: that religious symbolization of what Geertz calls ‘‘the general order of existence’’ 10 tends to change over time, at least in some instances, in the direction of more differentiated, comprehensive, and in Weber’s sense, more rationalized formulations. A second assumption is that conceptions of religious action, of the nature of the religious actor, of religious organization, and of the place of religion in the society tend to change in ways systematically related to the changes in symbolization. A third assumption is that these several changes in the sphere of religion, which constitute what I mean by religious evolution, are related to a variety of other dimensions of change in other social spheres that define the general process of sociocultural evolution. Now, for heuristic purposes at least, it is also useful to assume a series of stages that may be regarded as relatively stable crystallizations of roughly the same order of complexity along a number of different dimensions. I shall use five stages that, for want of better terminology, I shall call primitive, archaic, historic, early modern, and modern.11 These stages are ideal 10 Geertz, ‘‘Religion as a Cultural System,’’ 4. 11 These stages are actually derived from an attempt to develop a general schema of sociocultural evolution during the seminar in which I participated together with

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types derived from a theoretical formulation of the most generally observable historical regularities; they are meant to have a temporal reference but only in a very general sense. Of course the scheme itself is not intended as an adequate description of historical reality. Particular lines of religious development cannot simply be forced into the terms of the scheme. In reality there may be compromise formations involving elements from two stages that I have for theoretical reasons discriminated; earlier stages may, as I have already suggested, strikingly foreshadow later developments; and more developed may regress to less developed stages. And of course no stage is ever completely abandoned; all earlier stages continue to coexist with and often within later ones. So what I shall present is not intended as a procrustean bed into which the facts of history are to be forced but a theoretical construction against which historical facts may be illuminated. The logic is much the same as that involved in conceptualizing stages of the life cycle in personality development.

Primitive Religion Before turning to the specific features of primitive religion let us go back to the definition of religion as a set of symbolic forms and acts relating man to the ultimate conditions of his existence. Godfrey Lienhardt, in his book on Dinka religion, spells out this process of symbolization in a most interesting way: I have suggested that the Powers may be understood as images corresponding to complex and various combinations of Dinka experience which are contingent upon their particular social and physical environment. For the Dinka they are the grounds of those experiences; in our analysis we have shown them to be grounded in them, for to a European the experiences are more readily understood than the Powers, and the existence of the latter cannot be posited as a condition of the former. Without these Powers or images or an alternative to them there would be for the Dinka no differentiation between experience of the self and of the world which acts upon it. Suffering, for example, could be merely ‘‘lived’’ or endured. With the imaging of the grounds of suffering in a particular Power, the Dinka can grasp its nature intellectually in a way which satisfies Parsons and Eisenstadt. This essay must, however, be strictly limited to religious evolution, which is in itself sufficiently complex without going into still broader issues.

Religious Evolution 29 them, and thus to some extent transcend and dominate it in this act of knowledge. With this knowledge, this separation of a subject and an object in experience, there arises for them also the possibility of creating a form of experience they desire, and of freeing themselves symbolically from what they must otherwise passively endure.12

If we take this as a description of religious symbolization in general, and I think we can, then it is clear that in terms of the conception of evolution used here the existence of even the simplest religion is an evolutionary advance. Animals or prereligious men could only ‘‘passively endure’’ suffering or other limitations imposed by the conditions of their existence, but religious man can to some extent ‘‘transcend and dominate’’ them through his capacity for symbolization, and thus can attain a degree of freedom relative to his environment that was not previously possible.13 Now though Lienhardt points out that the Dinka religious images make possible a ‘‘differentiation between experience of the self and of the world which acts upon it,’’ he also points out earlier that the Dinka lack anything closely resembling our conception of the ‘‘ ‘mind,’ as mediating and, as it were, storing up the experiences of the self.’’ 14 In fact, aspects of what we would attribute to the self are ‘‘imaged’’ among the divine Powers. Again, if Lienhardt is describing something rather general, and I think there is every reason to believe he is, then religious symbolization relating man to the ultimate conditions of his existence is also involved in relating him to himself and in symbolizing his own identity.15 Granted then that religious symbolization is concerned with imaging the ultimate conditions of existence, whether external or internal, we should examine at each stage the kind of symbol system involved, the kind of religious action it stimulates, the kind of social organization in which this 12 Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 170. 13 One might argue that it was language and not religion that gave man the capacity to dominate his environment symbolically, but this seems to be a false distinction. It is very unlikely that language came into existence ‘‘first’’ and that men then ‘‘thought up’’ religion. Rather, we would suppose that religion in the sense of this essay was from the beginning a major element in the content of linguistic symbolization. Clearly the relations between language and religion are very important and require much more systematic investigation. 14 Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience, 149. 15 This notion was first clearly expressed to me in conversation and in unpublished writings by Eli Sagan.

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religious action occurs, and the implications for social action in general that the religious action contains. Marcel Mauss, criticizing the heterogeneous sources from which Lucien Lévy-Bruhl had constructed the notion of primitive thought, suggested that the word ‘‘primitive’’ be restricted to Australia, which was the only major culture area largely unaffected by the Neolithic.16 That was in 1923. In 1935 Lévy-Bruhl, heeding Mauss’s stricture, published a book called La Mythologie Primitive, in which the data are drawn almost exclusively from Australia and immediately adjacent islands.17 While Lévy-Bruhl finds material similar to his Australian data in all parts of the world, nowhere else does he find it in as pure a form. The differences between the Australian material and that of other areas are so great that Lévy-Bruhl is tempted to disagree with Durkheim that Australian religion is an elementary form of religion and term it rather ‘‘prereligion,’’ 18 a temptation that for reasons already indicated I would firmly reject. At any rate, W. E. H. Stanner, by far the most brilliant interpreter of Australian religion in recent years, goes far to confirm the main lines of Lévy-Bruhl’s position without committing himself on the more broadly controversial aspects of the assertions of either Mauss or Lévy-Bruhl (indeed without so much as mentioning them). My description of a primitive stage of religion is a theoretical abstraction, but it is heavily indebted to the work of Lévy-Bruhl and Stanner for its main features.19 16 In his discussion of Lévy-Bruhl’s thesis on primitive mentality, reported in Bulletin de la Socété Francaise de Philosophie, séance du 15 Febrier 1923, 23e année (1923): 26. 17 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La mythologie primitive (Paris: Alcan, 1935). This volume and Lévy-Bruhl’s last volume, L’experience mystique et les symboles chez les primitifs (Paris: Alcan, 1938), were praised by Evans-Pritchard as unsurpassed in ‘‘depth and insight’’ among studies of the structure of primitive thought in his introduction to the English translation of Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand (New York: Free Press, 1960), 24. 18 Lévy-Bruhl, La mythologie primitive, p. 217. 19 Of Stanner’s publications the most relevant are a series of articles published under the general title ‘‘On Aboriginal Religion’’ in Oceania 30–33 (1959–1963), and ‘‘The Dreaming’’ in T. A. G. Hungerford, ed., Australian Signpost (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1956), and reprinted in William Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, eds., Reader in Comparative Religion (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1958). References to ‘‘The Dreaming’’ are to the Lessa and Vogt volume. Outside the Australian culture area, the New World provides the most examples of the type of religion I call primitive. Navaho religion, for example, conforms closely to the type.

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The religious symbol system at the primitive level is characterized by Lévy-Bruhl as ‘‘le monde mythique,’’ and Stanner directly translates the Australians’ own word for it as ‘‘the Dreaming.’’ The Dreaming is a time out of time, or in Stanner’s words, ‘‘everywhen,’’ inhabited by ancestral figures, some human, some animal.20 Though they are often of heroic proportions and have capacities beyond those of ordinary men as well as being the progenitors and creators of many particular things in the world, they are not gods, for they do not control the world and are not worshiped.21 Two main features of this mythical world of primitive religion are important for the purposes of the present theoretical scheme. The first is the very high degree to which the mythical world is related to the detailed features of the actual world. Not only is every clan and local group defined in terms of the ancestral progenitors and the mythical events of settlement, but virtually every mountain, rock, and tree is explained in terms of the actions of mythical beings. All human action is prefigured in the Dreaming, including crimes and folly, so that actual existence and the paradigmatic myths are related in the most intimate possible way. The second main feature, not unrelated to the extreme particularity of the mythical material, is the fluidity of its organization. Lienhardt, though describing a religion of a somewhat different type, catches the essentially free-associational nature of primitive myth when he says, We meet here the typical lack of precise definition of the Dinka when they speak of divinities. As Garang, which is the name of the first man, sometimes associated with the first man and sometimes said to be quite different, so Deng may in some sense be associated with anyone called Deng, and the Dinka connect or do not connect usages of the same name in different contexts according to their individual lights and to what they consider appropriate at any given moment.22

The fluid structure of the myth is almost consciously indicated by the Australians in their use of the word ‘‘Dreaming’’: this is not purely metaphorical, for as Ronald Berndt has shown in a careful study, men do actually have a propensity to dream during the periods of cult performance. Through 20 Stanner, ‘‘The Dreaming,’’ p. 514. 21 This is a controversial point. For an extensive bibliography see Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 112. Eliade tends to accept the notion of high gods in Australia, but Stanner says of the two figures most often cited as high gods: ‘‘Not even by straining can one see in such culture heroes as Baiame and Darumulum the true hint of a Yahveh, jealous, omniscient and omnipotent’’ (‘‘The Dreaming,’’ 518). 22 Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience, 91.

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the dreams they reshape the cult symbolism for private psychic ends and, what is even more interesting, dreams may actually lead to a reinterpretation in myth that in turn causes a ritual innovation.23 Both the particularity and the fluidity, then, help account for the hovering closeness of the world of myth to the actual world. A sense of gap, that things are not all they might be, is there, but it is hardly experienced as tragic and is indeed on the verge of being comic.24 Primitive religious action is characterized not, as we have said, by worship, nor, as we shall see, by sacrifice, but by identification, ‘‘participation,’’ acting out. Just as the primitive symbol system is myth par excellence, so primitive religious action is ritual par excellence. In the ritual the participants become identified with the mythical beings they represent. The mythical beings are not addressed or propitiated or beseeched. The distance between man and mythical being, which was at best slight, disappears altogether in the moment of ritual when everywhen becomes now. There are no priests and no congregation, no mediating representative roles and no spectators. All present are involved in the ritual action itself and have become one with the myth. The underlying structure of ritual, which in Australia always has themes related to initiation, is remarkably similar to that of sacrifice. The four basic movements of the ritual as analyzed by Stanner are offering, destruction, transformation, and return-communion.25 Through acting out the mistakes and sufferings of the paradigmatic mythical hero, the new initiates come to terms symbolically with, again in Stanner’s words, the ‘‘immemorial misdirection’’ of human life. Their former innocence is destroyed and they are transformed into new identities now more able to ‘‘assent to life, as it is, without morbidity.’’ 26 In a sense the whole gamut of the spiritual life is already visible in the Australian ritual. Yet the symbolism is so compact that 23 Ronald Berndt, Kunapipi (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1951), 71–84. 24 Stanner, ‘‘On Aboriginal Religion I,’’ Oceania 30 (December 1959): 126; Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience, 53. 25 Stanner, ‘‘On Aboriginal Religion I,’’ 118. The Navaho ritual system is based on the same principles and also stresses the initiation theme. See Katherine Spencer, Mythology and Values: An Analysis of Navaho Chantway Myths (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1957). A very similar four-act structure has been discerned in the Christian Eucharist by Dom Gregory Dix in The Shape of the Liturgy (Westminster [London]: Dacre Press, 1943). 26 Stanner, ‘‘On Aboriginal Religion II,’’ Oceania (June 30, 1960): 278. Of ritual Stanner says: ‘‘Personality may almost be seen to change under one’s eyes.’’ ‘‘On Aboriginal Religion I,’’ 126.

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there is almost no element of choice, will, or responsibility. The religious life is as given and as fixed as the routines of daily living. At the primitive level religious organization as a separate social structure does not exist. Church and society are one. Religious roles tend to be fused with other roles, and differentiations along lines of age, sex, and kin group are important. While women are not as excluded from the religious life as male ethnographers once believed, their ritual life is to some degree separate and focused on particularly feminine life crises.27 In most primitive societies age is an important criterion for leadership in the ceremonial life. Ceremonies are often handed down in particular moieties and clans, as is only natural when the myths are so largely concerned with ancestors. Specialized shamans or medicine men are found in some tribes but are not a necessary feature of primitive religion. As for the social implications of primitive religion, Durkheim’s analysis still seems to be largely acceptable.28 The ritual life does reinforce the solidarity of the society and serves to induct the young into the norms of tribal behavior. We should not forget the innovative aspects of primitive religion, that particular myths and ceremonies are in a process of constant revision and alteration, and that in the face of severe historic crisis rather remarkable reformulations of primitive material can be made.29 Yet on the whole the religious life is the strongest reinforcement of the basic tenet of Australian philosophy, namely that life, as Stanner puts it, is a ‘‘onepossibility thing.’’ The very fluidity and flexibility of primitive religion is a barrier to radical innovation. Primitive religion gives little leverage from which to change the world.

Archaic Religion For purposes of the present conceptual scheme, as I have indicated, I am using primitive religion in an unusually restricted sense. Much that is usually classified as primitive religion would fall in my second category, archaic religion, which includes the religious systems of much of Africa and Polynesia and some of the New World, as well as the earliest religious 27 Catherine Berndt, Women’s Changing Ceremonies in Northern Australia (Paris: Herman, 1950). 28 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1947). 29 Anthony Wallace, ‘‘Revitalization Movements,’’ American Anthropologist 58 (April 1956): 264–279.

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systems of the ancient Middle East, India, and China. The characteristic feature of archaic religion is the emergence of true cult with the complex of gods, priests, worship, sacrifice, and in some cases divine or priestly kingship. The myth and ritual complex characteristic of primitive religion continues within the structure of archaic religion, but it is systematized and elaborated in new ways. In the archaic religious symbol system mythical beings are much more definitely characterized. Instead of being great paradigmatic figures with whom men in ritual identify but with whom they do not really interact, the mythical beings are more objectified, conceived as actively and sometimes willfully controlling the natural and human world, and as beings with whom men must deal in a definite and purposive way; in a word they have become gods. Relations among the gods are a matter of considerable speculation and systemization, so that definite principles of organization, especially hierarchies of control, are established. The basic worldview is still, like the primitives’, monistic. There is still only one world with gods dominating particular parts of it, especially important being the high gods of the heavenly regions whose vision, knowledge, and power may be conceived as very extensive indeed.30 But though the world is one it is far more differentiated, especially in a hierarchical way, than was the monistic worldview of the primitives: archaic religions tend to elaborate a vast cosmology in which all things divine and natural have a place. Much of the particularity and fluidity characteristic of primitive myth is still to be found in archaic religious thinking. But where priestly roles have become well established a relatively stable symbolic structure may be worked out and transmitted over an extended period of time. Especially where at least craft literacy 31 has been attained, the mythical tradition may become the object of critical reflection and innovative speculation that can lead to new developments beyond the nature of archaic religion. Archaic religious action takes the form of cult in which the distinction between men as subjects and gods as objects is much more definite than in primitive religion. Because the division is sharper, the need for a communication system through which gods and men can interact is much more acute. Worship and especially sacrifice are precisely such communication 30 Raffaele Pettazzoni, The All-Knowing God (London: Methuen, 1956). 31 By ‘‘craft literacy’’ I mean the situation in which literacy is limited to specially trained scribes and is not a capacity generally shared by the upper-status group. For an interesting discussion of the development of literacy in ancient Greece, see Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963).

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systems, as Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss so brilliantly established in their great essay on sacrifice.32 There is no space here for a technical analysis of the sacrificial process;33 suffice it to say that a double identification of priest and victim with both gods and men effects a transformation of motives comparable to that referred to in the discussion of primitive religious action. The main difference is that instead of a relatively passive identification in an all-encompassing ritual action, the sacrificial process, no matter how stereotyped, permits the human communicants a greater element of intentionality and entails more uncertainty relative to the divine response. Through this more differentiated form of religious action a new degree of freedom as well as, perhaps, an increased burden of anxiety enters the relations between man and the ultimate conditions of his existence. Archaic religious organization is still by and large merged with other social structures, but the proliferation of functionally hierarchically differentiated groups leads to a multiplication of cults, since every group in archaic society tends to have its cultic aspect. The emergence of a twoclass system, itself related to the increasing density of population made possible by agriculture, has its religious aspect. The upper-status group, which tends to monopolize political and military power, usually claims a superior religious status as well. Noble families are proud of their divine descent and often have special priestly functions. The divine king who is the chief link between his people and the gods is only the extreme case of the general tendency of archaic societies. Specialized priesthoods attached to cult centers may differentiate out but are usually kept subordinate to the political elite, which at this stage never completely divests itself of religious leadership. Occasionally priesthoods at cult centers located interstitially relative to political units—for example, Delphi in ancient Greece— may come to exercise a certain independence. The most significant limitation on archaic religious organization is the failure to develop differentiated religious collectivities including adherents as well as priests. The cult centers provide facilities for sacrifice and worship to an essentially transient clientele that is itself not organized as a collectivity, even though the priesthood itself may be rather tightly organized. The appearance of mystery cults and related religious confraterni32 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, ‘‘Essai sur la nature et la fonction du Sacrifice,’’ L’Annee Sociologique 2 (1899). 33 Two outstanding empirical studies are E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), esp. chaps. 8–11, and Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience, esp. chaps. 7 and 8.

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ties in the ancient world is usually related to a reorganization of the religious symbol and action systems, which indicates a transition to the next main type of religious structure. The social implications of archaic religion are to some extent similar to those of primitive religion. The individual and his society are seen as merged in a natural-divine cosmos. Traditional social structures and social practices are considered to be grounded in the divinely instituted cosmic order, and there is little tension between religious demand and social conformity. Indeed, social conformity is at every point reinforced with religious sanction. Nevertheless the very notion of well-characterized gods acting over against men with a certain freedom introduces an element of openness that is less apparent at the primitive level. The struggle between rival groups may be interpreted as the struggle between rival deities or as a deity’s change of favor from one group to another. Through the problems posed by religious rationalization of political change new modes of religious thinking may open up. This is clearly an important aspect of the early history of Israel, and it occurred in many other cases as well. The Greek preoccupation with the relation of the gods to the events of the Trojan War gave rise to a continuous deepening of religious thought from Homer to Euripides. In ancient China the attempt of the Chou to rationalize their conquest of the Shang led to an entirely new conception of the relation between human merit and divine favor. The breakdown of internal order led to messianic expectations of the coming of a savior king in such distant areas as Egypt on the one hand and Chou period China on the other. These are but a few of the ways in which the problems of maintaining archaic religious symbolization in increasingly complex societies drove toward solutions that began to place the archaic pattern itself in jeopardy.

Historic Religion The next stage in this theoretical scheme is called historic simply because the religions included are all relatively recent; they emerged in societies that were more or less literate and so have fallen chiefly under the discipline of history rather than that of archaeology or ethnography. The criterion that distinguishes the historic religions from the archaic is that the historic religions are all in some sense transcendental. The cosmological monism of the earlier stages is now more or less completely broken through and an entirely different realm of universal reality, having for religious man the highest value, is proclaimed. The discovery of an entirely

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different realm of religious reality seems to imply a derogation of the value of the given empirical cosmos: at any rate the world rejection discussed above is, in this stage for the first time, a general characteristic of the religious system. The symbol systems of the historic religions differ greatly among themselves but share the element of transcendentalism that sets them off from the archaic religions; in this sense they are all dualistic. The strong emphasis on hierarchical ordering characteristic of archaic religions continues to be stressed in most of the historic religions. Not only is the supernatural realm ‘‘above’’ this world in terms of both value and control but both the supernatural and earthly are themselves organized in terms of a religiously legitimated hierarchy. For the masses, at least, the new dualism is above all expressed in the difference between this world and the life after death. Religious concern, focused on this life in primitive and archaic religions, now tends to focus on life in the other realm, which may be either infinitely superior or, in certain situations with the emergence of various conceptions of hell, infinitely worse. Under these circumstances the religious goal of salvation (or enlightenment, release, and so forth) is for the first time the central religious preoccupation. In one sense historic religions represent a great ‘‘demythologization’’ relative to archaic religions. The notion of the one God who has neither court nor relatives, who has no myth himself, and who is the sole creator and ruler of the universe, the notion of self-subsistent being, or of release from the cycle of birth and rebirth, are all enormous simplifications of the ramified cosmologies of archaic religions. Yet all the historic religions have, to use Voegelin’s term, mortgages imposed on them by the historical circumstances of their origin. All of them contain, in suspension as it were, elements of archaic cosmology alongside their transcendental assertions. Nonetheless, relative to earlier forms the historic religions are all universalistic. From the point of view of these religions a man is no longer defined chiefly in terms of what tribe or clan he comes from or what particular god he serves but rather as a being capable of salvation. That is to say that it is for the first time possible to conceive of man as such. Religious action in the historic religions is thus above all action necessary for salvation. Even where elements of ritual and sacrifice remain prominent they take on a new significance. In primitive ritual the individual is put in harmony with the natural divine cosmos. His mistakes are overcome through symbolization as part of the total pattern. Through sacrifice archaic man can make up for his failures to fulfill his obligations to men or gods. He can atone for particular acts of unfaithfulness. But his-

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toric religion convicts man of a basic flaw far more serious than those conceived of by earlier religions. According to Buddhism, man’s very nature is greed and anger from which he must seek a total escape. For the Hebrew prophets, man’s sin is not particular wicked deeds but his profound heedlessness of God, and only a turn to complete obedience will be acceptable to the Lord. For Muhammad the kafir is not, as we usually translate, the ‘‘unbeliever,’’ but rather the ungrateful man who is careless of the divine compassion. For him only Islam, willing submission to the will of God, can bring salvation. The identity diffusion characteristic of both primitive and archaic religions is radically challenged by the historic religious symbolization, which leads for the first time to a clearly structured conception of the self. Devaluation of the empirical world and the empirical self highlights the conception of a responsible self, a core self, or a true self, deeper than the flux of everyday experience, facing a reality over against itself, a reality which has a consistency belied by the fluctuations of mere sensory impressions.34 Primitive man can only accept the world in its manifold givenness. Archaic man can through sacrifice fulfill his religious obligations and attain peace with the gods. But the historic religions promise man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it. The opportunity is far greater than before but so is the risk of failure. Perhaps partly because of the profound risks involved, the ideal of the religious life in the historic religions tends to be one of separation from the world. Even when, as in the case of Judaism and Islam, the religion enjoins types of worldly participation that are considered unacceptable or at least doubtful in some other historic religions, the devout are still set apart from ordinary worldlings by the massive collections of rules and obligations to which they must adhere. The early Christian solution, which, unlike the Buddhist, did allow the full possibility of salvation to the layman, 34 Buddhism, with its doctrine of the ultimate nonexistence of the self, seems to be an exception to this generalization, but for practical and ethical purposes, at least, a distinction between the true self and the empirical self is made by all schools of Buddhism. Some schools of Mahayana Buddhism give a metaphysical basis to a notion of ‘‘basic self’’ or ‘‘great self’’ as opposed to the merely selfish self caught up in transience and desire. Further, it would seem that nirvana, defined negatively so as rigorously to exclude any possibility of transience or change, serves fundamentally as an identity symbol. Of course the social and psychological consequences of this kind of identity symbol are very different from those following from other types of identity symbolization.

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nevertheless in its notion of a special state of religious perfection idealized religious withdrawal from the world. In fact the standard for lay piety tended to be closeness of approximation to the life of the religious. Historic religion is associated with the emergence of differentiated religious collectivities as the chief characteristic of its religious organization. The profound dualism with respect to the conception of reality is also expressed in the social realm. The single religiopolitical hierarchy of archaic society tends to split into two at least partially independent hierarchies, one political and one religious. Together with the notion of a transcendent realm beyond the natural cosmos comes a new religious elite that claims direct relation to the transmundane world. Even though notions of divine kingship linger on for a very long time in various compromise forms, it is no longer possible for a divine king to monopolize religious leadership. With the emergence of a religious elite alongside the political one the problem of legitimizing political power enters a new phase. Legitimation now rests upon a delicate balance of forces between the political and religious leadership. But the differentiation between religious and political that exists most clearly at the level of leadership tends also to be pushed down into the masses so that the roles of believer and subject become distinct. Even where, as in the case of Islam, this distinction was not supported by religious norms, it was soon recognized as an actuality. The emergence of the historic religions is part of a general shift from the two-class system of the archaic period to the four-class system characteristic of all the great historic civilizations up to modern times: a politicalmilitary elite, a cultural-religious elite, a rural lower-status group (peasantry), and an urban lower-status group (merchants and artisans). Closely associated with the new religious developments was the growth of literacy among the elite groups and in the upper segments of the urban lower class. Other social changes, such as the growth in the market resulting from the first widespread use of coinage and the development of bureaucracy and law as well as new levels of urbanization, are less directly associated with religion but are part of the same great transformation that got under way in the first millennium b.c. The distinction between religious and political elites applies to some extent to the two great lower strata. From the point of view of the historic religions the peasantry long remained relatively intractable and were often considered religiously second-class citizens, their predilection for cosmological symbolization rendering them always to some degree religiously suspect. The notion of the peasant as truly religious is a fairly modern idea. On the contrary it was the townsman who was much more likely to be numbered among the devout, and Max Weber has

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pointed out the great fecundity of the urban middle strata in religious innovations throughout the several great historical traditions.35 Such groups developed new symbolizations that sometimes threatened the structure of the historic religions in their early form, and in the one case where a new stage of religious symbolization was finally achieved they made important contributions. The social implications of the historic religions are implicit in the remarks on religious organization. The differentiation of a religious elite brought a new level of tension and a new possibility of conflict and change onto the social scene. Whether the confrontation was between Israelite prophet and king, Islamic ulama and sultan, Christian pope and emperor, or even between Confucian scholar-official and his ruler, it implied that political acts could be judged in terms of standards that the political authorities could not finally control. The degree to which these confrontations had serious social consequences of course depended on the degree to which the religious group was structurally independent and could exert real pressure. S. N. Eisenstadt has made a comprehensive survey of these differences;36 for our purposes it is enough to note that they were nowhere entirely absent. Religion, then, provided the ideology and social cohesion for many rebellions and reform movements in the historic civilizations, and consequently played a more dynamic and especially a more purposive role in social change than had previously been possible. On the other hand, we should not forget that in most of the historic civilizations for long periods of time religion performed the functions we have noted from the beginning: legitimation and reinforcement of the existing social order.

Early Modern Religion In all of the previous stages the ideal type was based on a variety of actual cases. Now for the first time it derives from a single case, or at best a congeries of related cases: namely, the Protestant Reformation. The defining characteristic of early modern religion is the collapse of the hierarchical structuring of both this and the other world. The dualism of the historic 35 Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 95–98, and elsewhere. 36 S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘‘Religious Organizations and Political Process in Centralized Empires,’’ Journal of Asian Studies 21 (May 1962): 271–294; and also his The Political Systems of Empires (New York: Free Press, 1963).

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religions remains as a feature of early modern religion but takes on a new significance in the context of more direct confrontation between the two worlds. Under the new circumstances salvation is not to be found in any kind of withdrawal from the world but in the midst of worldly activities. Of course elements of this existed in the historic religions from the beginning, but on the whole the historic religions as institutionalized had offered a mediated salvation. Either conformity to religious law, participation in a sacramental system, or performance of mystical exercises was necessary for salvation. All of these to some extent involved a turning away from the world. Furthermore, in the religious two-class systems characteristic of the institutionalized historic religions, the upper-status groups— the Christian monks or Sufi shaykhs or Buddhist ascetics—could through their pure acts and personal charisma store up a fund of grace that could then be shared with the less worthy. In this way, too, salvation was mediated rather than immediate. What the Reformation did was in principle, with the usual reservations and mortgages to the past, break through the whole mediated system of salvation and declare salvation potentially available to any man no matter what his station or calling might be. Since immediate salvation seems implicit in all the historic religions, it is not surprising that similar reform movements exist in other traditions, notably Shinran Shōnin’s version of Pure Land Buddhism, but also certain tendencies in Islam, Buddhism, and Confucianism. But the Protestant Reformation is the only attempt that was successfully institutionalized. In the case of Taoism and Confucianism the mortgage of archaic symbolization was so heavy that what seemed a new breakthrough easily became regressive. In the other cases, notably in the case of the Jōdo Shinshū, the radical implications were not sustained and a religion of mediated salvation soon reasserted itself. Religious movements of the early modern type may be emerging in a number of the great traditions today, perhaps even in the Vatican Council, and there are also secular movements with features strongly analogous to what I call early modern religion. But all of these tendencies are too uncertain to rely on in constructing an ideal type. Early modern religious symbolism concentrates on the direct relation between the individual and transcendent reality. A great deal of the cosmological baggage of medieval Christianity is dropped as superstition. The fundamentally ritualist interpretation of the sacrament of the Eucharist as a reenactment of the paradigmatic sacrifice is replaced with the antiritualist interpretation of the Eucharist as a commemoration of a once-and-forall historical event. Even though in one sense the world is more devalued in early Protestantism than in medieval Christianity, since the reformers

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reemphasized the radical separation between divine and human, still by proclaiming the world as the theater of God’s glory and the place wherein to fulfill his command, the Reformation reinforced positive autonomous action in the world instead of a relatively passive acceptance of it. Religious action was now conceived to be identical with the whole of life. Special ascetic and devotional practices were dropped as well as the monastic roles that specialized in them; instead the service of God became a total demand in every walk of life. The stress was on faith, an internal quality of the person, rather than on particular acts clearly marked ‘‘religious.’’ In this respect the process of identity unification that I have designated as a central feature of the historic religions advanced still further. The complex requirements for the attainment of salvation in the historic religions, though ideally they encouraged identity unification, could themselves become a new form of identity diffusion, as Luther and Shinran were aware. Assertion of the capacity for faith as an already received gift made it possible to undercut that difficulty. It also made it necessary to accept the ambiguity of human ethical life and the fact that salvation comes in spite of sin, not in its absolute absence. With the acceptance of the world not as it is but as a valid arena in which to work out the divine command, and with the acceptance of the self as capable of faith in spite of sin, the Reformation made it possible to turn away from world rejection in a way not possible in the historic religions. All of this was possible, however, only within the structure of a rigid orthodoxy and a tight though voluntaristic religious group. I have already noted that early modern religion abandoned hierarchy as an essential dimension of its religious symbol system.37 It did the same in its religious organization. Not only did it reject papal authority, but it also rejected the old form of the religious distinction between two levels of relative religious perfection. This was replaced with a new kind of religious two-class system: the division between elect and reprobates. The 37 God, of course, remains hierarchically superior to man, but the complex stratified structure of which purgatory, saints, angels, and so on, are elements is eliminated. Also, the strong reassertion of covenant thinking brought a kind of formal equality into the God-man relation without eliminating the element of hierarchy. Strictly speaking then, early modern (and modern) religion does not abandon the idea of hierarchy as such, but retains it in a much more flexible form, relative to particular contexts, and closely related to new emphases on equality. What is abandoned is rather a single overarching hierarchy, summed up in the symbol of the great chain of being.

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new form differed from the old one in that the elect were really a vanguard group in the fulfillment of the divine plan rather than a qualitative religious elite. The political implications of Protestantism had much to do with the overthrow of the old conception of hierarchy in the secular field as well. Where Calvinistic Protestantism was powerful, hereditary aristocracy and kingship were either greatly weakened or abandoned. In fact the Reformation is part of the general process of social change in which the four-class system of peasant societies began to break up in Europe. Especially in the Anglo-Saxon world Protestantism greatly contributed to its replacement by a more flexible multicentered mode of social organization based more on contract and voluntary association. Both church and state lost some of the reified significance they had in medieval times and later on the continent. The roles of church member and citizen were two among several. Both church and state had their delimited spheres of authority, but with the full institutionalization of the common law neither had a right to dominate the other or the whole of society. Nonetheless, the church acted for a long time as a sort of cultural and ethical holding company, and many developments in philosophy, literature, and social welfare took their initiative from clerical or church groups.38 The social implications of the Protestant Reformation are among the more debated subjects of contemporary social science. Lacking space to defend my assertions, let me simply say that I stand with Weber, Merton, and others in attributing very great significance to the Reformation, especially in its Calvinistic wing, in a whole series of developments from economics to science, from education to law. Whereas in most of the historic civilizations religion stands as virtually the only stable challenger to the dominance of the political elite, in the emerging early modern society religious impulses give rise to a variety of institutional structures, from the beginning or very soon becoming fully secular, which stand beside and to some extent compete with and limit the state. The direct religious response to political and moral problems does not disappear, but the impact 38 Of course, important developments in modern culture stemming from the recovery of classical art and philosophy in the Renaissance took place outside the mainstream of religious development. However, the deep interrelations between religious and secular components of the Renaissance should not be overlooked. Certainly the clergy in the Anglo-Saxon world were among the foremost guardians of the classical tradition in literature and thought. The most tangible expression of this was the close relation of higher education to the church, a relation that was not seriously weakened until the late nineteenth century in America.

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of religious orientations on society is also mediated by a variety of worldly institutions in which religious values have been expressed.Weber’s critics, frequently assuming a premodern model of the relation between religion and society, have often failed to understand the subtle interconnections he was tracing. But the contrast with the historic stage, when pressures toward social change in the direction of value realization were sporadic and often utopian, is decisive. In the early modern stage for the first time pressures to social change in the direction of greater realization of religious values are actually institutionalized as part of the structure of the society itself. The self-revising social order expressed in a voluntaristic and democratic society can be seen as just such an outcome. The earliest phase of this development, especially the several examples of Calvinist commonwealths, was voluntaristic only within the elect vanguard group and otherwise was often illiberal and even dictatorial. The transition toward a more completely democratic society was complex and subject to many blockages. Close analogies to the early modern situation occur in many of the contemporary developing countries, which are trying for the first time to construct social systems with a built-in tendency to change in the direction of greater value realization. The leadership of these countries varies widely between several kinds of vanguard revolutionary movements with distinctly illiberal proclivities to elites committed to the implementation of a later, more democratic, model of Western political society.

Modern Religion I am not sure whether in the long run what I call early modern religion will appear as a stage with the same degree of distinctness as the others I have distinguished or whether it will appear only as a transitional phase, but I am reasonably sure that, even though we must speak from the midst of it, the modern situation represents a stage of religious development in many ways profoundly different from that of historic religion. The central feature of the change is the collapse of the dualism that was so crucial to all the historic religions. It is difficult to speak of a modern religious symbol system. It is indeed an open question whether there can be a religious symbol system analogous to any of the preceding ones in the modern situation, which is characterized by a deepening analysis of the very nature of symbolization itself.

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At the highest intellectual level I would trace the fundamental break with traditional historic symbolization to the work of Kant. By revealing the problematic nature of the traditional metaphysical basis of all the religions, and by indicating that it is not so much a question of two worlds as it is of as many worlds as there are modes of apprehending them, he placed the whole religious problem in a new light. However simple the immediate result of his grounding religion in the structure of ethical life rather than in a metaphysics claiming cognitive adequacy, it nonetheless pointed decisively in the direction that modern religion would go. The entire modern analysis of religion, including much of the most important recent theology, though rejecting Kant’s narrowly rational ethics, has been forced to ground religion in the structure of the human situation itself. In this respect the present essay is a symptom of the modern religious situation as well as an analysis of it. In the worldview that has emerged from the tremendous intellectual advances of the last two centuries there is simply no room for a hierarchic dualistic religious symbol system of the classical historic type. This is not to be interpreted as a return to primitive monism: it is not that a single world has replaced a double one but that an infinitely multiplex one has replaced the simple duplex structure. It is not that life has become again a ‘‘one-possibility thing’’ but that it has become an infinite possibility thing. The analysis of modern man as secular, materialistic, dehumanized, and in the deepest sense areligious seems to me fundamentally misguided, for such a judgment is based on standards that cannot adequately gauge the modern temper. Though it is central to the problems of modern religion, space forbids a review of the development of the modern analysis of religion on its scholarly and scientific side. Hence I shall confine myself to some brief comments on directions of development within Protestant theology. In many respects Friedrich Schleiermacher is the key figure in early-nineteenthcentury theology who saw the deeper implications of the Kantian breakthrough. The development of ‘‘liberal theology’’ in the later nineteenth century, partly on the basis of Schleiermacher’s beginnings, tended to fall back into Kant’s overly rational limitations. Against this, Barth’s reassertion of the power of the traditional symbolism was bound to produce a vigorous response, but unfortunately, due to Barth’s own profound ambiguity on the ultimate status of dogma, the consequences were in part simply a regressive reassertion of the adequacy of the early modern theological formulation. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the deeper implications of Schleiermacher’s attempt were being developed in various

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ways by such diverse figures as Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.39 Tillich’s assertion of ‘‘ecstatic naturalism,’’ Bultmann’s program of ‘‘demythologization,’’ and Bonhoeffer’s search for a ‘‘religionless Christianity,’’ though they cannot be simply equated with each other, are efforts to come to terms with the modern situation. Even on the Catholic side the situation is beginning to be recognized. Interestingly enough, indications of the same general search for an entirely new mode of religious symbolization, though mostly confined to the Protestant West, also appear in that most developed of the non-Western countries, Japan. Uchimura Kanzō’s nonchurch Christianity was a relatively early indication of a search for new directions, and is being developed even further today. Even more interesting perhaps is the emergence of a similar development out of the Jōdo Shinshū tradition, at least in the person of Ienaga Saburō.40 This example indeed suggests that highly ‘‘modern’’ implications exist in more than one strand of Mahayana Buddhism and perhaps several of the other great traditions as well. Although in my opinion these implications were never developed sufficiently to dominate a historical epoch as they did in the West in the last two centuries, they may well prove decisive in the future of these religions. So far what I have been saying applies mainly to intellectuals, but at least some evidence indicates that changes are also occurring at the level of mass religiosity.41 Behind the 96 percent of Americans who claim to believe in God there are many instances of a massive reinterpretation that leaves Tillich, Bultmann, and Bonhoeffer far behind.42 In fact, for many 39 Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952); Karl Jaspers and Rudolf Bultmann, Myth and Christianity (New York: Noonday Press, 1958); Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (London: scm Press, 1954). Numerous other works of three theologians could be cited. 40 Bellah, ‘‘Ienaga Saburō and the Search for Meaning in Japan’’ (1965). 41 There are a few scattered studies such as Gordon Allport, James Gillespie, and Jacqueline Young, ‘‘The Religion of the Post-War College Student,’’ Journal of Psychology 25 (January 1948): 3–33, but the subject does not lend itself well to investigation via questionnaires and brief interviews. Richard V. McCann, in his Harvard doctoral dissertation ‘‘The Nature and Varieties of Religious Change’’ (1955), utilized a much subtler approach involving depth interviewing and discovered a great deal of innovative reinterpretation in people from all walks of life. Unfortunately, lack of control in sampling makes it impossible to generalize his results. 42 Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), p. 72.

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churchgoers the obligation of doctrinal orthodoxy sits lightly indeed, and the idea that all creedal statements must receive a personal reinterpretation is widely accepted. The dualistic worldview certainly persists in the minds of many of the devout, but just as surely many others have developed elaborate and often pseudoscientific rationalizations to bring their faith in its experienced validity into some kind of cognitive harmony with the twentieth-century world. The wave of popular response that some of the newer theology seems to be eliciting is another indication that not only intellectuals find themselves in a new religious situation.43 To concentrate on the church in a discussion of the modern religious situation is already misleading, for it is precisely the characteristic of the new situation that the great problem of religion as I have defined it, the symbolization of man’s relation to the ultimate conditions of his existence, is no longer the monopoly of any groups explicitly labeled religious. However much the development of Western Christianity may have led up to and in a sense created the modern religious situation, it just as obviously is no longer in control of it. Not only has any obligation of doctrinal orthodoxy been abandoned by the leading edge of modern culture, but every fixed position has become open to question in the process of making sense out of man and his situation. This involves a profounder commitment to the process I have been calling religious symbolization than ever before. The historic religions discovered the self; the early modern religion found a doctrinal basis on which to accept the self in all its empirical ambiguity; modern religion is beginning to understand the laws of the self’s own existence and so to help man take responsibility for his own fate. This statement is not intended to imply a simple liberal optimism, for the modern analysis of man has also disclosed the depths of the limitations imposed by man’s situation. Nevertheless, the fundamental symbolization of modern man and his situation is that of a dynamic multidimensional self capable, within limits, of continual self-transformation and capable, again within limits, of remaking the world, including the very symbolic forms with which he deals with it, even the forms that state the unalterable conditions of his own existence. Such a statement should not be taken to mean that I expect, even less that I advocate, some ghastly religion of social sci43 Bishop J. A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God (Philadelphia [London]: Westminster Press, 1963), which states in straightforward language the positions of some of the recent Protestant theologians mentioned above, sold, by November 1963, over 300,000 copies in England and over 71,000 in the United States, with another 50,000 on order, and this in the first few months after publication. Reported in Christianity and Crisis 23 [November 11, 1963]: 201.

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ence. Rather, I expect traditional religious symbolism to be maintained and developed in new directions, but with growing awareness that it is symbolism and that man in the last analysis is responsible for the choice of his symbolism. Naturally, continuation of the symbolization characteristic of earlier stages without any reinterpretation is to be expected among many in the modern world, just as it has occurred in every previous period. Religious action in the modern period is, I think, clearly a continuation of tendencies already evident in the early modern stage. Now less than ever can man’s search for meaning be confined to the church. But with the collapse of a clearly defined doctrinal orthodoxy and a religiously supported objective system of moral standards, religious action in the world becomes more demanding than ever. The search for adequate standards of action, which is at the same time a search for personal maturity and social relevance, is in itself the heart of the modern quest for salvation, if I may divest that word of its dualistic associations. How the specifically religious bodies are to adjust their time-honored practices of worship and devotion to modern conditions is of growing concern in religious circles. Such diverse movements as the liturgical revival, pastoral psychology, and renewed emphasis on social action are all efforts to meet the present need. Few of these trends have gotten much beyond the experimental stage but we can expect the experiments to continue. In the modern situation as I have defined it, one might almost be tempted to see in Thomas Paine’s ‘‘My mind is my church’’ or in Thomas Jefferson’s ‘‘I am a sect myself’’ the typical expression of religious organization in the near future. Nonetheless it seems unlikely that collective symbolization of the great inescapabilities of life will soon disappear. Of course the ‘‘free intellectual’’ will continue to exist as he has for millennia, but such a solution can hardly be very general. Private voluntary religious association in the West achieved full legitimation for the first time in the early modern situation, but in the early stages especially, discipline and control within these groups was very intense. The tendency in more recent periods has been to continue the basic pattern but with a much more open and flexible pattern of membership. In accord with general trends I have already discussed, standards of doctrinal orthodoxy and attempts to enforce moral purity have largely been dropped. The assumption in most of the major Protestant denominations is that the church member can be considered responsible for himself. This trend seems likely to continue, with an increasingly fluid type of organization in which many special purpose subgroups form and disband. Rather than interpreting these trends as significant of indifference and secularization, I see in them the increas-

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ing acceptance of the notion that each individual must work out his own ultimate solutions and that the most the church can do is provide him a favorable environment for doing so, without imposing on him a prefabricated set of answers.44 And it will be increasingly realized that answers to religious questions can validly be sought in various spheres of ‘‘secular’’ art and thought. Here I can only suggest what I take to be the main social implication of the modern religious situation. Early modern society, to a considerable degree under religious pressure, developed, as we have seen, the notion of a self-revising social system in the form of a democratic society. But at least in the early phase of that development social flexibility was balanced against doctrinal (Protestant orthodoxy) and characterological (Puritan personality) rigidities. In a sense those rigidities were necessary to allow the flexibility to emerge in the social system, but it is the chief characteristic of the more recent modern phase that culture and personality themselves have come to be viewed as endlessly revisable. This has been characterized as a collapse of meaning and a failure of moral standards. No doubt the possibilities for pathological distortion in the modern situation are enormous. It remains to be seen whether the freedom modern society implies at the cultural and personality as well as the social level can be stably institutionalized in large-scale societies. Yet the very situation that has been characterized as one of the collapse of meaning and the failure of moral standards can also, and I would argue more fruitfully, be viewed as one offering unprecedented opportunities for creative innovation in every sphere of human action.

Conclusion The schematic presentation of the stages of religious evolution just concluded is based on the proposition that at each stage freedom of personality and society has increased relative to environing conditions. Freedom has increased because at each successive stage the relation of man to the conditions of his existence has been conceived as more complex, more open, and more subject to change and development. The distinction between conditions that are really ultimate and those that are alterable be44 The great Protestant stress on thinking for oneself in matters of religion is documented in Gerhard Lenski, The Religious Factor (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), 270–273.

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comes increasingly clear though never complete. Of course this scheme of religious evolution has implied at almost every point a general theory of social evolution, which has had to remain largely implicit. Let me suggest in closing, as a modest effort at empirical testing, how the evolutionary scheme may help to explain the facts of alternating world acceptance and rejection that were noted near the beginning of the essay. I have argued that the world acceptance of the primitive and archaic levels is largely to be explained as the only possible response to a reality that invades the self to such an extent that the symbolizations of self and world are only very partially separate. The great wave of world rejection of the historic religions I have interpreted as a major advance in what Lienhardt calls ‘‘the differentiation between experience of the self and of the world which acts upon it.’’ Only by withdrawing cathexis from the myriad objects of empirical reality could consciousness of a centered self in relation to an encompassing reality emerge. Early modern religion made it possible to maintain the centered self without denying the multifold empirical reality, and so made world rejection in the classical sense unnecessary. In the modern phase knowledge of the laws of the formation of the self, as well as much more about the structure of the world, has opened up almost unlimited new directions of exploration and development.World rejection marks the beginning of a clear objectification of the social order and sharp criticism of it. In the earlier world-accepting phases religious conceptions and social order were so fused that it was almost impossible to criticize the latter from the point of view of the former. In the later phases the possibility of remaking the world to conform to value demands has served in a very different way to mute the extremes of world rejection. The world acceptance of the last two stages is shown in this analysis to have a profoundly different significance from that of the first two. Construction of a wide-ranging evolutionary scheme like the one presented here is an extremely risky enterprise. Nevertheless such efforts are justifiable if, by throwing light on perplexing developmental problems, they contribute to modern man’s efforts at self-interpretation.

2 The Five Religions of Modern Italy

This chapter takes as its point of departure and as recurring touchstones several texts of Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci. The method of the chapter pretends to no more than elucidation, interpretation, and commentary on these and certain other related texts. The justification of such a method can only come from the exceptional grasp and penetration of these two men and the great influence they have had—they are probably modern Italy’s two most important thinkers. Both were profoundly concerned with the meaning of modern Italian society in the broadest historical and philosophical perspective. It is not a question of accepting their views; indeed, they differed sharply from each other. But I have found that grappling with their views in the context of Italian history has been a serviceable way to understand the place of religion, in the sense of systems of ultimate meaning, in modern Italy. Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), the son of an aristocratic Neapolitan family, was a philosopher and historian of culture who became a living embodiment of liberal culture during the first half of the twentieth century. Believing ‘‘history is the history of liberty,’’ he opposed all totalitarianisms. During the Mussolini period he withdrew from public life and, though never silenced, lived on the margins of political toleration. After World War II he was felt to be the greatest living symbol of the old liberal Italy and was as such both honored and disregarded. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was the son of a poor Sardinian family, ultimately of Albanian extraction. After coming to Turin he became one of the first outstanding leaders of the Italian Communist Party. Arrested by Mussolini in 1926, he spent the rest of his life in prison, except for [First published in Italian under the title ‘‘Le cinque religioni dell’Italia moderna,’’ in Fabio Luca and Stephen R. Gaubard, eds., Il caso italiano (Milan: Garzanti Editore, 1974), 439–468. First published in English in Bellah and Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (1980), 86–118. Used by permission. In the introduction to Imagining Japan (2003), 1–62, I developed an interpretation of Japanese fascism as involving a regression to a less differentiated situation in which god, emperor, nation, and self were fused. When I wrote it I had forgotten that in this essay I had already analyzed fascism in Italy as involving a regression to elements of pre-Christian culture.]

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the few days he survived, diseased and physically broken, after his release in 1937. His greatest work was done in prison and became known only when it was published after World War II. Gramsci’s work has been widely popular among Italian intellectuals since the late 1940s, but he has had no outstanding continuator or successor. Both Croce and Gramsci, viewed in the proper light, can be seen as lawgivers and even as prophets. Both were intensely concerned with the ethical and political orders of Italian society. Both had a vision of a good normative order they hoped to persuade their society to adopt. Both based their norm giving or law giving on a fundamental conception of reality to which they gave ultimate respect and that they invoked as legitimation for their normative demands; so they can rightly be called prophets. To Croce the historical realization of liberty was the highest good; to Gramsci it was the dialectic of socialist liberation. But lawgivers require law takers, and prophets require followers. Each in his own way finally found himself alone. Each, though concerned with power, had to renounce power, to reject his society as it was, and to refuse to collaborate with it. Both of them joined that long line of Italians, saints and heroes, who refused the demands of the powers of their day. They are thus not unworthy guides to the study of the meaning of reality in modern Italy.

Croce and Gramsci Benedetto Croce began his well-known book History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, with a chapter entitled ‘‘The Religion of Liberty.’’ After describing various features of liberalism as it came to be expressed in the early nineteenth century, he writes, Now he who gathers together and considers all these characteristics of the liberal ideal does not hesitate to call it what it was: a ‘‘religion.’’ He calls it so, of course, because he looks for what is essential and intrinsic in every religion, which always lies in the concept of reality and an ethics that conforms to this concept. . . . Nothing more was needed to give them a religious character, since personifications, myths, legends, dogmas, rites, propitiations, expiations, priestly classes, pontifical robes, and the like do not belong to the intrinsic, and are taken out from particular religions and set up as requirements for every religion with ill effect.1

1 Benedetto Croce, History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Henry Furst (New York: Harbinger, 1963), 18.

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It is clear that Croce wishes to broaden the definition of religion beyond the traditionally religious elements he heaps together in the last sentence and that point to Catholicism. Croce’s argument is close enough to my own that, following him, I will treat modern Italy as a land not of one religion, as common sense would dictate, but of several. Even the varieties I will consider are all but one to be found in Croce’s book. In his second chapter, ‘‘Opposing Religious Faiths,’’ he discusses Catholicism and socialism as competitors to liberalism, and in his last chapter he discusses a more recent religion he calls activism, which includes, among other things, fascism, though that word is not mentioned.2 I will add a fifth religion, or class of religions, which I will argue precedes temporally, and in a sense, logically, all the others, and which I will call pre-Christian or sub-Christian religion. But I will not be satisfied, as Croce largely was, to lay out passively and statically the five religions side by side. Antonio Gramsci criticized Croce’s History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century for beginning in 1815 and his History of Italy for beginning in 1871, that is, just after but not including the French Revolution in the one book or the Risorgimento in the other.3 He thus excluded ‘‘the moment of struggle; the moment in which the conflicting forces are formed, are assembled and take up their positions; the moment in which one ethical-political system dissolves and another is formed by fire and steel; the moment in which one system of social relations disintegrates and falls and another arises and asserts itself.’’ 4 Gramsci’s view of the ‘‘religions’’ is instructive because it emphasizes the element of struggle, of process, of politics. His conception of religion modulates from the Crocean to something more recognizably Marxist: ‘‘Note the problem of religion taken not in the confessional sense but in the secular sense of a unity of faith between a conception of the world and a corresponding norm of conduct. But why call this unity of faith ‘religion’ and not ‘ideology,’ or even frankly ‘politics’?’’ 5 Gramsci sees two major functions of such ‘‘religions.’’ One is essentially defensive or, one might say, ‘‘integrative’’: 2 The book was first published in Italy in 1933, and it was necessary for Croce to be somewhat guarded in his language. 3 Benedetto Croce, A History of Italy, 1871–1915, trans. Cecilia M. Ady (New York: Oxford University Press, 1929). 4 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International; London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 118–119. 5 Gramsci, Selections, 326.

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The Five Religions of Modern Italy But at this point we reach the fundamental problem facing any conception of the world, any philosophy which has become a cultural movement, a ‘‘religion,’’ a ‘‘faith,’’ any that has produced a form of practical activity or will in which the philosophy is contained as an implicit theoretical ‘‘premiss.’’ One might say ‘‘ideology’’ here, but on condition that the word is implicitly manifest in art, in law, in economic activity and in all manifestations of individual and collective life. This problem is that of preserving the ideological unity of the entire social bloc which that ideology serves to cement and unify.6

The other is to provide new forms of consciousness appropriate for new stages of social development. Of particular importance to Gramsci is a religion or ideology that can provide a ‘‘national-popular collective will’’ such as he saw in Protestantism in the Reformation or Jacobinism in the French Revolution.7 For him the particular problem of Italy arose from the fact that the Renaissance was not in this respect the equivalent of the Reformation nor was the Risorgimento the equivalent of the French Revolution. It thus remained the task of Marxism (‘‘The Philosophy of praxis corresponds to the nexus Protestant Reformation plus French Revolution’’) to awaken the national-popular collective will so long dormant in Italy.8 One need not accept fully the terms of Gramsci’s dynamic analysis to see it usefully supplements Croce’s more static structure. In addition to the theoretical resources drawn from Croce and Gramsci I would like to apply two of my concepts developed from the analysis of American and Japanese society. In dealing with the religious dimension of American political life I borrowed the notion of ‘‘civil religion’’ from Rousseau and showed the extent to which a rather articulated set of religious beliefs and practices had grown up in the American polity that was independent from though not necessarily hostile to the various church religions that flourish in America.9 In applying the notion to Italy it becomes important to realize that all five religions are civil religions.10 This is above all because Italian Catholicism is and has always been a civil religion. Not only is it the nature of Catholicism generally, or at least until quite recently and in certain countries like the United States, to express itself in particular social and political forms, but above all because the papacy, with its 6 Gramsci, Selections, 328. 7 Gramsci, Selections, 130. 8 Gramsci, Selections, 45. 9 See ‘‘Civil Religion in America,’’ chapter 9 in this volume. 10 [On the religio-political problem, see Bellah, introduction to Bellah and Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (1980), vii–xv.]

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ineradicably political implications, has been for centuries an Italian institution. It has therefore, and again until quite recently, been impossible to challenge the Catholic political system without challenging Catholicism as a religion. It is for that reason, especially in Italy, that liberalism, socialism, and activism have had to be civil religions, religiopolitical organisms, in competition with the Catholic civil religion. The interrelations and interpenetrations are important, as we shall see, but the general point still stands. The sense in which the pre- or sub-Christian religions are civil religions is somewhat different and necessitates the application of still another concept, adapted from the language of music, of the ‘‘religious ground bass.’’ I developed the notion of the religious ground bass to get at that aspect of Japanese religion that cannot be subsumed under the headings of ‘‘Buddhism’’ or ‘‘Confucianism.’’ 11 It is close to what is meant by Shinto, not in the more formal aspects of that not very formal religion but at the point where Shinto shades off into the religion of the basic social structure itself, the religion embedded in the family, village, work group, and so on. What is evident in Japan just because there is such a thing as Shinto is more obscure in Italy but nonetheless important.

The Religious Ground Bass As a figure of a much more general phenomenon and as an example of its most extreme form let us consider Carlo Levi’s description of the religious life of a village in southern Italy in which he lived for a year, a life so alien that he considers it not only pre-Christian but in a sense prereligious. To the peasants everything has a double meaning. The cow-woman, the werewolf, the lion-baron, the goat-devil are only notorious and striking examples. People, trees, animals, even objects and words have a double life. Only reason, religion, and history have clear-cut meanings. But the feeling for life itself, for art, language, and love is complex, infinitely so. And in the peasants’ world there is no room for reason, religion, and history. There is no room for religion, because to them everything participates in divinity, everything is actually, not merely symbolically, divine: Christ and the goat; the heavens above, and the beasts of the field below; everything is bound up in natural magic. Even the ceremonies of the church become pagan rites, celebrating the existence of in-

11 Bellah, ‘‘Values and Social Change in Modern Japan,’’ in Beyond Belief (1970), 114–145.

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The Five Religions of Modern Italy animate things, which the peasants endow with a soul, the innumerable earthy divinities of the village.12

This passage and the one that follows are interesting not only as descriptions of what Levi saw but of how a cultivated Italian intellectual thought about what he saw. The following is a description of the procession at the local feast of the Virgin Mary: Amid this warlike thundering [of firecrackers] there was no happiness or religious ecstasy in the people’s eyes; instead they seemed prey to a sort of madness, a pagan throwing off of restraint, and a stunned or hypnotized condition; all of them were highly wrought up. The animals ran about wildly, goats leaped, donkeys brayed, dogs barked, children shouted, and women sang. Peasants with baskets of wheat in their hands threw fistfuls of it at the Madonna, so that she might take thought for the harvest and bring them good luck. The grains curved through the air, fell on the paving stones and bounced up off them with a light noise like that of hail. The black-faced Madonna, in the shower of wheat, among the animals, the gunfire, and the trumpets, was no sorrowful Mother of God, but rather a subterranean deity, black with the shadows of the bowels of the earth, a peasant Persephone or lower world goddess of the harvest.13

Not only, for Levi, do the peasants live at a level of ‘‘subterranean’’ intensity beneath the ‘‘clear-cut meanings’’ of reason, religion, and history; they are finally and deeply antagonistic to those meanings: Governments, Theocracies and Armies are, of course, stronger than the scattered peasants. So the peasants have to resign themselves to being dominated, but they cannot feel as their own the glories and undertakings of a civilization that is radically their enemy. The only wars that touch their hearts are those in which they have fought to defend themselves against that civilization, against History and Government, Theocracy and the Army. These wars they fought under their own black pennants, without military leadership or training and without hope, ill-fated wars that they were bound to lose, fierce and desperate wars, incomprehensible to historians.14

I would like to take Levi’s description of the pre-Christian or sub-Christian religion of a desperately poor village in the far south of Italy as standing for that particularistic religious life, embedded in the roots of the social 12 Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, trans. Francis Frenaye (New York: Noonday Press, 1970), 117. 13 Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, 118–119. 14 Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, 137–138.

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structure, that I have referred to metaphorically as the religious ground bass. Here I would include all those loyalties to family and clan, to pseudokinship groups like the Mafia, to village and town, and to faction and clique that so often in Italy, as elsewhere, ultimately define reality more significantly for their members than all the formal religions and ideologies combined. The musical metaphor of the ground bass is meant to suggest a deep and repetitious sonority, a drone bass that continues in spite of all melodic developments in the upper registers, the more formal theologies and philosophies, and not infrequently drowns them out altogether. While something like a religious ground bass is probably universal, its strength relative to other components of the religiocultural system is certainly variable—probably greater in Japan than in China, in Italy than in France or England. Its strength within Italy also clearly varies in time and space; it was stronger a century ago than today, stronger in the South than in the North. But of the latter contrast I have come to suspect that the South stands not only for a geographical region but for a region in the Italian soul and that there is something of the ‘‘South’’ everywhere in Italy. The characteristics of the particularistic religion generally can be extrapolated from Levi’s description: It is emotional and intense in contrast to the ascetic rationalism of high Italian culture; it is fiercely closed to the outside world (there is not one such religion but as many as there are groups), as opposed to the universalism of high Italian thought; and it is presided over by a woman, an epiphany of the Great Mother of the Mediterranean world, only partially and uncertainly articulated with the Virgin of Nazareth. To borrow an analogy from the political realm, I might say the religious ground bass has been traditionally the ‘‘real religion’’ and Catholicism the ‘‘legal religion.’’ Certainly the attitude toward the church has often been legalistic and external—one does what one must in terms of the deep loyalties and obligations of the particularistic structure and then squares it as best one can with the demands of the church. The statesman Minghetti, himself a religious man, described the Italian masses in the late nineteenth century as almost devoid of ‘‘religious sentiment.’’ For them, he said, ‘‘habit counts for more than faith. The latter has little influence on thought, and even less on action.’’ 15 The degree to which a genuine Catholic piety has penetrated the Italian masses has varied in time and place over the last century, but it must certainly be said that Catholic identity has often been more of a shield for particularistic loyalties than an expression 15 Arturo Carlo Jemolo, Church and State in Italy, 1850–1950, trans. David Moore (New York: Oxford University Press; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), 39.

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of deep inner faith. But then the same thing must be said for the secular religions of liberalism and socialism as well. Only in this connection can we understand how a society that seems, if one considers its articulate and self-conscious classes, so intensely ideological can show such low rates of political and ideological knowledge and involvement when compared with other modern societies.16 The gap between intellectuals and masses, between conscious ideology and popular feeling, is probably greater than in most Western countries. This can be and has been interpreted in terms of fragmentation and alienation, but we need more than merely negative terms to describe what is going on here.17 The ground bass religion involves deep loyalties and even a kind of faith. It is understandable as a defensive reaction to a long history of bad government, oppression, and brutality, especially in the South, and to the partial failure of mass religious and ideological movements to penetrate the masses. But it is also the expression of a cultural continuity with an ancient past, a form of culture not only premodern but also pre-Christian and even pre-Roman. In particular there seems to be something central about the place of the woman in the ground bass culture, a place never quite adequately expressed in the writings of the self-conscious intellectuals. The position of the Italian woman is markedly less equal than in most modern societies, but as the female opposition to the divorce law suggests, there are rewards other than equality for women in the traditional system. Finally, we may consider the ground bass religion as a civil religion, not of the nation but of the particular group whose essence it expresses. As such it may be a powerful force in combination, alliance, or opposition to one of the great rival civil religions seeking dominance in the state. An Italian professor pointed out to me that in Italy there is always a gap between believing and doing, and between belief and action comes the political calculus. But here I think political refers primarily to group interest and group loyalty rather than to civic concerns broadly expressed. The priority of particular group loyalties has protected the Italians from the worst extremes of ideological passion of the twentieth century—even fascism never went very deep—but it has also operated to undermine a genuine commitment to democratic and liberal values when these did not seem to pay off for particular groups. 16 Joseph LaPalombara, ‘‘Italy: Fragmentation, Isolation, and Alienation,’’ in Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 286–288. 17 LaPalombara, Political Culture.

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Catholicism The presence of the papacy in Italy has always been a mixed blessing for Italian spirituality. It has inhibited the development of a national church in the sense that France and Spain have national churches, religious patterns that are at the same time genuinely Catholic and expressive of the national popular culture. The ablest of the Italian clergy have been drawn into the international bureaucracy of the church, not into the formulation of a peculiarly national expression. At the same time the political priorities of the papacy seem in recent centuries to have inhibited the intellectual and devotional creativity the church has sometimes shown in other countries. Until a little over a century ago the papacy was itself a temporal power, one of the major states of Italy, and it remains to this day a sovereign state recognized diplomatically by many nations. It is impossible to understand the history of modern Italian Catholicism without understanding the politics of the papacy. Gramsci’s analysis of Italian history focused on the recurrent problem of the isolation of a cosmopolitan intellectual elite from a national-popular base that the structure of the Italian church exemplified but did not originate. Indeed, he traces this phenomenon back to the formation of a class of ‘‘imperial’’ intellectuals in the early Roman Empire.18 Nor did, in his view, the modern secular intellectuals wholly escape from an analogous position relative to the mass of the Italian people. But in many respects the Catholic clergy remain paradigmatic of the place of the intellectual in Italy, and the two-class structure of the church, the clear distinction between the religiously elite clergy and the common people, has had enormous general repercussions. It is in part to this phenomenon, emphasized especially by the presence of the central organ of the church, the papacy, that I would link the tendency of Italian thinkers of all persuasions to think in terms of elites, of governing classes and political classes, more or less clearly differentiated from the general population. One of Gramsci’s central theoretical problems is the conditions under which an ‘‘organic’’ intelligentsia is formed, that is, one closely tied to a social group or class, which expresses its inner needs and aspirations, rather than, as has usually been the case in Italy, one that remains isolated from effective social involvement. This perspective explains why for Gramsci the lack of an Italian Reformation is such a significant fact: 18 Gramsci, Selections, 17.

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‘‘The Lutheran Reformation and Calvinism created a vast national-popular movement through which their influence spread. . . . The Italian reformers were infertile of any major historical success.’’ 19 It is partly in response to that void of an Italian Reformation that we may understand Gramsci’s fascination, and not Gramsci’s alone but that of almost every major modern Italian intellectual, with Niccolò Machiavelli, the Italian contemporary of Luther and Calvin.20 Gramsci treats Machiavelli as a Reformer in secular guise, a ‘‘precocious Jacobin,’’ with a vision of a people armed, a national Italy, and Gramsci used the figure of Machiavelli’s Prince to express the unifying and leading function of the modern Communist Party. Gramsci does not mention that in the Discourses Machiavelli expresses an admiration for the religion of the ancient Romans, a truly ‘‘civil religion,’’ relative to which he found Christianity largely impotent politically. Nonetheless Machiavelli’s Discourses were undoubtedly one of the sources for that political faith that Gramsci so admired under the name of Jacobinism. The Counter-Reformation in Italy has often been condemned for its political and cultural effects, for its final confirmation of absolutism as against any kind of popular sovereignty, and for the stultifying consequences of its cultural policy. Its religious consequences were also negative, as for instance in the crushing of Sarpi’s ‘‘national-popular’’ Catholicism in Venice.21 The externality and legalism of Trent encouraged not a deeply internalized piety but only the theatrical and mannered religious fervor of the baroque.22 Yet within the pores, so to speak, of Tridentine Catholicism other possibilities were growing. The sober and sincere piety of Alessandro Manzoni in the nineteenth century was perhaps only a harbinger 19 Gramsci, Selections, 394. 20 Gramsci, Selections, 123. Croce, A History, 152, traces this modern interest in Machiavelli to the 1890s and says, ‘‘With the Marxists, Machiavelli returned to Italy.’’ By that he meant the Marxists were the first Italians since the midseventeenth century to take Machiavelli seriously. Croce’s own role in reviving Machiavelli scholarship was not negligible. 21 William Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 22 ‘‘The Counter-Reformation in Italy was essentially an authoritarian superstructure raised over indifferent individual consciences, a baroque decoration covering the religious and moral void.’’ Luigi Salvatorelli, The Risorgimento: Thought and Action (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 19. [Although the view of the Counter-Reformation expressed in the text represented the sources I had available at the time, the present, 2006, view of the Counter-Reformation stresses a much more dynamic and creative side.]

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of things to come: a serious lay piety that would penetrate and transform the popular consciousness, at least in certain areas of the North. But long before the fruits of such an inner transformation could become evident, the church was, in the middle of the nineteenth century, confronted with a major crisis: the emergence of the national question in Italy and the implications of unification for the papacy and the church. After a brief neo-Guelph flurry in 1847 and 1848, the first years of Pope Pius IX, when Italy was momentarily swept by the wild hope of an Italian confederation under the presidency of the pope, it became clear that the papacy would not only not lead the process of unification but would vigorously oppose it. The church was ideologically still locked in an encounter with the French Revolution, which it saw as the work of a liberal sect spawned ultimately by the Protestant Reformation and inimical to the principles of true religion. Throughout the nineteenth century the papacy resolutely opposed every effort to develop a liberal Catholicism, and it always felt closer to absolutist regimes like that of Austria than to any liberal polity. The papacy was, after all, one of the firmest of the remaining absolute monarchies of Europe, and within Italy after 1848 it felt closer to almost every regime than to that of Constitutional Piedmont, which was to form the territorial base for the unification effort. It was thus not surprising that Italy had to be unified in the teeth of papal opposition and that devout Catholics mourned instead of celebrating when in March of 1861 Cavour proclaimed the existence of the kingdom of Italy. Italy could not be unified without that large block of territories in the center of the peninsula known as the Papal States, and given its hostility to the nature of the new regime and the continued assertion of temporal sovereignty it would not relinquish for decades, the papacy would not accept the legitimacy of the new state. The aggrieved papacy in effect declared its loyal followers to be without a country. By its famous non expedit decree it forbade Catholics to be electors or elected in the new nation. The Catholic press referred to ‘‘King Victor Emmanuel’’ (presumably of Piedmont) and not to ‘‘the king’’ (of Italy). The liberal leaders of the new state did not engage in a religious persecution but neither did they fail to take advantage of their moment of triumph over the temporal power of the church. Many religious orders were dissolved and their properties confiscated. Anticlerical demonstrations were not unknown, and a certain anticlerical rhetoric was common to the more radical liberal politicians.23 A heritage of ill will was created in the first fifty years of the new nation whose full effects would not be 23 Jemolo, Church and State, 42.

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evident until the fascist period when the church, which on every conceivable ideological ground was antithetical to fascism, nonetheless found in it, at least at first, an ally, on the principle that an enemy of my enemy is my friend. Finally, the church consistently referred to its lay opponents as ‘‘sects.’’ The issue was not religion versus politics but two kinds of religion and two kinds of politics or two kinds of civil religion.

Liberalism Gramsci would have agreed with the Catholic apologists in seeing the French Revolution and its accompanying ideology as simply another stage of what had already been begun in the Reformation, though for him the valence would have been different: France was lacerated by the wars of religion leading to an apparent victory of Catholicism, but it experienced a great popular reformation in the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment,Voltairianism and the Encyclopaedia. This reformation preceded and accompanied the Revolution of 1789. It really was a matter here of a great intellectual and moral reformation of the French people, more complete than the German Lutheran Reformation, because it also embraced the great peasant masses in the countryside and had a distinct secular basis and attempted to replace religion with a completely secular ideology represented by the national patriotic bond.24

That aspect of liberalism, as I am using the term in this chapter, which Gramsci describes and tends to call ‘‘Jacobinism’’ with a very positive value, Croce, in whose terms this ‘‘secular ideology’’ was certainly a religion, called ‘‘democracy’’ with a rather negative value compared to the ‘‘liberalism’’ with which he identified. Croce contrasted the ‘‘democracy’’ of the eighteenth century as mechanical, intellectualist, and abstractly egalitarian, whereas the ‘‘liberalism’’ of the early nineteenth century was personal, idealistic, and historically organic: ‘‘The democrats in their political ideal postulated a religion of quantity, of mechanics, of calculating reason or of nature, like that of the eighteenth century; the liberals, a religion of quality, of activity, of spirituality, such as that which had risen in the beginning of the nineteenth century: so that even in this case, the con24 Gramsci, Selections, 394–395.

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flict was one of religious faiths.’’ 25 Transferring these general conceptions to the Risorgimento reveals a characteristic difference of evaluation between Croce and Gramsci. For Croce, Cavour is the great liberal hero of the Risorgimento, the man with a sense of organic continuity, of history, of the necessity of the monarchy. Croce viewed Mazzini as a mechanical democrat whose views would have ruptured the natural growth of Italian society and who justly failed. Gramsci saw the victory of Cavour and the moderates as a ‘‘passive revolution,’’ a victory of the ruling classes that the moderates organically and effectively represented but a defeat for the people. His sympathies would have been with Mazzini and Garibaldi had they been able to link their Action Party with the organic needs of the masses, especially the rural masses, but it was just this that they failed to do. The Action party was steeped in the traditional rhetoric of Italian literature. It confused the cultural unity which existed in the peninsula—confined, however, to a very thin stratum of the population, and polluted by the Vatican’s cosmopolitanism—with the political and territorial unity of the great popular masses, who were foreign to that cultural tradition and who, even supposing that they knew of its existence, couldn’t care less about it. A comparison may be made between the Jacobins and the Action party. The Jacobins strove with determination to ensure a bond between town and country, and they succeeded triumphantly.26

Both Croce and Gramsci underestimate Mazzini, the greatest liberal and popular prophet of the nineteenth century, perhaps because both of them are too imbued with a Hegelian historicism that tends to applaud the winners. In spite of the fact that for nearly forty years Mazzini was the heart and soul of the movement for Italian unity, it was not his ideas that were actualized in 1871 and he ended his days in sadness and disappointment. But Mazzini’s significance, as Luigi Salvatorelli has pointed out, is in his effort to reestablish the spiritual unity of the Italian people that had been draining away ever since the time of the medieval communes. His slogan, ‘‘Dio e popolo,’’ was not an empty phrase but the expression of a deep national need: Every nationalistic conception presupposes the primacy of politics over any other activity of the spirit. The Mazzinian conception of the Risorgimento, on the other hand, completely overcomes the political through the spiritual. Not

25 Croce, History of Europe, 31. 26 Gramsci, Selections, 63.

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The Five Religions of Modern Italy only is all ragion di stato radically rejected, but politics is integrally subordinated to ethics; and ethics is nothing but the application of religious faith. Mazzini took up the Italian religious problem, with a view toward a radical solution. Here we touch the true depths of the Mazzinian revolution. It does not reside in a political rearrangement (which might allow for gradualness and expediency); nor does it reside in insurrection, which is a simple temporary instrument; rather his revolution resides in this inner religious transformation. He speaks explicitly of a new faith, which goes not only beyond the old Christian confessions he now considers impotent, but also beyond the skeptical and materialist nonbelief of the eighteenth century. . . . What remains necessary is otherworldly faith, which for him is faith in God, who manifests himself to humanity through successive revelations; one day, all humanity will be called up to God, just as individuals ascend to him in their successive lives. Until such time as social unity is established, ecclesiastical and political authority must remain as independent of each other as possible. But once the new society has really been constituted, there will be no more reason for the separation of Church and state, or of political and religious institutions. Ethics will conform to faith, and will be realized in politics; so, too, the state shall be the Church and the Church shall be the state. No divorce between heaven and earth; our work on this earth is a sacred task, the realization of the reign of God.27

In the end, of course, the Risorgimento did not lead to such grand national regeneration. It was a revolution ‘‘from above,’’ a ‘‘passive revolution’’ leaving the Italian masses largely untouched. Cavour’s formula of ‘‘a free church in a free state’’ was not only entirely unacceptable to the Vatican, it woefully underestimated the religious transformation that would have been necessary to create the free people for whom the free church and free state could have had real meaning. This is not to say that Cavour’s vision was not ethical and indeed religious in its own right. But it remained the special property of a ruling elite and was not really translated into a national culture. Even when by the end of the nineteenth century liberalism became so widespread among the educated classes that it was almost taken for granted, it was by no means securely institutionalized among the masses, as the rise of socialist, Catholic, and fascist parties, uncertainly or not at all committed to democratic institutions, would subsequently show. But even the greatest of the twentieth-century Italian liberals, Benedetto Croce, suffered from the elitist restriction that had always characterized Italian liber27 Salvatorelli, The Risorgimento, 96.

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alism. Again it is Gramsci who makes the point when he criticizes Croce for not understanding that the philosophy of praxis, with its vast mass movement, has represented and does represent an historical process similar to the Reformation, in contrast with liberalism, which reproduces a Renaissance which is narrowly limited to restricted intellectual groups. . . . Croce is essentially anti-confessional (we cannot call him anti-religious given his definition of religious reality) and for numerous Italian and European intellectuals his philosophy . . . has been a genuine intellectual and moral reform similar to the Renaissance. . . . But Croce did not ‘‘go to the people,’’ did not wish to become a ‘‘national’’ element ( just as the men of the Renaissance—unlike the Lutherans and Calvinists—were not ‘‘national’’ elements), did not wish to create a band of disciples who . . . could have popularised his philosophy and tried to make it into an educative element, starting in the primary school (and hence educative for the simple worker or peasant, i.e., for the simple man of the people). Perhaps this was impossible, but it was worth trying and the fact that it was not tried is certainly significant.28

Gramsci goes on to criticize Croce’s elitist distinction of religion for the masses but philosophy for the educated elite. The following passage from Croce’s The Philosophy of Conduct with its delicately patronizing tone toward the ‘‘younger brother’’ illustrates precisely the weakness to which Gramsci points: This function of an idealistic ethical symbol, this affirmation that the moral act is an expression of the love and the will of the universal Spirit, is characteristic of the religious and Christian Ethic, the Ethic of love and of the anxious search for the divine presence, which, as a result of narrow partisanship or lack of insight, is spurned and vilified today by vulgar rationalists and intellectualists, by so-called free-thinkers and similar riff-raff who frequent Masonic lodges. There is hardly any truth of Ethics that cannot be expressed in the words of traditional religion, which we learned as children and which rise spontaneously to our lips because they are the most sublime, the most appropriate, and the most beautiful of all: words that are, to be sure, still redolent of mythology, yet at the same time instinct with philosophy. Between the idealistic philosopher and the religious man there is undoubtedly a deep rift; but it is no different from that which appears in ourselves on the eve of a crisis, when we are mentally divided, and yet very close to inner unity and harmony. If the religious man cannot help regarding the philosopher as his adversary, indeed as his mortal enemy, the philosopher

28 Gramsci, Selections, 132.

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The Five Religions of Modern Italy for his part sees in the religious man his younger brother, himself as he was but a moment before. Hence, he will always feel more strongly attracted to an austere, compassionate, allegorical religious ethic than to one that is superficially rationalistic.29

Liberalism as an articulate movement remains elitist in Italy to this day. The parties that remain loyal to it in parliament are small and do not represent the popular masses. Yet who can say the Catholic and socialist subcultures who represent the Italian masses have not, over the last century, steadily and continuously felt the influence of liberalism and been in part transformed by it? Perhaps Croce was not wrong after all in his claim for liberalism. Because this is the sole ideal that has the solidity once owned by Catholicism and the flexibility that this was never able to have, the only one that can always face the future and does not claim to determine it in any particular and contingent form, the only one that can resist criticism and represent for human society the point around which, in its frequent upheavals, in its continual oscillations, equilibrium is perpetually restored, so that when the question is heard whether liberty will enjoy what is known as the future, the answer must be that it has something better still: it has eternity.30

Socialism Many historians have described the first decades after the unification of the country as a period of mild disillusionment. The great battles of the Risorgimento had been fought and a victory of sorts had been won. Liberalism in the saddle proved disappointing compared to the heroic days when liberalism was in the opposition. The intense moral idealism of Mazzini was gradually replaced by the rise of positivism as the dominant philosophy— Herbert Spencer was everywhere read and quoted. The unification of the country provided the basis for a gradually accelerating industrial growth, particularly in the North, but this sign of positivistic ‘‘progress’’ seemed to be creating as many problems as it solved. It is these circumstances that make understandable the emergence of socialism as a major force in Italy. 29 Quoted in Jemolo, Church and State, 94–95, from Croce, La filosofia della pratica (1908; Bari: Laterza, 1957), 7th ed. 30 Croce, History of Europe, 358.

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As Croce saw it: ‘‘The psychological conditions which we have described, uncertainty with regard to aims, doubt as to means, bankruptcy of ideas, all these symptoms from which Italy was suffering explain how it was that her young men were fired with such lively enthusiasm for the doctrines of socialism. Beginning about 1890, the cult of socialism grew rapidly and continued throughout the decade.’’ 31 According to Croce the work of Karl Marx, ‘‘who created the new ‘religion of the masses’ in the same sense in which Paul of Tarsus created Christianity,’’ was at first known only secondor thirdhand.32 But when Antonio Labriola discovered Marx’s writing and popularized his theories, ‘‘Herbert Spencer, whom every one had read and quoted as the highest authority, was no longer quoted or read, and was allowed to fall into complete oblivion.’’ 33 Besides having a strong appeal for many of Italy’s educated youth, among whom Croce himself was numbered for a while, Marxian socialism early met success among the industrial workers, especially in the urban North. The Italian Socialist Party gradually began to build up not only a network of institutions—labor unions, mutual aid societies, and cultural organizations—but a distinct subculture, what according to Arturo Carlo Jemolo might almost be called ‘‘a new religion.’’ Jemolo vividly describes the quality of that early socialist culture: The Italian—and in general the Latin—socialist of the first ten years of the century was totally different from his brother of today. He would never have admitted, for instance, that any question of wages was of greater moment to him than a great abstract question. He longed for the moral and material redemption of the poorer classes, but he believed that this should be achieved by a transformation of the world. Depending on his school of thought and the particular concepts of the section of the Party with which he identified himself, he might differ from his fellows as to the manner in which he hoped to effect his regeneration, but his true aim was the complete obliteration of the past. He even had his special forms of dress, used the appellation ‘‘Comrade,’’ and wore a distinctive flower—a red carnation—in his buttonhole. If he was a fanatical believer in the new ideas he did not even observe the rites of civil marriage, but openly lived in ‘‘sin.’’ To his ideal system a fundamental reorganization of the economy was not less essential than a humanitarian outlook, anticlericalism, internationalism, anti-militarism, an aversion to all that had its origin in the military spirit

31 Croce, A History of Italy, 145. 32 Croce, A History of Italy, 145–146. 33 Croce, A History of Italy, 154.

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The Five Religions of Modern Italy or was infected with that spirit—whether it was a question of decorations, even for valour, or of duels.34

Just as the policy of various ministries ranged over time from vigorous repression of the socialists to tacit encouragement of them, especially in their efforts to unionize the workers, so the policy of the Socialist Party modulated from one of intransigent opposition to the entire ‘‘bourgeois regime’’ to one of gradual acceptance of the framework of democratic institutions. This tendency was set back at the time of the colonial conquest of Libya in 1911, which the socialists bitterly and in some areas violently opposed, and there ensued the dominance for a time of a militantly revolutionary faction led by Benito Mussolini. But all indications were that in the long run the Socialist Party tendency to enter the political system and thereby bring the newly emerging working classes into active participation in political society would prevail. The Great War, however, in Italy as elsewhere, shattered the illusion that this and similar trends were ‘‘inevitable,’’ as had been widely believed only a short time before.

Activism The last of modern Italy’s five ‘‘religions’’ is what Croce calls ‘‘activism.’’ For Croce, activism, which he defines as ‘‘morbid romanticism’’ and links loosely to incipient trends in the same direction in the early nineteenth century, is a parody or perversion of liberalism, a sickness of liberty.35 For if liberty is deprived of its moral soul, if it is detached from the past and from its venerable tradition, if the continuous creation of new forms that it demands is deprived of the objective value of this creation, if the struggles that it accepts and the wars and the sacrifice and the heroism are deprived of the purity of the end, if the internal discipline to which it spontaneously submits is replaced by external direction and commands—then nothing remains but action for action’s sake, innovation for the sake of innovation, and fighting for fighting’s sake; war and slaughter and death-dealing and suffering death are things to be sought for and desired for themselves, and obedience too, but the obedience that is customary in war; and the upshot is activism. This is, accordingly, in this translation and reduction and mournful parody that it achieves of an ethical ideal, a substantial

34 Jemolo, Church and State, 141. 35 Croce, History of Europe, 343.

The Five Religions of Modern Italy 69 perversion of the love of liberty, a devil-worship taking the place of that of God, and yet still a religion, the celebration of a black mass, but still a mass.36

Such trends were general in Europe in the first years of the twentieth century, according to Croce, but in Italy they focused around the ‘‘morbidly romantic’’ figure of Gabriele D’Annunzio, whom Croce calls libidinous and sadistic. It was not an accident that D’Annunzio, who would play the role of John the Baptist to the movement that was to be the fulfillment of activism in Italy, namely fascism, was a poet. Indeed, fascism attracted many of the leading innovators in Italian literature of the day, men like Marinetti and Pirandello. In this context a remark by Croce about socialism takes on a particular interest: ‘‘Thus not only political opinion but the whole of Italian thought and culture was permeated and invigorated by Marxian socialism. Only on literature and poetry it did not, and could not, have effective influence, owing not to lack of enthusiasm, but to its philosophical and practical character, which moved outside the mental process of poetry.’’ 37 The strictly rational tendency of Marxian socialism was characteristic of Italian thought, since both liberalism and Catholicism were, each in its own way, highly rationalistic and, in the early twentieth century, unpoetic. In all these traditions reason and intellect were highly valued, in part for their ability to control emotion and passion. In this regard activism was closer to the religious ground bass, with its intense emotional commitments and its relative lack of theoretical complexity, than to the other three traditions. However, in the years before World War I activism was a largely elite movement appealing to the educated but bored sons of the bourgeoisie, eager for excitement and glory and disappointed in the Italietta, the ‘‘Little Italy,’’ of the liberal politicians. It seems likely that without the drastic disruptions resulting from the First World War, activism would have remained little more than a literary mood and fascism as a major political movement would never have been born. There were, however, even before the war, a few connections between activism as a literary movement and a broader mass following, connections that would be broadened and strengthened when the fascist movement emerged after the war. One such point of connection was the work of Georges Sorel, translated in about 1909 by Croce and enjoying a vogue in Italy, partly thanks to Croce’s efforts, that it never enjoyed in France. 36 Croce, History of Europe, 342. 37 Croce, A History of Italy, 156.

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Sorel was the socialist closest to activism and also, not accidentally, a partial exception to Croce’s rule that socialism was not ‘‘poetic.’’ Croce’s own ambivalent assessment, published after the triumph of fascism, suggests Sorel’s importance: Revolutionary minds, scornful of accommodating reformism and impatient of the flabbiness into which orthodox socialism had fallen, devoted themselves in Italy also to seeking new formulas, better fitted to them; and one was supplied by Sorel with his syndicalism. Sorel assimilated socialism, as he conceived it, to primitive Christianity, assigned to it the aim of renewing society from its moral foundations, and therefore urged it to cultivate, like the first Christians, the sentiment of ‘‘scission’’ from surrounding society, to avoid all relations with politicians, to shut itself up in workmen’s syndicates and feed on the ‘‘myth’’ of the general strike. It was the construction of a poet thirsting for moral austerity, thirsting for sincerity, pessimistic with regard to the present reality, stubbornly trying to find a hidden fount from which the fresh pure stream would well forth; and tested by reality, his poetry quickly vanished, even in his own eyes.38

Among many others, Mussolini was infected by the mood of Sorellian apocalyptic activism well before he left the Socialist Party. According to Gramsci even Marinetti’s rather esoteric movement of futurism held some appeal for the workers. In a series of manifestos and theatrical demonstrations Marinetti declared all traditional culture obsolete— one of his most famous manifestos called for the filling in of the canals of Venice and the leveling of her marble palaces to make way for railroads and factories, the true poetry of the future. Gramsci claimed many workers before the war ‘‘had seen in futurism the elements of a struggle against the old academic culture of Italy, mummified and alien to the popular masses,’’ 39 Gramsci also claimed four-fifths of the readers of Marinetti’s review, Lacerba, with a circulation of twenty thousand, were from the working class. But one thing that differentiated all the activists, D’Annunzio, Marinetti, and Mussolini, from a left-wing socialist like Gramsci and a conservative liberal like Croce was their glorification of war, and more particularly their violent interventionism in the First World War. That war, traumatic for so many nations, was a major disaster for Italy. It seriously disrupted the economy and set off an inflation that was serious for wage earners and all but fatal for small property owners and produced a class of ultrarich war 38 Croce, History of Europe, 306. 39 Gramsci, Selections, 93.

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profiteers. It gravely overloaded the political system with serious problems at a time when it had not fully assimilated the consequences of universal male suffrage, adopted in 1912. One of the new political elements was the emergence of a Catholic party, the Popular Party, for the first time since the unification of the country. The 1919 elections showed the two great popular parties were the Catholics and the Socialists; the Liberals, who had ruled Italy for half a century, were a declining political force. In the disturbed period just after the war all the tensions and divisions of Italian society were exacerbated. Class conflict was intense; returning veterans were bitter toward the pacifist workers with their draft exemptions based on their essential occupations; small property owners were afraid of losing the last vestige of gentility in the galloping inflation; the Catholic Left, genuinely dedicated to nonrevolutionary social reform, did not unite with the socialists, many of whom were coming under the spell of the Russian Revolution, but formed rival ‘‘white’’ labor and peasant unions in competition with the ‘‘red’’ ones. Above all the great wave of strikes and demonstrations of 1919–1920 led to the fear that a Bolshevik revolution was in the making, though nowhere, not even in the best organized Turin group around Gramsci, was there any real revolutionary plan. Under these very severe tensions and pressures Italian politics reverted to its subideological base in the particular loyalties of families and small groups. Only thus can one understand the triumph of fascism, which never gained what Gramsci called ideological hegemony—indeed, which never had an ideology at anything like the level of articulation and sophistication of the Catholics, liberals, or socialists. Fascism in the immediate postwar period was a highly personal movement, an eclectic mixture of whatever Mussolini found that worked. Composed of veterans, former socialists and anarchists, and enraged bourgeois youth eager to fight the socialists as a substitute for the war they were too young for, fascism focused around the leader role Mussolini copied largely from D’Annunzio but with effective organizational forms Mussolini had learned in his years as a socialist. In the beginning its program contained a leftist flavor, but the situation dictated that Mussolini shift to the right, for it was the antisocialist violence of his squadristi that swelled his ranks. In free elections fascism never approached the vote of the Catholics and socialists. It only came to power through the tacit conviction of millions of Italians that Mussolini would protect family and home, property, and tradition. That tacit conviction created the possibility of Mussolini coming to power; it took the cowardice of the king and the weakness of the liberal politicians to ensure it.

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Even though fascism remained ideologically eclectic and chaotic—Gentile’s systematizations never had any organic connection with the movement—and in large measure it was simply the acting out on the national stage of some of the less pleasant aspects of the Italian underculture—the band of thugs tied to their leader in bonds of personal loyalty—it did develop an ideological style and became, once in power, a church, as Jemolo describes it: Fascism, like Bolshevism was itself a Church, claiming the whole man, in all his waking moments and in all his activities. Even in art and literature it prescribed what he must condemn and what he must admire. It had its uniforms, its epistolary style, its formulas, its gestures of salutation, its rites that accompanied the party-member to the grave: the summons to the burial service, the Roman salute with which the Blackshirt greeted even funerals, even religious processions. (For many years the anti-Fascist was easily recognizable by the way he saluted a hearse and by his behavior when passing a cemetery, by his recourse to the traditional forms of greeting and his refusal to adopt the Fascist salute.) As the parish church and its presbytery are a focal point of the activities of the good Catholic, so was the local party headquarters a place of meeting, recreation, and meditation: a place where the new faithful forgathered in the evenings and on feast-days, where all initiatives, whatever their object, had to originate, and where—after 1935—a bride would often go immediately after her wedding to exchange the gold ring which the priest had just blessed for a ring made of iron. The party was a Church that persuaded its zealots to renounce all other interests: a Church that did not concern itself with the life to come, because in the Fascist Weltanschauung, as in the Communist, every aspiration has to be fulfilled in this world and there is no place for a future life in which earthly injustices may be set to rights.40

Given the hollowness of his ideology, the meagerness of his successes, and the fact that Mussolini never gained the kind of totalitarian control over Italian society that Hitler did over Germany, one must ask about the social and ideological bases of support of his regime. There is no question that the Italian liberal bourgeoisie, convicted of impotence in handling the postwar crisis, surrendered control of the government, though not of the economy, to Mussolini, some of them willingly, some of them reluctantly, but only a few of them going into principled opposition. Even the latter, as long as it remained theoretical, Mussolini tolerated, particularly in the figure of Benedetto Croce, who continued to write and publish all through the fas40 Jemolo, Church and State, 191.

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cist years. But in tolerating it Mussolini largely neutralized that opposition. It was the socialists who took the brunt of fascism. Already in 1921 and 1922, even before Mussolini came to power, socialism’s painfully built-up network of institutions had been destroyed by the squadristi and many of its leaders murdered. Gramsci himself, by that time the leader of the Italian Communist Party, was arrested in 1926 after his parliamentary immunity was violated and died in 1937 after years of bad food and maltreatment in a fascist prison. Nevertheless, after the hurricane of terror it is probable that a sector of the working class grasped what comfort it could from the ideology of the corporative state and gave it its tacit consent. But, ironically for both parties, Mussolini’s securest basis of popular support came from his religious policy and derived from the Catholic Church. Fascism in its earliest days was both anticlerical and republican, in continuity with Mussolini’s earlier socialist position, but the Duce soon learned he had to swallow both monarchy and papacy to become dictator. The latter was for him the bitterest pill of all. After he had worked out the Concordat of 1929, which was to signal the high point of his popularity in Italy, Mussolini stipulated that in his audience with the pope he would not have to go through the ceremony of kissing the ring, and he forbade photographers when he participated in the religious service in Saint Peter’s during which he had to pray on his knees. There is no reason to believe Mussolini ever had anything but contempt for the church in his own personal life. On the other hand there is very little in fascist ideology to escape condemnation at the hands of religious orthodoxy, had the church desired to apply rigorous standards. The relations between party and church were indeed not untroubled, and the church successfully resisted Mussolini’s efforts, soon after the Concordat, to destroy its lay organization, Catholic Action. After the racial laws of 1938 and especially after the German occupation, the church became increasingly alienated from the regime, and the role of many of the clergy in the resistance was a heroic one. Yet the fact remains, and needs to be explained, that the relation of the church to the regime was for many years a close, indeed, an intimate one, as can be seen in Jemolo’s description: But the government gained far more from this co-operation than did the Church —among other things, a sense of legality, almost of divine prescription, such as no Government had ever enjoyed in the past: and that not merely as a Government, but as a regime. It might have seemed of small account that in their processions the boys of Catholic Action walked in threes, in imitation of the Fascist militia, and not in fours, as they had done up to 1922; that they carried

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The Five Religions of Modern Italy their flags with the staffs resting on their stomachs, again in imitation of the Fascists, and not on their shoulders, as had been the custom before the March on Rome; that even the most obscure parish magazines and journals of religious associations showed the year of the regime alongside that of the Christian era; and that Catholics habitually observed all the outward forms of Fascism, beginning with the Roman salute and the conversational use of voi, abandoning, because the Duce so willed it, the age-old use of the third person as the polite form of address. These things might have seemed unimportant, but they were not. Thus, only thus, by drawing a veil over the past, by keeping lowered the curtain which divided the Fascist world from all that lay beyond its frontiers, could the Government assert itself as a regime, as the regime: not merely as a system of government, but as a philosophy of life; one might well say, as a Church. Nor was it a matter of indifference that the Houses of the Fasci, the shrines of those who had given their lives for the Fascist revolution, were invariably blessed by the local bishop; that no party initiative which sought to create a new way of life, a new outlook, ever lacked the co-operation of the clergy; that a course on the mystique of Fascism could be inaugurated with a speech (albeit of strict religious orthodoxy) by a cardinal. All this went far beyond the idea inherent in the precept ‘‘Render unto Caesar,’’ far beyond respect for and co-operation with the lawful Government. All this was a sanctification not of the Fascist Government but of the Fascist outlook, the Fascist way of life. The non-Fascist, the anti-Fascist, was approaching a point at which he would have to ask himself whether the parish church was still his church; he was now having to go to mass early in the morning if he wished to avoid the sermon, which too often comprised a full-scale attack on all the democratic, Masonic Governments which were opposing the providential plans of the Duce. And, after 1929, one would have been hard put to it to find a bishop’s pastoral or sermon, an inaugural speech at a diocesan conference, that did not contain the word, the invocation, the blessing, the epithet appropriate to the Duce. And the epithets chosen became progressively more sonorous, and the person invoked tended more and more to assume the likeness not of a Head of Government, but of the pioneer of a civilization.41

The only thing that can explain how the church clung to this strange alliance for so long is the history of bitterness of the first seventy years of the kingdom of Italy and the fact that the church was at last coming into its own, legally recognized as a central institution of society instead of existing in some limbo of marginal toleration and occasional minor perse41 Jemolo, Church and State, 268–270.

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cution, that and the fact that the church was, for many people and in many areas, embedded in and serving the interests of the particularistic groups and their essentially pre-Christian group loyalties that regarded Mussolini as their savior.

The Recent Past The aftermath of the Second World War was remarkably similar to that of the First World War, though the outcome was radically different. Once again there was the threat of revolution, this time from the armed partisans and workers in the North; once again there was the upsurge of a great fear from all those concerned about family and property, stability and tradition. Only this time all such elements coalesced under the leadership of a reborn Catholic party, the Christian Democrats. The 1948 elections were the high water mark of this upsurge, the greatest electoral party victory in modern Italian history.42 Italy after 1945 was certainly different from Italy before 1922. The fascist regime itself, whatever its negative features, probably contributed to that ‘‘passive revolution’’ in another of the senses in which Gramsci used the term, in which important social changes can go on even under reactionary and repressive regimes—the gradual erosion of particularistic and traditional authority structures and the development of more egalitarian social forms—though it may be in the nature of the less effective Italian fascist regime to have served more as a guardian for such structures and less as a corrosive to them than in the more efficient fascist regimes in Germany and Japan. In any case Italy after 1945 was neither a mass society nor a very mobilized one. Never having had a Reformation or a revolution, the formal religions and ideologies continued to float on the surface of Italian society, appealing to a mobile educated elite but not permeating much of the substructure except in certain areas of the country where Catholic piety or socialist fervor were genuine popular phenomena (for example, the Veneto for the Catholics and Romagna-Emilia for the socialists). A culture of decadence reminiscent of the pre–World War I activism was again in evidence in the postwar period, though lacking in vigor and, fortunately so far, in any effective political expression. All the elements remain and remain with a viscosity that leads many to despair 42 For postwar politics generally but particularly for a helpful treatment of the Catholic and socialist subcultures, see Giorgio Galli and Alfonso Prandi, Patterns of Political Participation in Italy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970).

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of fundamental change in Italian society. Yet there are a number of new factors in the Italian situation that give rise to at least the possibility of creative change. An important contextual factor for much of the recent past has been a relatively favorable international situation that provided neither the threat nor the temptation of war nor, with the decline of the Cold War, any intense external ideological or political pressure either. Thus the kinds of external threats and disturbances that have frequently diverted modern Italian history from what might be thought of as a ‘‘normal’’ course have been on the whole less in evidence. The serious international economic crisis and the renewal of big power rivalry of the late 1970s threaten once again the fragile balances of Italian development. The electoral triumph of Christian Democracy within the institutional framework of the liberal state created a new situation with respect to the problem of civil religion. The very logic of the early Cold War forced the church into a defense of liberalism and democracy to a degree unprecedented since the French Revolution. The liberal state, instead of being the church’s persecutor, was now its defender and so had to be evaluated differently. Particularly now that liberalism was not a major independent political force or contender for rule, its values could be accepted as the legitimate norms of the state and given religious approval. On the other hand, in the immediate defensiveness of the first postwar years, instead of a rather clearly differentiated liberal civil religion toward which the church could maintain a nonantagonistic autonomy, there emerged a fusion of religious and political values, as the very term Christian Democracy suggests, which led almost to a clerical democratic state. Under John XXIII the tight bearhold union of party, church, and state began to be broken on the initiative not of the Christian Democratic party but of the church. With the ‘‘opening to the left,’’ itself made possible by that incipient differentiation of the party and the church in the early 1960s, the possibility of an autonomous liberal civil religion became more real. It would be based on the symbols of the Risorgimento, inevitably, but it would include the celebration of democratic values to which at several crucial points Catholics had also contributed. If such a solution to the civil religion problem does eventually emerge, a solution based on the common acceptance of certain political values rather than a struggle to the death between different religiopolitical ideologies, it will depend on changes in both the church and the socialist Left. Relevant changes in the church have been clearly evident, as I have already mentioned, from the time of the aggiornamento of Pope John. Developments

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have not been smooth and recent years have seen something of a ‘‘reverse course,’’ but the long-range tendencies do not seem likely to change. The basic implications of the changes are a greater freedom of the church from party and state on the one hand and a wider range of political options for Catholics than support of the Christian Democratic party, options that include support of more vigorously reformist or radical parties of the Left. It is true that the church in Italy has probably not responded as quickly to the new freedoms of Vatican II as have some other national churches—the habit of authority at the center of power has been too strong—and opportunities have been missed, as when the church responded too defensively and too unsympathetically to the movement of so-called ‘‘spontaneous groups’’ of idealistic youth in the late 1960s. But if the church will not lead the way to new freedoms, it has already lost its power to maintain strict discipline. A purely negative erosion of authority could prove dangerous for the church and for Italy, and there is no assurance that vigorous leadership will again be asserted. But the Italian church in the last fifty years has come a long way out of the wilderness. It faces no formidable secular enemy—even the Communist Party prefers not to face it head on—and it has long been close to the sources of secular power. It can afford, as Pope John so well saw, to open up all kinds of new possibilities, not out of weakness but out of strength. Temporary reversals should probably not obscure the long-term trend toward liberalization. If the Catholics have, in the last half century, gradually moved back into the centers of power, the same cannot be said of the socialists, who have never held effective power in Italy. Indeed, the history of socialism in Italy is a history of persecution from the very beginning, a persecution that reached catastrophic proportions in 1921 and 1922 and the long night that followed. Since the war, socialists have been harassed rather than persecuted, but only in the last few years has a large socialist group, the left-wing Italian Socialist Party, attained a share of political power, and that certainly not the lion’s share. If there has been no aggiornamento within the Italian Communist Party, no equivalent to Vatican II, it is certainly in part because an embattled defensiveness has been objectively warranted. Nevertheless the Italian Communist Party (cpi) has a tradition of flexibility, humanism, and appeal to intellectuals that is perhaps unique in the Western world. This does not by any means mean the cpi is clearly committed to liberal democratic values; it only means in the right circumstances it might be possible to open the door on that question. There have emerged in recent years a number of groups to the left of the cpi, disillusioned by its flaccidity and, if anything, more authoritarian than the orthodox parent. These

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groups express a left-wing activism reminiscent of the Sorellian variety previously discussed. The terrorism a few of these groups have spawned impedes rather than advances the evolution of a national community. It rouses once again the anxiety that strengthens particularistic commitment. The main problem on the left, however, remains the Italian Communist Party, the largest excluded group in modern Italian history. The eventual entry of the Communists into some share of governmental power, unthinkable only a few years ago, has come to be widely discussed. Such an eventuality would create the possibility for the transformation of Communist values in a way parallel to what has happened to the Catholics. But if such a transformation is to be something other than a sellout that will just produce a new mass alienated party to the left of the Communists, it will have to be accompanied by at least the beginning of the solution to some of Italy’s basic social problems. In other words the only way to democratize the socialists is to socialize the democracy. How difficult that will be is already evident from the fruits of the several efforts at establishing a center-left government. But in spite of some grounds for optimism, no observer of Italian society today could call it a happy one. Corruption and cynicism, as so often in the past, go hand in hand, and basic demands for justice and welfare go unanswered. These are generic problems in all modern societies, but the will to meet them seems more lacking in Italy than in many other advanced Western countries. The immobilism of particularistic interest, far more than fervid ideological differences, threatens every effort to create a genuinely democratic society responsive to popular need. Centuries of failure to institutionalize the dreams and ideals that again and again have grown up on Italian soil have led to a certain fatalism. Whatever their differences, the greatest of modern Italian novelists—Manzoni, Verga, Moravia, Silone, Lampedusa—share a fundamental pessimism about the human capacity to alter social institutions. All of them opt instead for a certain dignity and integrity in the individual human soul. And yet modern Italy has not been poor in individual souls who have had the courage to try to alter institutions. Arturo Carlo Jemolo, with his ceaseless struggle to defend religious liberty, critically, polemically, and legally, is such an example.43 So is Danilo Dolci, with his effort to find, outside of any religious or ideological orthodoxy, forms of social participa43 See H. Stuart Hughes, The United States and Italy, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 241.

The Five Religions of Modern Italy 79 tion that will be neither impersonally bureaucratic nor boss dominated.44

Nor should the achievements of many such men, working through parties and independently, be underestimated. Croce, who led at several points an active political life, always reminds me of the modest but real institutional successes of modern Italy. And Gaetano Salvemini, another man of conscience who was not afraid to enter the political arena, warns there are no paradises on earth and if we will not settle for some kind of purgatory, we are likely to end up in hell.45 Italian history states with stunning clarity the central issues of the sociology of human existence: the very partial institutionalization of morality, the role of the moral hero and the immoral hero, and the problem of when to take power and when to renounce power. Italian history has produced a continuous series, century after century, of men larger than life, extraordinary as intellectuals but above all as moral virtuosi. But at the same time no other society has illustrated so clearly the problem of continuous inveterate corruption and ineptitude. I shall close by quoting Ignazio Silone, whose words sum up many of the themes of this chapter in the way that they interweave the strands of socialism, liberty, and, implicitly, Christianity: Consideration of the experience I have been through has led me to a deepening of the motives for my separation which go very much further than the circumstantial ones by which it was produced. But my faith in Socialism (to which I think my entire life bears testimony) has remained more alive than ever in me. In its essence, it has gone back to what it was when I first revolted against the old social order; a refusal to admit the existence of destiny, an extension of the ethical impulse from the restricted individual and family sphere to the whole domain of human activity, a need for effective brotherhood, an affirmation of the superiority of the human person over all the economic and social mechanisms which oppress him. As the years have gone by, there has been added to this an intuition of man’s dignity and a feeling of reverence for that which in man is always trying to outdistance itself, and lies at the root of his eternal disquiet. But I do not think that this kind of Socialism is in any way peculiar to me. The ‘‘mad truths’’ recorded above are older than Marxism; towards the sec-

44 My visit to Dolci’s headquarters in Sicily and my talks with him in Rome during my research visit to Italy in the spring of 1972 were the most impressive moments of that trip. 45 Gaetano Salvemini, Italy from the Risorgimento to Fascism, ed. A. William Salomone (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1970), 453.

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The Five Religions of Modern Italy ond half of the last century they took refuge in the workers’ movement born of industrial capitalism, and continue to remain one of its most enduring founts of inspiration. I have repeatedly expressed my opinion on the relations between the Socialist Movement and the theories of Socialism, these relations are by no means rigid or immutable. With the development of new studies, the theories may go out of fashion or be discarded, but the movement goes on. It would be inaccurate, however, with regard to the old quarrel between the doctrinaires and the empiricists of the worker’s movement, to include me among the latter. I do not conceive Socialist policy as tied to any particular theory, but to a faith. The more Socialist theories claim to be ‘‘scientific’’ the more transitory they are; but Socialist values are permanent. The distinction between theories and values is not sufficiently recognized, but it is fundamental. On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men.46

46 Ignazio Silone in The God That Failed, ed. Richard Crossman (New York: Bantam, 1965), 101–102.

3 To Kill and Survive or to Die and Become T H E A C T I V E L I F E A N D T H E C O N T E M P L AT I V E L I F E

A S W AY S O F B E I N G A D U LT

Every third thought shall be my grave. —Prospero in The Tempest

The rhythm of activity and rest is one of the basic characteristics of all life, certainly of human life. The terrestrial rhythm of day and night echoed in the biological rhythm of waking and sleeping has been enormously elaborated in the psychological, social, and cultural life of man. In many cultures the wisdom of the night in the form of dreams provides a refreshing counterpoint to the trials of the day. The contrasts of action and passivity, work and enjoyment, initiative and receptivity have been woven into patterns of personal and social organization. A spatial correlate of this basically temporal rhythm is to be found in the common distinction of inner and outer, which may be elaborated in terms of private and public, the inner life versus life in the world. The focus of this essay is on the highest cultural expression of this fundamental rhythm: the contrast between sacred and profane, between the religious and the secular. We are not dealing here with irreconcilable opposites, with watertight, exclusive categories. The contrasts I have in mind are the two ends of a polarity, each implying the other. That is why the temporal metaphor of rhythm is perhaps to be preferred to a spatial image, though the rhythm of sacred and profane time is certainly echoed in the rhythm, if I may so speak, of sacred and profane space. In any case one of the most basic patterns of life in primitive societies is the annual alternation of work and [First published in Daedalus 102, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 57–77. Used by permission. The issue was devoted to the subject of adulthood, and contributors were free to define adulthood as they wished. But the presence of Erik Erikson at the center of the group made the use of his life-cycle typology relevant to many of the papers, including mine. Erikson was my colleague in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard for many years, so I knew him as well as his work quite well.]

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ritual that Durkheim described with classical precision in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life and that Victor Turner elucidated in his admirable book The Ritual Process. Not infrequently, the annual cycle among primitive peoples reflects still another terrestrial and biological cycle— that between summer and winter, growth and quiescence. The great rituals are often performed during periods when the earth is relatively unfruitful and does not yield to human labor. That the rituals themselves are often thought to contribute to earthly fruitfulness is another reminder that we are dealing with dialectical poles, not logical opposites. The series of contrasts going from activity and rest to profane and sacred would not be so germane to our subject of adulthood if they remained merely rhythmic alternations of all human life. They have, however, been taken as reference points for the elaboration of roles in almost all societies. Legitimately or not, they have been used to help define sex roles, stages of the life cycle, and the differentiated pattern of adult occupations. In most human cultures, though this is being questioned today, the ‘‘inner’’ and the ‘‘receptive’’ have been identified with the feminine and the ‘‘outer’’ and the ‘‘active’’ with the masculine. It is interesting that it is much rarer, though to some degree characteristic of our own society, to identify the feminine with the religious, or at least to identify religion with women. But some psychoanalytically oriented observers believe that the male claim to religious preeminence, so common in most primitive and advanced cultures, is a claim to ‘‘feminine’’ capacities at a higher level. Jealous of female superiority in the realm of biological creativity, the argument runs, men lay claim to a ‘‘higher’’ spiritual creativity. It is beyond the limits of this essay to pursue this question, but we may note that certainly the saint has often been in some sense less ‘‘masculine’’ than the warrior, even when the saint has been the highest ideal of male personality. It is with the double problem of the use of the religious–secular contrast for the differentiation of adult roles and for categorizing stages of the life cycle that this essay will be concerned. Erik Erikson has contributed significantly to our understanding of both of these uses. His most helpful statement of the role differentiation problem is to be found in his recent book on Jefferson, Dimensions of a New Identity: Human communities, whether they consist of a tribe set in a segment of nature, or of a national empire spanning the territory and the loyalties of a variety of peoples, must attempt to reinforce that sense of identity which promises a meaning for the cycle of life within a world view more real than the certainty of death. Paradoxically speaking, however, to share such a transient sense of being

To Kill and Survive 83 indestructible, all participants must accept a ritual code of mortality and immortality which . . . includes the privilege and the duty, if need be, to die a heroic, or at any rate a shared death, while also being willing and eager to kill or help kill those on ‘‘the other side’’ who share (and live and kill and die for) another world view. The motto of this immortality, whether in combat or competition, can be said to be ‘‘kill and survive.’’ The men who inspire and accomplish such a world view we call great and we bestow a form of immortality on them: While they must die, as we must, their image, cast in metal, seems to survive indestructibly in the monuments of our town squares or in the very rock of Mount Rushmore. But there is the other, the transcendent, effort at insuring salvation through a conscious acceptance of finiteness. It emphasizes nothingness instead of somebodyness. It is ‘‘not of this world,’’ and instead of a competition for the world’s goods (including those securing the earthly identity) it seeks human brotherhood in self-denial. It courts death or, at any rate, self-denial as a step toward a more real and everlasting life. It prefers self-sacrifice to killing. And it visualizes the men and women who can make this aspect of existence convincing, not as great and immortal, but as saintly and as partaking of an eternal life. This way of identity is personified by the great religious leaders who in their own words represent the naked grandeur of the I that transcends all earthly identity in the name of Him who is I Am. The motto of this world view could be said to be ‘‘die and become.’’ 1

That Erikson has here given expression so eloquently to the classic Western contrast between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa has provided both the theme and the title of this essay. I should point out at once that the contrast that seems so absolute in the above quotation (and often seems so absolute in the Western understanding of the active and contemplative lives) is not meant as absolute by Erikson, for in context he means to say that Jefferson participated in both ideals, however much we would have to place him primarily as an exemplar (and one of the greatest) of the first one. But in Erikson’s work we should not be surprised to find that what at first seems to be a contrast of adult role types (even if a contrast only of emphasis) also turns out to be related to life-cycle stages. This becomes quite clear in Gandhi’s Truth where there is a discussion of the Hindu theory of the life cycle with its clear distinction between the early adult householder 1 Erik H. Erikson, Dimensions of a New Identity (New York: Norton, 1974), 42– 43.

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stage (Grhastha) concerned with procreativity but also with ‘‘family relations, . . . communal power, . . . and productivity,’’ 2 and the final two stages of life that are defined as ‘‘Vanaprastha, or the inner separation from all ties of selfhood, body-boundness, and communality and their replacement by a striving which will eventually lead to Moksha: renunciation, disappearance.’’ 3 But in the Hindu pattern there was also a way of bypassing the cycle of stages and choosing early a life of renunciation, which could still imitate the householder stage, as Erikson suggests: We have seen how deeply Gandhi at times minded having to become a householder, for without his becoming committed to a normal course of life by child marriage, he might well have been a monastic saint instead of what he became: politician and reformer with an honorary sainthood. For the true saints are those who transfer the state of householdership to the house of God, becoming father and mother, brother and sister, son and daughter, to all creation rather than to their own issue.4

Erikson avoids any simple equation of his life-cycle pattern with that of the Hindus. He would perhaps resist relating it to the classical distinction between active and contemplative lives. Yet I think there is a clear relation between his last two stages and the active and contemplative lives. This comes out best, perhaps, in the discussion of the virtues (what a service Erikson has rendered us in helping to make this ancient word available to us once again) connected with the stages.5 For Erikson finds that the virtue associated with the stage of generativity, characteristic of the middle years of adulthood, is care, and care defined as he defines it (‘‘the widening concern for what has been generated by love, necessity or accident’’)6 is not only etymologically related to the characteristic feature of the active life as defined by Augustine: caritas (New Testament: agape) or charity. And Erikson associates the virtue of wisdom with the final human stage of integrity, characteristic of old age. The contemplative life has most frequently been characterized by the same word, which translates sapientia or sophia. Nor could Erikson’s definition, ‘‘detached concern with life itself, in the 2 Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth (New York: Norton, 1969), 37. 3 Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth, 38. 4 Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth, 399. Erikson seems fascinated by men who were torn between the active and contemplative life, for Luther as well as Gandhi was such, and Erikson even discerns a touch of the same tension in Jefferson. 5 See Erik H. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility (New York: Norton, 1964), esp. chap. 4, ‘‘Human Strength and the Cycle of Generations.’’ 6 Erikson, Insight, 131.

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face of death itself,’’ 7 be much improved on, especially if we add that concern for eternity that Erikson ascribed to the saint in the Jefferson book. It would be interesting to pursue in detail the many relationships between Erikson’s scheme and the traditional Christian one. The eight virtues that he attributes to the eight stages of the life cycle are surprisingly similar, though not identical, to the moral and theological virtues of traditional Christianity. It is particularly interesting that all three theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity) are there. And these relations in turn would reveal that Erikson brings a religious dimension into his life cycle far earlier than the final stage. At least as important would be the first stage of trust, characterized by the virtue of hope, and the adolescent stage of identity, characterized by the virtue of fidelity. Indeed, it is the essence of Erikson’s scheme that only if basic trust has been established early and a sense of faithfulness established in adolescence will it be possible to hope for wisdom in old age. But with this suggestive stimulus from Erikson I would like to turn now to some historical reflections on the vicissitudes of action and contemplation as adult ideals in the West, with a few side glances at East Asia for comparative purposes. While the contrast between sacred and profane can be found in all cultures, the idea of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa is historically specific. It originates first in the text of Plato (though perhaps in the life of Socrates).8 Since it is grounded in a strikingly nonprimitive conception of religion it differs markedly from comparable contrasts among primitive and archaic peoples and in this respect it is paralleled by developments in Israel, India, and China.9 But in this essay I will be mainly concerned with the particularities of the Western development, and only in connection with the Chinese comparison will a few more general considerations emerge. 7 Erikson, Insight, 133. 8 Two important books bearing on the subject of this essay came to my attention too late to be taken into account in the body of the text. One is Joseph Pieper’s Leisure the Basis of Culture, rev. ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964). The other is Nicholas Lobkowicz’s Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967). Lobkowicz cites (pp. 5ff.) a rather late tradition deriving from Cicero and Iamblichus to the effect that the distinction between the kinds of life and the special respect for contemplation should be traced back to Pythagoras. 9 For a discussion of the characteristic differences between primitive, archaic, and historic (Greece, Israel, India, China) religions, see ‘‘Religious Evolution,’’ chapter 1 of this volume.

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What is new in the Platonic text is the claim for a radical superiority of contemplation (theoria) or philosophy (love of wisdom) over other modes of life. The actual phrase ‘‘contemplative life’’ (bios theoretikos) is found first in Aristotle 10 where it is contrasted with the political life (bios politikos) and the life of pleasure. Plato contrasts love of wisdom with love of victory and love of gain.11 Only later would the political, the military, the economic, and the pleasure-seeking be aggregated as the active life (bios praktikos) in contrast to the contemplative. What is really striking in the Platonic corpus is not so much the terminology, although that remains decisive for the later tradition as the personification of the contrast even if requiring later systematization. The new claim is embodied in a person, Socrates, and that which is being rejected as the highest ideal is also embodied, though in a poetic person, Achilles. Achilles was the greatest hero of Homer, and the spirit of Homer, the ‘‘educator’’ of the Greeks, was still vibrant in the Athens of Pericles in Socrates’ youth. Perhaps no one has linked Homer and Periclean Athens more vividly than Hannah Arendt and thus disclosed to us what Socrates rejected when he offered himself in Achilles’ stead: The polis, as it grew out of and remained rooted in the Greek pre-polis experience and estimate of what makes it worthwhile for men to live together (syzēn), namely, the ‘‘sharing of words and deeds,’’ had a twofold function. First, it was intended to enable men to do permanently, albeit under certain restrictions, what otherwise had been possible only as an extraordinary and infrequent enterprise for which they had to leave their households. The polis was supposed to multiply the occasions to win ‘‘immortal fame,’’ that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness. . . . The second function of the polis, again closely connected with the hazards of action as experienced before its coming into being, was to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech; for the chances that a deed deserving fame would not be forgotten, that it actually would become ‘‘immortal,’’ were not very good. Homer was a shining example of the poet’s political function, and therefore the ‘‘educator of all Hellas’’; the very fact that so great an enterprise as the Trojan War could have been forgotten without a poet to immortalize it several hundred years later offered only too good an example of what could happen to human greatness if it had nothing but poets to rely on for its permanence. . . .

10 Nichomachean Ethics, 1095b. 11 Republic, 581c.

To Kill and Survive 87 The polis—if we trust the famous words of Pericles in the Funeral Oration— gives a guaranty that those who forced every sea and land to become the scene of their daring will not remain without witness and will neither need Homer nor anyone else who knows how to turn words to praise them; without assistance from others, those who acted will be able to establish together the everlasting remembrance of their good and bad deeds, to inspire admiration in the present and in future ages. . . .12 Not historically, of course, but speaking metaphorically and theoretically, it is as though the men who returned from the Trojan War had wished to make permanent the space of action which had arisen from their deeds and sufferings, to prevent its perishing with their dispersal and return to their isolated homesteads. . . .13 What is outstandingly clear in Pericles’ formulations—and, incidentally, no less transparent in Homer’s poems—is that the innermost meaning of the acted deed and the spoken word is independent of victory and defeat and must remain untouched by any eventual outcome, by their consequences for better or worse. . . . Thucydides, or Pericles, knew full well that he had broken with the normal standards of everyday behavior when he found the glory of Athens in having left behind ‘‘everywhere everlasting remembrance [mnêmeia aidia] of their good and evil deeds.’’ 14

Surely Socrates’ criticism of Achilles,15 as well as his criticism of Pericles,16 can be understood in this context. The amoral pursuit of shining glory and immortal fame, the narcissistic obsession with ‘‘everlasting remembrance,’’ could not be the basis of a good life or a good polis. In contrast to Achilles (and Pericles) is Socrates, the contemplative man, forbidden by his daimonion to engage in politics,17 who was described by Alcibiades as on one occasion standing from sunrise to sunrise rapt in thought.18 But, though his life differed so markedly from the Homeric heroes, Socrates, too, was a hero. Indeed Alcibiades prefaces his account of the incident with the ironic words: ‘‘And now I must tell you about an12 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 196–197. 13 Arendt, Human Condition, 198. 14 Arendt, Human Condition, 205–206. 15 Republic, 390e–391e. 16 Gorgias, 515. 17 Apology, 31c–32a. 18 Symposium, 220c.

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other thing ‘our valiant hero dared and did,’ ’’ 19 quoting a tag line from the Odyssey. And in the Apology Socrates compares himself to Achilles, calling to mind his own steadfastness in battle and asking how he could be any less steadfast in adhering to his divinely imposed duty to lead the philosophic life.20 With the courage of Achilles he will give a most unHomeric model of what human life can be. It is in the Republic that Plato most insistently substitutes Socrates for Achilles. In his commentary to book 3, Allan Bloom writes: Socrates brings Achilles to the foreground in order to analyze his character and ultimately to do away with him as the model for the young. The figure of Achilles, more than any teaching or law, compels the souls of Greeks and all men who pursue glory. He is the hero of heroes, admired and imitated by all. And this is what Socrates wishes to combat; he teaches that if Achilles is the model, men will not pursue philosophy, that what he stands for is inimical to the founding of the best city and the practice of the best way of life. Socrates is engaging in a contest with Homer for the title of teacher of the Greeks—or of mankind. One of his principal goals is to put himself in the place of Achilles as the authentic representation of the best human type.21

Later, in book 6 of the Republic, we begin to perceive more positively the outline of the new mode of life and of what makes it new: And there is this further point to be considered in distinguishing the philosophical from the unphilosophical nature. What point? You must not overlook any touch of illiberality. For nothing can be more contrary than such pettiness to the quality of a soul that is ever to seek integrity and wholeness in all things human and divine. Most true, he said. Do you think that a mind habituated to thoughts of grandeur 22 and the contemplation of all time and all existence can deem this life of man a thing of great concern? Impossible, said he.

19 Symposium, 220c. Michael Joyce’s translation in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 571. 20 Apology, 28b–29b. 21 Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 354. 22 The Greek word is megaloprepeia and means literally ‘‘that which is fitting or seemly.’’

To Kill and Survive 89 Hence such a man will not suppose death to be terrible? Least of all.23

Finally, toward the end of book 6, we learn that the object of contemplation is the Good, about which Socrates is unable to say anything directly. He speaks instead of the sun, which is to the visible world as the Good is to the intelligible world. But the Good is not merely intellectual, it is the end for which man yearns, the final object of eros. At the beginning of book 7, the parable of the cave completes the teaching about the Good. But it also gives the new Platonic teaching about action. For the true contemplative man, who has left the cave to gaze on all things in the direct light of the sun, elects to return and to assist the dwellers in the cave, even unto death. Guided by the vision of the heavenly city,24 which exists in the mode of eternity, the contemplative man can act for the welfare of the earthly city without being blinded by illusions of shining glory and immortal fame. The new understanding of contemplation and action, though adumbrated in pre-Socratic times by Parmenides and Heraclitus, Aeschylus and Sophocles, is brought to its fruition in Plato. It is a powerful reaction against the corruption and disintegration of archaic Greek culture. The older balance between ritual and deed was already depicted as problematic in Homer, where the heroes are not balanced by priests of comparable stature. By the time of Pericles, the Sophists, Euripides, and other skeptics have riddled the Homeric theology and the city religion. The city founder and the lawgiver have been replaced by the ambitious politician, the imperialist tyrant, and the glory-seeking general, all uninhibited in their ever expanding egoism. The fruit of that unrestrained egoism was the disaster of the Peloponnesian War. But, in the midst of the shambles, in the mind of the philosopher emerges a new conception of contemplation (theoria) in correlation with a new conception of the divine, and from this new experience comes a new set of standards for worldly action, standards which replace ‘‘glory’’ with ‘‘care’’ as the key to the active life. On the basis of a comparable, if less poetically expressed, experience of the divine presence in the mind (nous) of the philosopher, Aristotle worked out those standards in the Ethics and the Politics in ways that have remained to some degree normative for the Western tradition ever since. At no great distance in time from Plato and Aristotle, Confucius and Mencius were engaged in a comparable task in China. Appalled by the po23 Republic, 468aff. Paul Shorey’s translation in Hamilton and Cairns, Collected Dialogues of Plato, 722. 24 Republic, 592b.

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litical and social conditions in the late Chou period, in which ambitious feudal retainers overthrew their lords and embarked on policies of sheer self-aggrandizement, Confucius attempted to revive the normative order of the early Chou period. Instead of the continuity between Achilles and Pericles, Confucius discerned a great disparity between the duke of Chou and the princes of his own day. His attitude toward tradition is thus profoundly different from that of Socrates. Instead of rejecting and replacing the duke of Chou, Confucius identified with him and contributed to the deepening of his meaning for subsequent Chinese culture. Yet surely this is not merely because of Confucius’ ‘‘traditionalism’’ as against Socrates’ ‘‘iconoclasm.’’ For in the Chinese tradition the duke of Chou did not exemplify obsessive narcissism and the quest for ‘‘shining glory.’’ He was a modest and retiring man, forgoing the throne in favor of regency for his nephew and preaching a political doctrine based on virtue and benevolence. For all his ‘‘traditionalism’’ and love of the ancient rituals, Confucius breaks with archaic religion as decisively as does Socrates. For Confucius, too, it is in the mind (hsin, cf. Greek nous) of the sage that transcendence is recognized. There is a recognition of Heaven (t’ien) as of God (theos) in Plato. But Confucius is as reticent to speak of the highest things 25 as Plato is.26 Even in connection with the highest virtue ( jen, which Tu Weiming translates ‘‘humanity,’’ but Waley 27 translates ‘‘Goodness,’’ perhaps remembering Plato’s Agathon), Confucius is no more able than Plato to give a definition of the Good. The new experience of transcendence in the mind of the sage is related to a mode of life that is comparable to, though not identical with, the bios theoretikos. Perhaps the key Chinese terms are ‘‘learning’’ (hsüeh) and, in Mencius, the process known as ‘‘exhausting the mind and knowing the nature’’ (chin hsin chih hsing). Perhaps it would be well to give the whole passage from which the latter phrase comes, for it makes an interesting comparison with the passage from book 6 of the Republic quoted above. Mencius said, ‘‘It is the man who has stretched his mind to the full [chin ch’i hsin] who fully understands man’s true nature. And understanding his true nature, he understands Heaven. To guard one’s mind and to nourish one’s true nature is to serve Heaven. Do not be in two minds about premature death or a ripe old age.

25 Analects, 17:19, etc. 26 Seventh Letter, 341c. 27 Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius (London: Bradford and Dickens, 1938).

To Kill and Survive 91 Cultivate yourself [hsiu shen] and await the outcome. In this way you will attain to your allotted span [ming].28

All this is not to find ‘‘world rejection’’ in Confucius and Mencius. But neither is it really legitimate to find world rejection in Plato and Aristotle. All four were profound political philosophers. All four gave new definition and direction to political and practical life as well as to the life of the mind. But all were frustrated in their attempts to actualize their political teachings. All of them recognized a dimension of transcendence beyond the political even though they believed it had to be actualized in the political. To put it in Western terms, the new recognition of transcendence did not lead to an exclusive emphasis on the contemplative life but to a new conception of the balance between contemplation and action and a new understanding of the meaning of action as well as of contemplation. Nevertheless, deepening pessimism about the ‘‘world’’ did lead to genuine movements of world rejection not many centuries later both in the West and in East Asia. And subsequently world rejection was the dominant mode in East and West, an experience that has indelibly colored all of our thinking about the contemplative life in relation to action. In the West, the note of world rejection was carried predominantly by Christianity; in the East, by Buddhism. It is to the impact of these great religions on the balance between contemplation and action that we must now turn. In this brief essay we must bracket discussion of the break with archaic religion that occurred in ancient Israel.29 Suffice it to say that there, too, a new balance between the divine and the human was worked out, a new understanding of the implication of the divine demand for political existence. As in Greece and China a powerful experience of the divine—in Israel in the specific mode of prophetic revelation—did not entail world rejection but a renewed effort to realize ethical action in the world. With the emergence of Christianity, however, we find quite a different situation. The radical eschatological note, the imminent expectation of the end of the world, led to the nearly complete rejection of the larger political world in the (relatively brief ) time of waiting that remained. To the extent that ethical problems did consciously emerge they had to do with the personal lives of the converts, or at most with the problems of coherent community 28 Mencius, VII, 1:1. W. A. C. H. Dobson, Mencius (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 143. 29 See Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 1, Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959).

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in the new churches. Nothing like a Christian political philosophy can be discerned at least until the time of Augustine. Yet very early the bios theoretikos and the bios praktikos became foci of Christian reflection.What the terms meant in the new context we must now consider. It is actually in Philo (ca. 25 b.c.–ca. a.d. 40) that we can first discern the new interpretation that will later be taken up by the church fathers.30 In Philo the concern for the complexities and modulations in the variety of ‘‘practical lives’’ that we found in Plato and Aristotle has largely dropped out. In a sense the bios praktikos has now been absorbed into the bios theoretikos as a preparatory stage of ascetic discipline. The new articulation of the two lives as successive stages will be of great consequence in later Christian thought, but it is not without preparation in Plato. The contrast between phases of life is a not infrequent theme in Plato—indeed among the many contrasts between Achilles and Socrates not the least important is the hot-blooded death of the former in the bloom of youth and the philosophic death of the latter at the age of seventy. Particularly in the Laws, Plato worked out an ingenious pattern of change over the life cycle (even though the element of play and dance remained central at every age) culminating in the philosophic life of the elders who are the guardians of the laws. But Plato’s Magnesia is a total community in which a full political life is possible, whereas in Philo and the early church fathers the carapace of the empire is taken for granted and the concern of the religious community is largely with its own internal life. Origen (ca. 185–ca. 255) builds on Philo when he says, ‘‘Contemplatives are in the house of God, while those who lead an active life are only in the vestibule.’’ 31 But, however much 30 Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice, chap. 4, traces this shift to the Neoplatonists, but takes as his representative figure Plotinus. While Plotinus is clearly not the crucial figure for the early Christian tradition, there is another respect in which Plotinus made a significant contribution. It was he who distinguished decisively between logos in the sense of conceptual thought and theoria in the sense of unitive vision. Allowing for shifts in linguistic usage we may equate this contrast to the contemporary one in which theory means abstract conceptualization and contemplation means religious insight. While the connection between the ideas of theory and contemplation has never been wholly lost, to trace fully the development of the deepening split between them in the West is beyond the scope of this essay. Lobkowicz is concerned primarily with the contrast between theory and practice in the modern meanings of those terms. I am concerned with the contrast between contemplation and practice. 31 In his commentary on Psalm 133, quoted by Sister Mary Elizabeth Mason,

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the active life was downgraded relative to the contemplative—a tendency more common in the Eastern than in the Western church—even in Origen it is certainly not rejected. In commenting on the New Testament incident of the Transfiguration, Origen wrote: ‘‘Peter was eager that they should continue in the vision he was privileged to see, but that was not to be. By leaving the vision and going down to serve His brethren once more, Our Lord demonstrated to him that the active life must always continue with the contemplative, that the bios theoretikos and the bios praktikos are inseparable.’’ 32 That this passage echoes book 7 of the Republic as well as the New Testament will also be true of Augustine. As in so many other respects so with the reflection about the active and contemplative lives, Augustine marks a turning point in Christian history. He takes up and completes the striving for personal holiness so evident in the early fathers but he puts this striving in a far broader social context. For him there is no question as to the superiority of the contemplative life. Both active and contemplative lives are lived in the space between the divine and the human and both partake of the tension of that space. But the contemplative life is already a foretaste of the goal. Augustine picks up from Origen the reference to Martha and Mary in Luke 10:38–42 as types of the two lives: Martha’s part is holy and great: yet Mary hath chosen the better, in that while her sister was solicitous and working and caring for many things, she was at leisure and sat still and listened. Mary’s part will not be taken away from her, Martha’s will—for the ministering to the saints will pass away; to whom will food be given, where none hungers? Mary’s part does not pass away, for her delight was in justice and truth, and in this same will be her delight in eternity. What Mary chooses waxes greater; for the delight of the human heart—of a faithful and holy human heart—in the light of truth and the affluence of wisdom, if it be sweet now, will then be sweeter far.33

But though the hierarchical ordering is clear, no one has seen better than Augustine that true Christian existence requires both lives and that the active life is not merely another name for the ascetic disciplines prepaO.S.B., Active Life and Contemplative Life (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1961), 19. 32 In The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, quoted in Mason, Active Life, p. 25. 33 Sermo cixix, 17, quoted by Mason, Active Life, 36.

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ratory to contemplation but involves full participation in the ethical and political life of the world. Perhaps the key passage is in the City of God, book 19, chapter 19: As for the three kinds of life, the life of leisure, the life of action, and the combination of the two, anyone, to be sure, might spend his life in any of these ways without detriment to his faith, and might thus attain to the everlasting rewards. What does matter is the answers to those questions: What does a man possess as a result of his love of truth? And what does he pay out in response to the obligations of Christian love? For no one ought to be so leisured as to take no thought in that leisure for the interest of his neighbour, nor so active as to feel no need for the contemplation of God. The attraction of a life of leisure ought not to be the prospect of lazy inactivity, but the chance for the investigation and discovery of truth, on the understanding that each person makes some progress in this, and does not grudgingly withhold his discoveries from another. In the life of action, on the other hand, what is to be treasured is not a place of honour or power in this life, since ‘‘everything under the sun is vanity,’’ but the task itself that is achieved by means of that place of honour and that power— if that achievement is right and helpful; that is, if it serves to promote the wellbeing of the common people, for as we have already argued, this well-being is according to God’s intention. . . . So then, no one is debarred from devoting himself to the pursuit of truth, for that involves a praiseworthy kind of leisure. But high position, although without it a people cannot be ruled, is not in itself a respectable object of ambition, even if that position be held and exercised in a manner worthy of respect. We see then that it is love of truth that looks for sanctified leisure, while it is the compulsion of love that undertakes righteous engagement in affairs.34

Not for glory and not for power but for the welfare of the people under the compulsion of love the political functions of the active life have value and meaning. The early church, alternately persecuted and protected by the Roman Empire, largely abstained from participation in political life and remained particularly aloof from military life. But, after Christianity became the official religion of the empire, a more positive conception of political life (and an abandonment of Christian pacifism) developed. The return of classical political philosophy in Christian guise in the writings of Augus34 Henry Bettenson’s translation of St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1972), 880–881.

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tine greatly facilitated this process, which would be resumed in the High Middle Ages especially by Thomas Aquinas. But at the same time the spread of monasticism, which was just beginning in Augustine’s time, had new implications for the understanding of the active and contemplative lives. For the early church as well as for Augustine there was no suggestion that the contemplative life was only for clergy or the active for laity. Both clergy and laity ought, of necessity, to participate in both lives. But in the Middle Ages the contemplative life tended to be confused with the monastic life, or even with the life of particular orders (friars were committed to the ‘‘active life’’), even though this identification never became complete. On the other hand, the increasing recognition of the validity of secular life and the concomitant recovery of pre-Christian classical culture contributed to the crisis over the articulation of the contemplative and active lives that occurred in the sixteenth century. We may now glance briefly at the history of Confucianism in China and its relation to the rise of otherworldly religion after the third century of the Christian era. Pre-Han Confucianism was by no means the predominant school of Chinese thought, and even in its first great period of prosperity under the Han dynasty (roughly 200 b.c. to a.d. 200) it had to contend with other schools.With respect to our central concern the two major alternative ancient schools contrasted neatly with Confucianism. Legalism was the ideology of pragmatic manipulators interested primarily in the extension of state power. They represented a hypostatization of the active life, having no concern with the dimension of the transcendent. Taoism, on the other hand, was certainly primarily contemplative and even otherworldly, if we mean by that term rejecting the public and political realm. Confucianism, as we have seen, maintained a balance between active and contemplative modes, and indeed throughout history Confucianism seems to have had the potentiality to shade off toward Legalism, on the one hand, or Taoism, on the other.While the functioning bureaucrat was often a theoretical Confucianist but a practical Legalist, there is also much truth to the adage ‘‘A Confucianist in office; a Taoist out of office.’’ Thus while Confucianism has never totally dominated Chinese culture, it has through most of history provided the central integration of it. The period of the Han dynasty was by and large one of such successful integration. With the collapse of the Han dynasty and the subsequent loss of political unity, Confucianism no longer seemed wholly adequate even as a political ideology. The increasing existential anxiety accompanying a period of political turmoil seemed to require some more radically religious re-

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sponse than Confucianism could offer. Consequently we see in the centuries that followed the greatest challenge to the dominance of Confucianism as the organizing philosophy of Chinese culture in the entire history of imperial China. The challenge came first from religious Taoism, but, from the fourth century on, Taoism was overshadowed by Buddhism, which had arrived in China from India during the later Han dynasty, as the major challenge to Confucianism. Far more otherworldly than Christianity, Buddhism was an essentially contemplative religion with little to say about worldly action.While never replacing Confucianism, Buddhism remained the dominant cultural force in China for some six centuries (fourth to tenth), a fact that both Chinese and Western scholars seem to prefer to forget.35 This is not the place for even a cursory discussion of Buddhism. Suffice it to say that it is a tradition based on a profound experience of religious transcendence that has given rise to extraordinary systems of metaphysical speculation and subtle practices of meditation and devotion. Buddhism was in part shaped by the Chinese environment, so that by the seventh century it had become Chinese Buddhism, but by the same token neither Taoism nor Confucianism was ever the same after their prolonged exposure to Buddhism. When in the tenth and eleventh centuries a resurgent Confucianism (generally called ‘‘Neo-Confucianism’’ in the West) displaced Buddhism as the dominant force in Chinese culture, it did so only after having imbibed much from its opponent. Though it strongly rejected monasticism, the revived Confucianism was deeply contemplative. Under the Buddhist stimulus it greatly elaborated the incipient metaphysics of the ancient texts and developed every hint of meditational techniques. The failure of radical Confucian reforms in the Sung period gave an overtone of political pessimism to Neo-Confucianism that may not have approached Augustine’s somberness but was, and remained for centuries, far from optimistic about the possibility of action in the world even though it never abandoned the ideal of responsible political leadership. Curiously enough, it was in the sixteenth century that there arose, with no direct influence from the West, the first gentle hint of a major shift away from the contemplative mode and toward the active. In the West the shift was not gentle and it was far more than a hint. In the extraordinary figure of Niccolò Machiavelli, who stands at the head 35 This lapse has been pointed out in a doctoral dissertation, Wai-lun Lai, ‘‘The Awakening of Faith in Mahayana (Ta-ch’eng ch’i-hsin lun); A Study of the Unfolding of Sinitic Mahayana Motifs’’ (Harvard University, 1975).

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of modern Western philosophy, we encounter a radical criticism of Christianity, a tacit rejection of classical philosophy, and a dramatic reversal of the hierarchical relation between the contemplative life and the active life—or rather, the abandonment of the contemplative life altogether. We seem suddenly to be back in the world of Pericles, if not that of Achilles, though Machiavelli’s heroes are more often Romans than Greeks. But the amoral aggrandizement of one’s city and often the amoral aggrandizement of oneself (the pursuit of ‘‘shining glory,’’ whether by good or evil deeds) have replaced the rule of the moral and theological virtues. Indeed the very word virtus has become ambiguous in its Italian guise of virtù, which now has as much to do with natural capacity or strength as it does with morality.36 Machiavelli glories in action, and he is one of the greatest of all analysts of it. But with contemplation he wants no part. He criticizes Christianity as a weak and uncivic religion, preferring the ‘‘bloody’’ pagan religion of ancient Rome.37 Nothing draws his contempt so much as the unarmed prophet—Savonarola is his most common example, though Jesus of Nazareth, whom he studiously avoids mentioning, is probably another. Moses he admires because he was an armed prophet, and he mentions him together with others whom he admires, such as Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus.38 Throughout the texts of The Prince and the Discourses he mentions Plato and Aristotle only once. Neither the transcendence of revelation nor the transcendence discerned in the soul of the philosopher is of any 36 J. G. A. Pocock has some interesting reflections on virtus: ‘‘A term which was originally, and largely remained, part of the ethos of a political and military class, virtus became assimilated to the Greek aretê and shared its conceptual development. From the meaning of ‘civic excellence’—some quality respected by other citizens and productive of leadership and authority over them—aretê had been refined, by Socrates and Plato, to mean that moral goodness which alone qualified a man for civic capacity, which could even exist without it and render it unnecessary, and which, at the highest levels of Platonic thinking, rendered existence and the universe intelligible and satisfactory. Aretê and virtus alike came to mean, first, the power by which an individual or group acted effectively in a civic context; next, the essential property which made a personality or element what it was; third, the moral goodness which made a man, in city or cosmos, what he ought to be.’’ The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 37. Needless to say the Christian use of the term was a development of the Platonic usage, whereas Machiavelli’s virtù is a reversion to the most primitive stage of the concept. 37 Discourses, 1:11–15. 38 Prince, 6.

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interest to him. For those who view ‘‘secularization’’ as a gradual process Machiavelli must always come as a shock. It would be hard to imagine what it would mean to be more secular than Machiavelli. Machiavelli, of course, was not without precursors. Hans Baron has shown how Florentines such as Salutati and Bruni in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries resuscitated the honor of the active life on the basis of a ‘‘civic humanism’’ which learned much from the ancient world.39 But these early civic humanists did not reject the contemplative life, even in its most cloistered monastic form. They simply argued that it was not necessarily best for all people under all circumstances and that under certain conditions the active life could be of equal or even superior dignity. As Salutati wrote, ‘‘To devote oneself honestly to honest activities may be holy, and holier than laziness in solitude. For holiness in a [quiet] country life is useful only to itself, as St. Jerome says. But holiness in a busy life raises the lives of many.’’ 40 Nor did the early civic humanists (and many later ones) reject ancient philosophy. Plato and Cicero were particular favorites. Thus the teaching of the civic humanists was not a reversion to pre-Socratic politics as in the case of Machiavelli, but only an adjustment within the context of the Classical-Christian tradition in favor of a greater dignity of the active life. In view of the late medieval tendency to link the contemplative life to clerical life and the active life to secular life one might with reason consider the rise of civic humanism a ‘‘secularizing’’ trend. But even that is far from the whole story. Part of what was happening, as is evident in the Salutati passage, is that a religious dignity is being claimed for the active life. With Savonarola the Florentine tradition of civic humanism was fused with an eschatological interpretation of the mission of Florence which had the ironic consequence of linking civic humanism, with its sense of the dignity of the active life, to a more intense religiosity than that displayed by the Roman church, of which it was critical.41 An ideologist of Venetian republicanism like Paolo Paruta was in his defense of the active life far closer to this early strand of civic humanism than he was to his contemporary, Machiavelli.42 39 Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). 40 Baron, Crisis, 111. 41 See Donald Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). 42 William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 202ff. Sarpi would seem, in the crucial respects, to be closer to Paruta than to Machiavelli.

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Indeed there is much in common between the Florentine and Venetian civic humanists and the Protestant reformers in their revival of the religious dignity of the active life. The tendency to denigrate contemplation as the exclusive preserve of lazy, selfish, and conceited clerics did not at all mean an abandonment of many elements of the classic definition of the vita contemplativa, such as faith, prayer, and worship. Luther, perhaps, put it most bluntly when he wrote: If the monks really wanted to escape from people, they should honorably and honestly flee, not leave a stench behind them; that is, they should not by their fleeing give other vocations and offices a stench as though these were utterly damned and their own self-chosen monasticism were pure balsam. When a person flees from human society and becomes a monk it sounds as though he were saying, ‘‘Shame on you! How these people stink! How accursed is their vocation. I want to be saved and let them go to the devil!’’ If Christ had fled like this too and become such a holy monk, who would have died for our sin or atoned for us poor sinners? Do you suppose it would have been the monks with their unsociable and austere mode of life? 43

Perhaps behind those words we can see the reemergence of all that complexity of activities and occupations in the world to which Plato and Aristotle gave so much attention. Not just ‘‘the active life,’’ but the political, military, mercantile, manufacturing lives were beginning to require ethical and religious recognition. The Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines of ‘‘calling’’ were precisely designed to give those occupations religious meaning and value. Yet again this was no simple ‘‘secularization.’’ The con43 From ‘‘On the Councils and the Church,’’ in Luther’s Works (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 41:39. But Saint Gregory the Great, who had such an enormous influence on medieval monasticism, was long before aware of Luther’s problem. In taking Christ as his example, he wrote: ‘‘He set forth in himself patterns of both lives, that is, the active and the contemplative, united together. For the contemplative differs very much from the active. But our redeemer by becoming Incarnate, while he gave a pattern of both, united both in Himself. For when he wrought miracles in the city, yet continued all night in prayer on the mountain. He gave his faithful ones an example not to neglect, through love of contemplation, the care of their neighbours; nor again to abandon contemplative pursuits through being too immoderately engaged in the care of their neighbours; but so to keep together their mind, in applying it to the two cases, that the love of their neighbour might not interfere with the love of God, nor again the love of God, cast out, because it transcends, the love of their neighbour.’’ Morals on the Book of Job, 28:33, quoted in Mason, Active Life, 66.

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templative life, even though no longer called that, continued to permeate the active life, which was, as the Protestants insisted, to be pursued ‘‘in, but not of, this world.’’ Perhaps the most compressed way of summing up the position that spans both civic humanists and reformers is the phrase that one of Ignatius Loyola’s devoted disciples, the Jesuit Father Jerome Nadal, applied to that great Counter-Reformation leader: contemplativus in actione.44 But if one aspect of the early modern West involves a reordering of the place of action and contemplation within the continuing ClassicalChristian tradition, we must not forget that other aspect, which we already observed in Machiavelli, the utter abandonment of the tradition. From this point of view, Thomas Hobbes is the firstborn son of Machiavelli and outdoes his master, not in the radicalness of his views, but in the thoroughness of his theoretical support for them. For Machiavelli, theorist of political action though he was, seldom reflected on the first principles of the human condition. Hobbes we might call the first theoretical social scientist, just as Machiavelli was the first empirical one. For Hobbes meets the philosophical tradition on its own ground of first principles. He abandons entirely the fundamental Platonic-Aristotelian understanding of man as motivated primarily by eros toward the Good, just as he abandons the Christian understanding of man as in need of, and utterly dependent on, divine grace. Hobbes builds his understanding of man almost exclusively on one motive—the biological need for self-preservation. If he adds anything to this primary need it is the urge to dominate and excel others (which may be only an extrapolation of the primary need). In constructing a whole theory of social order on this principle, Hobbes creates a pre-Socratic political philosophy that far outdoes the meager attempts of the Sophists to do the same. Naturally in this theory there is no room for contemplation, for there is no room for transcendence. Like his predecessor, Hobbes is interested in religion, but primarily as a device for political control of the masses. About its inherent value and meaning Hobbes remains silent. There is one important difference between Machiavelli and Hobbes that has caused their influence to be somewhat divergent in subsequent history. However radically individualist Machiavelli can sometimes be, his starting point is never the isolated individual but the city. Because of his constant preoccupation with the city and its needs, there is a link to the tradition of civic humanism that was never broken. Machiavelli’s defense of republican liberty has been instructive to those who find in that liberty 44 Mason, Active Life, xi.

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an ethical and religious meaning utterly lacking in Hobbes. Another way of putting it is to say that Machiavelli was always profoundly political and that politics can be understood in an Aristotelian as well as a pre-Socratic way. But Hobbes is not finally political at all, for his radically individualist understanding of man is more economic than political. It is but a step from Hobbes to Locke’s basic understanding of man in terms of labor. If we may adopt Hannah Arendt’s useful subclassification of the vita activa 45 we may say that the homo politicus of Machiavelli is beginning to be replaced by the homo faber and the animal laborans of Hobbes and Locke. In Arendt’s terms this means that first work and then labor become more important than action. But whatever the tensions between the various radical champions of the active life, they all abandon contemplation. This had the ironic consequence that not only was religion undermined, but philosophy itself became a far more insignificant handmaiden than it had ever been in the Middle Ages.46 At this point we must allude to another crucial development that plays into our problem in important ways: the rise of modern science. Early modern science involved a dramatic break with classical philosophy, particularly Aristotle, but it did not necessarily involve a break with religion. One of the early great ideologists of science, Francis Bacon, saw it as part of the same divine providence that brought about the Reformation: We see before our eyes, that in the age of ourselves and our fathers, when it pleased God to call the Church of Rome to account for their degenerate manners and ceremonies, and sundry doctrines obnoxious and framed to uphold the same abuses; at one and the same time it was ordained by the Divine Providence that there should attend withal a renovation and new spring of all other knowledges.47

Yet the new science, even when understood in religious terms, came down heavily on the side of action rather than contemplation, as is explained admirably by Eugene Klaaren: 45 Arendt, Human Condition. 46 Cf. Arendt, Human Condition, 294. 47 From Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), quoted by Eugene M. Klaaren, ‘‘Belief in Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1975), 106. Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice, chap. 7, has a very valuable discussion of Bacon as the inheritor of the medieval artisan tradition. Out of this tradition comes the special stress on ‘‘making’’ as a central part of action, Arendt’s homo faber.

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For the venerable Augustinian tradition knowing consisted of participation in the known, an activity reinforced by the primacy of sapientia (wisdom). . . . This ontological orientation of knowledge was reinforced by the high value of contemplative knowledge, which genuinely symbolized the theology of Being in all things. The presupposition that the order of knowing followed that of being was basic. When Boyle and Bacon, like Descartes, reversed this traditional order, a venture of knowing itself emerged. As practical and experimental knowledge gained primacy in use and value over contemplative knowledge, the very activity of knowing acquired an integrity of its own. Henceforth, this activity closely approximated making or reconstruction rather than participation or abstraction. In this epochally new order the directing if not spontaneous significance of will, which presupposed the often distant yet all powerful will of God, disregarded the old maxim that the will moves according to the last dictate of understanding. Sharp distinctions between Creator and creation and man and world were also manifest between knower and known. A new field for individual will emerged.48

But where God must be known indirectly through his works and not directly through participation the very experience of transcendence itself is endangered. As Klaaren himself points out, the belief in an ‘‘often distant’’ God in the seventeenth century gave way to deism in the eighteenth and atheism in the nineteenth, at least among those who seriously pursued the relation of science and theology. We have already indicated that in early modern China (and Japan, too, as we shall see in a moment) the reversal in primacy of contemplation and action was also taking place, even if pianissimo, so to speak, compared to the West. With the seventeenth century the great age of metaphysical speculation is just about over, to be replaced by the development of ‘‘scientific’’ philology and a turn toward ‘‘practical studies.’’ The practice of meditation (quiet sitting) was not immediately abandoned, but its prestige, particularly among the most influential and innovative scholars, declined. De Bary in a magisterial review of the ‘‘enlightenment’’ tendencies in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese Confucianism speaks of its ‘‘pragmatic and positivist spirit,’’ 49 its liberation from the 48 Klaaren, ‘‘Belief,’’ 144. 49 W. Theodore de Bary, ed., The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 144. This and the following quotations are from De Bary’s own article, ‘‘Neo-Confucian Cultivation and the Seventeenth-Century ‘Enlightenment,’ ’’ 141–216.

To Kill and Survive 103 ‘‘ascetic and transcendental influences of Buddhism’’ 50 that had infiltrated

Sung Neo-Confucianism, and its emphasis on ‘‘the reality of the actual, physical natures of man and things.’’ 51 Few Chinese Confucianists openly rejected the ancient Confucian notion, expressed classically in Mencius, that the mind (hsin) is the sensorium for transcendence (through nature, hsing, to heaven, t’ien). And yet if De Bary is right that by the seventeenth century ‘‘sagehood as a goal of spiritual attainment had become almost as rare as had sainthood in the twentieth-century West,’’ 52 then we can ask whether early modern Chinese Confucianism was not reverting to a ‘‘pre-Confucian’’ philosophy, just as the West was reverting to a ‘‘preSocratic’’ one. While controversy over the meaning of the texts is still going on, it does seem to me that at least one influential eighteenth-century Japanese thinker, Ogyū Sorai, did make that reversion. Openly rejecting Mencius and tacitly rejecting Confucius, Sorai exalted the ‘‘ancient kings’’ whom he alleged had received the original modes and orders of human society from a rather distant Heaven. There is a strong naturalism in Sorai. He takes seriously the basic desires, talents, and abilities of men and considers society as the context for men to fulfill these desires and abilities. But what holds society together are the objective normative orders administered by the ruler, who acts in later ages in the place of the ancient kings. For Sorai there is no longer any direct link to heaven through the mind. He ridiculed contemporary followers of Mencius by saying: ‘‘To use one’s own mind to control one’s own mind is like a lunatic controlling himself by means of his own lunacy.’’ 53 The rejection of contemplation and the emphasis on the dynamism of political society made Sorai an important forerunner of the Meiji state. Indeed, we are beginning to be aware that modern China and Japan were far from unprepared for the modern period. Radical ideas from the West would never have been absorbed so quickly and effectively if there had not been a preparation from within. Nevertheless, in neither country was the traditional pattern of thought wholly destroyed either by the indigenous early modern thinkers or by the incursion of modern Western thought. Our final task is to bring what has become a sweeping excursion into 50 De Bary, ‘‘Neo-Confucian Cultivation,’’ 194. 51 De Bary, ‘‘Neo-Confucian Cultivation,’’ 201. 52 De Bary, ‘‘Neo-Confucian Cultivation,’’ 204. 53 Bendō, in Yoshikawa Kojiro et al., eds., Ogyū Sorai, Nihon Shisō Taikei (Tokyo, 1973), vol. 36, 28.

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intellectual history back to our original concern with patterns of individual adulthood. If comparative ethnography indicates that most human cultures have shown an alternating rhythm of concern with the sacred and the profane and if Erik Erikson has found that the mature personality expresses itself in both action and contemplation, then we might ask whether a culture that exclusively emphasizes action (or contemplation either, for that matter) can be a very healthy environment for human growth. The relation of history and life history is problematic at best, and the relation between intellectual history and life history is even more problematic. What the reigning intellectuals believe is not necessarily what everyone believes. Even the cultural resources available to intellectuals may not exhaust the cultural resources available to others. It is common knowledge, for example, that the religious life of Americans could hardly be gauged from the religious life of American university professors. Nevertheless the prolonged dominance of an intellectual tendency cannot but affect the larger culture. The loss of respect for the vita contemplativa by Western (and Eastern) intellectuals for several centuries has certainly put it on the defensive, even where it survives. The most viable survival technique under these circumstances, as we have seen in the West (there are comparable examples in East Asia), is to combine the two ways of life in some sort of synthesis. But to be in but not of the world or to be contemplativus in actione is enormously difficult, as Calvinists and Jesuits have learned. The ‘‘in’’ tends to become ‘‘of’’ just as action tends to obliterate contemplation. The Catholic turn toward the world in the twentieth century, in an effort to make the Jesuit model the model for the church as a whole, has further endangered the contemplative life by weakening one of the last lines of its defense. And yet, however unfavorable the cultural environment, an individual can still put together for himself (and for others) a coherent pattern of personal identity. Even in America, which was born in action, so to speak, and where contemplation has always had a foreign ring, it has been possible to find wisdom and to express it to others. I want to mention in this regard two quite extraordinary but exemplary Americans: Jefferson and Lincoln. The reference to Jefferson comes naturally from Erikson’s discussion mentioned at the beginning of this essay.54 Almost everything in Jefferson’s intellectual equipment would seem to militate for an exclusive concern with the active life. His intellectual heroes were Bacon and Newton and Locke. His study of eighteenth-century French thought brought him 54 See note 1 above.

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to a basically materialist and sensationalist conception of man, which was more radical than that of his English teachers. In his preoccupation with useful invention and his scorn for useless speculation he was typical of the best minds of his age. Yet even in his early life, when he was in the thick of action, there is a grandeur of vision, a concern for universal truth that prevented him from being only a pragmatic politician. Without that larger vision it would not have been possible for the Declaration of Independence to have been the revolutionary document that it was, for America and for the world. But it is in his late years that the contemplative side of Jefferson comes out best. There is something almost classical about his enjoyment of a leisured life in the country, not for lazy self-indulgence, but for the intellectual exploration of the world. In that exploration the Latin classics were a great comfort to him (he also studied the Greek texts but could make no sense of Plato). Erikson is quite right to point out that this contemplative mode reached a kind of culmination in his careful study of the Bible and his construction of a purified text of the teachings of Jesus. For Jefferson, Jesus was the highest model of humanity because of his deep concern for others. Even if what Jefferson left out is as instructive as what he kept in his ‘‘revised version,’’ this enterprise shows beyond doubt that Jefferson transcended the utilitarian and pragmatic mode. And the fruit of these years of retirement, the enormous correspondence—particularly that with John Adams—is not the least of what he has left to his country. Lincoln’s is a deeper and more obscure example.55 There were no late years of retirement in which wisdom could culminate. There is the probable rationalism of his early years and the certain fact that he never joined a church. Yet if there was ever a contemplative in action it was Lincoln. The enormous consistency of his vision from the late 1830s to the end of his life and the care and concern that went into his most casual writings give evidence of an extraordinary concentration. Aware as perhaps no other American of the moral price that every day of the existence of slavery exacted from all Americans, he nevertheless always controlled his actions, limiting them to what was politically possible, what was just beyond the national consciousness but not so far beyond as to be rejected. Lacking Jefferson’s education he was yet more deeply educated. His three greatest 55 My understanding of Lincoln has been greatly enhanced by Harry V. Jaffa’s extraordinary book Crisis of the House Divided (New York: Doubleday, 1959), as well as by some of the essays in the same author’s Equality and Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).

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teachers were the two texts that shaped the consciousness of Americans in those days, the Bible and Shakespeare, and Jefferson himself. As with all great contemplatives, there are many things we will never know about Lincoln. But out of the darkness of the war years, out of the concern and the care that he could never lay aside came two great documents that, like the Declaration of Independence, transcend the particularities of their origin and speak to mankind. The message they speak is not only that of inalienable rights, but also of charity, reconciliation, and rebirth. In 1940 Jacques Maritain wrote: As I have said . . . contemplation is particularly important to this continent. Is it not a universally repeated commonplace that America is the land par excellence of pragmatism and of the great undertakings of human activity? There is truth in this, as in most commonplaces. Whitman celebrates the pioneers in a manner which is certainly characteristic of the American soul. But, in my opinion, there are in America great reserves and possibilities for contemplation. The activism which is manifested here assumes in many cases the aspect of a remedy against despair. I think that this activism itself masks a certain hidden aspiration to contemplation. . . . On the other hand, the tendency, natural in this country, to undertake great things, to have confidence, to be moved by large idealistic feelings, may be considered, without great risk of error, as disguising that desire and aspiration of which I spoke. To wish paradise on earth is stark naiveté. But it is surely better than not to wish any paradise at all. To aspire to paradise is man’s grandeur; and how should I aspire to paradise except by beginning to realize paradise here below? The question is to know what paradise is. Paradise consists, as St. Augustine says, in the joy of the Truth. Contemplation is paradise on earth, a crucified paradise.56

Perhaps Maritain was too optimistic. Perhaps America is too deeply committed to the active life in its pathological hypostatization to find again the healing balance of contemplation. Even Maritain himself went on to speak of ‘‘contemplation overflowing in action,’’ which may be too easy a compromise with the reigning ethos. But at a moment when many Americans find the pragmatic world meaningless, perhaps Maritain’s hopes for this continent were not utterly misguided.

56 From an essay entitled ‘‘Action and Contemplation,’’ in Jacques Maritain, Scholasticism and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 192–193.

4 Stories as Arrows T H E R E L I G I O U S R E S P O N S E TO M O D E R N I T Y

Since The Secular City Harvey Cox, as a Christian theologian, has pioneered in finding the religious relevance of the secular and the secular implications of religion. He has also helped open the door to non-Christian religions as participants in the inquiry about the nature of contemporary society. I would like this essay to be a contribution to the dialogue he has so significantly widened. The thought of a leading contemporary defender of modernity, the philosopher-sociologist Jürgen Habermas, provides my point of departure. For Habermas the primary virtue of modernity is autonomy: men and women come of age, capable of rational thought and of the rational public discussion through which they are to determine their common fate. I believe this is a noble ideal but an incomplete one.1 In his single most important theoretical distinction Habermas divides society into ‘‘lifeworld’’ and systems. The characteristic feature of the lifeworld is that it is organized in terms of language: the use of language, in formal and informal ways, is the core of how the lifeworld functions. The lifeworld includes things like family, local community, and religious groups, but in a complex society it also includes the realm of public discourse. It is by no means exclusively private: it is that part of our lives where language, expressing what is important to us, is at the center. For some of us, what we mean by community is virtually identical with the lifeworld, but for reasons that will become clear later on, Habermas resists such an identification and does not use the term ‘‘community.’’ [Originated in a talk for the conference ‘‘Community, Modernity and Religion: Eurocentric/Aboriginal Conversation,’’ at St. Thomas More College, Sasksatoon, Saskatchewan, in June of 1995. It was first published in Arvind Sharma, ed., Religion in a Secular City: Essays in Honor of Harvey Cox (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity International, 2001), 91–115. Used by permission.] 1 Here and in what follows my discussion is based mainly on vol. 2 of Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987; first German ed., 1981).

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The systems, according to Habermas, are organized primarily not through language but through nonlinguistic media. The great archetypal systems that have so much to do with our lives today are the market economy, where the steering mechanism is money—the bottom line is the profit-and-loss calculation—and the administrative state, where the steering mechanism is power. In Habermas’s view the process of modernization involves two complementary processes: the rationalization of the lifeworld and the differentiation of the systems from the lifeworld. The distortions of modernity—and it should be remembered that Habermas is a critic as well as a defender of modernity—arise from blockages in the process of rationalization of the lifeworld, something I will explain shortly, and a reversal of the proper relation between lifeworld and systems. The differentiation of the systems from the lifeworld should allow them to operate more effectively so as to serve the lifeworld better. However if the systems—the economy and the administrative state—become autonomous to the degree that they are no longer anchored in the norms and values of the lifeworld but seek to subordinate the lifeworld to their own quest to maximize money and power— something Habermas vividly characterizes as the colonization of the lifeworld by the systems—then we have a distorted modernity indeed, one in need of radical reform. Let me return to the question of the rationalization of the lifeworld, the quintessential project of the Enlightenment. As I have indicated, for Habermas, a true child of the Enlightenment, autonomy is the central modern value. The rationalization of the lifeworld is that process through which individual autonomy is continuously increased and the barriers to it diminished. It is in this context that we can understand Habermas’s antipathy to community and his doubt about the value of religion. Community for Habermas involves taken-for-granted assumptions that are essentially unarguable and that limit the freedom of the individual. Thus, for Habermas, the individual and community exist in a zero-sum situation: the stronger the one, the weaker the other. I will reserve my criticism of this idea of community until later. Habermas’s view of religion is representative of much contemporary thought. Habermas is not unsympathetic to religion—indeed, he gives it considerable importance in his notion of social evolution. Religion, in his view, has made a significant contribution to the progressive sequence of enhanced social learning capacities, which is what he means by social evolution. It is just that with the advent of modernity, religion’s role has come to an end. Its conception of the sacred and of religious truth is too ‘‘frozen,’’ too closed to critical examination,

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too limiting of individual autonomy, to be viable in the modern world. Conceptions of the sacred and of religious tradition, according to Habermas, need to be ‘‘thawed’’ or ‘‘liquefied’’ if we are to have a genuinely modern culture based on undistorted communication, which he defines as the open argumentative redemption of validity claims concerning issues of truth, rightness, and authenticity where the best argument carries the day. From Habermas’s perspective the pernicious survival of frozen religious forms blocks free communication and interferes with the autonomy of individuals.2 Without being able to put it so elegantly, many of our contemporaries, particularly in the university but quite broadly in the well-educated middle class, would agree with Habermas’s position. Many of them would hold, however, that if religion confines itself to private life and the expressive concerns of individuals, eschewing any claim to influence public life and public decisions, then it may have a justifiable and harmless role to play in contemporary society, for those who continue to be interested in it. This understanding of religion, commoner than we might think within as well as without the churches, is not only the result of cultural forces associated with the Enlightenment; it is rooted in critical social changes associated with the emergence of modern society. All the terms that we confidently use in discussion of related issues today, such as ‘‘religion,’’ ‘‘civil society,’’ and ‘‘the state,’’ are products of a specifically European history that it might be useful for us to consider, even if briefly, before we go on. Many people know that ‘‘sociology’’ is a quite recent term, coined by Auguste Comte in 1837. We are perhaps not so aware of the fact that ‘‘society’’ and ‘‘religion’’ are also, in their current meanings, quite modern 2 This discussion of Habermas’s view of religion is based on vol. 2, especially chap. 5, sec. 3, ‘‘The Rational Structure of the Linguistification of the Sacred,’’ 77– 111. In ‘‘Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World,’’ his concluding chapter to Habermas: Modernity, and Public Theology, ed. Don S. Browning and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 226–250, Habermas modifies these views to some extent, recognizing the practical contribution of some Christians and some theologians to the public struggle for social justice. But with respect to the place of religion in modern culture he leaves us with only this rather agnostic statement: ‘‘As long as religious language bears with itself inspiring, indeed, unrelinquishable semantic contents which elude (for the moment?) the expressive power of a philosophical language and still await translation into a discourse that gives reasons for its position, philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will neither be able to replace nor to repress religion’’ (237).

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terms. ‘‘Society’’ is not only a new term but it is only intelligible as a contrast term to two other relatively new terms: ‘‘state’’ and ‘‘economy.’’ It is worth remembering that the ancient Greek word polis, from which comes a rich variety of modern words, for example, in English, ‘‘politics,’’ ‘‘policy,’’ ‘‘police,’’ and others, meant simultaneously city, state, society, and community, so that we have no modern word that really translates it. ‘‘Economy’’ is also Greek in origin, but in ancient Greek it meant household management—‘‘economy,’’ in our sense was for them just one more aspect of the polis. It was the rise of the modern Western nation-state, beginning in the seventeenth century but maturing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that gave rise to the notion of society as something different from the state. In early notions of ‘‘civil society,’’ society and economy were not clearly differentiated, but with the rise of industrialization the realms of society and economy came to be seen as different from each other and both of them as different from the state. It is this process to which Habermas points when he speaks of the differentiation of the systems from the lifeworld. It is interesting to note that ‘‘religion’’ is also a term that takes on its modern meaning at about the same time the terms ‘‘state,’’ ‘‘society,’’ and ‘‘economy’’ are differentiating out from each other. If we go back to ancient Greece, religion is simply the cultic life of the polis, and not conceivable outside it. It is true that Christianity developed the idea of the church, interestingly enough borrowing the word ecclesia, the assembly of the citizens, from Greek political life to denominate itself. But the church, though having an independent identity, a concept only barely foreshadowed by earlier Greek religious associations, was nonetheless very much embedded in the whole of society. Religion as a separate sphere was in considerable part itself the product of the rise of the nationstate system, which, in turn, was in part a reaction to the religious wars between Protestants and Catholics in the early seventeenth century. From the time of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 religion was seen as a matter for each state to decide for itself and no longer a valid cause of international warfare.3 From this idea there developed in the eighteenth century the idea that religion could be separated from the state altogether, being a matter of individual conscience. Thus emerged the idea of religion as something separate from other spheres and rooted in the experience and 3 The importance of the transition symbolized, but certainly not caused, by the Treaty of Westphalia was pointed out to me in an unpublished paper of Bryan Hehir in 1992.

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conscience of individuals which most of us take for granted in our modern usage of the term. Serious conceptual difficulties occur when we take these terms, arising from a specific history, but now common not only to social science but to modern discourse around the world, and apply them as universal categories. When we look at tribal societies that do not have a differentiated state or economy, then we can plainly see that religion cannot be a separate sphere of largely private experience. Rather, religion permeates and expresses the whole way of life of the tribal people.When we seek to study their rituals we soon find we are learning about their kinship relations, the exchange of goods, the hierarchies of power and influence, such as they are, and many other things. Indeed, singling out something we call ‘‘religion’’ from other things that tribal people do may be convenient for our analysis, but it is reading into their way of life a category not separated in that way by the people we are studying. When we look at what are frequently called the ‘‘world religions’’ (what I have called ‘‘historic religions’’),4 we find significant differences from tribal religions, in that there are written religious texts, groups of priests or religious teachers, and religious associations and schools, all things unlikely to be found in tribal societies, except in incipient form. Yet religion is still deeply embedded in the whole way of life of the people. It is certainly not a matter primarily of private experience and conscience and it is not a sphere of life separate from others, for none of the spheres of life that we take as separate in modern society is all that separate from the others. Since Judaism and Christianity are themselves ‘‘historic’’ religions, they exist somewhat uncomfortably in modern society. Protestant Christianity, with its strongly individualistic tendencies, has gone farthest in accepting the place to which modern culture assigns religion, but even there we will find more than a little unease. Religions that believe that God created heaven and earth and is the Lord of all do not easily accept being assigned to a delimited sphere. On the other hand, the very nature of modern life, whatever our beliefs, tends to assign our religion to a highly private sphere. Most modern states guarantee our religious freedom but tend to assume that that freedom will only be used within that private sphere. This assumption does not derive from some arbitrary prejudice against religion: it has a real historical source, namely, early modern wars of religion. We should not forget that in Europe the first half of the seventeenth century was the most 4 For this term see ‘‘Religious Evolution,’’ chapter 1 of this volume.

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terrible period until the twentieth century because of the wars of religion. The modern nation-state came into existence in part as an effort to calm religious passions and end religious wars. In the twentieth century nation-states have been responsible for the most horrible wars in human history, so we must consider them ambiguous projects at best, but we cannot entirely forget their initial connection to the search for peace. Particularly in religiously pluralistic societies, the salience of a national rather than of a religious narrative, and the national solidarity that such a narrative has created, has to some degree overcome the possible hostility that could and did divide nations along the lines of different religious communities. Where such national narratives have failed as in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, or most recently the lands that were once Yugoslavia, the possibility of religious warfare, so obvious in the seventeenth century, becomes actual again. I point out these uncomfortable facts to help us understand why descendants of the Enlightenment are so nervous about any role at all for religion in public life, and why they would like religion to remain safely ensconced in the private sphere. We have come a long way from Habermas, but I want to return to his argument for a moment. How can one answer Habermas when he says essentially that religion is outmoded in modern culture or can at best be a purely private consolation? I think it is possible to answer by showing that Habermas himself has no adequate reply to the distorted modernization that he criticizes, what he sometimes refers to as the depletion of nonrenewable cultural resources. Habermas’s response to the distortions of modernity involves controlling the economic and political systems that impinge on what he calls the lifeworld, that part of our life that is steered by language. So far so good, but when one asks how the lifeworld is supposed to provide a moral anchorage to the systems and prevent the systems from, as he puts it, colonizing the lifeworld, then his answer, namely a further rationalization of the lifeworld itself, seems unconvincing. The lifeworld, as Habermas at times seems to know, involves a balance between the takenfor-granted, the traditional, and that which is open to question. But instead of seeing that relation as a vital and dynamic one, Habermas tends to see it as a zero-sum relationship in which advance lies in the continuous increase of areas of life controlled by voluntary and autonomous action responding to the criterion of reason, and the continuous decline of everything else. I believe Habermas gets himself into an impossible and ultimately selfdefeating position because of an inadequate philosophical anthropology and ultimately an inadequate conception of rationality. I would argue that the Enlightenment has been strong on critique but singularly weak in pro-

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ducing new forms of solidarity. More than thinkers like Habermas have been willing to admit, religion has provided the social coherence that has allowed the constructive side of the Enlightenment project to proceed. Further, religion may be crucial in transforming the distortions of modernity that Habermas has so acutely analyzed. In moving toward a constructive answer to the problems that Habermas has raised, one which without rejecting the Enlightenment nonetheless reaffirms the indispensability of community, tradition, and religion, let me return to the situation of tribal societies which I mentioned above, for their situation vividly illustrates our problems and provides resources for their solution. To put it bluntly, tribal societies can be characterized as lifeworlds without systems. For a long time that fact was taken to be a negative judgment on tribal societies. It was seen as a sign of their backwardness: no money, no market economy, no powerful bureaucratic state. Tribal societies were seen as marginal, remnants of a past that progress and modernity have left far behind. At this point in human history we have begun to have second thoughts about that characterization.When we recognize that the lifeworld is threatened everywhere, we can take tribal societies and their travail in the modern world as a metaphor for the whole human condition. One of the points the authors of Habits of the Heart 5 tried to make is that even among the people who profit most in our society, the lifeworld, which is composed of those relationships that give meaning and integrity, is severely eroded. The price exacted by becoming a functionary in the economic and bureaucratic systems of our current society is the undermining of one’s ability to live in a coherent lifeworld. Many of those with whom we talked have come to see that that price is too high. Just because the systems are minimal in tribal societies we need not romanticize them. Christians can recognize that the systems are the projection and externalization of disordered desires that are characteristic of all of us, whether we live in tribal societies or any other. What Augustine called concupiscentia, the inordinate desire to possess, and what he called libido dominandi, the will to control other people—things that contribute to the childish omnipotence of wishes which makes us want to be like God—these are the motives that attract us to the power, the wealth, the control that are promised us by modern economies, modern states, and modern technology. 5 Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton, Habits of the Heart (1985). See especially the introduction, ‘‘The House Divided,’’ to the 1996 second edition.

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Members of tribal societies also have these disordered desires; their societies are not perfect: there is bullying and domination; there is intertribal warfare; there is personal tragedy. One doesn’t have to indulge in romantic fantasies, nonetheless, to see that those disordered appetites have not yet been externalized into structures that take on a life of their own, become like monsters, and are no longer the servants of our wishes but dominate, control, and subjugate us. That hasn’t happened yet in tribal societies. For those of us who live in a world where money, power, and technology more and more set the terms for everything about our lives, it is worth thinking about societies where that is not the case. I want to illustrate how such societies work, recognizing that no tribal society in the world, and certainly not in North America, is free of the impingement of the systems. My first example comes from the distinguished Laguna Pueblo Indian author Leslie Marmon Silko. She writes: Even now, the people at Laguna Pueblo spend the greater portion of social occasions recounting recent incidents or events which have occurred in the Laguna area. Nearly always, the discussion will precipitate the retelling of older stories about similar incidents or other stories connected with a specific place. The stories often contain disturbing or provocative material, but are nonetheless told in the presence of children and women. The effect of these inter-family or interclan exchanges is the reassurance of each person that she or he will never be separated or apart from the clan, no matter what might happen. Neither the worst blunders or disasters nor the greatest financial prosperity and joy will ever be permitted to isolate anyone from the rest of the group. In the ancient times, cohesiveness was all that stood between extinction and survival, and, while the individual certainly was recognized, it was always as an individual simultaneously bonded to family and clan by a complex bundle of custom and ritual. You are never the first to suffer a grave loss or profound humiliation. You are never the first, and you understand that you probably will not be the last to commit or be victimized by a repugnant act. Your family and clan are able to go on at length about others now passed on, others older or more experienced than you who suffered similar losses.6

What I want to bring out from this passage is how language—how the telling of stories—gives meaning, identity, and social coherence, and operates to organize a lifeworld that isn’t dependent on external control systems. When this kind of linguistic expression is working well it strengthens the 6 Leslie Marmon Silko, ‘‘Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination,’’ Antaeus, no. 57 (Autumn 1986): 93.

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coherence of society by exchanging stories, by telling what happened in the past. It makes sense of what is happening now by telling stories that are still rooted in the specific places that surround the people where they live. Aboriginal peoples are rooted in their particular localities in a way that those of us who more recently came to the land have difficulty understanding. For even clearer examples of how stories rooted in places act to defend the tribal lifeworld I want to turn to the Western Apache, a group I studied in my undergraduate honors thesis ‘‘Apache Kinship Systems,’’ 7 and have never forgotten. Keith Basso, an anthropologist who has long worked with the Western Apache, quotes several of them to show how places and their stories work in their lifeworld. According to a seventy-seven-year-old woman, ‘‘the land is always stalking people. The land makes people live right. The land looks after us. The land looks after people.’’ A fifty-twoyear-old man tells what can happen when one leaves the land, when one no longer has the land and its people to look after one: One time I went to L.A., training for mechanic. It was no good, sure no good. I start drinking, hang around bars all the time. I start getting into trouble with my wife, fight sometimes with her. It was bad. I forget about this country here around Cibicue. I forget all the names and stories. I don’t hear them in my mind anymore. I forget how to live right, forget how to be strong.8

Basso worked with a Western Apache named Nick Thompson to get his understanding clear about how these stories work, translating back and forth between Apache and English. Thompson was satisfied with the following version which summed up his understanding, thinking of stories as arrows which are told to hit you when you have been acting in ways that hurt other people: So someone stalks you and tells a story about what happened long ago. It doesn’t matter if other people are around—you’re going to know he’s aiming that story at you. All of a sudden it hits you! It’s like an arrow, they say. Sometimes it just bounces off—it’s too soft and you don’t think about anything. But when it’s strong it goes in deep and starts working on your mind right away. No one says anything to you, only that story is all, but now you know that people have been watching you and talking about you. They don’t like how you’ve been acting. So you have to think about your life.

7 Bellah, Apache Kinship Systems (1952). 8 Keith H. Basso, ‘‘Stalking with Stories,’’ chap. 2 of Wisdom Sits in Places (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 39.

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talk to anyone. That story is working on you now. You keep thinking about it. That story is changing you now, making you want to live right. That story is making you want to replace yourself. You think only of what you did and what was wrong and you don’t like it. So you want to live better. After a while, you don’t like to think of what you did wrong. So you try to forget that story. You try to pull that arrow out. You think it won’t hurt anymore because now you want to live right. . . . Even so, that place will keep on stalking you.9

A lot of what goes on in our society through the formal procedures of lawsuits and trials and jail sentences is going on in the lifeworld of these Western Apaches through stories. Through language, through these stories that are arrows, they pull people back from doing wrong things. In this way the lifeworld is maintained without being colonized by the systems, although to the degree the Apache are part of the larger society they can by no means escape the systems. It might be helpful to look at biblical religion from the perspective that we have begun to develop by considering tribal peoples. Even in the earliest parts of the Hebrew scriptures we are dealing with people who have come up against powerful systems, not as differentiated as modern ones, but strong enough to threaten the lifeworld. If we ask when the systems began—because they weren’t always around, they do begin at a certain point in history—they began somewhere near the beginning of the third millennium b.c. Their first appearance in the Bible, in the narrative that recounts the Exodus, came in the great bureaucratic, military empire of Egypt, which could mobilize vast forces of chariots and spears and had subjugated a tribal people, Israel.10 Moses was the leader of what we might call a renewal movement in this subjugated tribal people on the verge of losing its identity under the coercion of the Egyptian regime. Somehow Moses was able to lead his people out of that empire into the wilderness and to be the channel of the word of God, which allowed them to renew their tribal solidarity under Yahweh, but not under any king or emperor. Moses was not a king: he was the leader of a tribal people trying to regain a sense of who they were in part through remembering the stories of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, stories that linked them to the land to which they were returning. If we look at the New Testament, we see that Jewish Galilee was not a 9 Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places, 58–59. 10 The historicity of the Exodus narrative is problematic to say the least. It is its narrative truth that is relevant to the argument of this essay.

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land of tribal people. Through a thousand years of pressure the systems had gained ever increasing power. Jewish Galileans were a peasant people pushed almost to the verge of destruction by the Roman occupying power with its taxes, by the Greek landowners living in the cities and extracting their income from their tenants, and even by the emissaries of the temple aristocracy in Jerusalem, who also had to be paid. Poverty, misery and destruction were widespread. As in the case of Moses, contemporary biblical scholarship speaks of the Jesus movement initially as a renewal movement among those very impoverished peasants in Galilee in the face of the power of economic, bureaucratic, and military systems. If we know one thing about Jesus we know that he was executed by Roman imperial troops as a political criminal. The Romans were afraid of him because they saw him as an agitator of a subject people. But Jesus had not advocated violence; his message was a reassertion of the ethic of peasant reciprocity, pushed to the limit of self-giving love in an almost unbelievable response to the kind of pressures that the people he was speaking to were under. What did Jesus have in the face of the military and economic power of the established authorities, Jewish, Greek, and Roman? He had language. The disclosing word was all on earth he had: parables and stories. Many of the stories he told were arrows, pointed stories that had a message that called people to change their lives. ‘‘Repent,’’ he said, or, as the Western Apache put it ‘‘Replace yourselves.’’ Through most of human history the great traditional societies have lived in a balance between the lifeworld and the systems. Religion, because it is fundamentally linguistic and narrative, has operated as a bulwark of the lifeworld, but it has often been coopted by the systems so that it has on occasion been an agent of the colonization of the lifeworld by the systems, especially when an alien religion has been imposed by imperial power on a subject people. Again and again new religious movements or revivals have arisen to nurture, defend, and strengthen the lifeworld and to reassert lifeworld identities. But the systems have never relented their pressure. During the last two or three hundred years the pace of change has increased dramatically. The balance has begun to shift decisively in ways unknown in all previous history. One crucial factor was the emergence of the market economy in its most radical form, where not only materials and money were part of the market but land and labor as well, with devastating consequences for the lifeworld. We can see the shift vividly in what was happening in England at the end of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century in the poetry of Wordsworth and Blake and the novels of Dickens: the dispossessed peasants were driven into the

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cities, pushed to the wall economically, but, more importantly, deprived of their culture, of their lifeworld, of everything that made sense to them. Here too there were renewal movements, one of the greatest of which was Wesleyan Methodism, which was an effort to reform the lifeworld in the cities among the displaced peasants. It was a difficult task and not always successful. The market economy, wherever it goes—and by now there is nowhere it has not penetrated—undermines the lifeworld, whether in Europe or Africa or Asia or the New World. We heard in the voices of the Western Apache in Cibicue the way in which it undercuts the ability of the lifeworld to survive. The market economy is so destabilizing that it sets off deep political and ideological movements in response. Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation 11 shows how in many respects the modern nationstate in its bureaucratic form attempted to defend its population from the devastation created by the market economy. It has been an ambiguous response, however, for while defending its population in some ways it has developed a whole series of mechanisms of its own that intrude on and destabilize the lifeworld. Modern politics seem to oscillate between believers in the free market and believers in the bureaucratic state. If those are the only options then our outlook is bleak indeed, for both destroy the lifeworld if they have their way unimpeded. I have painted a rather dark picture of modernity and yet I do not consider myself an antimodernist. With Habermas I celebrate the positive achievements of modernity and the Enlightenment through the rationalization of the lifeworld: the criticism of oppression and injustice, the assertion of individual rights, the unleashing of energy that comes from free speech and free discussion without any censorship or dogmatism. I also celebrate the achievements of the modern economy and the modern state. They have created the possibility, unfortunately not yet the reality, of a degree of fulfillment and cultural enrichment of everyone that in all previous societies were reserved only for a few. And yet the modern scenario has never gone the way its most ardent proponents have hoped. The twentieth century saw the most terrible wars, and they still continue, and the most brutal despotisms—fortunately the worst of them have fallen—that the world has ever known. But now, with the collapse of fascism and communism and the end of the Cold War, why are we not entering a golden age? Why is the world increasingly divided between rich and poor nations and between rich and poor within each nation? Why 11 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944; Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).

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instead of sharing our abundance are we abandoning whole sectors of the population to misery and despair, in the United States to a vast and rapidly growing apparatus of police and prisons? For quite some time it has become evident that modernity is not leading unambiguously to human liberation but has some rather different consequences. Nobody sums it up better than George Orwell, in a paragraph that is quite stunning in the way it uses language, we could say language as arrows: ‘‘For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool filled with barbed wire.’’ If I may interpret Orwell’s metaphor: the branch of religion, tradition, and community on which we had been sitting and that we thought we could saw off because we would land in a bed of roses, turned out to be a lot more important than many people thought. Putting it this way poses a very big question. Our task is greater than the defense of the remnants of the lifeworld, although if there weren’t a lot of remnants it is doubtful that we would even be here. No one can live by the dollar sign and the power quotient alone. We still are who we are because religion, tradition, and community have somehow managed to survive in the face of all the disruptions of the last two hundred years. But our task is not simply, through nostalgia, to preserve the remnants. It is somehow or other to revivify the lifeworld and help it regain control over the systems. If we fail, we will simply commit suicide as the human race. That is why that most unutopian of statesmen, Vaclav Havel, speaks of our need at the present for a politics of the impossible.12 And for those who dismiss him as unrealistic I would remind them of the many years of persecution, including four years in prison, which he experienced under communism. If he is a man of faith it is because his faith has been tested in a way that few of ours has. So, in outlining a politics of the impossible I will argue that we have two huge tasks: (1) to revivify the lifeworld, and (2) to reintegrate the lifeworld and the systems. In seeking to revivify the lifeworld we must come to terms with the Enlightenment project of rationalization of the lifeworld, the project that, in Habermas’s terms, involves the melting or liquefying of the sacred, tra12 Vaclav Havel, The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice, Speeches and Writings, 1990–1996 (New York: Knopf, 1997).

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dition, and community. At the same time that we need to affirm rational criticism we must also see that rational criticism has never created a viable spiritual or ethical vision.We need to affirm the healthy function of doubt at the same time that we see that doubt only makes sense in relation to effective belief. Rational criticism and doubt are indispensable weapons in the struggle against all oppressive dogmatisms, but they cannot create a world, they can only destroy one. The source of vision, of reason in its classical not its modern sense, is story, is myth. The myth gives rise to thought.13 And the stories that transform us—replace us—are not only spoken but enacted, as tribal peoples know so well. But not only tribal peoples: ‘‘On the night he was handed over to suffering and death, our Lord Jesus Christ took bread . . . .’’ The words of institution become the embodied acts of priest and congregation. The words that are also enacted and that put us in touch with the sacred do something else that rational criticism and doubt can never do: they create a community, they bind us to one another and tell us who we are. Enlightenment criticism reminds us that stories and ritual actions and the communities they create can become closed, hardened, oppressive to those within as well as those without, and that is a lesson that we can never forget. But Enlightenment criticism is wrong to see such hardness and closure— such frozenness—as the essence of religion, tradition, and community. For a tribal people still in touch, however tenuously, with its life-giving past, every retelling of a sacred story is related to present need, is reshaped to meet present challenges and open the way to present solutions. For the biblical religions there is a living God who has spoken continually to current need throughout history and who still speaks anew if we could but hear. Only a dead tradition is closed. A living tradition is always an ongoing argument seeking to ‘‘gain knowledge of the New by reanimating the Old,’’ as Confucius put it.14 A genuine community is not based on uniform and unquestionable consensus. It shares a past which gives it a sense of identity and a future which gives it hope, but it is open to argument, even conflict, about what its shared history and its future engagements mean and should be. A genuine community does not crush but empowers individuals. In a deeply anxious and divided world we know that distorted communities based on fear and paranoia are all too common. But an enlightened 13 Paraphrased from Paul Ricoeur’s well-known remark ‘‘The symbol gives rise to thought,’’ in The Symbolism of Evil (1967; Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 347. 14 Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1972), 68.

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effort to destroy communities and reduce them to their constituent individuals is more likely to produce such distorted communities than eliminate them. What I am trying to argue is that the modern project so far as it attempts to follow Descartes in his incredible wish to be born at the age of twenty with no childhood and no history and to base his life on clear and distinct ideas alone,15 has been radically mistaken. Nor has it been only an intellectual mistake, for it has given rise to a ‘‘Cartesian savagery’’ when we moderns have attempted to wipe clean the slate of all cultures less ‘‘come of age’’ than our own.We must open our eyes to see that we are in the midst of a wonderfully unfolding story of life on this planet and we will only find our way within it, not by trying to jump outside our skins into a realm of pure reason. If revivifying the lifeworld under modern conditions is difficult, reintegrating the lifeworld and the systems would seem to be impossible. It would take far more space than this chapter even to sketch some beginnings. The basic point is that the market economy and the state exist to serve human beings not to enslave them. That is a mantra we can never repeat often enough. Habermas argues that we must ‘‘re-anchor’’ the systems in the lifeworld, that is, in a normative order that gives them human purposes. I think that is a useful metaphor but not a sufficient one. A modern lifeworld needs to constitute itself as a democratic community, a community that can spin a living membrane around the economy and the state so that they are not just anchored in but permeated by the values and meanings of the lifeworld. This would mean not abandoning power, but a new kind of power: replacing regardless power 16 with careful power, patient power. How to do that is, of course, an enormous challenge. Here all I can do is point to the idea of subsidiarity, for those familiar with Catholic social teachings, which has a rich set of implications for this project. Everything I have said is based on a different intuition of our present moment religiously from that of Samuel P. Huntington with his notion of the reemergence of conflict between the great religious civilizations of the 15 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution (Windsor,Vt.: Argo, 1969), 754, 756. The passage of Descartes on which Rosenstock-Huessy is elaborating is Discourse on Method, trans. John Veitch (1637; LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1946), pt. 2, p. 13. 16 Albert Borgmann in his Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992), defines regardless power as ‘‘the determination to prevail aggressively regardless of physical resistance, to prevail methodically regardless of complexity, and to prevail socially regardless of traditions’’ (123).

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be open to all the great traditions, including the tribal traditions, without falling into eclecticism or relativism. The better we understand other traditions the better we understand our own. The better we understand other traditions the better we see that we are engaged in a common struggle to create a more human world. To close by pointing once again to the central place of language in my argument let me adapt some biblical language: They that live by the sword shall perish by the sword. They that live by the Word shall have eternal life.

17 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

5 Max Weber and World-Denying Love A LO O K AT T H E H I S TO R I C A L S O C I O LO G Y O F R E L I G I O N

Max Weber is generally known as an uncompromising realist, a man who chose the ethic of responsibility rather than the ethic of conviction, a man utterly without illusions, indeed the man who proclaimed ‘‘the disenchantment of the world,’’ so it may come as a surprise to hear his name coupled with something as ethereal as ‘‘world-denying love.’’ Weber’s German term was Liebesakosmismus, which is usually translated as ‘‘acosmistic love,’’ leaving generations of students utterly baffled. ‘‘World-denying 1 love’’ is a more accessible English translation, but even that reverses the German noun and adjective. ‘‘World-denying love,’’ as opposed to worldly love, which is always love for particular persons, is love for all, without distinction—love for whoever comes, friends, strangers, enemies—which led Weber to quote Baudelaire in calling it ‘‘the sacred prostitution of the soul.’’ 2 At any rate, Liebesakosmismus, what I am pointing to with the in[Originally given as the Humanities Center and Burke Lecture on Religion and Society at the University of California, San Diego, on October 30, 1997. It was first published in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 277–304. Used by permission. I wish to thank my coteacher Ann Swidler and the members of the seminar on Max Weber’s sociology of religion at Berkeley in the spring of 1997 for the stimulation that led to many of the ideas in this chapter.] 1 Gr. kosmos = world, Gr. a = alpha privative; following Hegel’s point about Spinoza, that he was not an atheist, one who denies God, but an acosmist, one who denies the world, because God is all: G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 162–163. 2 Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (1921; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1947) (hereafter gars), 1:546; H. H. Gerth and C.Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946) (hereafter gm), 333. Wolfgang Schluchter writes, ‘‘To my knowledge, Weber used the term akosmism of love for the first time during the convention of the German Sociological Association in 1910.’’ In a discussion of mysticism following a paper by Troeltsch, Weber considered the case of Tolstoy. According to Schluchter, Weber said that ‘‘Tolstoy’s interpretation of Christian love qualifies as akosmism of love. It is regarded as formless, opposed to any form of life.’’ Personal communication, July 3,

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adequate term ‘‘world-denying love,’’ was for Weber a central notion. I will argue that tracing this idea in Weber’s work will lead us to the core of his historical sociology of religion and to problems that are still very much on the agenda today. We may begin by looking at this idea in the ‘‘Intermediate Reflections’’ (‘‘Zwischenbetrachtung’’) in volume 1 of his Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion.3 One can see why Gerth and Mills in their From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology preferred to call this essay ‘‘Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions,’’ 4 a title adapted from the German subtitle ‘‘Theorie der Stufen und Richtungen religiöser Weltablehnung,’’ which is literally ‘‘A Theory of the Stages and Directions of Religious Rejections of the World.’’ ‘‘Intermediate Reflections’’ refers to the place of the essay in the Collected Essays, between The Religion of China and The Religion of India, and since it no longer had that place in the Gerth and Mills volume, they used the German subtitle. But whether in German or English, this title is both inadequate and inaccurate. The title fundamentally misleads the reader as to the content of the essay and so may obscure the fact that this is a key text, perhaps the key text in Weber’s entire corpus. For the subject is not, or not simply, religious rejections of the world, but the differentiation of what Weber calls value spheres (Wertsphären), and the increasingly irreconcilable conflict between them, a differentiation which leads to the ‘‘polytheism’’ of modernity, a ‘‘war of the gods,’’ which is the result of the entire process of rationalization, Weber’s central preoccupation during his last and most fruitful period. Although he rejected nineteenth-century evolutionism, Weber’s own comparative historical sociology has a strongly developmental frame1997. Schluchter discusses this event in Paradoxes of Modernity: Culture and Conduct in the Theory of Max Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 275– 277. On p. 281 of that book Schluchter defines ‘‘Akosmismus der Liebe’’ as ‘‘love transcending the orders of the world.’’ Schluchter has indicated in his personal communication that the word Akosmismus was in general use in the intellectual life of the time: for example, in the article on ‘‘Types of Religion’’ in the famous German encyclopedia of religion Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Tübingen: Mohr, 1909–1913), 1415, it says, ‘‘The more mystical the mysticism is the more its Weltanschauung becomes akosmistisch.’’ 3 gars, 1:536–573. Rogers Brubaker in The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), provides a useful commentary on the ‘‘Zwischenbetrachtung’’ and related essays. 4 gm, 323–359. I will frequently make minor alterations in the Gerth and Mills translation.

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work, which could still be called evolutionary if that word is properly construed.5 In this evolutionary framework,6 which is the essential context for understanding the ‘‘Zwischenbetrachtung,’’ the first stage in whatever sphere—economics, politics, law, religion—is always characterized by a social structure based on kinship and neighborhood, and specifically in the sphere of religion, by magic. Kinship societies are succeeded by more complex societies characterized by patriarchalism, patrimonialism, and traditional bureaucracy, and related developments in economics, law, and urbanism, all with greater capacity for rationalization than kinship societies, but usually with various blockages to continuous rationalization. In the sphere of religion, these intermediate societies see the emergence of salvation or prophetic religions, which, through the rejection of magic, have, in varying degrees, rationalizing potentialities. Weber organized his comparative work in the sociology of religion around the salvation religions that emerged largely in the first millennium b.c., the most important of which he called world religions. These include, following the order of Weber’s own presentation, Confucianism and Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism, and Judaism, studies that were to be completed by further work on Christianity and Islam. Although he never treated it extensively, he also included Zoroastrianism among the world religions. Karl Jaspers, a close friend and student of Weber’s work, called the period of the emergence of these religions the axial age.7 S. N. Eisenstadt, the leading Weberian 5 See the discussion of this issue in Wolfgang Schluchter, The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History (1979; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 141, where Schluchter speaks of ‘‘Weber’s limited program in evolutionary theory.’’ Schluchter prefers the term ‘‘developmental history,’’ but he takes note of the same features of Weber’s thought to which I am calling attention. For my qualified use of the term evolution see my ‘‘Religious Evolution,’’ chapter 1 of this volume. In his Paradoxes of Modernity: Culture and Conduct in the Theory of Max Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), Schluchter expresses stronger reservations about the relation of Weber’s developmental history to neoevolutionary theory. 6 One can detect such a framework not only in the Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion and in every section of the ‘‘Zwischenbetrachtung,’’ but in every chapter of Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (1922–1923; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), which will be referred to hereafter as es. 7 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (1948; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953). Weber himself referred in passing to ‘‘the prophetic age.’’ See the ‘‘Sociology of Religion’’ section of es, 447. In connection with the develop-

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sociologist today, speaks of the world religions as axial religions, and their related civilizations as axial civilizations.8 Rationalizing potentialities exist in all the axial civilizations, but, according to Weber, it was several tendencies within Western Civilization that led to the decisive breakthrough into modernity, the third of his major evolutionary stages, one characterized by a high degree of rationalization in every sphere and the increasing disjunction between the spheres. Although Weber used the term ‘‘capitalism’’ as his most frequent way of referring to modern society, he by no means considered economics the key to the entire complex. He attributed to the Protestant Reformation, particularly in its Calvinist and sectarian forms, a key role in the emergence of modernity, especially through its relentless criticism of magic and its organization of ethical life in an effort to transform the world. A close reading of the ‘‘Zwischenbetrachtung,’’ which is what I want to undertake in this chapter, leads to the central problem of Weber’s sociology of religion. The opening paragraph notes that the essay precedes the treatment of the Indian case, which is, ‘‘in strongest contrast to the case of China, the cradle of those religious ethics which have abnegated the world’’ and then goes on to wonder whether perhaps it was from India that this idea ‘‘set out on its historical way throughout the world at large.’’ 9 After a brief excursus on the value of ideal types, Weber then develops in swift overview his typology of world rejection, namely asceticism and mysticism, each in an other-worldly (ausserweltlich) and inner-worldly (innerweltlich) form. I will assume familiarity with this basic Weberian typology and only note that there is an ambiguity about whether all four types ment of prophecy in ancient Greece he wrote: ‘‘It is not necessary to detail here these developments of the eighth and seventh centuries, . . . some of which reached into the sixth and even the fifth century. They were contemporary with Jewish, Persian, and Hindu prophetic movements, and probably also with the achievements of Chinese ethics in the pre-Confucian period, although we have only scant knowledge of the latter.’’ es, p. 442. Weber’s dating of the prophetic age to the early-middle first millennium b.c. fits with Jaspers’s dating of the axial age. The latter has been criticized for leaving out not only Islam but Christianity. But these and later developments can be seen as ‘‘secondary formations’’ from the original breakthroughs. 8 Among many relevant works one might mention especially S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). 9 gars, 1:536; gm, 323.

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involve rejection of the world. The inner-worldly types are not ‘‘worldfleeing’’ (weltfluchtig, a synonym for ausserweltlich) since they require that believers stay in and work with the world. They are in another sense, however, world-rejecting, in that they do not take the world for granted, but either work in the world to change the world (inner-worldly asceticism) or act in the world without attachment to the results of action (inner-worldly mysticism). For Weber’s sociology of religion the critical case is innerworldly asceticism, above all as expressed in Puritanism, because of its role in the emergence of capitalism and the other essential features of the modern world. Weber then turns to the central topic of the essay, ‘‘the tensions existing between religion and the world,’’ which involves not only the notion of religious rejections of the world, but at least equally worldly rejections of religion. He begins with the emergence of salvation religions from magic. ‘‘The magician has been the historical precursor of the prophet, of the exemplary [mystical] as well as of the emissary [ascetic] prophet and savior.’’ 10 But the prophet or savior who is a bearer of a true religion of salvation, that is, one that holds out deliverance from suffering to its adherents, will often lead to ‘‘not only an acute but a permanent state of tension in relation to the world and its orders.’’ The tension has become greater ‘‘the more religion has been sublimated from ritualism and towards ‘religious absolutism.’ ’’ 11 But the rationalization of salvation religion is paralleled by the rationalization and increasing autonomy of the other spheres, thus heightening the tension from both sides. Weber opens his substantive account of the relation of religion to the other value spheres where we might expect, given his evolutionary propensities, namely the conflict between religion and kinship.12 ‘‘When sal10 gars, 1:540; gm, 327. 11 gars, 1:541; gm, 328. 12 Much of the secondary literature omits kinship as one of the value spheres. This is partly because Weber’s terminology is variable here. He often speaks of kinship by referring to the sib, what in American anthropology would be called the clan, and neighborhood is often treated as part of this complex. It may also be partly because Gerth and Mills do not give a title to the section discussing kinship in the ‘‘Zwischenbetrachtung.’’ The discussion of kinship has no section heading called ‘‘The Kinship Sphere,’’ as there is subsequently ‘‘The Economic Sphere,’’ and so on. It should be noted that the German original of this essay is without section breaks and that all the section headings in the English translation were added by the editors.

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vation prophecy has created communities [Gemeinschaften] on a purely religious basis,’’ it has devalued kinship and marriage. In the place of ‘‘the magical ties and exclusiveness’’ of kinship, ‘‘within the new community the prophetic religion has developed a religious ethic of brotherliness.’’13 What is critically important is that in the rest of the essay and in many other places as well, salvation religion and the ethic of brotherliness are synonymous for Weber, and the polarity of asceticism and mysticism is secondary, although it surfaces from time to time. The source of this ethic is extremely interesting in the context of an evolutionary view of religion. According to Weber, ‘‘This ethic [of brotherliness] has simply taken over the original principles of social and ethical conduct which ‘the association of neighbors’ had offered, whether it was the community of villagers, members of the sib, the guild, or of partners in seafaring, hunting, and warring expeditions. These communities have known two elemental principles: first, the dualism of in-group and outgroup morality; second, for in-group morality, simply reciprocity: ‘As you do unto me I shall do unto you.’ ’’ The idea was ‘‘your want of today may be mine of tomorrow.’’ 14 Within the group those with wealth and status have an obligation to help the needy. What Weber is describing is very close to what Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age Economics describes as ‘‘generalized reciprocity,’’ which may involve kinship obligations or the redistributional obligations of chiefs: At the extreme, say voluntary food-sharing among near kinsmen—or for its logical value, one might think of the suckling of children in this context—the expectation of a direct material return is unseemly. At best it is implicit. The material side of the transaction is repressed by the social: reckoning of debts outstanding cannot be overt and is typically left out of account. This is not to say that handing over things in such form, even to ‘‘loved ones,’’ generated no counterobligation. But the counter is not stipulated by time, quantity, or quality: the expectation of reciprocity is indefinite. . . . Receiving goods lays on a diffuse obligation to reciprocate when necessary to the donor and/or possible for the recipient. The requital may be very soon or it may be never. There are people who even in the fullness of time are incapable of helping themselves or others. . . .

13 gars, 1:542; gm, 329. It would be unfaithful to Weber’s text to abandon the term ‘‘brotherliness’’ for the sake of gender inclusiveness, but it goes without saying that ‘‘brotherliness’’ in this sense includes ‘‘sisterliness’’ as well, and is synonymous, in Weber’s usage, with the gender-neutral term ‘‘ethic of neighborliness.’’ 14 gars, 1:542; gm, 329.

Max Weber and World-Denying Love 129 Failure to reciprocate does not cause the giver of stuff to stop giving: the goods move one way, in favor of the have-not, for a very long period.15

According to Weber, ‘‘the religiosity of the congregation transferred this ancient ethic of neighborliness to the relations among brethren of the faith.’’ 16 This could lead to a ‘‘brotherly love-communism’’ and to an inner attitude of ‘‘caritas, love for the sufferer as such, for one’s neighbor, for man, and finally for the enemy.’’ The euphoria produced by salvation religion, related to a ‘‘direct feeling of communion with God,’’ can incline the believers toward ‘‘an objectless world-denying love’’ (einen objektlosen Liebesakosmismus). And while the psychological tone of the ethic of world-denying benevolence can vary widely, it moves ‘‘in the direction of a universalist brotherliness, which goes beyond all barriers of social association, often including that of one’s own faith.’’ 17 What has happened to the two principles of the ancient ethic of neighborliness is that the principle of the contrast between in-group and out-group has been abandoned and the principle of reciprocity has been absolutized. Before turning to the conflict between religion and the economic, political, aesthetic, erotic, and intellectual spheres, Weber sums up what has happened when the brotherliness of kinship is transformed by salvation religion: ‘‘Religious brotherliness has always clashed with the orders and values of this world, and the more its consequences have been realized, the sharper the clash has been.’’ 18 But the clash between religion and kinship differs from that with all the other spheres: kinship is not simply rejected; it is transformed and universalized so that it becomes the very principle of religion itself in the form of world-denying love. We must stop and ask for the empirical reference for world-denying 15 Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1972), 194.

16 gars, 1:543; gm, 329. 17 gars, 1:543; gm, 330. There is a passage in the ‘‘Sociology of Religion’’ sec-

tion of es, 632–633, which applies this argument specifically to Jesus: ‘‘Jesus nowhere explicitly states that the preoccupation with wealth leads to unbrotherliness, but this notion is at the heart of the matter. For the prescribed injunctions definitely contain the primordial ethic of mutual help which is characteristic of neighborhood associations of poorer people. The chief difference is that in Jesus’s message acts of mutual help have been synthesized into Gesinnungsethik [ethic of conviction or ethic of ultimate ends] involving a fraternalistic sentiment of love. The injunction of mutual help was also construed universalistically, extended to everyone.’’ 18 gars, 1:544; gm, 330.

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love, or religious brotherliness, which becomes the very definition of religion in the rest of the essay, that is, of that religion which most severely clashes with the other value spheres. In the context of Weber’s typology of religious world rejections, this definition would seem to be rather one-sided. The very notion of world denial (Akosmismus) would seem to rule out the inner-worldly alternatives. Further, world denial seems much closer to mysticism than to asceticism, to saviors than to prophets. We might remember Weber’s pointing to India at the beginning of the essay. And yet there is another recurrent clue that suggests he is not only pointing to India. At certain points, often rhetorically critical points, such as once late in the ‘‘Zwischenbetrachtung’’ 19 and again twice in ‘‘Politics as a Vocation,’’ 20 Weber cites the three figures of the Buddha, Jesus, and Francis as archetypically religious, so there is a clear Christian reference as well. And yet in other contexts it is ascetic Protestantism that is the religious archetype relative to which everything else is compared. But ascetic Protestantism cannot be characterized by world-denying love, nor represented by the Buddha, Jesus, and Francis. We will have to return later to this apparent contradiction. Given the religious conflicts which are so obvious in the world today, we can hardly argue that religion, in the eyes of secular intellectuals often seen as inevitably divisive, can usually be characterized by universal brotherliness: even Christianity and Buddhism often fall short of the mark. If religion has overcome the ancient in-group, out-group boundaries of kinship, it has often given rise to new boundaries of at least equal strength. And yet the frequency with which religions of quite different historic origins have verged on universal brotherliness or even world-denying love cannot be underestimated either. We may begin our brief empirical reconnaissance with the example of the Buddha, who is not only one of Weber’s three archetypical figures, but who emerges in India, which Weber says produced the most consistent world-denying forms (weltverneinendsten Formen) of religious ethics.21 The Buddha, as a result of his enlightenment experience, saw through the illusory nature of the ‘‘house’’ of this world: 19 gars, 1:571, gm, 357. 20 gm, 119, 126. ‘‘Politics as a Vocation’’ was a lecture delivered on January 28, 1919, whereas the ‘‘Zwischenbetrachtung’’ was essentially written in 1915, although revised for publication at the very end of Weber’s life. The similarity of concerns and even phraseology between the two pieces suggest the continuity of his thinking in the last five years of his life. 21 gars, 1:536; gm, 523.

Max Weber and World-Denying Love 131 All your rafters are broken The peak of the roof is ruined, The mind is freed from its accumulations, It has reached the cessation of desires.22

G. C. Pande speaks of ‘‘the superhuman compassion that bridges the vast gulf between the eternal silence of transcendental wisdom and the preaching of the truth in the world.’’ He goes on to say that ‘‘wisdom alone would have led to total silence. It is compassion that made the historic ministry of the Buddha possible.’’ 23 Edward Conze, however, argues for the intrinsic relation between Buddhist wisdom and Buddhist compassion: Normally we live in a world of false appearances, where I myself seem to be surrounded by other persons. In actual truth I have no self, nor have they; all that exists is an incessant flow of impersonal dharmas. True, spiritual, selfless love therefore must operate on the plane of true reality, and, selfless within, must transcend also the false appearance of a self in others, and be directed toward that which is really there, i.e. the dharmas. Since wisdom is the ability to contemplate the dharmas, selfless love is dependent on wisdom.24

Here indeed we get very close to Weber’s Liebesakosmismus, worlddenying love, and we begin to understand the intrinsic relation between the Akosmismus (world denial) and the Liebe (love).25 22 Dhammapada 11.9, as quoted in G. C. Pande, ‘‘The Message of Gotama Buddha and Its Earliest Interpreters,’’ in Takeuchi Yoshinori, ed., Buddhist Spirituality (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 9. 23 Pande, ‘‘Message,’’ 9. 24 Edward Conze, Buddhist Thought in India (1962; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 85. 25 It is an interesting question whether one can have the Akosmismus without the Liebe. Parmenides is as close to Akosmismus as one can get in early Greek thought: the changeless realm of reason is utterly different from the changing world of appearance. I am indebted to Wolfgang Schluchter, personal communication, July 2, 1997, for the reference to Parmenides. We have only fragments of the writings of Parmenides, but from the fragments and later accounts of his thought there is no indication of an ethic of love. Spinoza, on the other hand, seems to have a somewhat pallid but not insubstantial doctrine of love. Part 4 of the Ethics is famously entitled ‘‘Of Human Bondage.’’ It is the ‘‘intellectual love of God’’ (remembering that in Spinoza God and Nature are the same: Deus sive natura) that frees us from emotional bondage in a way not entirely dissimilar to the enlightenment of

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There is a problem about applying the term ‘‘world denial’’ to Jesus. In a biblical perspective, since God created the world, it must be good. Yet to the god-obsessed the world falls away, loses its claim, or rather, its claim is wholly derivative from its creator. Thus we can understand the ambivalence of the New Testament toward the world. On the one hand ‘‘God so loved the world, that he sent his only begotten son’’ (John 3:16). On the other hand ‘‘the world knew him not’’ (John 1:10). The connotation of ‘‘this world’’ is negative when the world denies God. For Jesus, whose attitude Weber characterizes as ‘‘an absolute indifference to the world,’’ 26 love of neighbor is inextricably linked with love of God. What Jesus calls ‘‘the greatest and first commandment’’ is the love of God, and the second is the love of neighbor (Matthew 22:37–40). And Jesus drastically extends the notion of neighbor, as Weber noted, to the stranger and the alien, as in the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), and even to the enemy as in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’’ (Matthew 5:44). Edward Conze attempts to link the Buddhist and Christian teaching: The Christian doctrine is quite analogous to the Buddhist and might perhaps be described as follows: spiritual love for people is entirely dependent on the love for god, and secondary to it. Since we are bidden to love all people equally, we can do so only by loving them in the one respect in which they are equal, and that is their relation to God, whose children they are. The love of god is therefore the necessary antecedent to the love of others.27

Francis, who attempts to reenact the life and teaching of Jesus, extends the love commandment to the whole of the cosmos, to ‘‘brother sun and sister moon,’’ and so on, as in his Cantico delle creature. In all three, worlddenying love has the further correlate of absolute nonviolence. The first of the Buddha’s rules for his followers is to refrain from injury to all living things.28 Jesus intensifies the commandment not to kill by saying also that one should not be angry (Matthew 5:21–22), and rejects ‘‘An eye for an the Buddha, and leads Spinoza to conclude: ‘‘he who lives under the guidance of reason will endeavour to repay hatred with love, that is with kindness.’’ Pt. 4, prop. 46, The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951), 2:220. 26 es, 633. 27 Conze, Buddhist Thought, 85. 28 Pande, ‘‘The Message,’’ 16.

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eye and a tooth for a tooth’’ in commanding ‘‘Resist not evil.’’ (Matthew 5:39). Not only the early church but also later monastic orders, such as that founded by Francis, followed Jesus in this regard. All three of our paradigmatic characters could be called, following Louis Dumont, ‘‘renouncers,’’ 29 that is, persons who stand outside everyday existence and question many of its most basic assumptions. It would be hard to see how a sincere believer in world-denying love could be other than a renouncer, although we shall find that a number of compromise positions are possible. From the point of view of Weber’s interest in the conflict between the value spheres, it is clear that the most consistent renouncers will produce the greatest tension with the other value spheres. This is not the place to conduct a general survey of renouncers in the various traditions, but it might be helpful to suggest that the three paradigmatic figures are far from alone. India, as we might expect, has produced many renouncers: besides the Buddhists there are the Jains, as well as many figures within the Hindu tradition. In China the Mohists believed in ‘‘universal love,’’ although they do not appear to have been world-denying. They were opposed to war, yet were active in defending small states against large ones. The Taoists might seem to be better candidates, although their world denial, which might better be called partial world withdrawal, was far from radical; and although they were opposed to aggressive action, they cannot be said to believe in universal love. On the other hand, the Confucians, who might be seen as quintessential world affirmers, believed in a graded love ( jen), which, while it should be felt more strongly toward close kin, should ultimately be extended to all, even barbarians; and government should be by moral example, not through compulsion or punishment. In the ancient Mediterranean world, the Cynics were clearly renouncers. They appear to have believed in nonviolence, indeed in nonparticipation in society generally, but not in universal love. The Stoics, who owed a considerable debt to the Cynics, did believe in universal benevolence, the abolition of distinctions of gender and servitude, and universal peace, but it would be hard to argue that they were world-denying. If we move to the immediate background of Christianity, we find Weber himself identifying world-denying love among the Essenes (the community about which we would later learn much from the Dead Sea Scrolls). He says that the Essenes ‘‘pushed the old social commandment 29 Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). See especially appendix B, ‘‘World Renunciation in Indian Religions.’’

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of brotherliness to the length of a full economic world-denying love.’’ 30 A few pages later he characterizes them as having ‘‘world-denying lovecommunism.’’ 31 Most surprisingly, he argues that the boundary between Pharisaism and Essenism was fluid, ‘‘at least with regard to the way of life,’’ and he indicates that the first of the features which suggest a similar mentality is the Liebesakosmismus, which is to be found among the Pharisees.32 We may well ask a question that Weber, surprisingly, never asks: how can we account for the emergence of the salvation religions in the axial age? What was there about the social and cultural conditions of the first millennium b.c. that could have given rise to these unprecedented developments? 33 In the major cultural centers of the Old World it was a period of rapid economic and political development with unsettling consequences for older kinship and tribal solidarities and the potentiality for serious social conflict. Yet these processes were only accelerations of conditions that had been developing since the emergence of centralized state structures in 30 ‘‘vollen ökonomischen Liebesakosmismus,’’ gars, 3:424; Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale, trans., Ancient Judaism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952), 407. 31 ‘‘akosmistischen Liebeskommunismus,’’ gars, 3:428; Gerth and Martindale, Ancient Judaism, 410. 32 gars, 3:427; Gerth and Martindale, Ancient Judaism, 409. 33 S. N. Eisenstadt has considered this question in his general introduction and the introduction to the several parts of Eisenstadt, Axial Age Civilizations. Weber did suggest in one of his brilliant throwaway lines, which he never to my knowledge followed up, but which would be well worth pursuing, the beginnings of an answer: ‘‘Perhaps prophecy in all its forms arose, especially in the Near East, in connection with the reconstitution of the great world empires in Asia, and the resumption and intensification of international commerce after a long interruption.’’ es, 441. Jürgen Habermas gives an interesting ‘‘materialist’’ background for the emergence of salvation religions that assert in a new and more radical way the ‘‘generalized reciprocity’’ of the early kinship and tribal ethic: social integration accomplished via kinship relations and secured in cases of conflict by preconventional legal institutions belongs, from a developmental-logical point of view, to a lower stage than social integration accomplished via relations of domination and secured in cases of conflict by conventional legal institutions. Despite this progress, the exploitation and oppression necessarily practiced in political class societies has to be considered retrogressive in comparison with the less significant social inequalities permitted by the kinship system. Because of this, class societies are unable to satisfy the need for legitimation that they themselves generate. Communication and the Evolution of Society (1976; Boston: Beacon, 1979), 163.

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Mesopotamia early in the fourth millennium, in Egypt from the end of the fourth millennium, in north China and the Indus River Valley from the late third and early second millennia. With the uncertain exception of Akhenaten 34 in fourteenth-century b.c. Egypt, and the hard-to-date figures of Moses and Zoroaster late in the second millennium, all the significant developments, including the larger implications of the teachings of Moses and Zoroaster, appeared only in the first millennium b.c. A social conflict or social criticism model has been developed in several cases. The notion that the covenant, which is the foundation of ancient Israel, formed a revolutionary confederation of marginal people in conflict with Canaanite city states has gained considerable currency.35 Arguments for Christianity as a protosocialist protest movement go back to Karl Kautsky, but recently a considerable body of work has suggested a linkage between the multiple levels of oppression suffered by Jewish peasants under Roman occupation and the Jesus movement.36 The Cynics and 34 Akhenaten’s religious ‘‘revolution’’ is endlessly fascinating. Although it comes out of a background of intense mythical speculation about solar deities, speculation that does not appear to transcend the limits of archaic religiosity, Akhenaten’s monistic conception of light as the fundamental reality does seem to approach an almost Spinozist acosmism: Deus sive lux. After making this connection between Spinoza and Akhenaten, I learned from Jan Assmann’s book Moses the Egyptian (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 143, that eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Spinozists were making a connection with Egyptian religion even before the discovery of Akhenaten’s religious revolution, a connection which can be expressed as Deus sive natura sive Isis. But the fact that the truth of the one God, Aten, is available only through the divine king, Akhenaten, is thoroughly archaic. See Jan Assmann, ‘‘State and Religion in the New Kingdom,’’ and James P. Allen, ‘‘The Natural Philosophy of Akhenaten,’’ both in William Kelly Simpson, ed., Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt, Yale Egyptological Studies 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 55–88 and 89– 101; and Jan Assmann, ‘‘Akhanyati’s [Akhenaten’s] Theology of Light and Time,’’ Israel Academy of Arts and Humanities Proceedings 7, no. 4 (1992): 143–175. 35 See Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 BCE (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1979). For a less scholarly, but most interesting discussion which shows the indelible connection of religion and politics in early Israel, see Michael Walzer, Israel and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985). It is remarkable how much of this ‘‘revolutionary’’ theory of early Israelite history is foreshadowed in Weber’s Ancient Judaism. 36 For three among many examples, see Gerd Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1948); Richard A. Horsley with John S. Hanson, Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements at the Time

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especially the early Stoics have been portrayed as offering a fundamental criticism of Hellenistic society.37 Chad Hanson has suggested a social critical role and a social context in the artisan class for the Mohist movement in Warring States China.38 One would like to add to these instances of social criticism or protest in a context of social disturbance the case of ancient India. Wouldn’t it make sense that the homeland of world denial would have been suffering from severe social disruptions at the time of the emergence of such movements? Unfortunately, the evidence concerning social conditions in first millennium b.c. India is wholly inadequate to confirm (or disconfirm) such a connection. If a context of social unrest only partially accounts for the emergence of the axial religions, can we consider the possibility that some of these new conceptions of reality arose primarily out of cultural reinterpretations? One possibility might be that the spread of literacy in the first millennium b.c. might have made possible more systematic and abstract reflection. Writing is older than the first millennium, and even then was in most places quite limited to priestly or scribal groups, but it was certainly more widespread than earlier. Unfortunately, however, writing does not appear to be decisive in many cases. Much of the speculation that led to axial breakthroughs occurred in purely oral traditions. Zoroaster’s Gathas and the Brahmanic Upanishads were not written down for centuries, nor were the early teachings of Buddhism.39 The teachings of Confucius, Socrates, of Jesus (Minneapolis, Minn.: Winston, 1985); and Douglas E. Oakman, Jesus and the Economic Questions of His Day (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1986). Again, it is remarkable to what degree Weber’s treatment of Jesus, for example, toward the end of the ‘‘Sociology of Religion’’ section of Economy and Society, 632–633, foreshadows this contemporary view. Kautsky’s 1908 venture into a class analysis of early Christianity is translated as Foundations of Christianity (New York: Russell, 1953). 37 See Andrew Erskine, The Hellenistic Stoa: Political Thought and Action (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), and Doyne Dawson, Cities of the Gods: Communist Utopias in Greek Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 38 Chad Hanson, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 4. 39 Stanley J. Tambiah has discussed the remarkable capacity of the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, the latter virtually to this day, to transmit and develop teachings of great complexity purely orally. See his ‘‘The Reflexive and Institutional Achievements of Early Buddhism,’’ in Eisenstadt, Axial Age Civilizations, particularly 458–465.

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and Jesus were transmitted orally, although probably written down within a generation of their deaths. Plato, although a superb writer, was famously skeptical of writing and may have transmitted his most important teachings orally.40 The tradition of an ‘‘inner’’ teaching to be transmitted orally appears to survive even today among the followers of Leo Strauss. But if writing is not the key factor, groups of intellectuals, clerical or lay, with a sufficient degree of autonomy from the established order to question its assumptions, would seem to be an essential condition for the axial breakthroughs. The transmitters of the Iranian Avestas and the Indian Vedas, out of which came the Zoroastrian and Brahmanic breakthroughs, and perhaps the status group to which Confucius belonged, seem to be priesthoods of typically archaic type, whose teachings became transformed under new conditions. Greek philosophy and Israelite prophecy, as well as Mohism in ancient China, appear to have derived from groups of lay intellectuals, though some of the Hebrew prophets may have had priestly connections.41 In most cases, although we have enough evidence to feel that a combination of disturbed social conditions and partially autonomous groups of intellectuals help account for the emergence of axial religions, the exact connections remain to be worked out. In many of the cases (including India) the surviving data will probably never allow more than probable hypotheses. From the beginning, the heroes of world-denying love, the renouncers—to use Dumont’s term—exerted intense pressure against the familial, economic, political, aesthetic, erotic, and intellectual value spheres. Not surprisingly, renouncers were always problematic from the point of view of political, military, and intellectual elites, as Weber’s entire sociology of religion repeatedly points out. Yet in almost all traditional societies the radical implications of the axial religions were moderated by a compromise formation that Weber called ‘‘the organic social ethic.’’ The organic social ethic met the needs of both elites and masses. Such a compromise formation made it possible for elites to use religion for ‘‘the taming of the masses,’’ and for the reinforcement of their own legitimacy. On the other hand, when salvation religions developed large popular fol40 Plato, Seventh Letter. Plato’s anxiety about the danger of committing the most important things to writing may not be dissimilar to the anxieties of some of us about the consequences of television and computers, and in both cases the anxiety may have some justification. 41 Eisenstadt in his Axial Age Civilizations has emphasized the importance of these groups.

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lowings, among whom thoroughgoing renouncers, usually organized in some form of monasticism, would inevitably be a minority, it became necessary to recognize what Weber called ‘‘the inequality of religious charisma.’’ The fact of unequal charismatic qualifications could be linked to ‘‘secular stratification by status, into a cosmos of God-ordained services which are specialized in function. . . . As a rule, these tasks stand in the service of the realization of a condition which, in spite of its compromise nature, is pleasing to God.’’ 42 That is, the organic social ethic made it possible to include in the religious community those who, for reasons of temperament or occupation, could not fulfill the radical demands of worlddenying love. Weber’s two most frequently cited examples of the organic social ethic are Hinduism and Catholic Christianity. Already in the Brahmanism of ancient India, although the renouncer ideal had emerged in the Upanishads in the first half of the first millennium b.c., it was seen as only one possible role, or one stage in the life cycle, of the elite classes. This view reaches its classical formulation for Hinduism, as Weber noted, in the Bhagavad Gita, where the renouncer ideal is fully articulated with its accompanying world-denying love. Krishna tells Arjuna that the man who is dear to him ‘‘is the same with regard to enemies and friends.’’ He is ‘‘without hatred for any creature, friendly and compassionate, free from possessiveness and egoism, indifferent to pleasure and pain, enduring.’’ 43 Yet Krishna enjoins Arjuna to fulfill his role as a warrior, even though it means killing his own relatives. As long as Arjuna acts without attachment to the results of 42 gars, 1:553; gm, 338. In chap. 15 of pt. 2 of es, Weber describes the transformation of the original charismatic ‘‘communism of love’’ into the organic social ethic: ‘‘Once the eschatological expectations fade, charismatic communism in all its forms declines and retreats into monastic circles, where it becomes the special concern of the exemplary followers of God (Gottesgefolgschaft). . . . The maintenance of the indigent and unemployed brothers becomes the task of a regular officer, the deacon. Some ecclesiastic revenues are set aside for them (in Islam as well as Christianity). For the rest, poor relief becomes the concern of the monks. As a remnant of the charismatic communism of love, Islam, Buddhism and Christianity equally consider the giving of alms as pleasing to God, despite their greatly different origins. . . . For caritas, brotherhood, and ethically imbued personal relations between master and servant remain the foundation of every ecclesiastic ethic, from Islam and Judaism to Buddhism and Christianity; they are the residues of the old ethos of love of the charismatic brotherhood.’’ es, 1187–1188. 43 Bhagavad Gita 12.13 and 18, trans. W. J. Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 56.

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his action, he is fulfilling his religious obligation. In this way Liebesakosmismus is reconciled with an organic ethic. Catholic sacramentalism, in a quite different religious context, nonetheless also succeeded in legitimating the renunciatory role of the religious life together with the necessarily compromised obligations of the laity, including the military. If traditional axial religions have been able to compromise, however uneasily—and with occasional rebellions and breakdowns—with the realities of an organic ethic, such compromises, according to Weber, are no longer possible in the modern world. In order to see why, it will be necessary to look more closely at each of the value-spheres described in the ‘‘Zwischenbetrachtung.’’ As we have seen, Weber begins with the sphere of kinship, which turns out to be the exception among value spheres because, although there is indeed tension between salvation religion and kinship, that tension is in a way overcome by the incorporation of the ‘‘generalized reciprocity’’ ethic of kinship in an absolute form in salvation religion itself. In treating the other spheres—economic, political, aesthetic, erotic, and intellectual—Weber follows the same basic pattern: he invariably begins by indicating that in the earliest, magical, phase of development, there is no tension between religion and the other spheres; they are effectively fused. Magical religion operates to bring economic well-being— rain, good harvests, successful fishing, and so on—as well as success in war; magical ritual often has an erotic aspect and is the primary sphere of aesthetic expression in simple societies; mythology provides the sole forum for intellectual speculation. The religion of brotherliness, however, finds itself at odds with each sphere, and increasingly so as that sphere is rationalized. In the economic sphere it is the ‘‘interest struggles of men in the market’’ 44 that it finds offensive. In the political sphere it is coercion, and above all the violence of war that it finds wholly incompatible with its teachings. But in the political sphere, as well as in the aesthetic and erotic spheres, there is another source of tension. Not only is there an intrinsic incompatibility of value: in each of these spheres a competing form of salvation actually emerges. In the political sphere it is salvation through death in war. What Weber says is particularly poignant since the essay was probably written during World War I and revised shortly thereafter: The community of the army standing in the field today feels itself—as in the times of the war lord’s following—to be a community unto death, and the great-

44 Weber’s emphasis, gars, vol. 1, p. 544; gm, 331.

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est of its kind. Death on the field of battle differs from death that is only man’s common lot. . . . Death on the field of battle differs from this merely unavoidable dying in that in war, and in this enormity only in war, the individual can believe that he knows he is dying ‘‘for’’ something. The why and the wherefore of his facing death can, as a rule, be so indubitable to him that the problem of the ‘‘meaning’’ of death does not even occur to him.45

What is implicit here and becomes explicit in the treatment of the aesthetic and erotic spheres is that not only does death in battle compete with brotherly religion in solving the meaning of death; it is one of the few points in our modern disenchanted world where any meaning at all can be found. The aesthetic sphere is a danger to the religion of brotherliness once form becomes an object of cultivation independent of content, for formal elaboration without ethical content can only seem self-indulgent and unbrotherly to salvation religion. But the tension is greatly heightened with the development of ‘‘intellectualism and the rationalization of life’’: For under these conditions, art becomes a cosmos of more and more consciously grasped independent values which exist in their own rights. Art takes over the function of a this-worldly salvation, no matter how this may be interpreted. It provides a salvation from the routines of everyday life, and especially from the increasing pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism.46

Weber points out that the tension between salvation religion and the aesthetic and erotic spheres (as well, by the way, as warfare) is that these spheres, while participating in the general process of intellectualiztion and rationalization, are basically nonrational or even antirational, and thus serve not only as alternatives to religion, but as refuges from the increasing compulsion of a market economy and a bureaucratic state (‘‘the iron cage’’) as well as from a hypertrophied intellectual sphere. Weber’s discussion of the erotic sphere is one of the most remarkable passages in all of his writings and the second longest section of the ‘‘Zwischenbetrachtung.’’ One need not find in it a specific autobiographical reference, as Arthur Mitzman does,47 to feel that it comes ‘‘from the heart,’’ so to speak, as much as anything Weber ever wrote. This is not the place for a full commentary on this extraordinary passage. The main point appears in the first paragraph of the section: 45 Weber’s emphasis, gars, 1:548; gm, 335. 46 Weber’s emphasis, gars, 1:555; gm, 342. 47 Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New York: Knopf, 1969).

Max Weber and World-Denying Love 141 The brotherly idea of salvation religion is in profound tension with the greatest irrational force of life: sexual love. The more sublimated sexuality is, and the more principled and relentlessly consistent the salvation ethic of brotherliness is, the sharper is the tension between sex and religion.48

As in the aesthetic sphere, the elaboration of eroticism in modern life —Weber makes it clear that he is speaking of ‘‘specifically extramarital sexual life, which has been removed from the everyday’’—gives it the quality of a full-scale alternative form of salvation, one particularly appealing in the face of modern disenchantment: Under these conditions, the erotic relation seems to offer the unsurpassable peak of the fulfillment of the request for love in the direct fusion of the souls of one to the other. The boundless giving of oneself is as radical as possible in its opposition to all functionality, rationality, and generality. . . . It is so overpowering that it is treated ‘‘symbolically’’: as a sacrament. The lover realizes himself to be rooted in the kernel of the truly living, which is eternally inaccessible to any rational endeavor. He knows himself to be freed from the cold skeleton hands of rational orders, just as completely as from the banality of everyday routine.49

Yet for Weber, brotherly love’s critique of this kind of ecstatic experience, which he so eloquently describes, is nonetheless overwhelming: From the point of view of any religious ethic of brotherhood, the erotic relation must remain attached, in a certain sophisticated measure, to brutality. The more sublimated it is, the more brutal. Unavoidably, it is considered to be a relation of conflict. This conflict is not only, or even predominantly, jealousy and the will to possession, excluding third ones. It is far more the most intimate coercion of the soul of the less brutal partner. This coercion exists because it is never noticed by the partners themselves. Pretending to be the most humane devotion, it is a sophisticated enjoyment of oneself in the other.50

48 gars, 1:556; gm, 343. 49 Weber’s emphasis, gars, 1:560; gm, 346–347. 50 gars, 1:561–562; gm, 348. In starkest contrast to this passage is the paean to married love at the very end of the section on the erotic sphere: ‘‘From a purely inner-worldly point of view, only the linkage of marriage with the thought of ethical responsibility for one another—hence a category heterogeneous to the purely erotic sphere—can carry the sentiment that something unique and supreme might be embodied in marriage; that it might be the transformation of the feeling of a love which is conscious of responsibility throughout all the nuances of the organic life process, ‘up to the pianissimo of old age,’ and a mutual granting of oneself to another and the becoming indebted to each other (in Goethe’s sense). Rarely does

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It is worth remembering that once earlier in the essay Weber used the word ‘‘brutality,’’ when he said that ‘‘the brotherliness of a group of men bound together in war must appear devalued in brotherly religions . . . as a mere reflection of the technically sophisticated brutality of the struggle.’’ 51 Weber’s final section on the intellectual sphere is the longest and most somber passage in an essay that is somber enough already. It requires far more careful analysis than I can give it here. One point worth noting is that the intellectual sphere, like the economic sphere, but unlike the political, aesthetic, and erotic spheres, offers no alternative form of secular salvation. The wisdom (sophia) that we encounter in Plato or in book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, as the way humans can approach most closely to transcendence, is for Weber not an option: The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism. For then science encounters the claims of the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented, cosmos. In principle, the empirical as well as the mathematically oriented view of the world develops refutation of every intellectual approach which in any way asks for a ‘‘meaning’’ of inner-worldly occurrences. . . . [C]ulture’s every step forward seems condemned to lead to an ever more devastating senselessness.52

Weber uses this final discussion of the intellectual sphere to sum up the consequences of the whole process of rationalization and intellectualization in every sphere. These consequences are overwhelmingly negative in two critical aspects: (1) they remove individuals from any sense of embeddedness in an organic cycle of life, and (2) they deny the ethic of brotherliness at the core of salvation religions. In making these points Weber shows the rhetorical power characteristic of his last writings. On our alienation from organic life he writes: The peasant, like Abraham, could die ‘‘satiated with life.’’ The feudal landlord and the warrior hero could do likewise. For both fulfilled a cycle of existence life grant such a value in pure form. He to whom it is given may speak of fate’s fortune and grace—not of his own ‘merit.’ ’’ gars, 1:563; gm, 350. It is worth remembering that Weber dedicated the volume to Marianne with the words ‘‘1893 [the year of their marriage] ‘bis ins Pianissimo des höschsten Alters.’ ’’ 51 gars, 1:549; gm, 336. 52 gars, 1:564, 570; gm, 350–351, 357.

Max Weber and World-Denying Love 143 beyond which they did not reach. Each in his way could attain an inner-worldly perfection as a result of the naïve unambiguity of the substance of his life. But the ‘‘cultivated’’ man who strives for self-perfection, in the sense of acquiring or creating ‘‘cultural values,’’ cannot do this. He can become ‘‘weary of life’’ but he cannot become ‘‘satiated with life’’ in the sense of completing a cycle. . . . It thus becomes less and less likely that ‘‘culture’’ and the striving for culture can have any inner-worldly meaning for the individual.53

The denial of love in every differentiated sphere of life is equally devastating: ‘‘absence of love is attached from the very root’’ to ‘‘the routinized economic cosmos’’; ‘‘the external order’’ of the state ‘‘could be maintained only by brutal force, which was concerned with justice only nominally and occasionally’’; ‘‘the barriers of education and of aesthetic cultivation are the most intimate and the most insuperable of all status differences’’; ‘‘veiled and sublimated brutality,’’ as well as ‘‘idiosyncrasy hostile to brotherliness . . . have inevitably accompanied sexual love’’; and finally ‘‘the aristocracy of intellect’’ is an ‘‘unbrotherly aristocracy.’’ 54 It is the final irony that even ‘‘mystical attempts at salvation . . . succumb in the end to the universal domination of unbrotherliness.’’ Because it is ‘‘not accessible to everybody . . . it is an aristocratic religiosity of redemption.’’ But it is not just the religious virtuosity that it requires that isolates radical salvation religion today: it is also its external conditions: And, in the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of world-denying brotherliness. . . . Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.55

Thus an ethic of universal brotherliness, which first came into being through the idea of world-denying love in the salvation religions, has no place in the world today. This appalling conclusion has not failed to raise objections even among Weber’s greatest admirers. For Jürgen Habermas, for example, the universalistic ethic of human rights, which derives from the Enlightenment, and especially from Immanuel Kant, and which is highly relevant for today’s world, is itself a development out of the religious ethic of brotherliness, which therefore lives on, in altered form, 53 gars, 1:569–570; gm, 356. 54 gars, 1:568–569; gm, 354–355. 55 gars, 1:571; gm, 357.

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Weber consigned them. But before we ask further about the continued viability of an ethic of brotherliness today we must consider more carefully Weber’s reasons for denying it. (We will see that Weber did, after all, reserve one place for this ethic today: the sphere of intimate life.) They are implicit in what I have said about the various spheres already. We need not discuss further the aesthetic or the erotic spheres, or even the intellectual sphere, once we realize that for Weber salvation religion inevitably requires ‘‘the sacrifice of the intellect.’’ 57 But Weber’s arguments for the incompatibility of the modern economy and state with an ethic of brotherliness have to be taken with the utmost seriousness. Since Weber spent many years studying economic history in relation to religious ethics, it is not lightly that he argues for their incompatibility: Money is the most abstract and ‘‘impersonal’’ element that exists in human life. The more the world of the modern capitalist economy follows its own immanent laws, the less accessible it is to any imaginable relationship with a religious ethic of brotherliness. The more rational, and thus impersonal, capitalism becomes, the more this is the case. In the past it was possible to regulate ethically the personal relations between master and slave precisely because they were personal relations. But it is not possible to regulate—at least not in the same sense or with the same success—the relations between the shifting holders of mortgages and the shifting debtors of the banks that issue these mortgages: for in this case, no personal bonds of any sort exist.58

Weber fears any effort to impose ethical regulation on the market because of the danger that it would undermine the formal rationality of the market mechanism itself. Elsewhere Weber writes that ‘‘in [the world of capitalism] the claims of religious charity are vitiated not merely because of the refractoriness and weakness of particular individuals, as it happens everywhere, but because they lose their meaning altogether. Religious ethics is confronted by a world of depersonalized relationships which for fundamental reasons cannot submit to its primeval norms.’’ 59 Weber seems 56 See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981; Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), vol. 1, chap. 2, for Habermas’s treatment of Weber. 57 gars, 1:566; gm, 352. See the parallel assertion in ‘‘Science as a Vocation,’’ gm, 155. 58 gars, 1:544; gm, 331. Elsewhere Weber speaks of ‘‘the ‘masterless slavery’ of the modern proletariat.’’ es, 600. 59 es, 585. In chap. 7, pt. 2, of es, ‘‘The Market,’’ Weber writes: ‘‘Where the market is allowed to follow its own autonomous tendencies, its participants do not

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remarkably contemporary in viewing any effort to ‘‘interfere with’’ the market economy as destructive of the viability of such an economy, as his lifelong hostility to socialism also suggests. But Weber is no simple apologist for laissez-faire capitalism—he sees its human destructiveness as clearly as its harshest critics. Rather, he is giving us his own bleak picture of the irreconcilable conflict of the value spheres. He closes his discussion of the economic sphere in the ‘‘Zwischenbetrachtung’’ by pointing out the two ‘‘consistent avenues for escaping the tension between religion and the economic world’’: (1) the ‘‘benevolence’’ of the mystic who gives whatever is asked with no thought of return; and (2) the paradox of the Puritan ethic of ‘‘vocation’’: Puritanism renounced the universalism of love, and rationally routinized all work in this world into serving God’s will and testing one’s state of grace. . . . Puritanism accepted the routinization of the economic cosmos, which, with the whole world, it devalued as creatural and depraved. This state of affairs appeared as God-willed, and as material given for fulfilling one’s duty. In the last resort, this meant in principle to renounce salvation as a goal attainable by man, that is by everybody. It meant to renounce salvation in favor of the groundless and always only particularized grace. In truth, this standpoint of unbrotherliness was no longer a genuine ‘‘religion of salvation.’’ 60

In thinking about the meaning of these words of Weber’s in contemporary America, it would be well to remember that American Protestantism, and to some degree American religion generally, is the lineal descendent of that Puritanism that Weber describes as having so abandoned the ethic of brotherliness that it is no longer a religion of salvation. Only in this way can religion and the capitalist economy be reconciled. look toward the persons of each other but toward the commodity; there are no obligations of brotherliness or reverence, and none of those spontaneous human relations that are sustained by personal unions. They would all just obstruct the free development of the bare market relationship, and its specific interests serve, in their turn, to weaken the sentiments on which these obstructions rest. . . . Such absolute depersonalization is contrary to all the elementary forms of human relationship. . . . The ‘free’ market, that is, the market which is not bound by ethical norms, with its exploitation of constellations of interests and monopoly positions and its dickering, is an abomination to every system of fraternal ethics. In sharp contrast to all other groups which always presuppose some measure of personal fraternization or even blood kinship, the market is fundamentally alien to any type of fraternal relation.’’ es, 636–637. 60 gars, 1:545–546; gm, 332–333.

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Weber’s discussion of politics and ethics is complex and it would take us too far from the topic of this essay to go into it in detail. But as far as an ethic of brotherly love is concerned, Weber has little doubt that it is as inapplicable to the modern state as to the modern economy. The state is based on power and serves the interests of power, not the commands of an ethic of conviction. Any effort to justify the coercive actions of the state with ethical or certainly with religious language seems purely hypocritical to Weber. ‘‘In the face of this, the cleaner and only honest way may appear to be the complete elimination of ethics from political reasoning,’’ he writes.61 If Weber denies the applicability of the radical ethic of brotherliness to the modern economy and state, we may be sure that he would similarly deny the possibility that the organic social ethic could be resurrected to meet our current need. One can imagine the skepticism with which he would greet the present effort in the United States to offer so-called private-sector volunteerism, family values, and a renewal of local community as ways of providing the safety net, such as it was, that is no longer publicly provided. The gated, guarded ‘‘communities’’ that have in recent years been springing up in American suburbs, most frequently of California, would surely seem to Weber to be the complete antithesis of genuine organic community. Yet, however somber Weber’s view of the iron cage of modern society, he did not entirely despair of an ethic of brotherliness. He was fascinated by the writings of Tolstoy and Dostoevski, those modern representatives of a radical ethic of world-denying love, and enjoyed conversations with young Russians concerning these writers. His wife, Marianne, in her biography of him, tells us that ‘‘for a long time he had been planning to write a book about Tolstoy that was to contain the results of his inner-most experiences.’’ 62 She also says that ‘‘he never lost his profound reverence for the gospel of brotherhood, and he accepted its demands relating to personal life.’’ 63 In the late address, ‘‘Science as a Vocation,’’ Weber, while raising doubts about the religious self-understanding of ‘‘some of the youth groups [of] recent years,’’ nevertheless says, ‘‘every act of genuine brotherliness may be linked with the awareness that it contributes something imperish61 gars, 1:548; gm, 334. 62 Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (1926; New York: Wiley, 1975), 466. 63 Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 90.

Max Weber and World-Denying Love 147 able to a super-personal realm.’’ 64 And his characterization of marriage

(which he says is ‘‘a category heterogeneous to the purely erotic sphere’’) in the ‘‘Zwischenbetrachtung’’ as ‘‘a mutual granting of oneself to another,’’ is surely an example of the significance of the love ethic in personal life. To underscore, however, the limits of the claims of world-denying love on Weber, Marianne says that ‘‘for him, the God of the Gospels did not have any claim to exclusive dominion over the soul. He had to share them with other ‘gods,’ particularly the demands of the fatherland and of scientific truth.’’ 65 At the end of this effort to place the radical ethic of brotherly love in the context of Weber’s historical sociology of religion we must ask whether he was right to confine that ethic to the purely personal realm in the modern world, whether in the public world we must accept the sole dominion of the ‘‘gods’’ of money and power unrestrained by brotherliness, and of science which cannot give us any answers to questions of meaning, even the meaning of its own endeavor. To attempt an answer to the latter question would require at least another essay. To the former I will offer a brief response. We might begin by asking whether the subsequent course of history in the twentieth century would have provided any basis for Weber to change his mind. We can imagine that much of the last eighty years of history would only have confirmed Weber in his darkest predictions: ‘‘Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness.’’ 66 Yet we can also point to things that perhaps Weber did not imagine. At least in the figures of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. we have seen leaders exemplifying the ethic of Jesus, the Buddha, and Francis on the public stage and with significant, if not unambiguous, political achievements. Equally, if not more significant, we have seen in the years after World War II an effort in Western Europe, usually under 64 gm, 155. On the same page just a few lines down Weber writes: ‘‘Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today only within the smallest and most intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together.’’ 65 Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 90. 66 gm, 128.

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some sort of combined effort of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, to create what has come to be called a welfare state, one that would embody in impersonal legal and bureaucratic structures something of the ethic of brotherly love. Even in the United States there was a half-hearted and inadequate effort in this direction during the middle years of the twentieth century. The impersonality of these efforts might make them appear far from the ethic of brotherliness, but it is worth remembering Weber’s emphasis on the fact that world-denying love is always impersonal, open to all who come, ‘‘no respecter of persons.’’ Now, of course, that effort is everywhere under attack on the grounds that we can no longer ‘‘afford’’ the welfare state under the pressure of ‘‘the global economy’’—the ‘‘world dominion of unbrotherliness,’’ if there ever was one. Of course it remains to be seen whether we will all succumb to this pressure and sink back into a world where only the few at the top really prosper and where everyone else either works to provide them with their luxuries or exists under carceral conditions provided for surplus and unneeded labor. Jürgen Habermas has argued for the ‘‘reanchoring’’ of the economic and state administrative structures in the ‘‘lifeworld,’’ where an ethic of solidarity and normative standards of social justice would take priority over the pure incentives of profit- and power-maximization.67 This would require rethinking the Christian Democratic and Social Democratic projects under twenty-first century conditions, a difficult, but perhaps not wholly impossible project. The problems of global political order are even more intimidating. If there is some slight moderation of the purely Hobbesian play of power interests on the international stage in recent years, it is even harder to see where there might emerge an ethic of solidarity between rich and poor nations than it is to see how we might revive such an ethic for all citizens within developed societies. Living in a very different cultural context from that of Weber, Americans—even those of us who feel that the United States is giving the worst possible example of unbrotherliness in its economic and political policies today—have an inveterate hopefulness that leads us to believe that an ethic of universal love, is, after all, not irrelevant to our most urgent economic and political problems. But beyond hopefulness there is the realistic consideration that a society in which money and power are radically detached from ethical life may undermine the conditions of its own survival. Nor should we forget, as Weber reminded us, that the God of Jesus is not only 67 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981; Boston: Beacon, 1987), vol. 2, chap. 6, sec. 2, 153–197.

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a God of love but also a God of judgment: ‘‘It must not be overlooked, as it so often has been,’’ he wrote, ‘‘that Jesus combined world-denying love with the Jewish notion of retribution. God alone will one day compensate, avenge, and reward.’’ 68 As the evolutionary biologists are warning us, if our proclivities toward uncontrolled exploitation of our environment and of each other go on unchecked, they could lead to the destruction of the species or even of life on our planet. In short, no one in today’s world can be sure that Weber’s fear of ‘‘the polar night of icy darkness and hardness’’ was entirely misplaced.

68 es, 633.

6 Durkheim and Ritual

Although this chapter will begin with the Elementary Forms, I will focus on the place of ritual in the Durkheimian tradition, rather than add to the already enormous amount of explication of that book and the place of ritual in it. Even so, because of the vast influence of Durkheim on several disciplines, my treatment will be highly selective.1 I will focus on the ways in which ritual continues to be central for the understanding not only of religion, but of society. There is probably no better place to begin a discussion of the place of ritual in the thought of Emile Durkheim than with a famous passage in his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: Life in Australian [Aboriginal] societies alternates between two different phases. In one phase, the population is scattered in small groups that attend to their occupations independently. Each family lives to itself, hunting, fishing— in short, striving by all possible means to get the food it requires. In the other phase, by contrast, the population comes together, concentrating itself at specified places for a period that varies from several days to several months. This concentration takes place when a clan or a portion of the tribe . . . conducts a religious ceremony. These two phases stand in the sharpest possible contrast. The first phase, in which economic activity predominates, is generally of rather low intensity. Gathering seeds or plants necessary for food, hunting, and fishing are not occupations that can stir truly strong passions. The dispersed state in which the society finds itself makes life monotonous, slack, and humdrum. Everything changes when a [ceremony] takes place. . . . Once the individuals are gathered [Published in Alexander and Smith, eds., Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 183–210. Used by permission. It has a considerable overlap with, though significant differences from, my chapter ‘‘The Ritual Roots of Society and Culture,’’ in Michelle Dillon, ed., Handbook for the Sociology of Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 31–44.] 1 For a discussion of Elementary Forms and its influence, see N. J. Allen,W. S. F. Pickering, and W.Watts Miller, On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London: Routledge, 1998).

Durkheim and Ritual 151 together a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them into an extraordinary height of exaltation. . . . Probably because a collective emotion cannot be expressed collectively without some order that permits harmony and unison of movement, [their] gestures and cries tend to fall into rhythm and regularity, and from there into songs and dances.2

Thus Durkheim makes his critical distinction between profane time, which is ‘‘monotonous, slack and humdrum,’’ and sacred time, which he characterizes as ‘‘collective effervescence.’’ Sacred time is devoted primarily to ritual. Further, the community that ritual creates is at the center of Durkheim’s definition of religion: ‘‘A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.’’ 3 Although Durkheim speaks of ‘‘beliefs and practices’’ and organizes his work in three books, the first introductory, the second and much the longest on beliefs, and the third on ritual practices, it would not be right to assume that Durkheim privileges beliefs over practices. We learn from what is perhaps the key chapter of the whole volume, book 2, chapter 5, entitled ‘‘Origin of These Beliefs,’’ that ritual is prior to belief and gives rise to it. Collective representations . . . presuppose that consciousnesses are acting and reacting on each other; they result from actions and reactions that are possible only with the help of tangible intermediaries. Thus the function of the intermediaries is not merely to reveal the mental state associated with them; they also contribute to its making. The individual minds can meet and commune only if they come outside themselves, but they do this only by means of movement. It is the homogeneity of these movements that makes the group aware of itself and that, in consequence, makes it be. Once this homogeneity has been established and these movements have taken a definite form and been stereotyped, they serve to symbolize the corresponding representations. But these movements symbolize those representations only because they have helped to form them.4

2 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (1912; New York: Free Press, 1995), 216–218. 3 Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 44. In the original the entire definition is in italics. See Emile Durkheim, Les formes elémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 65. 4 Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 232. Ann Warfield Rawls has usefully emphasized what she calls ‘‘concrete practices,’’ that is, actual bodily movements, as the

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Collective representations—beliefs—are essential in the process through which society becomes aware of itself, but they arise from and express the homogeneous physical movements that constitute the ritual, not the other way around. Thus Durkheim does not authorize a ‘‘symbolic interpretation’’ of ritual that attempts to read off symbolic meaning from observed events. Rather he would interpret the ‘‘emblems,’’ as he calls them, the bullroarers or other ritual implements engraved with abstract totemic designs, in terms of the ritual actions within which they are used. Meaning arises from this totality, not as an interpretation of it. Mary Douglas, whose work will be discussed further below, offers the idea of the exemplar as a way of avoiding the distinction between the real and the symbolic. She cites Godfrey Lienhardt’s work on Dinka ritual as ‘‘a model of cognition based on repeated enactment of exemplars,’’ which does not point beyond itself ‘‘symbolically’’: A Dinka rite mimes a wish, the miming articulates an intention. The community that has killed and eaten together the sacrificial ox has enacted some of its complex intentions about itself. It would be absurd to say that their ritual has represented a communion meal, when they have just eaten one. Their wish for community to be possessed by divinity is realized (not represented) in the trance of their priests whom the spirit does possess. The quivering flesh of the dying victim is not symbolising something other than itself, it is an example of the same quivering in the flesh of the person in trance. The community is not depicting something but giving itself a sample of its idea of true community. Against this sample it measures its own achievement of the ideal. The sacrifice is a self-referencing enactment. In structuring the community’s self-perception it structures its future behaviour: as Goodman says, the version of the world that has been adopted itself affects the world.5

basis of Durkheim’s theory of ritual. It was her article, ‘‘Durkheim’s Treatment of Practice: Concrete Practice vs. Representation as the Foundation of Reason,’’ Journal of Classical Sociology 1, no. 1 (2001): 33–68, that called this passage to my attention. 5 Mary Douglas, ‘‘Rightness of Categories,’’ in Mary Douglas and David Hull, eds., How Classification Works: Nelson Goodman among the Social Scientists (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 249–251. I should note that though, on occasion, Douglas has criticized Clifford Geertz for being ‘‘idealistic’’ in discussing culture independent of its embeddedness in society, in this instance she uses Geertz to reinforce her argument about exemplification, citing his book Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

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Thus with respect to the Durkheimian understanding of ritual it is social enactment that is primary. A world of symbolic meanings can and does arise from such enactments, a world with many implications for the rest of social life, but the ritual enactment retains its primacy and cannot be reduced to the symbols that derive from it. Since ritual, for Durkheim, is primarily about the sacred in a sense in which the religious and the social are almost interchangeable, subsequent work on ritual under his influence has not moved far beyond him by placing ritual at the core of any kind of social interaction whatsoever. While on the one hand this might be seen as broadening the idea of ritual to include ‘‘secular ritual,’’ the same development might be seen as disclosing an element of the sacred, and thus of the religious, at the very basis of social action of any kind. Recent work of Randall Collins represents this development most clearly. In The Sociology of Philosophies, he combines Durkheim and Goffman to define the basic social event as, in Goffman’s phrase, an interaction ritual.6 At the most fundamental level interaction rituals involve 1. A group of at least two people physically assembled; 2. who focus attention on the same object or action, and each becomes aware that the other is maintaining this focus; 3. who share a common mood or emotion.

In this process of ritual interaction the members of the group, through their shared experience, feel a sense of membership, however fleeting, with a sense of boundary between those sharing the experience and all those outside it; they feel some sense of moral obligation to each other, which is symbolized by whatever they focused on during the interaction; and, finally, they are charged with what Collins calls emotional energy but which he identifies with what Durkheim called moral force. Since, according to Collins, all of social life consists of strings of such ritual interactions, then ritual becomes the most fundamental category for the understanding of social action.7 Collins then makes another move that has, I believe, the greatest significance: ‘‘Language itself is the product of a pervasive natural ritual. The rudimentary act of speaking involves the ingredients listed at the outset of this chapter: group assembly, mutual focus, common sen6 Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual (New York: Doubleday, 1967). Goffman, like Collins, is explicit in recognizing his debt to Durkheim. 7 Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uiversity Press, 1998), 22–24.

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timent; as a result, words are collective representations, loaded with moral significance.’’ 8

Ritual and the Origin of Language This observation of Collins, in turn, suggests a digression into the present evolutionary understanding of the origin of language. The origin of language was for long a taboo subject because it opened the door to unrestrained speculation. The question remains and probably will always remain, speculative, but advances in neurophysiology on the one hand and Paleolithic archaeology on the other have opened the door to much more disciplined forms of speculation, such as that of Terrence Deacon in his book The Symbolic Species.9 Deacon is a biological anthropologist and neuroscientist, and his book is subtitled The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. Deacon is trying to understand the emergence of language among our ancestral hominids, whose brains were not organized for language use, although, as we know, our nearest primate relatives can, with the most enormous effort and external training, be taught at least a rudimentary use of words. But, as Deacon puts it, ‘‘The first hominids to use symbolic communication were entirely on their own, with very little in the way of external supports. How then, could they have succeeded with their chimpanzeelike brains in achieving this difficult result? . . . In a word, the answer is ritual.’’ Deacon makes the case for the parallel between teaching symbolic communication to chimpanzees and the origin of language in ritual as follows: Indeed, ritual is still a central component of symbolic ‘‘education’’ in modern societies, though we are seldom aware of its modern role because of the subtle way it is woven into the fabric of society. The problem for symbolic discovery is to shift attention from the concrete to the abstract; from separate indexical links between signs and objects to an organized set of relations between signs. In order to bring the logic of [sign-sign] relations to the fore, a high degree of redundancy is important. This was demonstrated in the experiments with the chimpanzees. . . . It was found that getting them to repeat by rote a large number of errorless trials in combining lexigrams enabled them to make the transition from explicit and concrete sign-object associations to implicit sign-sign associa-

8 Collins, Philosophies, 47. 9 Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997).

Durkheim and Ritual 155 tions. Repetition of the same set of actions with the same set of objects over and over again in a ritual performance is often used for a similar purpose in modern human societies. Repetition can render the individual details of some performance automatic and minimally conscious, while at the same time the emotional intensity induced by group participation can help focus attention on other aspects of the object and actions involved. In a ritual frenzy, one can be induced to see everyday activities and objects in a very different light.10

But if repetition and redundancy are always, as we shall see, important in ritual, what was the evolutionary push that made the transition from indexical to symbolic signs essential, and therefore the ritual mechanism so indispensable? Deacon describes the situation at the period of this critical transition: The near synchrony in human prehistory of the first increase of brain size, the first appearance of stone tools for hunting and butchery, and a considerable reduction in sexual dimorphism is not a coincidence. These changes are interdependent. All are symptoms of a fundamental restructuring of the hominid adaptation, which resulted in a significant change in feeding ecology, a radical change in social structure, and an unprecedented (indeed, revolutionary) change in representational abilities. The very first symbols ever thought, or acted out, or uttered on the face of the earth grew out of this socio-ecological dilemma, and so they may not have been very much like speech. They also probably required considerable complexity of social organization to bring the unprepared brains of these apes to comprehend fully what they meant. . . . Symbolic culture was a response to a reproductive problem that only symbols could solve: the imperative of representing a social contract.11

Ritual is common in the animal world, including among the primates. But nonhuman ritual is always indexical, not symbolic; that is, it points to present realities, not to future contingencies. The primary focus of animal ritual is on issues of great importance and uncertainty: sex and aggression. Through ritual actions animals represent to each other their readiness or unreadiness for sexual contact or for combat. Through the ritual ‘‘dance’’ an unwilling partner may be ‘‘persuaded’’ to engage in sexual intercourse, 10 Deacon, Symbolic Species, 402–403. In spite of the Durkheimian echoes of this passage, Deacon makes no reference to Durkheim, nor to Goffman or Collins. The strength of disciplinary boundaries seems to have necessitated independent discovery, though we cannot rule out the influence of unconscious diffusion of ideas. 11 Deacon, Symbolic Species, 401.

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or an originally combative opponent may be persuaded to offer signs of submission. Such ritual behaviors help to make possible these inherently difficult transactions. The ‘‘reproductive problem’’ to which Deacon suggests symbolism was the solution, however, required more than assuring a present response; it required assurance of future actions—it required promises. At the point where efficient adaptation to the environment made cross-gender pair bonding necessary, with its division of labor between the provision of meat and care of infants, the stability of what was now necessarily ‘‘marriage’’ required more than nonsymbolic ritual. Sexual or mating displays are incapable of referring to what might be, or should be. This information can only be given expression symbolically. The pair bonding in the human lineage is essentially a promise, or rather a set of promises that must be made public. These not only determine what behaviors are probable in the future, but more important, they implicitly determine which future behaviors are allowed and not allowed; that is, which are defined as cheating and may result in retaliation.12

Another advantage of symbolic ritual as against purely nonhuman animal ritual is that it gives rise not to ad hoc relationships, but to a whole system of relationships: Ritualized support is also essential to ensure that all members of the group understand the newly established contract and will behave accordingly. As in peacemaking, demonstrating that these relationships exist and providing some way of marking them for future reference so that they can be invoked and enforced demand the explicit presentation of supportive indices, not just from reproductive partners but from all significant kin and group members. . . . Marriage and puberty rituals serve this function in most human societies. . . . The symbol construction that occurs in these ceremonies is not just a matter of demonstrating certain symbolic relationships, but actually involves the use of individuals and actions as symbol tokens. Social roles are redefined and individuals are explicitly assigned to them. A wife, a husband, a warrior, a fatherin-law, an elder—all are symbolic roles, not reproductive roles, and as such are defined with respect to a complete system of alternative or complementary symbolic roles. Unlike social status in other species, which is a more-or-less relationship in potential flux, symbolic status is categorical. As with all symbolic relationships, social roles are defined in the context of a logically complete system of potential transformations; and because of this, all members of a social

12 Deacon, Symbolic Species, 399.

Durkheim and Ritual 157 group (as well as any potential others from the outside) are assigned an implicit symbolic relationship when any one member changes status.13

And Deacon points out that, over the last million years, although language undoubtedly developed toward more self-sufficient vocal symbol systems, whose very power was the degree to which they could become contextfree, nonetheless, ‘‘symbols are still extensively tied to ritual-like cultural practices and paraphernalia. Though speech is capable of conveying many forms of information independent of any objective supports, in practice there are often extensive physical and social contextual supports that affect what is communicated.’’ 14 Deacon’s argument runs remarkably parallel to that of Goffman, Collins, and of course Durkheim. The point is that symbolism (including centrally language), social solidarity based on a moral order, and individual motivation to conform, all depend on ritual. But Deacon, as we have seen, has indicated that the very first emergence of symbolism ‘‘may not have been very much like speech.’’ There is reason to believe that full linguisticality, language as, with all its diversity, all known human cultures have had, is relatively recent, perhaps no older than the species Homo sapiens sapiens, that is 120,000 years old.15 But symbol-using hominids have been around for at least a million years. Can we say anything about what kind of protolanguage such hominids might have used? Perhaps we can in a way that will further illuminate the nature of ritual.

Ritual and the Origin of Music While in the last decade or two a number of valuable books concerned with the origins of language have been published, it was not until the year 2000 that an important volume entitled The Origins of Music appeared. A number of articles in this edited volume begin to indicate what the ‘‘ritual’’ 13 Deacon, Symbolic Species, 406. For a somewhat different attempt to find ritual at the basis of kinship in the very earliest human society see N. J. Allen, ‘‘Effervescence and the Origins of Human Society,’’ in N. J. Allen et al., On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms, 149–161. 14 Deacon, Symbolic Species, 407. 15 Johanna Nichols, ‘‘The Origin and Dispersal of Languages: Linguistic Evidence,’’ in Nina J. Jablonski and Leslie C. Aiello, eds., The Origin and Diversification of Language, Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences, no. 24 (San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 1998), 127–170.

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that Deacon suggests provided the context for the origin of language might have been like: namely, it involved music. The ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl, in discussing features of music found in all cultures, writes: ‘‘It is important to consider also certain universals that do not involve musical sound or style. I mentioned the importance of music in ritual, and, as it were, in addressing the supernatural. This seems to me to be truly a universal, shared by all known societies, however different the sound.’’ 16 He draws from this the conclusion that the ‘‘earliest human music was somehow associated with ritual.’’ 17 But ‘‘music’’ in most cultures involves more than what can simply be heard, as our current usage of the word implies. As Walter Freeman puts it, ‘‘Music involves not just the auditory system but the somatosensory and motor systems as well, reflecting its strong associations with dance, the rhythmic tapping, stepping, clapping, and chanting that accompany and indeed produce music.’’ 18 And Ellen Dissanayake writes, ‘‘I suggest that in their origins, movement and music were inseparable, as they are today in premodern societies and in children. . . . I consider it essential that we incorporate movement (or kinesics) with song as integral to our thinking about the evolutionary origin of music.’’19 While the contributors to The Origins of Music are not of one mind about the social function of music that gave it its evolutionary value, several of them emphasize the role of music in the creation of social solidarity. As Freeman puts it, ‘‘Here [in music] in its purest form is a human technology for crossing the solipsistic gulf. It is wordless [not necessarily, R.B.], illogical, deeply emotional, and selfless in its actualization of transient and then lasting harmony between individuals. . . . It constructs the sense of trust and predictability in each member of the community on which social interactions are based.’’ 20 Dissanayake, who locates music fundamentally in the mother-infant relationship in the human species with its much longer period of infant dependence on adult care, compared to any other species, writes: 16 Bruno Nettl, ‘‘An Ethnomusicologist Contemplates Universals in Musical Sound and Musical Culture,’’ in Nils L. Wallin, Björn Merker, and Steven Brown, eds., The Origins of Music (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2000), 468. 17 Nettl, ‘‘An Ethnomusicologist,’’ 472. 18 Walter Freeman, ‘‘A Neurobiological Role of Music in Social Bonding,’’ in Wallin et al., eds., Origins, 412. 19 Ellen Dissanayake, ‘‘Antecedents of the Temporal Arts in Early Mother-Infant Interaction,’’ in Wallin et al., eds., Origins, 397. 20 Freeman, ‘‘Neurobiological Role,’’ 420.

Durkheim and Ritual 159 I suggest that the biologically endowed sensitivities and competencies of mother-infant interaction were found by evolving human groups to be emotionally affecting and functionally effective when used and when further shaped and elaborated in culturally created ceremonial rituals where they served a similar purpose—to attune or synchronize, emotionally conjoin, and enculturate the participants. These unifying and pleasurable features (maintained in children’s play) made up a sort of behavioral reservoir from which human cultures could appropriate appealing and compelling components for communal ceremonial rituals that similarly promoted affiliation and congruence in adult social life.21

Finally Freeman, unlike Deacon, brings us back to Durkheim when he quotes a passage from The Elementary Forms: Emile Durkheim described the socializing process as the use of ‘‘. . . totemic emblems by clans to express and communicate collective representations,’’ which begins where the individual feels he is the totem and evolves beliefs that he will become the totem or that his ancestors are in the totem. Religious rites and ceremonies lead to ‘‘collective mental states of extreme emotional intensity, in which representation is still undifferentiated from the movements and actions which make the communion toward which it tends a reality to the group. Their participation in it is so effectively lived that it is not yet properly imagined.’’ 22

Dissanayake emphasizes the socializing and enculturating aspects of the quasi-ritual interactions between mother and infant, interactions that actually create the psychological, social, and cultural capacity of children to become full participants in society. While we might think of these ‘‘socializing’’ or even ‘‘normalizing’’ functions of ritual as Durkheimian, we should not forget that Durkheim believed that through experiences of collective effervescence, not only was society reaffirmed, but new, sometimes radically new, social innovations were made possible. Freeman puts this insight into the language of contemporary neurobiology: I conclude that music and dance originated through biological evolution of brain chemistry, which interacted with the cultural evolution of behavior. This led to the development of chemical and behavioral technology for inducing altered states of consciousness. The role of trance states was particularly important for breaking down preexisting habit and beliefs. That meltdown appears to be necessary for personality changes leading to the formation of social groups by cooperative action leading to trust. Bonding is not simply a release of a neuro-

21 Dissanayake, ‘‘Antecedents,’’ 401. 22 Freeman, ‘‘Neurobiological Role,’’ 419.

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chemical in an altered state. It is the social action of dancing and singing together that induces new forms of behavior, owing to the malleability that can come through the altered state. It is reasonable to suppose that musical skills played a major role early in the evolution of human intellect, because they made possible formation of human societies as a prerequisite for the transmission of acquired knowledge across generations.23

Having seen how much light this new work on the origins of music has shed on questions of the place of ritual in human evolution, let us finally return to the question raised by Deacon about the fact that early symbol use ‘‘may not have been very much like speech,’’ but was probably some kind of protolanguage. Steven Brown starts from the point that, though language and music today are clearly different in that their primary locations in the brain are different, nonetheless, even in terms of brain physiology, there is a great deal of overlap between them. He then suggests that language and music form a continuum rather than an absolute dichotomy, with language in the sense of sound as referential meaning at one end, and music in the sense of sound as emotive meaning at the other. What is interesting is the range of things in between, with verbal song at the midpoint (verbal song is the commonest form of music worldwide). Moving toward language as referential meaning from the midpoint we have poetic discourse, recitativo, and heightened speech. Moving toward music as emotive meaning from the midpoint we have ‘‘word painting,’’ leitmotifs, and musical narration.24 From this existing continuum, from features of their overlapping location in brain physiology, and from parsimony in explanation, Brown argues that rather than music and language evolving separately, or emerging one from the other, the likeliest account is that both developed from something that was simultaneously protolanguage and protomusic and that he calls ‘‘musilanguage.’’ 25 If we postulate that musilanguage was also enacted, that is, involved meaningful gesture as well as sound, then we can see ritual as a primary evolutionary example of musilanguage and note that even today ritual is apt to be a kind of musilanguage: however sophisticated its verbal, musical, and gestural components have become, they are still deeply implicated with each other.

23 Freeman, ‘‘Neurobiological Role,’’ 422. 24 Steven Brown, ‘‘The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution,’’ in Wallin et al., eds., Origins, 275. 25 Brown, ‘‘The ‘Musilanguage’ Model,’’ 277.

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The Nature of Ritual Having considered the roots of ritual and its most fundamental human functions, we will now consider somewhat more closely the basic features of ritual. The most important book on ritual in recent years is Roy Rappaport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity,26 a book immersed in the Durkheimian anthropological tradition. Rappaport’s first, and highly condensed, definition of ritual is ‘‘the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers.’’ 27 Rappaport’s stress on ‘‘invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances’’ brings us back to features of musilanguage that may have been essential in the transformation of meaningless sound sequences into highly condensed, in the sense of undifferentiated, but still referentially/emotively meaningful, sound events. A key aspect of these transitional events is redundancy, essential in helping humans move from indexical to symbolic meaning. According to Bruce Richman, musical redundancy is communicated in three forms: (1) repetition, (2) formulaicness, that is, ‘‘the storehouse of preexisting formulas, riffs, themes, motifs and rhythms,’’ and (3) expectancy ‘‘of exactly what is going to come next and fill the upcoming temporal slot.’’ 28 In the redundancy created by expectancy, the most important element is the rhythm that may be created by drumming, the stamping of feet, or other means. It is noteworthy that humans are the only primates with the ability to keep time to an external timekeeper, such as the beating of a drum.29 This ability to ‘‘keep together in time’’ is probably one of several biological developments that have evolved synchronously with the development of culture, but one of great importance for the ritual roots of society.30 In any case it is closely 26 Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Keith Hart in his preface to this posthumously published book invokes Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life and holds that Rappaport’s book is ‘‘comparable in scope to his great predecessor’s work’’ (xiv), a judgment with which I agree. 27 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 24. 28 Bruce Richman, ‘‘How Music Fixed ‘Nonsense’ into Significant Formulas: On Rhythm, Repetition, and Meaning,’’ in Wallin et al., eds., Origins, 304. 29 Steven Brown, Björn Merker, and Nils J. Wallin, ‘‘An Introduction to Evolutionary Musicology,’’ in Wallin et al., eds., Origins, 12. 30 See William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). On the coevo-

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related to the ‘‘more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances’’ that are central to Rappaport’s definition of ritual. From his very condensed original definition of ritual Rappaport draws implications, which he spends the rest of a rather long book developing. For our purposes, the most important implications have to do with the creation of social conventions, a moral order, a sense of the sacred, and a relationship to the cosmos, including beliefs about what lies behind the empirical cosmos.31 Rappaport, like most other writers on ritual, is aware of the wide variety of actions that can be classified under this term. One defining feature of ritual for him is performance.32 In his usage of this potentially ambiguous term, ‘‘performance’’ carries the sense of what is called in the philosophy of language performative speech: something is not simply described or symbolized, but done, enacted. This gets back to Deacon’s point about promises or Freeman’s emphasis on trust. The sheer act of participating in serious rituals entails a commitment with respect to future action, at the very least solidarity with one’s fellow communicants. Thus, as Rappaport uses the term, it would explicitly not be the same as participating in a dramatic ‘‘performance,’’ where the actor sheds the ‘‘role’’ as soon as the performance is over, and the audience, however moved, goes away knowing it was ‘‘only a play.’’ 33 On the contrary, serious ritual performance has the capacity to transform not only the role but the personality of the participant, as in rites of passage.34 The fundamental relationship between saying and doing Rappaport sees as establishing ‘‘convention in ritual’’ and the ‘‘social contract and morality that inhere in it.’’ This is the ground, he argues, for ‘‘taking ritual to be humanity’s basic social act.’’ 35 Talal Asad in an important critique of anthropological theories of ritual as ‘‘symbolic action,’’ that is, action whose meaning can simply be read off by the anthropological observer, emphasizes instead the older Chrislution of mind and culture, see Clifford Geertz, ‘‘The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind,’’ in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 55–83. 31 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 27. 32 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 37. 33 Victor Turner has usefully emphasized the relation between ritual and dramatic performance, and the boundary between them is indeed fuzzy. See particularly part 2 of his On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985). 34 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (1908; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 35 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 107.

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tian meaning of ritual as discipline. In this he would seem, in part, to be paralleling Rappaport’s distinction between dramatic performance, which is expressive of meaning but has no moral consequence, and ritual as performative in the sense of a fundamental change of disposition on the part of the participant. Asad writes: The idea of the sacraments as metaphorical representations inhabits an entirely different world from the one that gives sense to Hugh of St. Victor’s theology: ‘‘Sacraments,’’ he stated, ‘‘are known to have been instituted for three reasons: on account of humiliation, on account of instruction, on account of exercise.’’ According to this latter conception, the sacraments are not the representation of cultural metaphors; they are parts of a Christian program for creating in its performers, by means of regulated practice, the ‘‘mental and moral dispositions’’ appropriate to Christians.36

It is precisely the element of discipline or external constraint that Radcliffe-Brown, as quoted by Rappaport, sees in the ritual dances of the Andaman Islanders: The Andaman dance, then, is a complete activity of the whole community in which every able-bodied adult takes part, and is also an activity to which, so far as the dancer is concerned, the whole personality is involved, by the intervention of all the muscles of the body, by the concentration of attention required, and by its action on the personal sentiments. In the dance the individual submits to the action upon him of the community; he is constrained by the immediate effect of rhythm, as well as by custom, to join in, and he is required to conform in his own actions and movements to the needs of the common activity. The surrender of the individual to this constraint or obligation is not felt as painful, but on the contrary as highly pleasurable.37

Although ritual is deeply involved with what Marcel Mauss called ‘‘techniques of the body,’’ 38 it also at the same time involves a complex set of meanings, which cannot simply be read off from the ritual but must be 36 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 78. 37 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 221, quoting A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (1922; Glencoe: Free Press, 1964), 251–252. Asad emphasizes the painful aspect of ritual discipline, but he focuses particularly on the sacrament of penance. See ‘‘Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual,’’ in Asad, Genealogies, 83–124. 38 See Marcel Mauss, ‘‘Techniques of the Body,’’ Economy and Society 2 ([1935] 1973): 70–88.

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understood in the context of the whole form of life of the ritual participants. One of Rappaport’s most interesting ideas is his typology of three levels of meaning that are normally involved in ritual.39 Low-order meaning is grounded in distinction (a dog is not a cat) and is virtually the same as what is meant by information in information theory. Low-order meaning answers the question ‘‘What is it?’’ but it doesn’t have much to say about the question ‘‘What does it all mean?’’ Middle-order meaning does not so much distinguish as connect: its concern is with similarities, analogies, emotional resonances and its chief form is metaphor (the fog comes on little cat feet). Art and poetry operate primarily at this level and it is very important for ritual, in which the focus on techniques of the body in no way excludes symbolic meanings. Since ritual depends heavily on exact repetition, it cannot convey much information—it doesn’t tell one anything new—but it does link realms of experience and feeling that have perhaps become disconnected in the routine affairs of daily life. High-order meaning ‘‘is grounded in identity or unity, the radical identification or unification of self with other.’’ 40 Such meaning, the immediate experience of what has been called ‘‘unitive consciousness,’’ 41 can come in mystical experience, but, according to Rappaport, the most frequent context for such an experience is ritual. Here he links back to Durkheim’s famous definition of ritual—it is in the effervescence of ritual that the individual concerns of daily life are transcended and society is born. The world of daily life—economics, politics—is inevitably dependent on information, on making the right distinctions. Rational action theory assumes that all we need is information, in this technical sense of the term. But Rappaport, with Durkheim, argues that if rational action were all there is, there would be no solidarity, no morality, no society, and no humanity. The Hobbesian world of all against all is not a human world. Only ritual pulls us out of our egoistic pursuit of our own interests and creates the possibility of a social world. As this highly condensed résumé of Rappaport’s argument suggests, there is reason to wonder about the future of ritual in our kind of society. Technological and economic progress is based on the enormous proliferation of information, but information is in a zero-sum relation to meaning. Undermining middle- and high-order meaning is not 39 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 70–74. 40 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 71. 41 Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1962). Maslow calls such experiences ‘‘peak experiences,’’ which may or may not be explicitly religious.

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just a threat to ritual and religion, if Rappaport is right, but to society and humanity as well. Both Rappaport in the last pages of his book and Durkheim in the conclusion of Elementary Forms refer to the difficulty yet necessity of ritual performance in the contemporary world. Rappaport refers to the ‘‘skepticism and cynicism’’ with regard to such matters today, and Durkheim refers to the ‘‘moral cold’’ which he already experienced as current in his day. Both have some optimism that, as has happened before, new resources for ritual meaning and moral solidarity could emerge once again in modern society. Neither of them, to my knowledge, explicitly discussed the subject of antiritualism. They seem to imply that modernity entails a gradual erosion of the sacred as expressed in ritual rather than an active opposition to it. Mary Douglas has helped the discussion by making antiritual an explicit topic of analysis.

Ritual in the Work of Mary Douglas Mary Douglas is, I believe, the most interesting living Durkheimian. Her work is voluminous, and she has frequently returned to the subject of ritual. In the necessarily brief space I can devote to her, I would like to concentrate on her early, but very influential, book, Natural Symbols. The whole book can be seen as centrally concerned with the threat to ritual in contemporary life, the source and meaning of antiritualism, and the possibility of countering it. Her point of departure is an incisive analysis of the destructive consequences of the Vatican II reform that led to the abandonment of Friday abstinence, that is, the prohibition of eating meat on Fridays. For what she calls the ‘‘Bog Irish,’’ that is, working-class Irish living in London, that prohibition was central to their understanding of themselves and their world. She tries to understand how middle-class reformers could so totally fail to understand the meaning of this ritual prohibition.42 She begins her effort to understand ritual and antiritual tendencies in modern life with some interesting observations of Basil Bernstein’s about London families in the mid-twentieth century and uses them to construct a general theory of the relation between social control and symbolic codes. Bernstein noted that there were two rather different forms of family in his sample and that these two forms differed by class. Working-class families 42 Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970; New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 3 and passim.

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used what he called positional control systems and restricted speech codes and middle-class families used personal control systems and elaborated speech codes. Because the word ‘‘restricted’’ is invidious in a way I think neither Bernstein nor Douglas intends, I will henceforth speak of ‘‘condensed’’ rather than ‘‘restricted’’ speech codes in contrast to elaborated ones, and will make this terminological change even when quoting them. Douglas describes the condensed speech code that is generated in the positional family: The child in this family is controlled by the continual building up of a sense of social pattern: of ascribed role categories. If he asks ‘‘Why must I do this?’’ the answer is in terms of relative position. Because I said so (hierarchy). Because you’re a boy (sex role). Because children always do (age status). Because you’re the oldest (seniority). As he grows, his experience flows into a grid of role categories; right and wrong are learnt in terms of given structure; he himself is seen only in relation to that structure.43

Douglas notes that this pattern can be found in some aristocratic as well as working-class families. She then describes the other form: By contrast, in the family system which Professor Bernstein calls personal a fixed pattern of roles is not celebrated, but rather the autonomy and unique value of the individual. When the child asks a question the mother feels bound to answer it by as full an explanation as she knows. The curiosity of the child is used to increase his verbal control, to elucidate causal relations, to teach him to assess the consequences of his acts. Above all his behaviour is made sensitive to the personal feelings of others, by inspecting his own feelings. Why can’t I do it? Because your father’s feeling worried; because I’ve got a headache. How would you like it if you were a dog?

Douglas quotes Bernstein to the effect that in the middle-class family the child is being regulated by the feelings of the regulator: ‘‘ ‘Daddy will be pleased, hurt, disappointed, angry, ecstatic if you go on doing this.’ . . . Control is effected through either the verbal manipulation of feelings or through the establishment of reasons which link the child to his acts.’’44 Douglas sums up the middle-class pattern in a way that should give us pause: ‘‘In this way the child is freed from a system of rigid positions, but made a prisoner of a system of feelings and abstract principles.’’ 45 I’m sure 43 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 24. 44 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 26. 45 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 27.

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that I speak for most of us when I say that ‘‘we’’ think the personal form and the elaborated code are surely preferable to the positional form and the condensed code, to a considerable degree because the personal form and the elaborated code would seem to foster in the child just the individual initiative that we have come to value so highly. Yet Douglas, well before anyone was talking about Foucault, is suggesting that the personal form of control is still control, and perhaps, in its own way, as coercive as the positional form. But I would draw a further conclusion. No one ever starts with the elaborated code. All children begin with positional control and the condensed language code because personal control and the elaborated code require skills that no newborn has. The relation between mother and child, or perhaps we should better say between parent and child, is necessarily positional, because highly asymmetrical: an infant needs to be held, cared for, talked to or sung to, but cannot be addressed with elaborate appeals to feelings or ideas, at least not for quite a while. In fact, interaction with an infant looks suspiciously like ritual. Linguists have discovered that in all cultures parents speak to infants in something they call ‘‘motherese,’’ a kind of simplified, highly repetitive, sing-song, partly nonsense, kind of language, one that communicates feeling rather than information. Each language has its own version of motherese, to be sure, but the basic characteristics seem to be quite universal. Nonverbal communication with an infant is probably even more important. Erik Erikson suggested that the ‘‘greeting ceremonial’’ between mother and child, marking the beginning of the infant’s day, is the root of all subsequent ritualization.46 Infants become human because of habitual, nondiscursive, verbal, and nonverbal interaction with adults, which is, in Basil Bernstein’s terms, necessarily positional in control and condensed in speech code. Dissanayake puts it well when, as we have seen above, she says the function of this kind of interaction is to ‘‘attune or synchronize, emotionally conjoin, and enculturate the participants,’’ or, we could say, to position them, to give them an identity relative to others, to provide them a social location. And that is what ritual is basically doing. Not only in infants, but in the infancy of the species, as we have seen, there is reason to believe that language itself developed out of ritual, differentiated out of an initial fusion with music, ‘‘musilanguage,’’ the motherese of the species so to speak.47 46 Erik H. Erikson, ‘‘The Development of Ritualization,’’ in Donald R. Cutler, ed., The Religious Situation, 1968 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 711–733. 47 Brown, ‘‘The ‘Musilanguage’ Model,’’ 271–300.

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If, as I have argued, positional control and condensed code are basic to our humanity and cannot be dispensed with, why did we develop personal control and the elaborated code in the first place? Mary Douglas has two answers to this. One has to do with how strong social solidarity is in any given society. A society with clear boundaries and well-defined roles is positional by definition, and will almost certainly have a well-developed ritual system involving a condensed speech code, while societies with loose boundaries and not very well-defined roles require that people relate to each other on a more or less ad hoc basis, negotiating each encounter as they go along, with little taken for granted, and thus will be personal in control and elaborated in speech. She is at pains to argue that there is no overall historical tendency to go from condensed to elaborated—that is, tribal people cannot be presumed to have strong solidarity and welldeveloped rituals because we have instances such as the pygmies of central Africa who are both loosely bounded and largely free of ritual. Be that as it may, her primary interest is in contemporary society and the way in which the division of labor, which is for her the second source of personal control and elaborated code, differentially impacts working-class and middleclass families: It is essential to realize that the elaborated code is a product of the division of labour. The more highly differentiated the social system, the more specialised the decision-making roles—then the more the pressure for explicit channels of communication concerning a wide range of policies and their consequences. The demands of the industrial system are pressing hard now upon education to produce more and more verbally articulate people who will be promoted to entrepreneurial roles. By inference the [condensed] code will be found where these pressures are weakest [that is to say among people whose jobs are both routine and require little verbal facility].48

Although Douglas finds the social basis for positional control and condensed code in some modern professions, the military for example, most of the professions that increasingly dominate the higher echelons of our occupational world require people well versed in personal control and elaborated speech. The symbolic analysts, as Robert Reich characterizes our top professionals, are critical by their very job description. Douglas characterizes them as follows: Here are the people who live by using elaborated speech to review and revise existing categories of thought. To challenge received ideas is their very bread

48 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 21.

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Indeed, she goes on to say, they are likely to prefer personal forms of control and to focus on feelings rather than rules in child rearing. As a result, ‘‘ideas about morality and the self get detached from the social structure.’’ 49 It is not that children raised in such a milieu lack ethical ideas; sensitivity to the feelings of others can arouse strong ethical passions when others are observed to be suffering. The problem is that without some positional sense of social membership and without strong condensed symbols, ethical sensitivities may simply dissipate into good intentions without leading to sustained moral commitments. Douglas is very even-handed in her sense that we need both modes of relating. She affirms ‘‘the duty of everyone to preserve their vision from the constraints of the [condensed] code when judging any social situation . . . [W]e must recognise that the value of particular social forms can only be judged objectively by the analytic power of the elaborated code.’’ 50 She is well aware that condensed codes in the context of positional authority can be both authoritarian and unjust. ‘‘Do it because I said so,’’ is an example of condensed code that carries the implication of some, perhaps quite unpleasant, nonverbal sanction that will follow if the recipient of the command rejects it. Except under conditions of extreme emergency, an elaborated request for reasons is justified. Similarly the condensed statement ‘‘Little girls don’t do that’’ is open to challenge with respect to the whole taken-for-granted definition of gender. These are the kinds of reflection which lead ‘‘us’’ to presume that personal control and elaborated code are always preferable to the alternative. Yet Douglas warns us against precisely that conclusion: There is no person whose life does not need to unfold in a coherent symbolic system. The less organized the way of life, the less articulated the symbolic system may be. But social responsibility is no substitute for symbolic forms and

49 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 31. 50 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 166.

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indeed depends upon them.When ritualism is openly despised the philanthropic impulse is in danger of defeating itself. For it is an illusion to suppose that there can be organisation without symbolic expression. . . . Those who despise ritual, even at its most magical, are cherishing in the name of reason a very irrational concept of communication.51

So where does Douglas leave ‘‘us,’’ including her? She is not asking us, as some converts to various forms of fundamentalism are, to abandon our personal and elaborated selves and jump back into the positional box. No, she is asking us with all our critical rationality to see that we need both forms of control and both codes. She writes: In the long run, the argument of this book is that the elaborated code challenges its users to turn round on themselves and inspect their values, to reject some of them, and to resolve to cherish positional forms of control and communication wherever these are available. . . . No one would deliberately choose the elaborated code and the personal control system who is aware of the seeds of alienation it contains.52

Whether, even in the most secular society where the elaborated code and personal control systems predominate, ritual can really be abandoned remains to be seen.

Ritual in Various Spheres of Life Our society does not understand ritual very well and for many of us even the term is pejorative; further, the great religious rituals that in almost all earlier societies carried what Rappaport calls high-order meaning have been privatized so that they act, not for society as a whole, but only for the particular groups of believers who celebrate them. The ambiguous term secularization might be used to describe not only the alleged decline of religion, but the decline of ritual as well. But, although some forms of ritual have become less evident, or retreated from the public sphere, it is also true that even in contemporary society we remain surrounded by ritual in a myriad of forms. It might even be argued that ritual is to be found everywhere that humans live together if we look in the right places, although where those places are may be very different from one society to the next. 51 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 50. 52 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 157.

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In this connection I would like to pursue a bit further the idea of interaction ritual as developed by Goffman and Collins. Like so much else in the study of ritual the idea of interaction ritual can be found in germ in Durkheim’s Elementary Forms: [The] stimulating action of society is not felt in exceptional circumstances alone. There is virtually no instant of our lives in which a certain rush of energy fails to come to us from outside ourselves. In all kinds of acts that express the understanding, esteem, and affection of his neighbor, there is a lift that the man who does his duty feels, usually without being aware of it. But that lift sustains him; the feeling society has for him uplifts the feeling he has for himself. Because he is in moral harmony with his neighbor, he gains new confidence, courage, and boldness in action—quite like the man of faith who believes he feels the eyes of his god turned benevolently toward him. Thus is produced what amounts to a perpetual uplift of our moral being.53

Goffman made the point that any social interaction, even between two persons, inevitably has a ritual dimension involving stylized elements of both speech and gesture. Collins has built on Goffman’s work to argue that the basic social fact is the local interaction ritual, and that individuals cannot be said to have a higher degree of reality than the interaction in which they engage since they are in fact constituted in and through the interaction. Goffman saw deference as one indispensable element in interaction ritual. In hierarchical societies the ritual enactment of shared moral understandings expresses a sacred hierarchical order and the place of the interacting partners in it. In our society where the moral order emphasizes equality, even though hierarchy is inevitably present, there is a special effort to protect the sacredness of the individual person, no matter how disparate the status of the individuals involved.54 Even in a relatively fleeting encounter, then, the basic elements of ritual can be discerned: the synchronizing rhythm of conversational speech and gesture and the affirmation of social solidarity that they imply, regardless of the content of the conversation, and, if only by implication, the recognition of the sacredness, either of the code governing the interaction, the individuals interacting, or both. Even in mundane daily life, ritual is not only a matter of occasional meeting and parting; it is very much part of the periodicity of life. Eat53 Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 213. 54 Goffman, Interaction Ritual.

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ing together may well be one of our oldest rituals, since humans are the only primates who regularly share food.55 Margaret Visser has made the case for the centrality of what she calls ‘‘rituals of dinner,’’ because eating together is just the sort of occasion that makes ritual necessary. She writes, Table manners are social agreements; they are devised precisely because violence could so easily erupt at dinner. Eating is aggressive by nature and the implements required for it could quickly become weapons; table manners are, most basically, a system of taboos designed to ensure that violence remains out of the question. But intimations of greed and rage keep breaking in: many mealtime superstitions, for example, point to the imminent death of one of the guests. Eating is performed by the individual, in his or her most personal interest; eating in company, however, necessarily places the individual face to face with the group. It is the group that insists on table manners; ‘‘they’’ will not accept a refusal to conform. The individual’s ‘‘personal interest’’ lies therefore not only in ensuring his or her bodily survival, but also in pleasing, placating, and not frightening or disgusting the other diners.56

Although Visser underlines the elements of personal interest and group pressure, which are always involved in ritual, one would need to add that the ‘‘ritual of dinner,’’ in the sense of ‘‘breaking bread together,’’ implicitly, and often explicitly, has a religious dimension, as when there is a blessing before or after the meal, or, as in some Asian societies, a token offering to the ancestors precedes the meal. Periodicity is characteristic of ritual of a wide variety of types ranging from the most secular, or even trivial, to the most solemn and religious. Academic life is highly ritualized, and the school year is marked by numerous ritual events. Sporting events, both professional and collegiate have become highly ritualized in modern societies, and follow different seasonal patterns depending on the sport. A full discussion of the senses in which sporting events can be interpreted as rituals would exceed the bounds of this chapter. Suffice it to say that the absence or weakness of the performative dimension in Rappaport’s sense make sporting events, like concerts, operas, plays, or movies seen in theaters, problematic as ritual events in the full sense of the word. If involvement with a team 55 The classic discussion of this issue is Glynn Isaac, ‘‘The Food Sharing Behavior of Proto-Human Hominids,’’ Scientific American 238 (April 1978): 90–108. 56 Margaret Visser, Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners (New York: Penguin, 1992), xii–xiii.

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becomes a major life concern, or even gives rise to ‘‘fan cults’’ in some cases, this might move such sporting events more fully into the ritual category. Political life also gives rise to various periodicities, including national holidays, elections, inaugurations, and so forth (the nation-state as a sacred object will be considered further below). Religious ritual has a strong tendency toward periodicity—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam require weekly worship—and yearly liturgical calendars are widespread. Economic transactions, as Durkheim pointed out, are the least likely to be ritualized, being highly utilitarian in character. Nonetheless, economic exchange in premodern societies is often accompanied by ritual, and a full analysis of economic life in our own society would probably discover more than a few ritual elements. William McNeill in his important book Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History deals with many issues relevant to the concerns of this chapter, but he begins with military drill, not something students of ritual would usually start with. The two places where what McNeill calls ‘‘muscular bonding’’ have been most central have been, in his analysis, religion and the military.57 Learning that from McNeill, I was not entirely surprised to discover that not only was Colin Powell raised an Episcopalian, but that his service as an altar boy prepared him psychologically for a career in the army. The proximity of Episcopal liturgy and military life, while making a certain amount of sense, was not something I would spontaneously have imagined. McNeill does a great deal to clarify this otherwise somewhat disconcerting conjuncture. His starting point is frankly autobiographical: how did it happen that as a draftee in 1941, while enduring basic training in a camp on the barren plains of Texas, he actually enjoyed the hours spent in close-order drill? His answer in his admittedly somewhat speculative history of keeping together in time (after all, who bothered much to write about such things?) is that ‘‘moving our muscles rhythmically and giving voice consolidate group solidarity by altering human feelings.’’ 58 Virtually all small communities of which we have knowledge, whether tribal or peasant, have been united on significant occasions by communitywide singing and dancing, usually more or less explicitly religious in content. (McNeill points out that what we today usually mean by ‘‘dancing,’’ namely paired cross-gender performances with some degree of sexual in57 McNeill, Keeping Together, 1–11. 58 McNeill, Keeping Together, viii.

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tent, is, when viewed historically, aberrant to the point of being pathological.)59 McNeill notes that in complex societies divided by social class muscular bonding may be the medium through which discontented and oppressed groups can gain the solidarity necessary for challenging the existing social order, using early prophetism in Israel as an example. He puts in perspective something that has often been noticed, namely that the liturgical movements of the more advantaged members of society are apt to be relatively sedate, whereas those of the dispossessed can become energetic to the point of inducing trance.60 Close-order drill, McNeill’s starting point, turns out to have emerged in only a few rather special circumstances, although dancing in preparation for or celebration after military exploits is widespread in simple societies. Here again there are ambiguities. Intensive drill in the Greek phalanx or trireme provided the social cohesion and sense of self-respect that reinforced citizenship in the ancient polis, but in early modern Europe its meaning was more ambiguous, sometimes reinforcing citizenship, sometimes absolutism. McNeill gives the interesting example of the strongly bonded citizen armies of the French Revolution that then turned out to be manipulable elements in the establishment of Napoleon’s autocracy.61 His comments on the use of rhythmic motion, derived in part from military drill but in part from calisthenics, in the creation of modern nationalism, culminating in Hitler’s mass demonstrations (inspired in part by the mass socialist parades on May Day, which in turn were inspired in part by Corpus Christi celebrations), are very suggestive.62 But if such sinister uses of keeping together in time are always possible, all forms of nationalism have drawn on similar techniques. Benedict Anderson, in his valuable analysis of modern nationalism, describes what he calls unisonance, which is another form of keeping together in time: There is a special kind of contemporaneous community which language alone suggests—above all in the form of poetry and songs. Take national anthems, for example, sung on national holidays. No matter how banal the words and mediocre the tunes, there is in this singing an experience of simultaneity. At precisely such moments, people wholly unknown to each other utter the same

59 McNeill, Keeping Together, 65. 60 McNeill, Keeping Together, 86–90. 61 McNeill, Keeping Together, 113–136. 62 McNeill, Keeping Together, 147–148.

Durkheim and Ritual 175 verses to the same melody. The image: unisonance. Singing the Marseillaise, Waltzing Matilda, and Indonesia Raya provide occasions for unisonality, for the echoed physical realization of the imagined community. (So does listening to [and maybe silently chiming in with] the recitation of ceremonial poetry, such as sections of The Book of Common Prayer.) How selfless this unisonance feels! If we are aware that others are singing these songs precisely when and as we are, we have no idea who they may be, or even where, out of earshot, they are singing. Nothing connects us all but imagined sound.63

Through the prevalence of television, rituals today can be shared by millions within and even beyond the nation state. I think of two instances: one where ritual worked effectively and one where it collapsed. I am old enough to remember well the November afternoon in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas. For the following three days millions were glued to their television screens as a ritual drama of great complexity unfolded. The rituals were both national and religious. They involved the casket lying in state in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol, and then being taken by procession to the railway station, from which it was transported by train to Boston for a Catholic funeral mass presided over by the cardinal archbishop of Boston. The sudden loss of a head of state is apt to be traumatic in any society. The three days of ritual following Kennedy’s death did seem to help make it possible to return to some kind of normal life after such a catastrophe. In democratic societies, elections are ritual events, even if minimally religious ones. The very fact that millions of people go to the polls on one day and that there is great national attention to the outcome guarantees a high order of emotional intensity to such an event. Since television, elections have gathered very large audiences to await the outcome and the ritual concession and acceptance speeches that follow. But in the United States federal election of 2000, nothing seemed to go right. The television media made two wrong calls as to who won the election and then had to admit that the election in Florida, on which the Electoral College vote hung, was too close to call.What followed was anything but effective ritual. Almost every key actor in the events after the election failed to follow the appropriate ritual script—indeed, things reached the point where it wasn’t clear what the script was. The resolution of the election by a partisan vote of the Supreme Court of the United States, which has no role to play in elections according to the American Constitution, was the final failure of 63 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 145.

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ritual closure. A failed electoral ritual produced a winner with severely damaged legitimacy.64

Conclusion In closing I would like to suggest, with the help of a couple of examples, that any adequate account of ritual would need to situate ritual and antiritual in a long-term historical perspective. Already in Natural Symbols Mary Douglas, though starting with antiritual tendencies in the Vatican II reforms, gives her reflections a deeper historical background by frequent reference to the Protestant Reformation and even earlier renewal movements that had antiritual tendencies. She also points out that the extirpation of ritual is never complete, that the Protestants, in depriving the Eucharist of its deep ritual meaning by reducing it to a mere commemoration, at the same time made the Bible into a sort of ritual talisman. The doctrine of the ‘‘Word alone,’’ though it has had major consequences for the religious and social life of Northern Europeans ever since the Reformation, nonetheless gave rise to its own forms of reritualization. But the perseverance of ritual in changing forms as well as the periodic antiritual challenges to it would require a historical study that would take us far beyond the confines of this chapter. Here I can only allude to a couple of studies that contribute to this important project. One is a study of the early history of the Vedic-Hindu tradition that has survived for over three thousand years. The other is Mary Douglas’s recent work on ancient Israel. In his Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion,65 Brian K. Smith presents what I believe is a basically Durkheimian history of the devel64 Clifford Geertz brilliantly describes a failed ritual of much more modest scale in his ‘‘Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example,’’ in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 142–169. The events of September 11, 2001, may have given George W. Bush a legitimacy that he had not previously had, but that in no way invalidates the argument that the presidential election of 2000 was a failed ritual. 65 Brian K. Smith, Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). In his subsequent book, Classifying the Universe: The Ancient Indian Varna System and the Origins of Caste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), Smith draws explicitly and extensively, if critically, from Durkheim with respect to the social basis of classification in the Indian tradition.

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opment of ritual in India. (Although he does not cite Durkheim, he does draw significantly from Marcel Mauss and from Mauss’s student, Louis Dumont.) Smith makes the point that it is ritual action and not its symbolic interpretation that does the work of unifying the fragmented: For the Vedic priests and metaphysicians, ritual activity does not ‘‘symbolize’’ or ‘‘dramatize’’ reality; it constructs, integrates, and constitutes the real. Ritual forms the naturally formless, it connects the inherently disconnected, and it heals the ontological disease of unreconstructed nature, the state toward which all created things and beings naturally tend.66

Interestingly enough, Smith, writing before Rappaport’s book was published, organizes his argument around three levels of meaning that are parallel to Rappaport’s low-, middle-, and high-order levels. Smith argues that Vedic ritual works primarily with the middle level of resemblance, analogy, and metaphor, making connections between the cosmos, society, and the individual, connections that position the participants in relation to one another, the gods, and the natural world. Here we are clearly seeing the Bernstein-Douglas condensed code and positional control at work. Smith sees ritual as operating between two opposite poles, either of which would make ritual action impossible, poles that can be equated, I would argue, with Rappaport’s low- and high-order meaning, but defined by Smith as radical difference and radical identity.67 The pole of radical difference is a form of low-order meaning that could be interpreted in contemporary terms as an extreme nominalistic atomism, a kind of tabula rasa from which scientific observation and investigation can begin (although however much the philosophy of science prefers reductionism, analogy seems always to sneak in by the back door). At this level operationally defined propositions replace metaphor and the world of ritual is (apparently) abolished. The pole of radical identity, a form of high-order meaning, implies a fusion of self and world that actually appears in the history of Indian religion, but is always antithetical to ritual and its differentiations, although in the end mystical union can no more absolutely do without metaphor and its accompanying ritual than can science. Smith suggests two significant kinds of change in the history of Indian ritual, both of which are involved in the development of what has come to be called Hinduism, though, according to Smith, Hinduism never aban66 Smith, Reflections, 51. 67 Smith, Reflections, 51–52.

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doned its Vedic core. One of these changes involves the development of a nondualistic metaphysics and the practice of mystical union, first in the Upanishads and then in the (from the point of view of Hinduism) heretical religions of Buddhism and Jainism. From about the sixth century b.c. the figure of the renouncer appeared both within and beside the Hindu tradition. The renouncer, typically a religious intellectual who has withdrawn to the forest, stands outside the ritual system and the society it constantly reproduces, most notably outside the caste system, though ultimately, as Louis Dumont has argued, the renouncer and the society renounced in fact form a complementarity.68 The antiritualism of the renouncer is illustrated quite early, according to Smith, in the Mundaka Upanishad which, ‘‘as part of a critique of ritualism in light of the new emphasis on mystical knowledge alone, declares sacrifices to be ‘leaky vessels,’ unfit for the true voyage—the attainment of liberation from karma.’’ 69 At its most radical, the quest for high-order meaning through mystical union obliterates the world of ritual, though in the long run it gives ritual a new meaning. Self-liberation is a kind of ‘‘sacrifice’’ of the self, thus keeping the ritual metaphor,70 but the path of self-liberation in both Vedanta Hinduism and Buddhism soon developed its own ritual complex. The other great change, which occurred at approximately the same period, is the domestication of Vedic ritual. Early Vedic ritual of highly elaborated sacrifice focused on royal and aristocratic lineages and was an expression of the political power of the lineage. With the rise of centralized monarchies these great rituals fell into disuse, but what had been minor domestic rituals under the old system took on a new centrality. It was domestic sacrifice, carried out by the householder and his wife in the home, that became the core of Hindu practice and the place where Vedic ritual survived until today.71 Even this very inadequate summary of Smith’s complex and subtle argument suggests two important points about ritual: (1) Ritual can take many, sometimes highly diverse, forms; ritual and society tend to change in relation to each other; (2) ritual under a variety of circumstances gives rise to 68 Louis Dumont, ‘‘World Renunciation in Indian Religions,’’ Contributions to Indian Sociology 4 (1960): 33–62; reprinted in Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, complete rev. English ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 267–286. 69 Smith, Reflections, 106. 70 Smith, Reflections, 173, 209. 71 Smith, Reflections, 195–199.

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antiritual movements that can have significant consequences for the history of religion, though the elimination of ritual is not one of them. Mary Douglas, drawing on the work of many others, has recently pointed out developments in the history of ritual in ancient Israel that are to some degree parallel to the Indian developments.72 The prophetic movement from the eighth to the sixth centuries b.c. in Israel was often quite critical of ritual. It did not, as in the case of India, offer mystical contemplation as an alternative. Rather it was ethical demand that was said to be more acceptable to God than ritual—righteousness, rather than sacrifice—a view summed up in Psalm 51:16–17: ‘‘For thou hast no delight in sacrifice; were I to give a burnt offering, thou wouldst not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.’’ The Hebrew prophet was not in the Indian sense a renouncer—we might even coin the term ‘‘denouncer’’ as a counterterm for the Hebrew prophets—but, as the passage from the Psalms suggests, the external sacrifice, as in the case of India, has become an internal one. However different the two examples, we can discern, in Bernstein-Douglas terms, a personal rather than a positional note in both cases. What these examples suggest is that antiritual movements of religious renewal begin long before the Protestant Reformation, at least as early as the axial age, the first millennium b.c. The other change in ancient Israel was the domestication of ritual, related to a number of social changes. The late preexilic effort to centralize the sacrificial ritual in the temple in Jerusalem meant that sacrifice could no longer be performed in local areas. With the exile, the sacrificial system broke down completely, although it was revived, perhaps in truncated form, during the Persian period and later, finally collapsing with the destruction of the second temple by the Romans in a.d. 70. During all this period the ritual system was by no means abandoned, and it has survived until today at the level of the local congregation and the household, particularly in connection with issues of ritual purity. Similar and different sorts of changes could be traced in all the religions that have survived over long periods of time in greatly changing social conditions. And if ritual has survived in all of the great religious traditions, in spite of periodic antiritual movements of great intensity, it survives in ostensibly secular contexts as well, as the work of Goffman and Collins cited above indicates. 72 Mary Douglas, In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (1993; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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The present moment, with its tendency to privilege information, that is, low-order meaning, above middle- and high-order meaning, is not a propitious one for ritual or even for the understanding of it. Nevertheless, I have argued, in the spirit of Durkheim and in agreement with Rappaport, that ritual is ‘‘humanity’s basic social act,’’ a position that, though contestable, has a great deal of evidence in its favor.

7 Rousseau on Society and the Individual

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the strangest, and one of the most intelligent, men of the eighteenth century—of any century. He said himself that he was a man of paradoxes, and several of his most important works begin, famously, with paradoxes. The Social Contract: ‘‘Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.’’ Emile: ‘‘Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.’’ And The Reveries of a Solitary Walker: ‘‘So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbor or friend, nor any company left me but my own. The most sociable and loving of men has with one accord been cast out by all the rest.’’ The third paradox concerns Jean-Jacques alone; the other two concern the whole of humanity. The paradox on which I wish to focus here is as follows: no one has argued more strongly than Rousseau that human nature is fundamentally individualistic, yet no one has more clearly seen what humans owe to society. According to him society is what makes us fully human and society is what debases us below our natural state. Rousseau has a story to tell which explains how all this came to be; it is a very complex story, so complex that scholars continue to disagree about how to interpret it. Yet it is a story that is still very much part of the self-understanding of the modern world. We have much to learn from it, not only about Rousseau, but about ourselves, who are, more than we are aware, still under his influence. I want to tell that story briefly by examining the arguments of the Second Discourse and The Social Contract, considering in passing the First Discourse and several other of his writings. Then I want to test whether these arguments are true, scientifically and morally. I hope only to lead readers into conversation with Rousseau’s great texts themselves; I cannot replace Rousseau’s answers nor foresee the answers that his future readers will give. Many have noted that Rousseau was born and raised a Protestant in Calvin’s city, Geneva. His deism distanced him from the Protestant and [First published in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourse, ed. and intro. Susan Dunn, Rethinking the Western Tradition Series (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 266–287. Used by permission.]

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Catholic churches alike, but his sympathies 1 and perhaps the inner structure of his thought had a Protestant cast. Charles Taylor has argued that Rousseau’s contrast between that which is good from the hands of God and the evil that men have made of it brought an Augustinian, even a hyperAugustinian, strand into eighteenth-century thought,2 and we should remember that Augustine was the church father who had the greatest influence on Protestantism. Rousseau’s pessimism about human progress in history was surely one of the reasons for his alienation from the literary and philosophical circles of his day. Those thinkers who were determined to erase the infamy of Christian superstition were not happy to see its shadow reappearing in one of their own. It is commonly held that Rousseau, along with many eighteenth-century thinkers, believed that human nature is basically good, that he rejected the idea of original sin, and Rousseau himself said as much. But on closer inspection Rousseau’s view of human nature is perhaps closer to that of orthodox Christianity, especially Protestantism, than is usually recognized. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden were not evil—they hadn’t sinned. From the hand of God they were, like all of creation, good. It was their own action, their own sin, that brought about the Fall and distorted all subsequent human nature, so in this sense sin is not original. Human nature for Rousseau is only good in the state of nature, before the beginning of society. It was the human creation of society, with all its attendant vices, that began the fatal process of human distortion and degeneration. Further, just as Christians can be saved from their sinful state through belief in Jesus Christ and membership in the church which is his body on earth, so human beings for Rousseau may regain something like their natural freedom if they enter the social contract and gain civil freedom, or if they as individuals attain moral freedom. But these forms of salvation for Rousseau, in spite of his Pelagianism, are more difficult to attain and rarer than those offered by Christianity; his view of human history is marked by a more than Augustinian gloom.3 1 ‘‘Experience teaches that of all the Christian sects, Protestantism, as the wisest and gentlest, is also the most peaceful and social. It is the only one in which the laws can maintain their dominion and the leaders their authority.’’ J.-J. Rousseau, The Geneva Manuscript, in On the Social Contract, ed. Roger D. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 201. 2 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 356. 3 In spite of his gloomy view of human progress, Rousseau remained personally

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There is one further parallel between Christian teaching and that of Rousseau that will lead me into the central concern of this chapter. Adam’s fall was not viewed as wholly a disaster. Without it there would have been no salvation history of the human race, no need for the redeemer, Jesus Christ. The human condition in the Garden of Eden has been referred to as ‘‘dreaming innocence,’’ an existence so simplified as to be hardly human. Viewing Paradise in this way, the Fall has been seen as fortunate, a felix culpa, for it is only through it that we became fully human, though in need of salvation. For Rousseau man in the state of nature is solitary, without language or culture, satisfied with meeting only his simplest biological needs, in short, little different from nonhuman animals. But entering society brings dramatic changes. Chapter 8 of book 1 of The Social Contract puts it succinctly: The transition from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting in his behavior justice for instinct, and by imbuing his actions with a moral quality they previously lacked. Only when the voice of duty prevails over physical impulse, and law prevails over appetite, does man, who until then was preoccupied only with himself, understand that he must act according to other principles, and must consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although, in this state, he gives up many advantages that he derives from nature, he acquires equally great ones in return; his faculties are used and developed; his ideas are expanded; his feelings are ennobled; his entire soul is raised to such a degree that, if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below that from which he emerged, he ought to bless continually the wonderful moment that released him from it for ever, and transformed him from a stupid, limited animal into an intelligent being and a man.

A happy fall indeed. Although he sometimes, as in the above passage, describes the shift from the state of nature to the civil state as occurring in a single jump, at other times, especially in the Second Discourse, as below, he describes the transition as more gradual, with several intermediary stages. Jean Starobinski, a leading French specialist on Rousseau, has described these stages in some detail and it is useful to follow his discussion in order to understand better the role of society in Rousseau’s conception of social evolution.4 It is true

happy, or so he claimed in his last work, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). 4 Jean Starobinski, introduction to Discours sur l’Origine et les fondements de

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that Rousseau insisted that his views on the original state of nature ‘‘are not to be taken as historical truths, but merely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings’’ (Second Discourse, as are all the following quotes unless indicated otherwise). Nonetheless, his account of the several stages of the transition between the state of nature and the formation of civil society is circumstantial, including references to existing peoples representing various stages, and some of it could still be defended today as having a degree of historical accuracy. In these respects Rousseau’s account is more than the ‘‘just-so’’ story that the accounts of Hobbes and Locke, for example, so clearly are. In the state of nature itself humans are solitary, without speech or culture, have only the briefest of contacts with each other, and do not even know that they will die; they are, in effect, without self-consciousness. Mating consists of only passing encounters, and even children, though briefly suckled by their mother (Rousseau blithely informs us that children among primitives grow up much more quickly than among us), ‘‘no sooner gained strength to run about in quest of food than they separated even from her.’’ Eventually mother and child came not even to recognize each other. These utterly unsociable creatures are governed, says Rousseau, by two principles prior to reason: ‘‘one of them interests us deeply in our own preservation and welfare, the other inspires us with a natural aversion to seeing any other being, but especially any being like ourselves, suffer or perish.’’ The first principle, self-preservation, Rousseau shares with Hobbes and Locke, but he does not draw a Hobbesian conclusion from it. Precisely because humans are solitary, the quest for self-preservation involves no necessary hostility toward others nor even any competition with them. The second principle, quite absent in Hobbes but essential to Rousseau, he calls pity, and defines as a sentiment not a rule of reason. It is the feeling of pity which will hinder ‘‘even a robust savage from plundering a feeble child, or an infirm old man’’ unless in the direst need himself. And although pity does not rise to the level of the golden rule, it results in a ‘‘maxim of natural goodness a great deal less perfect, but perhaps more useful, Do good to yourself with as little prejudice as you can to others’’ (Rousseau’s emphasis). We will have to consider below whether pity as Rousseau defines it, is, after all, compatible with the radically nonsocial nature he is trying to describe. l’inégalité, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 3:xlii–lxxi (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1964).

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However hypothetical this starting point may be, the succeeding stages begin to be empirically recognizable. But why should there be any succeeding stages—why not an everlasting contentment with the ‘‘natural’’ state? Rousseau gives two kinds of reasons, internal and external. Starting first with the internal reasons, there are two things about human nature even in its earliest stage that makes it different from that of other animals. Whereas animals operate solely according to the laws of mechanics and are strictly governed by instinct (here Rousseau follows Descartes), humans have the ‘‘spiritual’’ capacity for ‘‘willing, or rather choosing,’’ and ‘‘the consciousness of this power.’’ In other words, humans are free; they have the ‘‘quality of a free agent.’’ But there is another quality equally if not more important than freedom that distinguishes man from beast, perfectibility, ‘‘a faculty which, as circumstances offer, successively unfolds all the other faculties, and resides among us not only in the species, but in the individuals that compose it.’’ Yet neither of these internal potentialities, freedom and perfectibility, though they make possible developments not open to other animals, necessitate such developments. It is, rather, the external reasons, ‘‘accidents’’ Rousseau calls them, which pressure men to take the first steps toward what will prove a fatal course: After having showed that perfectibility, the social virtues, and the other faculties, which natural man had received as potentialities, could never be developed of themselves, that they needed the fortuitous concurrence of several foreign causes, which might never arise, and without which he must have eternally remained in his primitive condition, I must proceed to consider and bring together the different accidents which may have perfected the human understanding while debasing the species, and made man wicked by making him sociable, and from so remote a time bring man at last and the world to the point at which we now see them. (Rousseau’s emphasis)

One of these accidents, perhaps the most important (and one often invoked today by scholars who think about social evolution) was population increase. What was easy when men were few became more difficult when they multiplied. It was need that motivated ingenuity, leading to the invention of hooks and lines, bows and arrows, and it was need that led men, solitary by nature, to begin to associate, although the association was transitory, lasting only as long as the need was felt. It was also need that instigated the first use of language in the hitherto silent species. ‘‘The first language of man,’’ said Rousseau, ‘‘was the cry of nature,’’ imploring

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‘‘assistance in great danger, or relief in great sufferings.’’ 5 These earliest forms of association, based only on moments of temporary mutual need, as in a common hunt, ‘‘scarcely required a more refined language than that of crows and monkeys.’’ This is what Starobinski calls the first stage, ‘‘one in which pressed by need [men] begin to associate themselves for a common effort: occasional collaboration, where anarchic hordes without permanence are constituted.’’ 6 Once technological advances began, they led to others at an increasing rate resulting in a ‘‘first revolution,’’ from which emerged what Starobinski calls the ‘‘patriarchal age.’’ This stage he identifies with life in the Paleolithic, though it is the first of the stages to be represented by still living peoples.7 Huts and villages were constructed, family life began, language reached a degree of subtlety similar to our own, but private property was still minimal, the land being used in common for hunting and gathering. Rousseau’s description of this age is both idyllic and ominous: They now began to assemble round a great tree: singing and dancing, the genuine offspring of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of the men and women, free from care, thus gathered together. Everyone began to notice the rest, and wished to be noticed himself; and public esteem acquired a value. He who sang or danced best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most dexterous, or the most eloquent, came to be the most respected: this was the first step toward inequality, and at the same time toward vice.

In this stage some differences between the strong and the weak, the skilled and the less skilled, the beautiful and the less beautiful, began to appear, and, though ideas of justice and morality began to emerge, retribution for wrongs was left to the action of those aggrieved, there being no law. Nonetheless this was a happy state, what Starobinski calls a golden age.8 Rousseau describes it as follows: [Though] natural compassion had already suffered some alteration, this period of the development of human faculties, holding a just mean between the indo-

5 In Essay on the Origin of Languages Rousseau writes that among men in northern climes ‘‘the first words among them were not love me [aimez-moi] but help me [aidez-moi].’’ See Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder, On the Origin of Language, trans. John H. Moran (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 47. 6 Starobinski, introduction, lxii. 7 Starobinski, introduction, lxii. 8 Starobinski, introduction, lxii.

Rousseau on Society and the Individual 187 lence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of egoism [amour propre], must have been the happiest and most durable epoch. The more we reflect on this state, the more convinced we shall be, that it was the least subject of any to revolutions, the best for man, and that nothing could have drawn him out of it but some fatal accident, which, for the common good, would never have happened. The example of savages, most of whom have been found in this condition, seems to confirm that mankind was formed ever to remain in it, that this condition is the real youth of the world, and that all ulterior improvements have been so many steps, in appearance towards the perfection of individuals, but in fact towards the decrepitness of the species.

Before turning to the ‘‘great revolution’’ which would end this golden age, the age Rousseau’s description of which has led people to attribute to him the idea of the ‘‘noble savage,’’ a term he did not use, we must look at another key but problematic distinction in his account, that between amour de soi and amour propre. Careful translators distinguish them by translating the first as ‘‘love of self’’ and the second as ‘‘self-love,’’ though in normal French they do indeed mean the same thing. According to Rousseau’s analysis in note O of the Second Discourse, the love of self (amour de soi ) in the true state of nature is a natural passion little different from the animal instinct of self-preservation. In particular, it involves no comparisons with others, for in his solitary state ‘‘man seldom consider[s] his fellows in any other light than he would animals of another species.’’ This primitive love of self, then, involves no consciousness of others as comparable to one’s self, and, conversely, no consciousness of self as comparable to others. It is selfish only in an innocent sense, since it lacks any desire to elevate the self at the expense of others. Self-love (amour propre), on the other hand, is based fundamentally on invidious comparisons with others and so gives rise to all the vices of pride, envy, resentment, and spite. As we have seen, self-love (amour propre) is present already in the golden age, but its consequences will grow steadily worse in succeeding historical periods. Turning then to the great revolution, let us consider how Rousseau describes it and to what causes he attributes it: From the moment it appeared an advantage for one man to possess enough provisions for two, equality vanished; property was introduced; labor became necessary; and boundless forests became smiling fields, which had to be watered with human sweat, and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to sprout out and grow with the harvests. Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts whose invention produced this

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great revolution. . . . [I]t is iron and corn, which have civilized men, and ruined mankind.

Starobinski identifies this change with the Neolithic revolution as currently understood, although we know that agriculture considerably predated metallurgy, particularly the iron metallurgy that Rousseau had in mind. Nonetheless, Rousseau, who began the second part of the Second Discourse by finding the first man who enclosed a piece of ground to be the cause of crimes, wars, murders, misfortunes, and horrors, was probably right in seeing agriculture as the origin of private property in land and the exploitation of agricultural surplus (Starobinski notes that though he does not use the terms, Rousseau accurately describes the transition from a subsistence economy to a production economy)9 as the most fundamental cause of human inequality. Such an insight was not new: ‘‘Subjection enters the house with the plough’’ is a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad.10 And recent scholars have shown that agrarian societies had greater inequality than any other societies before or since.11 The problem that soon arose under the new agricultural regime was that even those who prospered and who had extensive property could claim no right to it, for the very idea of law and right did not yet exist. Even though one had, as Locke had argued, a just claim to the soil to which one had added one’s labor, there was no reason for others to respect such a claim. Thus, says Rousseau: ‘‘There arose between the title of the strongest and that of the first occupier a perpetual conflict, which always ended in battle and bloodshed. The new state of society became the most horrible state of war.’’ At this point Rousseau, though rejecting the Hobbesian view of human nature and the original condition of men, comes to agree with Hobbes that a war of all against all indeed lies in the human past (and always potentially in the present as well). Even in the golden age of hunters and gatherers there had been a difference between the strong and the weak and the beginning of invidious self-love (amour propre), but the new situation gave rise to the distinction between rich and poor and invidious self-love grew exponentially. In this situation of calamity, according to Rousseau, ‘‘the rich in particular must have soon perceived how much they suffered by a perpetual 9 Starobinski, introduction, lxiii. 10 Cited by Ernest Gellner in Plough, Sword and Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 10. 11 Gerhard Lenski, Power and Privilege; a Theory of Social Stratification (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).

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war, of which they alone supported all the expense, and in which, though all risked life, they alone risked any property.’’ For Rousseau, the claim to legitimacy of ownership by the rich, even when based on the right of first possession, was without foundation as long as many who had no property ‘‘suffered grievously for want of what [the rich] had too much of.’’ Without justification for his wealth or forces sufficient to defend himself against all comers ‘‘the rich man . . . at last conceived the deepest project that ever entered the human mind: this was to employ in his favor the very forces that attacked him, to make allies of his enemies, to inspire them with other maxims, and make them adopt other institutions as favorable to his pretensions, as the law of nature was unfavorable to them.’’ Thus was born the social contract and the civil society based on it. In the words of the rich, Rousseau defines the essence of the new order: ‘‘Instead of turning our forces against ourselves, let us collect them into a sovereign power, which may govern us by wise laws, may protect and defend all the members of the association, repel common enemies, and maintain a perpetual concord and harmony among us.’’ Thus emerged the first state. For Rousseau, it is clear that the new order, establishing justice and right in name but not in fact, was a trick the rich played on the poor: ‘‘Such was, or must have been the origin of society and of law, which gave new fetters to the weak and new power to the rich; irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, fixed for ever the laws of property and inequality; changed an artful usurpation into an irrevocable right; and for the benefit of a few ambitious individuals, subjected the rest of mankind to perpetual labor, servitude and misery.’’ It is not necessary to follow the argument in the remaining pages of the Second Discourse, describing as they do in depressing detail how civil society degenerates gradually into sheer tyranny and the relation between rich and poor turns into the relation between master and slave. Given that the social contract guarantees life and property, however unequally, it might appear that Rousseau is describing a Hobbesian contract between ruler and subject in which the latter gives up his freedom in exchange for his life. But such is not the case. Rousseau refutes the idea that the social contract is based on acquiescence to the rule of the stronger. However deluded the poor and the weak are when they are persuaded to enter the social contract, they do so believing that what they give up in the way of freedom of action will be returned to them by the rule of law, to which all, rich and poor, ruler and ruled, are to be subject. There is even the first appearance of the idea of the general will that will be central to the argument of The Social Contract: ‘‘The multitude having, in regard to their

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social relations, concentrated all their wills in one, all the articles, in regard to which this will expresses itself, become so many fundamental laws, which oblige without exception all the members of the State’’ (my emphasis). Here Rousseau touches on the matter of right, which will be central in the later book, as opposed to fact, which largely occupies him here. Before turning to The Social Contract, which in comparison to the historical narrative, however hypothetical, of the Second Discourse, would seem to be an abstract, logical, even mathematical argument, we might assess briefly the empirical validity of the story so far. As I have implied, the story of the transition from the hunting and gathering societies of the Paleolithic, to the agricultural societies of the Neolithic, to the formation of the early state, though not reliable in detail, is not radically different from the story we would tell today. Rousseau’s account of social evolution was the first of many, and not the least accurate, that have been told subsequently. But what of Rousseau’s starting point, the original state of nature, on which he staked so much? Why Rousseau believed that man in the state of nature was solitary is not easy to answer. One can point to his own life: he lost his mother shortly after his birth and his father left him at the age of ten. Subsequently his movements were frequent and his attachments few and mostly fleeting. One can perhaps see a source in his Protestant background where the individual is seen as ultimately alone in the presence of God. Most obviously, in the tradition of modern political philosophy by which he was greatly influenced even when he argued against it, man was seen as originally solitary: in Hobbes’s famous phrase human life in the ‘‘naturall condition of mankind’’ was ‘‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.’’ 12 Whatever the sources of Rousseau’s idea, the empirical basis for it, unlike that for much of his subsequent account, is entirely lacking. Not only are the chimpanzees, with whom we are most closely related, and with whom we share a common ancestor four or five million years ago, as well as the other great apes, social, but so are all the primates, whose origin is at least forty million years ago. That is a long way back to go to find a solitary ancestor and such an ancestor would hardly qualify as a man, even in Rousseau’s stripped down version of the state of nature. As far as the genus Homo is concerned, of which we have evidence for several million years, again everything points to the fact that all the species of the genus were social. Of course Rousseau did not have the advantage of paleontology to help him reconstruct the early history of man, but there is a glaring error 12 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), pt. 1, chap. 13.

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in his argument where he seems almost willfully to overlook an obvious fact. This is his attempt to minimize the length of time it takes for a child to become independent. The long dependency of human childhood not only necessitates the continuing relation of mother and child, but some degree of cross gender cooperation in its care and feeding. Some recognition of kinship and local group relations appear to have existed among all humans and among most of our close primate relatives. Finally, one must doubt whether the solitary animals that Rousseau describes could have had the sentiment of pity that he attributes to them. Pity as he describes it, a concern for the sufferings of others, would seem to imply just the degree of identification with another that Rousseau wants to deny was yet possible. For putting oneself in the place of the other entails just that capacity to see oneself as the other sees one, which would also generate the comparative self-consciousness that Rousseau called selflove (amour propre). Only a social animal can have pity of the sort Rousseau describes and the other side of the generous love of another which he calls pity is always the possibility of the self-consciousness that is a form of self-love.13 It is, then, safe to say that human beings are social by nature and that society is not an artificial creation at a late stage of social evolution. What difference does this make to how we think about Rousseau’s ideas? We will have to return to this subject later, but we can say that the extreme tension that Rousseau finds between the human desire for liberty and the obligations that any kind of society require may be less ‘‘natural’’ than he assumes. The understanding of human beings as social by nature would seem to mitigate the pessimism of his account, though it would still require us to explain tensions between individual and society where they actually exist. But when Rousseau says that ‘‘the subjecting of man to law is a problem in politics which I liken to that of the squaring of the circle in geometry,’’ 14 he assumes a creature more recalcitrant to the demands of society than humans in fact are. Nonetheless, to the extent that Rousseau believed that human beings are deeply asocial, the theoretical problem of how society is possible is acute, 13 I don’t want to say that ‘‘pity’’ or what today we might more likely call ‘‘empathy’’ necessarily implies invidious comparison, only that the possibility is always present. Indeed ‘‘pity’’ has been criticized as a way of ‘‘looking down’’ on another: ‘‘Oh you poor thing, you’re so much worse off than I am.’’ 14 Considerations on the Government of Poland, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Political Writings, trans. and ed. Frederick Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 161–162.

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and in The Social Contract required all his genius to explain. Here he does not entirely ignore the historical conditions leading up to the social contract as explained in the Second Discourse, but he concentrates on what could possibly make it legitimate in the eyes of intransigently individualistic humans. He states the ‘‘fundamental problem’’ of which the social contract is the solution as follows: ‘‘To find a form of association which may defend and protect with the whole force of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of which each, coalescing with all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and remain as free as before.’’ He then spells out the solution: [The contract to form such an association implies] the total alienation to the whole community of each associate with all his rights; for, in the first place since each gives himself up entirely, the conditions are equal for all; and, the conditions being equal for all, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others. . . . In short, each giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is not one associate over whom we do not acquire the same rights which we concede to him over ourselves, we gain the equivalent of all that we lose, and more power to preserve what we have. . . . If, then, we set aside what is not of the essence of the social contract, we shall find that it is reducible to the following terms: ‘‘Each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general will; and in turn we receive every member as an indivisible part of the whole.’’ (book 1, chap. 6)

Here we have a series of assertions that must seem bewildering, especially to Americans. On the one hand there is an intense desire to maintain one’s liberty, even ‘‘to remain as free as before,’’ that is, in the totally asocial state of nature. On the other hand there seems to be an extreme abdication of just that freedom, in that one alienates one’s self, one’s property and all one’s rights to the community. In part Rousseau seems to be getting ahead of himself here, for it can be only hypothetical rights that are being alienated. In the state of nature there are no rights; rights derive exclusively from the social contract. Even though Rousseau reassures us quickly that we will get everything back, we aren’t so sure. Especially important for him, by giving ourselves to all, we give ourselves to nobody. Living in a still quasi-feudal society where personal dependence on others was everywhere (including in his own life), Rousseau believed dependence on the community to be far preferable. But personal dependence is not so central an issue for us. What about ‘‘total alienation to the whole community’’?

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For freedom-loving Americans that is hard to take. From being a radical individualist, Rousseau seems to have turned into a radical communitarian in the strong sense that makes Americans nervous. If we are nervous already then we will be really upset by Rousseau’s next move: ‘‘In order, then, that the social pact may not be a vain formulary, it tacitly includes this engagement, which can alone give force to the others—that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body; which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free’’ (book 1, chap. 7, my emphasis; consult the whole passage). We have noted Rousseau’s penchant for paradox. We should remember that a paradox is not a contradiction. Something important may be going on in this strange expression, ‘‘forced to be free.’’ Some critics have found that something indeed important is going on: the invention of totalitarianism, the state forcing the individual to be ‘‘free’’ in some preordained way that is in fact the total violation of freedom. Given the whole context of Rousseau’s work and the argument of The Social Contract, the idea of a totalitarian Rousseau is hard to understand except as the result of the overheated sensitivities about totalitarianism in the mid-twentieth century. At one level all he is saying is that it is law that makes us free (for in the state of nature there is no law and, once we are no longer isolated, no freedom) and that law is only law when it is enforced. We will be forced to be law-abiding, for only thus can we be free. But he is probably saying more than that. What more is going on begins to be apparent in the opening paragraph of book 2: The first and most important consequence of the principles above established is that the general will alone can direct the forces of the State according to the object of its founding, which is the common good; for if the opposition of private interests has rendered necessary the establishment of societies, the agreement of these same interests has rendered it possible. That which is common to these different interests forms the social bond; and unless there were some point in which all interests agree, no society could exist. Now, it is solely with regard to this common interest that the society should be governed. (book 2, chap. 1)

Although we Americans are familiar with the phrase ‘‘common good,’’ we have difficulty understanding it as meaning anything other than the sum of private goods. But that is just what Rousseau says the common good is not: ‘‘There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will; the latter regards only the common interest, while

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the former has regard to private interests, and is merely a sum of particular wills’’ (book 2, chap. 3). The distinction between the will of all and the general will is critical.15 It is one of the most important distinctions between Rousseau’s position, which we might characterize as civic republicanism, and that of Locke, which we might characterize as classical liberalism. The liberal view is expressed by Mandeville in the idea that the pursuit of private vice will result in public good, or Adam Smith’s notion of the ‘‘invisible hand’’ of the market which guarantees that the individual pursuit of self-interest will result in an increase in wealth in the society as a whole. The Lockean strand in the Anglo-American tradition is so powerful that we suspect Rousseau of a totalitarian willingness to sacrifice the individual good to the common good if he means by the latter anything other than the sum of private goods. The difference between the liberal and the civic republican positions is sometimes expressed by a contrast between negative liberty and positive liberty. Negative liberty protects individuals from the abrogation of their rights by the state. Positive liberty requires the active participation of citizens in their own government. Pushed to the extreme, the emphasis on positive liberty can be seen as totalitarian: individuals are ‘‘forced to be free.’’ But Rousseau’s position does not fit easily into this dichotomy, for he is as adamant as any liberal in defense of the rights of individuals, that is, of negative liberty. He holds that the idea that ‘‘government is allowed to sacrifice an innocent man for the safety of the multitude’’ is ‘‘one of the most execrable that tyranny ever invented.’’ In fact ‘‘if a single citizen perished who could have been saved; if a single one were wrongly held in prison; and if a single suit were lost due to evident injustice,’’ then ‘‘the civil state is dissolved.’’ 16 Even the aclu could hardly go further than that. So Rousseau’s insistence that the general will is not the same as the will of all has nothing to do with any willingness to trample on individual rights. Perhaps we can begin to understand the elusive idea of the general will if we ask ourselves what we mean when we use the term so common in 15 Rousseau’s distinction between the general will and the will of all is expressed by Durkheim in his frequently reiterated assertion that society is more than the sum of its parts. Indeed the strongly objective meaning of society in Durkheim owes more than a little to Rousseau. See ‘‘Rousseau’s Social Contract,’’ in Emile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 65–138. On Durkheim’s view of society, see Bellah, introduction to Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society (1973). 16 In Discourse on Political Economy, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, ed. Roger D. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 220.

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contemporary political discourse, ‘‘special interests.’’ We mean that some individual or group—very rich persons, corporations, labor unions, and so on—are putting their own interests ahead of the general interest. But again what is the general interest? Do we really mean, as the cynics would say, that we object to the special interests of others and would prefer that our own special interests be honored instead? That would hardly seem to capture the passion that the denunciation of special interests arouses in the citizenry. But can we imagine that the general interest is merely the additive sum of everyone’s special interest? Could it be, for example, that if every one of us preferred to ride in our own individual automobile and spend no tax money on public transportation that would be in the general interest? James Stockinger, one of the wisest commentators on Rousseau that I know, puts it well when he writes: ‘‘The central theoretical point is that the general will is the result of an ongoing disposition on the part of each citizen or member of a community to ask himself or herself ‘What is best for all of us?,’ rather than the Lockean question, ‘What’s in it for me?’ ’’ 17 If Rousseau believed, as he did, that the civil state is dissolved if a single individual is unjustly treated, he also believed that if the citizens never think of the general interest, what is best for all of us, but only of what’s in it for me, then there too the civil state is dissolved. And, since the civil state is the only protector of our liberty once society has developed, without it we are subject to sheer tyranny. Thus, finally to return to the meaning of the paradox ‘‘forced to be free,’’ if it doesn’t mean the violation of our individual rights, as it clearly doesn’t, it does mean that if we want to retain our freedom we will have to think of the common good, for if we don’t, then our freedom will be lost. That is a theme which is central to the entire political thought of Alexis de Tocqueville. While it is important to get clear on what Rousseau means by the social contract and the general will on which it is based, we must still ask where this rather abstract idea fits into his understanding of the social history of mankind. In one sense it is a purely theoretical construction which can be used as a measure by which to judge all past and present societies. Since Rousseau’s description of the social contract as a measure is sternly uncompromising, it is evident that virtually all existing societies are illegitimate and that what we have instead of a civil state is a more or 17 James Stockinger, ‘‘Locke and Rousseau: Human Nature, Human Citizenship, and Human Work’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1990), 226.

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less disguised return to the state of nature in which the rich and strong tyrannize over the poor and weak. That is pretty much what Rousseau did think. Although he was very moderate in his advice as to practical political action, his ideas were indeed revolutionary and would have revolutionary consequences. Even so, Rousseau’s idea of the social contract in its pure form was not entirely a theoretical construct. He thought it had actually existed in human history, and he described the conditions that made it possible. His usual examples were Sparta (which seems to have been his type-case), republican Rome, and (in theory if not in fact) his home city of Geneva. It is obvious that these are all city states, and he makes it clear that a republic based on a genuine social contract could not exist in any other kind of society. He often contrasted the relatively small and rigorous republican cities with the great luxurious cities that were capitals of empires: Sparta with Athens, republican Rome with imperial Rome, Geneva with Paris. In every case the civil freedom of the republic was lost in the inevitable tyranny befitting an imperial city.18 But although size is critical, it is not the only precondition of a true republic. The single most important precondition is the quality of the people: ‘‘As an architect, before erecting a large edifice, examines and tests the soil in order to see whether it can support the weight, so a wise lawgiver does not begin by drawing up laws that are good in themselves, but considers first whether the people for whom he designs them are fit to endure them’’ (book 2, chap. 8). The quality of the people is indicated by their mores,19 that is, their manners and morals, their customs. For Rousseau, as for Tocqueville after him (there were classical precedents as well), the mores are more important than the laws, for without suitable mores the laws will not function. So what kinds of mores are requisite for a true republic? On this issue Rous18 Rousseau was not immune to empirical evidence. He had held that Sparta, unlike Athens, had no theater until a scholar pointed out to him that the ruins of a theater had been discovered there. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan Bloom (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), 152, n. 64. Rousseau accepted the correction. One would wonder what he would say to the fact that democracy survived far longer in Athens than in any Greek city. Perhaps he would say it was not real democracy. 19 French moeurs. Allan Bloom hesitates to translate this term by ‘‘mores,’’ its Latin root, but prefers the rather awkward ‘‘morals [manners].’’ See Letter to d’Alembert, 149, n. 3. ‘‘Mores,’’ however, has become standard in translations of the same French word in Tocqueville and is a familiar term in social science.

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seau is both specific and narrow. The proper mores will exist only among a people at a late stage of patriarchal society, his golden age. For him it is essential that the society be young. ‘‘The majority of nations, as well as of men, are tractable only in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow old’’ (book 2, chap. 8). As he explains in detail in the First Discourse, old societies, that is, ones advanced in the arts and sciences and in the luxury that attends them, will be so permeated by vicious mores that they will never endure the rigors of a true republic; they are incapable of freedom. What is critical about youth, whether in an individual or in a society, is the capacity to become virtuous, something that Rousseau discussed at length in Emile.20 On occasion, civil wars and revolutions can allow a people to regain the vigor of youth. ‘‘Such was Sparta in the time of Lycurgus, such was Rome after the Tarquins, and such among us moderns were Holland and Switzerland after the expulsion of their tyrants.’’ But once the opportunity is past, it cannot be regained: ‘‘Liberty may be acquired but never recovered’’ (book 2, chap. 8). But even the healthy mores that go with youth or youth regained are not enough. There is another factor, rare, indispensable: the presence of a legislator. The reader should peruse chapter 7 of book 2 of The Social Contract, entitled ‘‘The Legislator,’’ although that is only one of the places where Rousseau discusses the issue. Here it is enough to say that the legislator must be an extraordinary person, perhaps even someone we could call charismatic, personally disinterested, and concerned only with the good of the new state. And we should remember that even the best of legislators would be helpless unless the people for whom he is legislating has mores that can be molded into good laws. The necessary coincidence of such an extraordinary leader and a society at just the right stage of development would appear to be so rare as scarcely to exist. That is what Rousseau believed; he was no optimist. But there is one more qualification that brings us to an issue we have not so far discussed: religion. Even the wisest and most charismatic of legislators will not convince a people by reason alone. Only the sanction of the gods will make the new republic possible: ‘‘The legislator puts into the mouths of the immortals that sublime reason which soars beyond the reach of common men, in order that he may win over by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move’’ (book 2, chap. 7). In a footnote to this passage Rousseau cites Machiavelli, but he could also have cited 20 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979).

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Spinoza. For all of them the primary model of the legislator is Moses, who was able to impose his God-given laws on a people such that it has survived for millennia. The achievement of most legislators has been more transient. Among Rousseau’s prime examples, as we would suspect, were Lycurgus for Sparta, Numa for Rome, and, interestingly enough, Calvin for Geneva.21 But it is not only at the inception of a new republic that the gods must be invoked: a civil society requires a civil religion. The chapter ‘‘On Civil Religion’’ near the end of The Social Contract has been considered horrifying by some, and we will have to consider why. The content of Rousseau’s civil religion is far from horrifying. It would seem to be moderation itself: The dogmas of the civil religion ought to be simple, few in number, stated with precision, and without explanation or commentaries. The existence of the Deity, powerful, wise, beneficent, prescient, and bountiful, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and of the laws; these are the positive dogmas. As for the negative dogmas, I limit them to one only, that is, intolerance. (book 4, chap. 8)

Not only are the positive dogmas of the civil religion few and so general that all the existing religions, at least those of Rousseau’s day, could affirm them, but Rousseau explicitly stated that citizens could hold whatever other religious beliefs they chose without the knowledge or interference of the state, so long as they did not violate these few. The founders of the American republic, being good deists, that is, more or less on the same page as Rousseau in their religious beliefs, were fairly explicit in thinking that just this set of beliefs was essential if the new republic was to survive. That is why I took from Rousseau the term ‘‘civil religion’’ in my 1967 essay ‘‘Civil Religion in America.’’ 22 So what is so horrifying? It is the following illiberal conclusion: Without having power to compel any one to believe [these dogmas], the sovereign may banish from the state whoever does not believe them; it may banish him not as impious, but as unsociable, as incapable of sincerely loving law and justice and of sacrificing at need his life to his duty. But if any one, after publicly acknowledging these dogmas, behaves like an unbeliever in them, he should be

21 He writes, ‘‘Those who consider Calvin only as a theologian are but little acquainted with the extent of his genius.’’Social Contract, book 2, chap. 8. 22 Robert N. Bellah, ‘‘Civil Religion in America,’’ Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1– 21. Reprinted in Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (1970; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 168–189.

Rousseau on Society and the Individual 199 punished with death; he has committed the greatest of crimes, he has lied before the laws.23 (book 4, chap. 8)

Rousseau would enforce tolerance by being intolerant of intolerance. That is shocking to us today, as we have learned that to tolerate intolerance is the price of our liberty. But the societies of Rousseau’s day had not learned the first lesson of tolerance. He was himself the victim of intolerance—it was for his views of religion that he was persecuted, and both in Catholic France and in Protestant Switzerland. Even in America, where the founders of our republic believed that the dogmas of Rousseau’s civil religion were a prerequisite for a free society, but without Rousseau’s draconian provisions for enforcing them, tolerance of deviant religious views was limited, if not in law, then in public opinion. Thomas Paine discovered how unpopular a self-proclaimed atheist could be on these shores, in spite of his many services to the republic. It is important to remember that the idea that shared religious belief is a prerequisite for social coherence long predated Rousseau and has survived long after him, though in various forms. Tocqueville said of religion in America that it was ‘‘the first of their political institutions.’’ For Durkheim religion was the expression of social solidarity. It would take us too far afield to explore the ramifications of this idea, which at face value would seem to be in complete contradiction to our American belief in the separation of church and state and the idea that religion is essentially private. To understand why Rousseau held a belief that seems so alien to us, we must see that he, along with many others, doubted whether religion and morality, and morality and politics, can really be separated. If republican politics depend on republican mores, and if republican mores depend on republican religion, then republican politics depend on republican religion. It is for this reason that Tocqueville, speaking of the Americans, said ‘‘they have a democratic and a republican religion,’’ and he included American Catholics as well as Protestants. Remember that Rousseau had no interest in enforcing religious beliefs and practices as such. In the passage outlining his draconian enforcement he says he would banish unbelievers ‘‘not as impious, but as unsociable, as incapable of sincerely loving law and justice.’’ In short, Rousseau, and in 23 It would be helpful to compare Rousseau’s position on the punishment of unbelievers in the civil dogmas with the punishments proposed in book 10 of Plato’s Laws, 907d to the end of the book. While Plato’s treatment of civil theology in the Laws is clearly a model for Rousseau, the differences are as significant as the similarities.

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this the founders of the American republic resembled him, was trying to balance two potentially contradictory intentions: they felt that they needed to found society in religious belief, but they wanted that belief to be minimal and tolerant. Neither Rousseau’s minimalist civil religion nor that of the American founders seem vigorous enough to sustain the task assigned them. Rousseau apparently sensed that, for he relied on more than deist dogmas to create the solidarity necessary in his true republic. In several places he speaks of the civic celebrations that are essential to the life of a republic, but nowhere more clearly than in his Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theater. He contrasts the passivity of the audience in a darkened theater, seduced by unseemly and privatized emotions,24 with the open air celebrations of republican peoples. In particular he describes the festivals of the Genevans that he knew from his own experience: One must have been there with the Genevans to understand with what ardor they devote themselves to [the festivities]. They are unrecognizable; they are no longer that steady people which never deviates from its economic rules; they are no longer those slow reasoners who weigh everything, including joking, in the scale of judgment. The people are lively, gay, and tender; their hearts are then in their eyes as they are always on their lips; they seek to communicate their joy and their pleasures. They invite, they importune, and coerce the new arrivals and dispute over them. All the societies constitute but one, all become common to all. It is a matter of indifference at which table one sits.25

Here it is as if the general will becomes visible; that which people share overcomes that which separates them. It is hard not to see in Rousseau’s description a precursor of Durkheim’s idea of ‘‘collective effervescence,’’ the ritual occasions in which society becomes visible to itself as he put it in Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. One must remember, too, that the late eighteenth century saw a critical moment in the development of modern nationalism. Rousseau was not without a role in that development. The content of civic festivities is patriotism. He describes what followed a joyous dance of his father’s military company after the completion of their exercises: 24 It is worth remembering that Rousseau, so passionately opposed to the establishment of a theater in republican Geneva, was himself a passionate theatergoer and the composer of a successful opera, Le Devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer). He was also the author of one of the most widely read (and sentimental) novels of the eighteenth century, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse. Another paradox? 25 Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert, 127.

Rousseau on Society and the Individual 201 The dance was suspended, now there were only embraces, laughs, healths, and caresses. There resulted from all this a general emotion that I could not describe but which, in universal gaiety, is quite naturally felt in the midst of all that is dear to us. My father, embracing me, was seized with trembling which I think I still feel and share. ‘‘Jean-Jacques,’’ he said to me, ‘‘love your country. Do you see these good Genevans? They are all friends, they are all brothers; joy and concord reign in their midst. You are a Genevan.’’ 26

Rousseau put on the title page of The Social Contract and certain of his other works, ‘‘J. J. Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva.’’ Perhaps it was the Geneva of his dreams of which he was a citizen, for he never lived there again after running away at the age of fifteen. And Emile and The Social Contract were publicly burned by the Genevan authorities shortly after their publication. Today the great Pléiade edition of the complete works of Rousseau is underwritten in part by the City of Geneva, at last proud of one of its most illustrious sons. But the paradox of the solitary walker as citizen of Geneva remains one of the most poignant in a life of paradox. Perhaps we can say that Rousseau avoided nothing, that he lived in his person the conflicts of emerging modernity. He experienced great joy and great suffering, but he did not share in any triumphant confidence about human progress. If the conflict between the individual and society is less deeply embedded in human nature than he thought, it is nonetheless one of the great tensions of modernity. No one saw more clearly than he, in spite of his deep devotion to individual freedom, that the new self-assertion of the individual in the modern age 27 was fraught with danger. To continue the passage with which I began this chapter: What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to anything which tempts him and which he is able to attain; what he gains is civil liberty and property in all that he possesses. So not to misunderstand these gains, we must clearly distinguish natural liberty, which is limited only by the powers of the individual, from civil liberty, which is limited by the general will; and we must distinguish possession, which is nothing but the result of force or the right of first occupancy, from property, which can be based only on a lawful title. We might also add to the advantages of the civil state moral freedom, which alone enables man to be truly master of himself; for the impulse of mere appetite

26 Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert, 135. 27 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966; Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1983).

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is slavery, while obedience to a self-prescribed law is freedom. (Social Contract, book 1, chap. 8)

For those who believe that all we need to understand about society is that it is composed of competing individuals, each with his consumer preferences, Rousseau’s insistence on the tension between individual and society becomes invisible, because, as Margaret Thatcher put it, ‘‘society does not exist.’’ But if the will of all replaces the general will, Rousseau would argue, any hope of civil freedom will evaporate and the ‘‘soft despotism’’ that Tocqueville, in this respect his disciple, predicted, will be upon us. It is hard to over-estimate Rousseau’s deep and continuing influence. Kant, Hegel, Tocqueville, Durkheim, and a host of others owe him vital elements in their thought. Yet for Americans today and for people all over the world who are influenced by American culture, he is a difficult thinker. Rebellious against authority, yet enraptured by Genevan festivities, Rousseau reminds us that society is both the problem and the answer. We will forget him only at our peril.

8 The History of Habit

In 1919 Emily James Putnam gave twelve lectures at the New School under the title ‘‘Habit and History.’’ The course description is as follows: The long predominance of habitual conduct over individual initiative in primitive society and in the early empires; the biological and social limitations which tend to foster habit and develop it beyond its proper sphere; the technique of habit-breaking inaugurated by the Greeks and becoming a characteristic of western society; an effort to appraise the amount of excessive and undesirable habit in thought and action generally connected with such concepts as nationalism, religion, the status of women, etc.

It is an interesting challenge, eighty-two years later, to try to understand what Mrs. Putnam meant by that description and how to think about those issues today. Mrs. Putnam contrasts the term ‘‘habitual conduct’’ to the term ‘‘individual initiative,’’ and finds the former more characteristic of primitive society and the early empires, whereas the latter, beginning with the habitbreaking Greeks, is more characteristic of Western society. She does not reject habit altogether, indicating that it has a ‘‘proper sphere,’’ but only ‘‘excessive and undesirable habit,’’ and she suggests that nationalism, religion, and the status of women are spheres where such excessive and undesirable habits are to be found. Without being able to peruse her lectures in detail, I cannot be sure of all that she is implying. One might note that in her contrast between habit and individual initiative she privileges, as until recently we have been wont to do, the West as against the rest. This contrast, with its whiff of Orientalism, might serve to warn us that, although the contrast at the heart of her lecture series is still part of our common [First given as a lecture entitled ‘‘Habit and History’’ at The New School in New York City on June 11, 2001. It was part of a series that was designed as a response to courses given in the opening year of the New School, 1919; speakers were asked to give their contemporary response to the original 1919 titles. The talk was published under the title ‘‘Habit and History’’ in Ethical Perspectives 8, no. 3 (2001): 156–167. Used by permission.]

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sense today, it, like the contrast between the West and the non-West, ought not be affirmed until subjected to a degree of critical suspicion. It will not be my purpose to reverse the value judgment implicit in Mrs. Putnam’s basic contrast, but I will attempt to right the balance, to suggest that rather than seeing the more ‘‘modern’’ term, ‘‘individual initiative,’’ as superior to its contrast term, ‘‘habit,’’ it may be more fruitful to see these as permanent polarities of human action, each term of which is in need of continual rethinking, but both of which are necessary to any coherent form of life. To do this I might alter Mrs. Putnam’s title slightly and speak of the history of habit rather than habit and history. Let me start with an important early use of the term ‘‘habit’’ by turning to one of the most influential of the ‘‘habit-breaking Greeks,’’ namely Aristotle, for whose Ethics the term is basic. (I might note that Mrs. Putnam was herself a classicist and taught in the Department of Greek at Barnard College, so she would have been familiar with the point I am about to make.) Virtue, Aristotle’s fundamental ethical term, is, he says, a habit, in Greek a hexis, that is, specifically not an emotion or a capacity for an emotion, but a ‘‘formed state of character’’ which is in control of our emotions (1105b–1106a). We are judged, therefore, not by our emotions but by the settled dispositions, the habits, which control our emotions. Aristotle draws from this definition a conclusion that may surprise us or even offend us: he says that the young are not fit students for ethical philosophy, for they are too apt to be led by their feelings and they have not yet developed the habits which would allow them to appreciate ethical reflection. Ethics, as he says, is, after all, not an exact science and its object is not knowledge but action (1095a). So bright young people might well study modern moral philosophy, Kant’s categorical imperative, for example, or Bentham’s greatest good of the greatest number, for these are purely theoretical ideas and the young can be quite good at theory, but little good it would do them ethically, Aristotle would say, if they do not already have the habits required for living an ethical life. Of course, Aristotle is quick to add, the matter is not one of chronological age, for there are some who are forever too ‘‘young’’ to understand ethics, and some relatively young people might already have acquired virtuous habits. Still it is worth considering the fact that Aristotle, who wrote voluminous critical treatises on just about everything, and was willing to discourse at great length on all manner of ethical problems, begins, not with talk, but with habit, and says, in effect, that without habit talk about ethics is worthless. What is shocking about this is that Aristotle seems to be overriding individual initiative,

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worse yet, the individual initiative of the young, and insisting in an utterly authoritarian manner, that he will not even teach them about ethics until they have learned proper habits. Socrates famously questioned whether it is possible to teach virtue, and Aristotle’s argument here helps us understand why. Philosophical teaching is, after all, always a matter of discursive, analytical, talk. Habit is clearly something else.What is that something else? To understand the difference between these two approaches I want to turn to Mary Douglas’s remarkable book Natural Symbols, a book I have reread carefully several times in my life, each time with increasing profit.1 Douglas takes some interesting observations of Basil Bernstein’s about London families in the midtwentieth century and uses them to construct a general theory of the relation between social control and symbolic codes, a theory which, if you will bear with me, I think sheds a great deal of light on our problem of the history of habit. Bernstein noted that there were two rather different forms of family in his sample and that these two forms differed by class. Working-class families used what he called positional control systems and restricted speech codes, and middle-class families used personal control systems and elaborated speech codes. Because the word ‘‘restricted’’ is invidious in a way I think neither Bernstein nor Douglas intends, I will henceforth speak of ‘‘condensed’’ rather than ‘‘restricted’’ speech codes in contrast to elaborated ones, and will make this terminological change even when quoting them. Douglas describes the condensed speech code that is generated in the positional family: The child in this family is controlled by the continual building up of a sense of social pattern: of ascribed role categories. If he asks ‘‘Why must I do this?’’ the answer is in terms of relative position. Because I said so (hierarchy). Because you’re a boy (sex role). Because children always do (age status). Because you’re the oldest (seniority). As he grows, his experience flows into a grid of role categories; right and wrong are learnt in terms of given structure; he himself is seen only in relation to that structure.2

1 [The discussion of Mary Douglas’s work in the following paragraphs has appeared in slightly different form in the chapter ‘‘Durkheim and Ritual.’’ In this chapter, where these paragraphs bear on habit rather than ritual, their implication is somewhat different and are worth rereading.] 2 Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970; New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 24.

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Douglas notes that this pattern can be found in some aristocratic as well as working-class families. She then describes the other form: By contrast, in the family system which Professor Bernstein calls personal a fixed pattern of roles is not celebrated, but rather the autonomy and unique value of the individual. When the child asks a question the mother feels bound to answer it by as full an explanation as she knows. The curiosity of the child is used to increase his verbal control, to elucidate causal relations, to teach him to assess the consequences of his acts. Above all his behaviour is made sensitive to the personal feelings of others, by inspecting his own feelings. Why can’t I do it? Because your father’s feeling worried; because I’ve got a headache. How would you like it if you were a dog?

Douglas quotes Bernstein to the effect that in the middle-class family the child is being regulated by the feelings of the regulator: ‘‘ ‘Daddy will be pleased, hurt, disappointed, angry, ecstatic if you go on doing this.’ . . . Control is effected through either the verbal manipulation of feelings or through the establishment of reasons which link the child to his acts.’’3 Douglas sums up the middle-class pattern in a way that should give us pause: ‘‘In this way the child is freed from a system of rigid positions, but made a prisoner of a system of feelings and abstract principles.’’ 4 I’m sure that I speak for most of us when I say that ‘‘we’’ think the personal form and the elaborated code are surely preferable to the positional form and the condensed code, to a considerable degree because the personal form and the elaborated code would seem to foster in the child just the ‘‘individual initiative’’ that Mrs. Putnam contrasted to habit. Yet Douglas, well before anyone was talking about Foucault, is suggesting that the personal form of control is still control, and perhaps, in its own way, as coercive as the positional form. But let me back up a step with an example. A friend of mine was standing waiting for an elevator in his apartment building overhearing a conversation between a mother and a small child. The child was whining about something or other most persistently and the mother was calmly and extensively explaining why the child could not have what it wanted. The child persisted with rising whiny tones and the mother continued to reiterate all the reasons why not. My friend was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this apparently interminable palaver, when the mother finally said quite firmly and briefly: ‘‘Because I’m the mother and you’re the child, 3 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 26. 4 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 27.

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that’s why.’’ What this mother had done was to shift rather abruptly from the elaborated code to the condensed code. This example suggests that Bernstein’s two codes are not mutually exclusive and that all of us use both of them at least some of the time. But I would draw a further conclusion. No one ever starts with the elaborated code. All children begin with positional control and the condensed language code because personal control and the elaborated code require skills that no newborn has. The relation between mother and child, or perhaps we should better say between parent and child, is necessarily positional, because highly asymmetrical: an infant needs to be held, cared for, talked to or sung to, but cannot be addressed with elaborate appeals to feelings or ideas, at least not for quite a while. In fact, interaction with an infant looks suspiciously like habit, or its close relation, ritual. Linguists have discovered that in all cultures parents speak to infants in something they call ‘‘motherese,’’ a kind of simplified, highly repetitive, sing-song, partly nonsense, kind of language, one that communicates feeling rather than information. Each language has its own version of motherese, to be sure, but the basic characteristics seem to be quite universal. Nonverbal communication with an infant is probably even more important. Erik Erikson suggested that the ‘‘greeting ceremonial’’ between mother and child, marking the beginning of the infant’s day, is the root of all subsequent ritualization.5 Ellen Dissanayake has recently developed Erikson’s insight: I suggest that the biologically endowed sensitivities and competencies of mother-infant interaction were found by evolving human groups to be emotionally affecting and functionally effective when used and when further shaped and elaborated in culturally created ceremonial rituals where they served a similar purpose—to attune or synchronize, emotionally conjoin, and enculturate the participants. These unifying and pleasurable features (maintained in children’s play) made up a sort of behavioral reservoir from which human cultures could appropriate appealing and compelling components for communal ceremonial rituals that similarly promoted affiliation and congruence in adult social life.6

It may seem that I have wandered a bit, but I haven’t really. Infants become human because of habitual, nondiscursive, verbal and nonverbal 5 Erik H. Erikson, ‘‘The Development of Ritualization,’’ in Donald R. Cutler, ed., The Religious Situation, 1968 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 711–733. 6 Ellen Dissanayake, ‘‘Antecedents of the Temporal Arts in Early Mother-Infant Interaction,’’ in Nils L.Wallin, Björn Merker, and Steven Brown, eds., The Origins of Music (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2000), 397.

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interaction with adults, which is, in Basil Bernstein’s terms, necessarily positional in control and condensed in speech code. Dissanayake puts it well when she says the function of this kind of interaction is to ‘‘attune or synchronize, emotionally conjoin, and enculturate the participants,’’ or, we could say, to position them, to give them an identity relative to others, to provide them a social location. And that is what habit and its Siamese twin, ritual, are basically doing. Not only in infants, but in the infancy of the species, so to speak, as we now have reason to believe that language itself developed out of ritual, differentiated out of an initial fusion with music that has been called ‘‘musilanguage,’’ the motherese of the species if I may put it that way.7 So far I have been trying to insist, because of the low esteem we have these days for things like habit and ritual, that positional control and condensed code are rather basic to our humanity and cannot really be dispensed with. So why did we develop personal control and the elaborated code in the first place? Mary Douglas has two answers to this. One has to do with how strong social solidarity is in any given society. A society with clear boundaries and well-defined roles is positional by definition, and will almost certainly have a well-developed ritual system involving a condensed speech code, while societies with loose boundaries and not very well-defined roles require that people relate to each other on a more or less ad hoc basis, negotiating each encounter as they go along, with little taken for granted, and thus will be personal in control and elaborated in speech. She is at pains to argue that there is no overall historical tendency to go from condensed to elaborated—that is, tribal people cannot be presumed to have strong solidarity and well-developed rituals because we have instances such as the pygmies of central Africa who are both loosely bounded and largely free of ritual. Be that as it may, her primary interest is in contemporary society and the way in which the division of labor, which is for her the second source of personal control and elaborated code, differentially impacts working-class and middle-class families: It is essential to realize that the elaborated code is a product of the division of labour. The more highly differentiated the social system, the more specialised the decision-making roles—then the more the pressure for explicit channels of communication concerning a wide range of policies and their consequences. The demands of the industrial system are pressing hard now upon education to produce more and more verbally articulate people who will be promoted to entre-

7 Steven Brown, ‘‘The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution,’’ in Wallin et al., Origins of Music, 271–300.

The History of Habit 209 preneurial roles. By inference the condensed code will be found where these pressures are weakest [that is to say, among people whose jobs are both routine and require little verbal facility].8

Although Douglas finds the social basis for positional control and condensed code in some modern professions, the military for example, and perhaps engineering, most of the professions that increasingly dominate the higher echelons of our occupational world require people well versed in personal control and elaborated speech. The symbolic analysts, as Robert Reich characterizes our top professionals, are critical by their very job description. Douglas characterizes them as follows: Here are the people who live by using elaborated speech to review and revise existing categories of thought. To challenge received ideas is their very bread and butter. They (or should I say we?) practise a professional detachment toward any given pattern of experience. The more boldly and comprehensively they apply their minds to rethinking, the better their chances of professional success. Thus the value of their radical habit of thought is socially confirmed, and reinforced. For with the rise to professional eminence comes the geographical and social mobility that detaches them from their original community. With such validation, they are likely to raise their children in the habit of intellectual challenge and not to impose a positional control pattern.

Indeed, she goes on to say, they are likely to prefer personal forms of control and to focus on feelings rather than rules in child rearing. As a result, ‘‘ideas about morality and the self get detached from the social structure.’’ 9 It is not that children raised in such a milieu lack ethical ideas; sensitivity to the feelings of others can arouse strong ethical passions when others are observed to be suffering. The problem is that without some positional sense of social membership and without strong condensed symbols, ethical sensitivities may simply dissipate into good intentions without leading to sustained moral commitments. Douglas is very even-handed in her sense that we need both modes of relating. She affirms ‘‘the duty of everyone to preserve their vision from the constraints of the condensed code when judging any social situation. . . . [W]e must recognise that the value of particular social forms can only be judged objectively by the analytic power of the elaborated code.’’ 10 She is well aware that condensed codes in the context of positional authority 8 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 21. 9 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 31. 10 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 166.

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can be both authoritarian and unjust. ‘‘Do it because I said so,’’ is an example of condensed code that carries the implication of some, perhaps quite unpleasant, nonverbal sanction that will follow if the recipient of the command rejects it. Except under conditions of extreme emergency, an elaborated request for reasons is justified. Similarly the condensed statement ‘‘Little girls don’t do that’’ is open to challenge with respect to the whole taken-for-granted definition of gender. These are the kinds of reflection which lead ‘‘us’’ to presume that personal control and elaborated code are always preferable to the alternative. Yet Douglas warns us against precisely that conclusion: There is no person whose life does not need to unfold in a coherent symbolic system. The less organized the way of life, the less articulated the symbolic system may be. But social responsibility is no substitute for symbolic forms and indeed depends upon them.When ritualism is openly despised the philanthropic impulse is in danger of defeating itself. For it is an illusion to suppose that there can be organisation without symbolic expression. . . . Those who despise ritual, even at its most magical, are cherishing in the name of reason a very irrational concept of communication.11

So where does Douglas leave ‘‘us,’’ including her? She is not asking us, as some converts to various forms of fundamentalism are, to abandon our personal and elaborated selves and jump back into the positional box. No, she is asking us with all our critical rationality to see that we need both forms of control and both codes. She writes: In the long run, the argument of this book is that the elaborated code challenges its users to turn round on themselves and inspect their values, to reject some of them, and to resolve to cherish positional forms of control and communication wherever these are available. . . . No one would deliberately choose the elaborated code and the personal control system who is aware of the seeds of alienation it contains.12

But the question remains, in what sense can we, products of personal families and modern educational and occupational systems, ‘‘deliberately choose’’ aspects of positional control and condensed code? In other words, maybe Mrs. Putnam had it right: it’s either habit or individual initiative, but not both. Still, I will argue that some dialectic, some complementarity, must be sought because giving up either alternative would exact too high 11 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 50. 12 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 157.

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a price. I think we know the price of going back into the box of some kind of closed traditionalism. Can we explore further the implications of Douglas’s warning about trying to live in the elaborated code alone? Let me suggest that while the elaborated code gives us information, the condensed code and only the condensed code gives us meaning, and that in the end we cannot live by information alone.We have all heard about the information superhighway and more and more of us are spending a good deal of time on it. Today we are in the midst of an information explosion. I have heard it said that the world’s knowledge doubles every two years, and I am not prepared to doubt it, though I don’t know how that is quantified. But of this I am sure: the world’s meaning is not doubling every two years. Indeed we might be tempted to argue that the more information the less meaning. But if, as I have argued, meaning is dependent on the condensed code, we might begin to understand that though the word is frequently used, meaning is not nearly as central to our present concerns as is information. After all, meaning doesn’t tell us something new, it seems just to be saying the same old thing, though in a deeper understanding it makes sense of the new. Meaning is iterative, not cumulative. If someone in an intimate relation says to the other ‘‘Do you love me?’’ and the other replies ‘‘Why do you ask? I told you that yesterday,’’ we can say that he doesn’t get it. The request was not for information but for the reiteration of meaning. Or to use Douglas’s terms, the question was in condensed code but the answer was in elaborated code. Or another way of making the point would be if someone said, ‘‘Why do we have to say the Lord’s Prayer this Sunday?— we already said it last Sunday.’’ Again we would say the person is using the wrong code. The Lord’s Prayer is not information that we can forget once we’ve heard it; it is an expression of the deepest commitment of the community which uses it, and its reiteration is not redundant but a renewed affirmation of meaning, an invocation of a total context. I want to turn to an example of the use of the Lord’s Prayer to suggest how different meaning is from information. The example comes from a doctoral dissertation that I helped supervise some years ago. The writer of the dissertation had served as the pastor of an urban California congregation. He wrote: A woman’s mother was near death, but she didn’t have a church home. She asked her neighbor, a member of the congregation I served, if she belonged to a church. The neighbor gave her my name and I visited her. I met her at the door and the conversation went something like this. ‘‘I don’t know why I called you, but my

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mother is near death and I thought maybe we should have someone from the church here.’’ She invited me into her home and we talked about her mother. I found out that the mother and daughter had been involved with a church many years ago. Then I suggested that we go into her mother’s room and have a prayer. The woman suggested that we have the prayer in the living room because her mother had been in a coma for many days and couldn’t participate. But I urged that we go in the room anyway. I offered a prayer and then asked if she knew the ‘‘Lord’s Prayer.’’ I invited her to join me. We had barely said, ‘‘Our Father who art in heaven,’’ when her mother joined us through the rest of the prayer. She came out of her coma for a few days before she died and the mother and daughter had significant conversation.13

Here familiar, powerful, we can certainly say habitual, words reached into the mother’s body and pulled her back into consciousness, at least for a few days. No amount of elaborated code talk would have done that. Experiences of ritual, such as this example, don’t tell us anything about specifics, but they remind us of the whole of which we are a part, and are thus positional in Douglas’s terms. In an information culture, where only what is new and what is useful is interesting, ritual is incomprehensible. I noticed a full page ad in the October 2, 2000, New Yorker which read: ‘‘Fact: almost everything you learn today will be obsolete in 12 months.’’ But it is precisely because ritual reiterates what in one sense we already know but in another we will never know enough that it will not be obsolete in twelve months. If I am right, then ritual is a form of the condensed code which is the basis of culture, and of our humanity, and we can’t avoid it. Ritual persists in the interstices of our lives—otherwise how could we live?—but ritual practices as central cultural concerns are pushed to the margins in contemporary society. Just how little understood ritual is today can be illustrated with the words of our president, or some would say, our resident. When George W. Bush was asked to explain the difference between the Episcopal Church in which he was raised and the Methodist Church to which he now belongs, he said: The Episcopal Church is very ritualistic and it has a kind of repetition to the service. It’s the same service, basically, over and over again. Different sermon, of course. The Methodist Church is lower key. We don’t have the kneeling. And

13 Mons Teig, ‘‘Liturgy as Fusion of Horizons: A Hermeneutical Approach Based on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Theory of Application’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate Theological Union, 1991), 295–296.

The History of Habit 213 I’m sure there is some kind of heavy doctrinal difference as well, which I’m not sophisticated enough to explain to you. (Houston Post, October 2, 1994, A1)

It is just the repetition, the ‘‘same service, basically over and over again,’’ as Bush so charmingly puts it, which links the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer service to the continuous liturgical history of the church and even to the liturgical practice of ancient Israel: it is just this repetition—repetition of the Gloria, the Creed, the Sanctus, the Our Father, and so forth— that guarantees it will not be obsolete in twelve months. Hegel speaks of an old man who utters the same creed as the child, but for whom it signifies his whole life. The child in contrast may understand the religious content of the creed. But all of life and the whole world still exist outside it.14 It is that lifelong repetition in the context of a life lived that has made the difference. Speaking of the creed, let me give another example of how the condensed code and the elaborated code can clash. An old Greek Orthodox professor was offering a course on the Nicene Creed at Yale Divinity School. At the beginning of the class, a student raised his hand and said, ‘‘But this is not my creed.’’ The professor nodded and proceeded with his opening lecture. Toward the end of the hour the student raised his hand again in a more agitated way. ‘‘But professor,’’ he said, ‘‘you don’t understand, this is not my creed.’’ The professor mildly replied, ‘‘Of course it isn’t; it’s the church’s creed. Just keep on saying it and you’ll eventually understand.’’ Here we see another example of Aristotle’s point about youth. The creed is a habit the young man hasn’t yet formed. Further, growing up in a personal family and adept at the elaborated code, he is eager to express his disdain for a creed at which, on his own individual initiative, he hasn’t personally arrived. The professor, however, is telling him that the creed is positional, not personal—it expresses membership in a body that was here before the young man was born and will be here after he dies. Further it is in condensed code, and precisely for that reason its meaning isn’t obvious. That’s why he is teaching a course on the creed. But a course on the creed? Surely a course is elaborated code, even if the creed itself is condensed code. Perhaps the two are not always in a zero-sum relation, perhaps they sometimes need each other. I will return to this issue later. But first I want to talk a bit more about the social context, for we’re not just dealing with problems of language, but of society, of how language is 14 Paraphrased from Emil L. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (1967; Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 160.

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situated in society. The professor was presuming a positional understanding of society: for him there is such a thing as the church, the Body of Christ and a foretaste of the Kingdom of God, and it has a prior claim on its members. For the young man, there is first of all free agency: any association with the church will have to be completely voluntary and on his own terms. What we have here is not just a clash of language codes but a clash of two different understandings of society. We have already seen Mary Douglas noting that in the modern occupational system, especially its upper echelons where professional expertise and the skills of verbal criticism are highly rewarded, positional loyalties are not only not valued, they are hardly understood. Since Douglas wrote, the trends she noted have become ever more pervasive. A good recent discussion of these trends is Robert Wuthnow’s Loose Connections, a book whose very title expresses the problem.15 In America, and increasingly in other developed nations, people aren’t plugged in very tightly to groups and associations: they may volunteer a few hours a week for a while, but they won’t join an organization which will expect their loyalty and commitment for the long haul, or at least they are much more reluctant to than once they were. Even commitment to marriage and family, leave aside job and vocation, are much more fragile, much more dependent on individual mood, than they used to be. Loose connections is a powerful metaphor, but Wuthnow pairs the metaphor of loose connections with another metaphor that partly explains it: porous institutions. Porous institutions are ones that don’t hold individuals very securely; porous institutions are ones that leak. In a world of porous institutions it is hard to have any connections that are not loose. One thinks of the family: whereas in 1960 one in four marriages would fail, today one in two will. And a lot of consequences follow from that. The fastest growing category of households is those with one member, which now amount to 25 percent of all households. Families, as we know, do not necessarily consist of two parents and their children. Husbands and wives drift in and out, often bringing children from a former marriage with them, resulting in what are called ‘‘blended families.’’ However successfully families are coping with these conditions, there is always the uncertainty: will this marriage last? will my parents divorce? But, we might ask, doesn’t religious involvement, so much higher in the United States than in most other advanced nations, give our people 15 Robert Wuthnow, Loose Connections (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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stronger connections and less porous institutions? But to what extent are the religious communities in America, the churches, synagogues, and mosques, still sufficiently strong as communities to understand the condensed code of their own traditions, or to what extent has the world in which we live so invaded and eviscerated those communities that they have difficulty understanding their own core meanings? I say this because the triumph of information over meaning is not simply a cultural reality, but is, as I have been arguing, rooted in social reality. The question is whether America is a collection of individuals who, if they are religious at all, are embarked on their own private spiritual journeys and intent on furnishing their souls with whatever attractive religious antiques they may gather from whatever tradition may be at hand, or does the United States still contain communities that think of themselves as the Body of Christ, or the Children of Israel, or the Community of the Prophet? If the former, then a universal bazaar of religious information available to individuals to choose from is all we need. If the latter, then it is a matter of beliefs and practices embedded in a continuing solidary community that it is increasingly difficult to maintain in our kind of society. But the very fact that Web sites devoted to religion are rapidly proliferating is suggestive that generations less and less in touch with meaning as opposed to information are nonetheless hungry for meaning even when they don’t know what it is. As loyalty weakens and the routines and rituals that make it real disappear, the idea of loyalty still exerts an attraction. In a society with an ever fainter grasp on the reality of community, the word ‘‘community’’ is still, except among some academics, widely popular. The trouble is that younger Americans, late boomers and Generation Xers especially, can’t imagine infringing their autonomy. Freedom is still the highest good. So they want somehow to combine choice and commitment in ways that may be performatively impossible. According to David Brooks in his book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There,16 which describes the bohemian bourgeoisie that is setting the tone of our younger cultural elite, many in this group are trying to find a way to, as he puts it, ‘‘smoosh together choice and commitment’’ in highly problematic ways. He quotes a rabbi whom he interviewed in Montana as saying what we need is ‘‘flexidoxy.’’ The question is, how would flexidoxy work sociologically? Obviously this loosening hold on meaning and its social correlates can16 David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

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not be the whole story, although the trends I have described affect Protestants and Catholics, Evangelicals and non-Evangelicals, Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims, at least in America. Communities for which rituals and texts in condensed code remain central will continue to exist, even if their numbers decline, but what will they look like? I have recently read a book describing contemporary American Jewry by Samuel Freedman who argues that what he calls the orthodox model is winning out.17 Secular Jews are simply gone—the social and cultural context that has sustained them in their identity so far is rapidly evaporating, and if they are religious at all it is apt to take the form of the do-it-yourself spirituality that appeals so widely to younger Americans. Jewish identity will survive only in clearly structured religious communities emphasizing Hebrew, daily Torah reading, and religious practices, perhaps including keeping kosher. The author is not saying that all Jewish groups will become ideologically like the ultraorthodox of today. Far from it: some of these groups will continue to ordain women, bless gay unions, and support a variety of progressive causes which would be anathema to the ultraorthodox. But they will look more orthodox because their practice will be more orthodox. To many people I know, Jews and non-Jews alike, that is a scary prospect. Let me see if I can make it a little less scary. We have already heard Mary Douglas urging us to ‘‘cherish’’ the condensed code wherever it is available. But how can it be available to us moderns? Wouldn’t believing the Nicene Creed, for example, require us to ‘‘sacrifice the intellect,’’ to accept sacred authority without question? The best answer I know to this question comes from Paul Ricoeur, who shows us that through interpretation, that is, through a kind of elaborated code, perhaps the kind of elaborated code the Yale Divinity School professor was using in his course on the creed, we can hear again, that is hear the condensed code. So the two codes are not simply in a zero-sum relation. We can move back and forth between them. But how? Ricoeur says that in our age ‘‘when language has become more precise, more univocal, more technical in a word, more suited to those integral formalizations which are called precisely symbolic logic, it is in this very age of discourse that we want to recharge our language, that we want to start again from the fullness of language.’’ 18 Ricoeur’s project is the ‘‘restoration of myth as symbol. . . . [W]e are,’’ he says, ‘‘in every way children 17 Samuel G. Freedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 338ff. 18 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (1967; Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 349.

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of criticism, and we seek to go beyond criticism by means of criticism, by a criticism that is no longer reductive but restorative.’’ By recognizing myth as myth we can regain contact with the fundamental symbols; they can live again for us, in a new way. Does that mean [he asks] that we could go back to a primitive naïveté? Not at all. In every way, something has been lost, irremediably lost: immediacy of belief. But if we can no longer live the great symbolisms of the sacred in accordance with the original belief in them, we can, we modern men, aim at a second naïveté in and through criticism. In short, it is by interpreting that we can hear again.19

But this hearing again, this second naïveté, isn’t so easy. It’s not one more do-it-yourself trick. It requires a turn in consciousness, even a kind of conversion, for it requires us to give up the ego-centered position of the observer, of the collector of information about things, and let the symbol speak to us ‘‘at the heart of the being’’ in which we move, exist and will. For, as Ricoeur says, ‘‘The symbol gives reason to think that the Cogito is within being and not vice-versa.’’ Even as we separate ourselves from the objects of our thought in thinking with the elaborated code, if I may return to Douglas’s language, the symbol reminds us that we are still within being and not outside it, that is, at the deepest level we live in the condensed code.20 Enormously helpful though Ricoeur is, we need to put what he says in sociological perspective, for language and society entail each other. Let me give an example from another contemporary philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre. In his recent book Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre points out that our philosophical tradition, going all the way back to Aristotle, assumes the standpoint of an independent, autonomous, adult male. But the truth of our condition is that we come into the world dependent, we end our days dependent, and are often, more often than we like to admit, dependent all during our lives.21 But dependency is by definition positional. We have to define ourselves in relation to others because we need them. The elaborated code requires that we see ourselves, or pretend to, as entirely apart from the world, totally free to pursue our own interests and express our own feelings. What I am trying to say is that for us to hear the symbols again, to feel at home in the condensed code, we would 19 Ricoeur, Symbolism, 350–351. 20 Ricoeur, Symbolism, 356. 21 Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago: Open Court, 1999).

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have to give up the illusion of absolute autonomy and recognize that we are related to, even dependent on, others. Let me give a fairly basic example: In the traditional view of marriage husband and wife become one flesh. Indeed Genesis 2:24, says, ‘‘Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.’’ That is positional control and condensed code with a vengeance, and, not surprisingly, moderns find it very hard to take. I have been to weddings in Berkeley where husband and wife becoming one flesh has been strongly and explicitly disavowed. In one such ceremony the man and woman were sent into two different rooms for a moment to symbolize that they are separate people and will continue to be separate after the marriage. And, of course there is a good reason. When people said that man and wife become one flesh, whose flesh did they have in mind? (Although, actually, in the passage in Genesis the man cleaves to his wife, so we might imagine that it is her flesh that he becomes.) All right, fair enough. If positional control and condensed code have been used to affirm gender inequality, and who could deny that they have, why not jettison the whole idea of one flesh? Because gender inequality is not all that that ancient symbolism affirms. And because, we, children of criticism, can reaffirm the symbol critically, disavowing the inequality while affirming the solidarity. The price of giving up the symbolism of one flesh altogether is high: if we do that we are tempted to believe that leaving a marriage is no different from entering one; we can speak of a ‘‘starter marriage’’ or a marriage with ‘‘term limits,’’ humorously of course, but there is a lot of truth in humor. But, upon reflection, if we really want to get married, and the great majority of Americans still do (even many gays who aren’t allowed to), then we may not really like the implications of the idea of marriage as an easily broken contract. It was Hegel who said, ‘‘Marriage is not a contractual relationship. On the contrary, though marriage begins in contract, it is precisely a contract to transcend the standpoint of contract.’’ 22 In other words Hegel is saying marriage is a contract to enter a noncontractual relationship. I’m not saying, and neither is Hegel, that divorce is never justified, but that it is a last resort, because marriage is a solidarity so central, not only to the couple but to their children and everyone around them, that it is not lightly to be tossed aside. As Mary Douglas has pointed out, strong social solidarity is almost always symbolized by body images. That husband 22 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), para. 163, p. 112.

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and wife become one flesh is not too strong an image for what marriage really is. I think the same logic applies to membership in a religious body. Joining a church or synagogue because it is conveniently located, or only while one’s children are growing up, is not really joining any more than a starter marriage is really a marriage. If flexidoxy means commitment only as long as it ‘‘meets my needs,’’ then it can’t be the basis of strong communities or provide the meaning that individuals desire. Earlier I spoke of communities that still think of themselves as the Body of Christ, or the Children of Israel, or the Community of the Prophet, and suggested, following Samuel Freedman, that they are in some sense rediscovering orthodoxy. What I am thinking of is not fundamentalism, which is an uncritical traditionalism combined with an uncritical modernism, and originates in bad conscience, in an effort to repress the challenge of modernity, not respond to it. Rather, I want to describe a critical orthodoxy, I could even say a radical orthodoxy, based on a critical reappropriation of the condensed code and enabling strong and lasting religious communities to nurture mature and responsible believers. And if religious communities decide to choose critical orthodoxy rather than flexidoxy or fundamentalism, then that choice would involve not only rethinking religious community but trying to reform the environing society as well. Religious communities do not, any more than marriages and families, exist in a vacuum. Surrounded by a society of loose connections and porous institutions it will always be difficult for them to sustain solidarity and meaning. Neither ‘‘family values’’ nor ‘‘community’’ alone will solve the problems of modern society. Only a thoroughgoing redirection of the whole modern project will make the future livable for human beings. Let me conclude by returning to Emily Putnam’s course description and the problems she raises at the end of it, that is ‘‘to appraise the amount of excessive and undesirable habit in thought and action generally connected with such concepts as nationalism, religion, the status of women, etc.’’ If I were giving this talk in 1919 I, too, would probably be advocating ‘‘individual initiative’’ as the answer to excessive and undesirable habit in these spheres. But after eighty years of individual initiative becoming ever more dominant in every sphere I have tried to make the case that habit, which I have explicated variously as positional control, condensed code, ritual, and meaning, also has its place and may be the necessary foundation for any genuine and sustained individual initiative. With respect to nationalism, religion, and the status of women we know that uncritical and habitual affirmation of the status quo in these spheres has often legitimated injus-

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tice or worse. Criticism and the elaborated code that makes it possible is absolutely necessary if we are to overcome ancient and modern evils. But criticism has to be criticism of something. Criticism alone cannot give us solidarity or meaning. Rather, criticism, like appetite in Shakespeare, can become an universal wolf that in the end eats up itself. In 2001 it would be well to realize that our critical elaborated code and our personal freedom, good as they are in themselves, cannot survive without structures of solidarity and meaning. In short, the history of habit cannot lead to the abandonment of habit altogether, but to a renewed understanding that the right kind of habit is the foundation of a good form of life.

Part II AMERICAN RELIGION

The essay ‘‘Civil Religion in America,’’ originally published in 1967, opens this section as chapter 9. It began a debate over the term ‘‘civil religion’’ and what it pointed to that continued for many years, even to the present, although the term does not appear in the chapters in this section after chapter 10, ‘‘Religion and the Legitimation of the American Republic,’’ published in 1978.1 The original essay emerged from the midst of the national debate over the Vietnam War and was intended to call upon resources in the American tradition that would provide a critical perspective on the issues of the day. The term ‘‘civil religion,’’ however, took on a life of its own, one that distracted attention from the substantive issues for which it was originally intended. Perhaps the problem arose from giving a name to something (for example, the fact that all presidents had used the word ‘‘God’’ in their inaugural addresses) that, up until then, had been taken for granted so much so that it had not needed a name. That by the late sixties it could no longer be taken for granted probably gave the ensuing debate a sharpness that, had it remained nameless, it might not have had. The initial essay was the application of sociological common sense, at least in the tradition of Durkheim: any lasting social group will have a way of expressing its identity that will be, sociologically speaking, ‘‘religious.’’ That essay tried to specify the form that the expression of religious identity took in the American republic and something of its historical development. It was not intended to celebrate the civil religion but to describe it and to see if it had resources for the work of national self-criticism. The argument of ‘‘Civil Religion in America’’ was developed at book length in The Broken Covenant, delivered as lectures in 1973 and first published in 1975. But it was not until ‘‘Religion and the Legitimation of the American Republic’’ that the views of those who attacked as well as those who defended the idea of an American civil religion were discussed at length. That essay defends the use of the term ‘‘civil religion’’ as productive of a useful discussion, but its main burden was an effort to show that 1 For the reasons why the term was dropped in subsequent work, see Bellah, ‘‘Comment on James A. Mathisen, ‘Twenty Years after Bellah,’ ’’ (1989).

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ambiguities about the place of religion in American life reflected deep ambiguities about the nature of the American regime, ambiguities that remain unresolved to this day. The tension between utilitarian individualism and concern for the common good, first sharply defined in that essay, recurs as a theme in many chapters of this volume as well as in the collective works, Habits of the Heart and The Good Society.2 Chapter 11, ‘‘New Religious Consciousness and the Crisis in Modernity,’’ was one of two concluding chapters in a book reporting on a study of new religious groups in the San Francisco Bay Area, carried out by students and faculty in the early 1970s. It suggests that the new religious movements there studied were in part protests against the hegemony of utilitarian individualism and in part expressions of it. Readers interested in recapturing the atmosphere of the immediate aftermath of the cultural revolution of the 1960s might still find the volume from which this chapter comes to be of interest.3 ‘‘The New Religious Consciousness and the Crisis in Modernity’’ opened up the question of religious pluralism or diversity that has been a concern of much subsequent work, including Habits of the Heart, which depicted multiple moral languages coexisting and contesting with one another in the cultural conversation and argument of American public life. Among the chapters included in this section, chapter 13, ‘‘Citizenship, Diversity, and the Common Good,’’ and chapter 14, ‘‘Is There a Common American Culture?’’ are particularly concerned with diversity in the forms of American religious life, real and imagined. Chapter 15, ‘‘Flaws in the Protestant Code,’’ makes explicit what was implied in the chapters just mentioned, that Protestantism is the central American religious tradition, that its assumptions are expressed in many features of American culture that we now assume are secular, and that Protestantism has influenced the other major American religious groups to such an extent that the degree of diversity as opposed to homogeneity can be called into question. ‘‘Flaws in the Protestant Code’’ also argues that, though Protestantism contributed to many of the most positive achievements of American society, to 2 Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton, Habits of the Heart (1985; 2nd ed. 1996); and Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton, The Good Society (1991). 3 Charles Y. Glock and Robert N. Bellah, eds., The New Religious Consciousness (1976). Also relevant is Steven M. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

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the degree that it has encouraged radical individualism it may be a source of present difficulties. The discussion of the religious dimension of American culture in all the chapters in part II involves cultural criticism that only deepens with the more recent essays. The uniqueness of the United States among advanced industrial societies in its lack of a national health care system, its toleration of an unusually high degree of poverty and an increasing income polarization, are linked in these chapters in part to our religious heritage. In the most recent essays, chapter 16, ‘‘The New American Empire,’’ and chapter 17, ‘‘God and King,’’ the connection between that religious heritage and America’s stance in the world is also suggested. If it is true, as these chapters argue, that the United States has become the greatest empire the world has ever seen, then the question as to how religious believers are to live in such an empire has to be raised. From the time of the publication of ‘‘Civil Religion in America,’’ Stanley Hauerwas, for one, has been unhappy with the idea of civil religion, holding that Christians should take primary responsibility for the health of the church and above all should not identify church and nation. The chapters included in this section suggest a movement toward an ever gloomier view of the American project, though they never abandon all hope for it.4 The choice between the daunting attempt to reform an empire and the effort to build a countersociety within it, one that faced early Christians from the time of Constantine, seems to grow ever starker for all religious believers, indeed for all ethically concerned citizens, in America today. The chapters in this section attempt to give some of the background against which such a choice must be made.

4 For a sense of the continuing debate between Hauerwas and Bellah, see Hauerwas’s chapter and Bellah’s response in Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, eds., Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): Hauerwas’s chapter, ‘‘On Being a Christian and an American,’’ 224–235, and Bellah’s response, ‘‘Epilogue,’’ 255–276.

9 Civil Religion in America

While some have argued that Christianity is the national faith, and others that church and synagogue celebrate only the generalized religion of ‘‘the American Way of Life,’’ few have realized that there actually exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion in America. This essay argues not only that there is such a thing, but also that this religion—or perhaps better, this religious dimension—has its own seriousness and integrity and requires the same care in understanding that any other religion does.1 [First published in Dædalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 1–21. Used by permission. Originally written for a Dædalus conference on American religion in May 1966, it was reprinted with comments and a rejoinder in The Religious Situation: 1968, where I defended myself against the accusation of supporting an idolatrous worship of the American nation. I think it should be clear from the text that I conceive of the central tradition of the American civil religion not as a form of national selfworship but as the subordination of the nation to ethical principles that transcend it in terms of which it should be judged. I am convinced that every nation and every people come to some form of religious self-understanding whether the critics like it or not. Rather than simply denounce what seems in any case inevitable, it seems more responsible to seek within the civil religious tradition for those critical principles which undercut the ever present danger of national self-idolization.] 1 Why something so obvious should have escaped serious analytical attention is itself an interesting problem. Part of the reason is probably the controversial nature of the subject. From the earliest years of the nineteenth century, conservative religious and political groups have argued that Christianity is, in fact, the national religion. Some of them from time to time and as recently as the 1950s proposed constitutional amendments that would explicitly recognize the sovereignty of Christ. In defending the doctrine of separation of church and state, opponents of such groups have denied that the national polity has, intrinsically, anything to do with religion at all. The moderates on this issue have insisted that the American state has taken a permissive and indeed supportive attitude toward religious groups (tax exemptions, etc.), thus favoring religion but still missing the positive institutionalization with which I am concerned. But part of the reason this issue has been left in obscurity is certainly due to the peculiarly Western concept of ‘‘religion’’ as denoting a single type of collectivity of which an individual can be a member of one and only one at a time. The Durkheimian notion that every group has a reli-

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The Kennedy Inaugural John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address of January 20, 1961, serves as an example and a clue with which to introduce this complex subject. That address began: We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom—symbolizing an end as well as a beginning—signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago. The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and to abolish all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forbears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.

And it concluded: Finally, whether you are citizens of America or of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice that we shall ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.

These are the three places in this brief address in which Kennedy mentioned the name of God. If we could understand why he mentioned God, the way in which he did, and what he meant to say in those three references, we would understand much about American civil religion. But this is not a simple or obvious task, and American students of religion would probably differ widely in their interpretation of these passages. Let us consider first the placing of the three references. They occur in the two opening paragraphs and in the closing paragraph, thus providing a sort of frame for more concrete remarks that form the middle part of the speech. Looking beyond this particular speech, we would find that similar references to God are almost invariably to be found in the pronouncements of American presidents on solemn occasions, though usually not in the working messages that the president sends to Congress on various gious dimension, which would be seen as obvious in southern or eastern Asia, is foreign to us. This obscures the recognition of such dimensions in our society.

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concrete issues. How, then, are we to interpret this placing of references to God? It might be argued that the passages quoted reveal the essentially irrelevant role of religion in the very secular society that is America. The placing of the references in this speech as well as in public life generally indicates that religion ‘‘has only a ceremonial significance’’; it gets only a sentimental nod that serves largely to placate the more unenlightened members of the community before a discussion of the really serious business with which religion has nothing whatever to do. A cynical observer might even say that an American president has to mention God or risk losing votes. A semblance of piety is merely one of the unwritten qualifications for the office, a bit more traditional than but not essentially different from the present-day requirement of a pleasing television personality. But we know enough about the function of ceremonial and ritual in various societies to make us suspicious of dismissing something as unimportant because it is ‘‘only a ritual.’’ What people say on solemn occasions need not be taken at face value, but it is often indicative of deep-seated values and commitments that are not made explicit in the course of everyday life. Following this line of argument, it is worth considering whether the very special placing of the references to God in Kennedy’s address may not reveal something rather important and serious about religion in American life. It might be countered that the very way in which Kennedy made his references reveals the essentially vestigial place of religion today. He did not refer to any religion in particular. He did not refer to Jesus Christ, or to Moses, or to the Christian church; certainly he did not refer to the Catholic Church. In fact, his only reference was to the concept of God, a word that almost all Americans can accept but that means so many different things to so many different people that it is almost an empty sign. Is this not just another indication that in America religion is considered vaguely to be a good thing, but that people care so little about it that it has lost any content whatever? Isn’t Dwight Eisenhower reported to have said, ‘‘Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith— and I don’t care what it is,’’ 2 and isn’t that a complete negation of any real religion? These questions are worth pursuing because they raise the issue of how 2 Dwight D. Eisenhower, as quoted in Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 97.

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civil religion relates to the political society on the one hand and to private religious organization on the other. President Kennedy was a Christian, more specifically a Catholic Christian. Thus his general references to God do not mean that he lacked a specific religious commitment. But why, then, did he not include some remark to the effect that Christ is the Lord of the world or some indication of respect for the Catholic Church? He did not because these are matters of his own private religious belief and of his own particular church; they are not matters relevant in any direct way to the conduct of his public office. Others with different religious views and commitments to different churches or denominations are equally qualified participants in the political process. The principle of separation of church and state guarantees the freedom of religious belief and association, but at the same time clearly segregates the religious sphere, which is considered to be essentially private, from the political one. Considering the separation of church and state, how is a president justified in using the word ‘‘God’’ at all? The answer is that the separation of church and state has not denied the political realm a religious dimension. Although matters of personal religious belief, worship, and association are considered to be strictly private affairs, there are, at the same time, certain common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share. These have played a crucial role in the development of American institutions and still provide a religious dimension for the whole fabric of American life, including the political sphere. This public religious dimension is expressed in a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that I am calling American civil religion. The inauguration of a president is an important ceremonial event in this religion. It reaffirms, among other things, the religious legitimation of the highest political authority. Let us look more closely at what Kennedy actually said. First, he said, ‘‘I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forbears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago.’’ The oath is the oath of office, including the acceptance of the obligation to uphold the Constitution. He swears it before the people (you) and God. Beyond the Constitution, then, the president’s obligation extends not only to the people but to God. In American political theory, sovereignty rests, of course, with the people, but implicitly, and often explicitly, the ultimate sovereignty has been attributed to God. This is the meaning of the motto ‘‘In God we trust,’’ as well as the inclusion of the phrase ‘‘under God’’ in the pledge of allegiance.What difference does it make that sovereignty belongs to God? Though the will of the people as expressed in the majority vote is care-

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fully institutionalized as the operative source of political authority, it is deprived of an ultimate significance. The will of the people is not itself the criterion of right and wrong. There is a higher criterion in terms of which this will can be judged; it is possible that the people may be wrong. The president’s obligation extends to the higher criterion. When Kennedy says that ‘‘the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God,’’ he is stressing this point again. It does not matter whether the state is the expression of the will of an autocratic monarch or of the ‘‘people’’; the rights of man are more basic than any political structure and provide a point of revolutionary leverage from which any state structure may be radically altered. That is the basis for his reassertion of the revolutionary significance of America. But the religious dimension of political life as recognized by Kennedy not only provides a grounding for the rights of man that makes any form of political absolutism illegitimate, it also provides a transcendent goal for the political process. This is implied in his final words that ‘‘here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.’’ What he means here is, I think, more clearly spelled out in a previous paragraph, the wording of which, incidentally, has a distinctly biblical ring: Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, ‘‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation’’—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

The whole address can be understood as only the most recent statement of a theme that lies very deep in the American tradition, namely the obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God’s will on earth. This was the motivating spirit of those who founded America, and it has been present in every generation since. Just below the surface throughout Kennedy’s inaugural address, it becomes explicit in the closing statement that God’s work must be our own. That this very activist and noncontemplative conception of the fundamental religious obligation, which has been historically associated with the Protestant position, should be enunciated so clearly in the first major statement of the first Catholic president seems to underline how deeply established it is in the American outlook. Let us now consider the form and history of the civil religious tradition in which Kennedy was speaking.

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The Idea of a Civil Religion The phrase ‘‘civil religion’’ is, of course, Rousseau’s. In chapter 8, book 4 of The Social Contract, he outlines the simple dogmas of the civil religion: the existence of God, the life to come, the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice, and the exclusion of religious intolerance. All other religious opinions are outside the cognizance of the state and may be freely held by citizens.While the phrase ‘‘civil religion’’ was not used, to the best of my knowledge, by the founding fathers, and I am certainly not arguing for the particular influence of Rousseau, it is clear that similar ideas, as part of the cultural climate of the late eighteenth century, were to be found among the Americans. For example, Benjamin Franklin writes in his autobiography, I never was without some religious principles. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that he made the world and govern’d it by his Providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing of good to men; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded either here or hereafter. These I esteemed the essentials of every religion; and, being to be found in all the religions we had in our country, I respected them all, tho’ with different degrees of respect, as I found them more or less mix’d with other articles, which, without any tendency to inspire, promote or confirm morality, serv’d principally to divide us, and make us unfriendly to one another.

It is easy to dispose of this sort of position as essentially utilitarian in relation to religion. In Washington’s farewell address (though the words may be Hamilton’s) the utilitarian aspect is quite explicit: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man ought to cherish and respect them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the

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But there is every reason to believe that religion, particularly the idea of God, played a constitutive role in the thought of the early American statesmen. Kennedy’s inaugural pointed to the religious aspect of the Declaration of Independence, and it might be well to look at that document a bit more closely. There are four references to God. The first speaks of the ‘‘Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’’ that entitle any people to be independent. The second is the famous statement that all men ‘‘are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights.’’ Here Jefferson is locating the fundamental legitimacy of the new nation in a conception of ‘‘higher law’’ that is itself based on both classical natural law and biblical religion. The third is an appeal to ‘‘the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions,’’ and the last indicates ‘‘a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.’’ In these last two references, a biblical God of history who stands in judgment over the world is indicated. The intimate relation of these religious notions with the self-conception of the new republic is indicated by the frequency of their appearance in early official documents. For example, we find in Washington’s first inaugural address of April 30, 1789: It would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every defect, that His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States a Government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes, and may enable every instrument employed in its administration to execute with success the functions allotted to his charge. No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of man more than those of the United States. Every step by which we have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token providential agency. . . . The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained. . . . The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment intrusted to the hands of the American people.

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Nor did these religious sentiments remain merely the personal expression of the president. At the request of both Houses of Congress, Washington proclaimed on October 3 of that same first year as president that November 26 should be ‘‘a day of public thanksgiving and prayer,’’ the first Thanksgiving Day under the Constitution. The words and acts of the founding fathers, especially the first few presidents, shaped the form and tone of the civil religion as it has been maintained ever since. Though much is selectively derived from Christianity, this religion is clearly not itself Christianity. For one thing, neither Washington nor Adams nor Jefferson mentions Christ in his inaugural address; nor do any of the subsequent presidents, although not one of them fails to mention God.3 The God of the civil religion is not only rather ‘‘unitarian,’’ he is also on the austere side, much more related to order, law, and right than to salvation and love. Even though he is somewhat deist in cast, he is by no means simply a watchmaker God. He is actively interested and involved in history, with a special concern for America. Here the analogy has much less to do with natural law than with ancient Israel; the equation of America with Israel in the idea of the ‘‘American Israel’’ is not infrequent.4 What was implicit in the words of Washington already quoted be3 God is mentioned or referred to in all inaugural addresses but Washington’s second, which is a very brief (two paragraphs) and perfunctory acknowledgment. It is not without interest that the actual word ‘‘God’’ does not appear until Monroe’s second inaugural, March 5, 1821. In his first inaugural,Washington refers to God as ‘‘that Almighty Being who rules the universe,’’ ‘‘Great Author of every public and private good,’’ ‘‘Invisible Hand,’’ and ‘‘benign Parent of the Human Race.’’ John Adams refers to God as ‘‘Providence,’’ ‘‘Being who is supreme over all,’’ ‘‘Patron of Order,’’ ‘‘Fountain of Justice,’’ and ‘‘Protector in all ages of the world of virtuous liberty.’’ Jefferson speaks of ‘‘that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe,’’ and ‘‘that Being in whose hands we are.’’ Madison speaks of ‘‘that Almighty Being whose power regulates the destiny of nations,’’ and ‘‘Heaven.’’ Monroe uses ‘‘Providence’’ and ‘‘the Almighty’’ in his first inaugural and finally ‘‘Almighty God’’ in his second. See Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States from George Washington 1789 to Harry S. Truman 1949, 82d Congress, 2d Session, House Document no. 540 (1952). 4 For example, Abiel Abbot, pastor of the First Church in Haverhill, Massachusetts, delivered a Thanksgiving sermon in 1799, ‘‘Traits of Resemblance in the People of the United States of America to Ancient Israel,’’ in which he said, ‘‘It has been often remarked that the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel, than any other nation upon the globe. Hence ‘Our American Israel’ is a term frequently used; and common consent allows it apt and proper.’’ In Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 665.

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comes explicit in Jefferson’s second inaugural when he said: ‘‘I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.’’ Europe is Egypt; America, the promised land. God has led his people to establish a new sort of social order that shall be a light unto all the nations.5 This theme, too, has been a continuous one in the civil religion.We have already alluded to it in the case of the Kennedy inaugural. We find it again in President Johnson’s inaugural address: They came already here—the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened—to find a place where a man could be his own man. They made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind; and it binds us still. If we keep its terms, we shall flourish.

What we have, then, from the earliest years of the republic is a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity. This religion—there seems no other word for it—while not antithetical to and indeed sharing much in common with Christianity, was neither sectarian nor in any specific sense Christian. At a time when the society was overwhelmingly Christian, it seems unlikely that this lack of Christian reference was meant to spare the feelings of the tiny non-Christian minority. Rather, the civil religion expressed what those who set the precedents felt was appropriate under the circumstances. It reflected their private as well as public views. Nor was the civil religion simply ‘‘religion in general.’’ While generality was undoubtedly seen as a virtue by some, as in the quotation from Franklin above, the civil religion was specific enough when it came to the topic of America. Precisely because of this specificity, the civil religion was saved from empty formalism and served as a genuine vehicle of national religious self-understanding. 5 That the Mosaic analogy was present in the minds of leaders at the very moment of the birth of the republic is indicated in the designs proposed by Franklin and Jefferson for the seal of the United States of America. Together with Adams, they formed a committee of three delegated by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, to draw up the new device. ‘‘Franklin proposed as the device Moses lifting up his wand and dividing the Red Sea while Pharaoh was overwhelmed by its waters, with the motto ‘Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.’ Jefferson proposed the children of Israel in the wilderness ‘led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire at night.’ ’’ Anson Phelps Stokes, Church and State in the United States, vol. 1 (New York: Harper, 1950), 467–468.

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But the civil religion was not, in the minds of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, or other leaders, with the exception of a few radicals like Tom Paine, ever felt to be a substitute for Christianity. There was an implicit but quite clear division of function between the civil religion and Christianity. Under the doctrine of religious liberty, an exceptionally wide sphere of personal piety and voluntary social action was left to the churches. But the churches were neither to control the state nor to be controlled by it. The national magistrate, whatever his private religious views, operates under the rubrics of the civil religion as long as he is in his official capacity, as we have already seen in the case of Kennedy. This accommodation was undoubtedly the product of a particular historical moment and of a cultural background dominated by Protestantism of several varieties and by the Enlightenment, but it has survived despite subsequent changes in the cultural and religious climate.

Civil War and Civil Religion Until the Civil War, the American civil religion focused above all on the event of the Revolution, which was seen as the final act of the Exodus from the old lands across the waters. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were the sacred scriptures, and Washington the divinely appointed Moses who led his people out of the hands of tyranny. The Civil War, which Sidney Mead calls ‘‘the center of American history,’’ 6 was the second great event that involved the national self-understanding so deeply as to require expression in civil religion. In 1835, Alexis Tocqueville wrote that the American republic has never really been tried and that victory in the Revolutionary War was more the result of British preoccupation elsewhere and the presence of a powerful ally than of any great military success of the Americans. But in 1861 the time of testing had indeed come. Not only did the Civil War have the tragic intensity of fratricidal strife, but it was one of the bloodiest wars of the nineteenth century; the loss of life was far greater than any previously suffered by Americans. The Civil War raised the deepest questions of national meaning. The man who not only formulated but in his own person embodied its meaning for Americans was Abraham Lincoln. For him the issue was not in the first instance slavery but ‘‘whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, 6 Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 12.

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and so dedicated, can long endure.’’ He had said in Independence Hall in Philadelphia on February 22, 1861: ‘‘All the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments which originated in and were given to the world from this Hall. I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.’’ 7 The phrases of Jefferson constantly echo in Lincoln’s speeches. His task was, first of all, to save the Union—not for America alone but for the meaning of America to the whole world so unforgettably etched in the last phrase of the Gettysburg Address. But inevitably the issue of slavery as the deeper cause of the conflict had to be faced. In his second inaugural, Lincoln related slavery and the war in an ultimate perspective: If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘‘the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’’

But he closes on a note if not of redemption then of reconciliation—‘‘With malice toward none, with charity for all.’’ With the Civil War, a new theme of death, sacrifice, and rebirth enters the new civil religion. It is symbolized in the life and death of Lincoln. Nowhere is it stated more vividly than in the Gettysburg Address, itself part of the Lincolnian ‘‘New Testament’’ among the civil scriptures. Robert Lowell has pointed out the ‘‘insistent use of birth images’’ in this speech explicitly devoted to ‘‘these honored dead’’: ‘‘brought forth,’’ ‘‘conceived,’’ ‘‘created,’’ ‘‘a new birth of freedom.’’ He goes on to say: The Gettysburg Address is a symbolic and sacramental act. Its verbal quality is resonance combined with a logical, matter of fact, prosaic brevity. . . . In his

7 Abraham Lincoln, in Allan Nevins, ed., Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1964), 39.

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words, Lincoln symbolically died, just as the Union soldiers really died—and as he himself was soon really to die. By his words, he gave the field of battle a symbolic significance that it has lacked. For us and our country, he left Jefferson’s ideals of freedom and equality joined to the Christian sacrificial act of death and rebirth. I believe this is the meaning that goes beyond sect or religion and beyond peace and war, and is now part of our lives as a challenge, obstacle and hope.8

Lowell is certainly right in pointing out the Christian quality of the symbolism here, but he is also right in quickly disavowing any sectarian implication. The earlier symbolism of the civil religion had been Hebraic without any specific sense of being Jewish. The Gettysburg symbolism (‘‘those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live’’) is Christian without having anything to do with the Christian church. The symbolic equation of Lincoln with Jesus was made relatively early. W. H. Herndon, who had been Lincoln’s law partner, wrote: For fifty years God rolled Abraham Lincoln through his fiery furnace. He did it to try Abraham and to purify him for his purposes. This made Mr. Lincoln humble, tender, forbearing, sympathetic to suffering, kind, sensitive, tolerant; broadening, deepening and widening his whole nature; making him the noblest and loveliest character since Jesus Christ. . . . I believe that Lincoln was God’s chosen one.9

With the Christian archetype in the background, Lincoln, ‘‘our martyred president,’’ was linked to the war dead, those who ‘‘gave the last full measure of devotion.’’ The theme of sacrifice was indelibly written into the civil religion. The new symbolism soon found both physical and ritualistic expression. The great number of the war dead required the establishment of a number of national cemeteries. Of these, Gettysburg National Cemetery, which Lincoln’s famous address served to dedicate, has been overshadowed only by the Arlington National Cemetery. Begun somewhat vindictively on the Lee estate across the river from Washington, partly with the end that the Lee family could never reclaim it,10 it has subsequently become the most hallowed monument of the civil religion. Not only was a section set aside 8 Robert Lowell, in Nevins, ed., Lincoln, ‘‘On the Gettysburg Address,’’ 88–89. 9 William Henry Herndon, in Sherwood Eddy, The Kingdom of God and the American Dream (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), 162. 10 Karl Decker and Angus McSween, Historic Arlington (Washington: Decker and McSween Publishing, 1892), 60–67.

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for the Confederate dead, but it has received the dead of each succeeding American war. It is the site of the one important new symbol to come out of World War I, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; more recently it has become the site of the tomb of another martyred president, John F. Kennedy, and its symbolic eternal flame. Memorial Day, which grew out of the Civil War, gave ritual expression to the themes we have been discussing. As Lloyd Warner has so brilliantly analyzed it, the Memorial Day observance, especially in the towns and smaller cities of America, is a major event for the whole community involving a rededication to the martyred dead, to the spirit of sacrifice, and to the American vision.11 Just as Thanksgiving Day, which incidentally was securely institutionalized as an annual national holiday only under the presidency of Lincoln, serves to integrate the family into the civil religion, so Memorial Day has acted to integrate the local community into the national cult. Together with the less overtly religious Fourth of July and the more minor celebrations of Veterans Day and the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, these two holidays provide an annual ritual calendar for the civil religion. The public school system serves as a particularly important context for the cultic celebration of the civil rituals.

11 How extensive the activity associated with Memorial Day can be is indicated by Warner: ‘‘The sacred symbolic behavior of Memorial Day, in which scores of the town’s organizations are involved, is ordinarily divided into four periods. During the year separate rituals are held by many of the associations for their dead, and many of these activities are connected with later Memorial Day events. In the second phase, preparations are made during the last three or four weeks for the ceremony itself, and some of the associations perform public rituals. The third phase consists of scores of rituals held in all the cemeteries, churches, and halls of the associations. These rituals consist of speeches and highly ritualized behavior. They last for two days and are climaxed by the fourth and last phase, in which all the separate celebrants gather in the center of the business district on the afternoon of Memorial Day. The separate organizations, with their members in uniform or with fitting insignia, march through the town, visit the shrines and monuments of the hero dead, and, finally, enter the cemetery. Here dozens of ceremonies are held, most of them highly symbolic and formalized.’’ During these various ceremonies Lincoln is continually referred to and the Gettysburg Address is recited many times. W. Lloyd Warner, American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 8–9.

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The Civil Religion Today In reifying and giving a name to something that, though pervasive enough when you look at it, has gone on only semiconsciously, there is risk of severely distorting the data. But the reification and the naming have already begun. The religious critics of ‘‘religion in general,’’ or of the ‘‘religion of the ‘American Way of Life,’ ’’ or of ‘‘American Shinto’’ have really been talking about the civil religion. As usual in religious polemic, they take as criteria the best in their own religious tradition and as typical the worst in the tradition of the civil religion. Against these critics, I would argue that the civil religion at its best is a genuine apprehension of universal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through the experience of the American people. Like all religions, it has suffered various deformations and demonic distortions. At its best, it has neither been so general that it has lacked incisive relevance to the American scene nor so particular that it has placed American society above universal human values. I am not at all convinced that the leaders of the churches have consistently represented a higher level of religious insight than the spokesmen of the civil religion. Reinhold Niebuhr has this to say of Lincoln, who never joined a church and who certainly represents civil religion at its best: An analysis of the religion of Abraham Lincoln in the context of the traditional religion of his time and place and of its polemical use on the slavery issue, which corrupted religious life in the days before and during the Civil War, must lead to the conclusion that Lincoln’s religious convictions were superior in depth and purity to those, not only of the political leaders of his day, but of the religious leaders of the era.12

Perhaps the real animus of the religious critics has been not so much against the civil religion in itself but against its pervasive and dominating 12 Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘‘The Religion of Abraham Lincoln,’’ in Nevins, ed., Lincoln, 72.William J.Wolfe of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has written: ‘‘Lincoln is one of the greatest theologians of America— not in the technical meaning of producing a system of doctrine, certainly not as a defender of some one denomination, but in the sense of seeing the hand of God intimately in the affairs of nations. Just so the prophets of Israel criticized the events of their day from the perspective of the God who is concerned for history, and who reveals His will within it. Lincoln now stands among God’s latter day prophets.’’ The Religion of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Seabury, 1963), 24.

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influence within the sphere of church religion. As S. M. Lipset has recently shown, American religion at least since the early nineteenth century has been predominantly activist, moralistic, and social rather than contemplative, theological, or innerly spiritual.13 Tocqueville spoke of American church religion as ‘‘a political institution which powerfully contributes to the maintenance of a democratic republic among the Americans’’ 14 by supplying a strong moral consensus amidst continuous political change. Henry Bargy in 1902 spoke of American church religion as ‘‘la poésie du civisme.’’ 15 It is certainly true that the relation between religion and politics in America has been singularly smooth. This is in large part due to the dominant tradition. As Tocqueville wrote: The greatest part of British America was peopled by men who, after having shaken off the authority of the Pope, acknowledged no other religious supremacy: they brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion.16

The churches opposed neither the Revolution nor the establishment of democratic institutions. Even when some of them opposed the full institutionalization of religious liberty, they accepted the final outcome with good grace and without nostalgia for the ancien régime. The American civil religion was never anticlerical or militantly secular. On the contrary, it borrowed selectively from the religious tradition in such a way that the average American saw no conflict between the two. In this way, the civil religion was able to build up without any bitter struggle with the church powerful symbols of national solidarity and to mobilize deep levels of personal motivation for the attainment of national goals. 13 Seymour Martin Lipset, ‘‘Religion and American Values,’’ in his The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1964), chap. 4. 14 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1954), 1:310. 15 Henry Bargy, La religion dans la société aux États-Unis (Paris: Colin, 1902), 31. 16 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 311. Later he says, ‘‘In the United States even the religion of most of the citizens is republican, since it submits the truths of the other world to private judgment, as in politics the care of their temporal interests is abandoned to the good sense of the people. Thus every man is allowed freely to take that road which he thinks will lead him to heaven, just as the law permits every citizen to have the right of choosing his own government’’ (436).

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Such an achievement is by no means to be taken for granted. It would seem that the problem of a civil religion is quite general in modern societies and that the way it is solved or not solved will have repercussions in many spheres. One need only to think of France to see how differently things can go. The French Revolution was anticlerical to the core and attempted to set up an anti-Christian civil religion. Throughout modern French history, the chasm between traditional Catholic symbols and the symbolism of 1789 has been immense. American civil religion is still very much alive. Just three years ago we participated in a vivid reenactment of the sacrifice theme in connection with the funeral of our assassinated president. The American Israel theme is clearly behind both Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society. Let me give just one recent illustration of how the civil religion serves to mobilize support for the attainment of national goals. On March 15, 1965, President Johnson went before Congress to ask for a strong voting-rights bill. Early in the speech he said: Rarely are we met with the challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our welfare or our society—but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we double our wealth and conquer the stars and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For with a country as with a person, ‘‘What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul.’’

And in conclusion he said: Above the pyramid on the great seal of the United States it says in Latin, ‘‘God has favored our undertaking.’’ God will not favor everything that we do. It is rather our duty to divine his will. I cannot help but believe that He truly understands and that He really favors the undertaking that we begin here tonight.17

The civil religion has not always been invoked in favor of worthy causes. On the domestic scene, an American Legion type of ideology that fuses 17 Lyndon B. Johnson, ‘‘Special Message to the Congress: The American Promise’’ (March 15, 1965), Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1966), vol. 1, entry 107, pp. 281–287.

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God, country, and flag has been used to attack nonconformist and liberal ideas and groups of all kinds. Still, it has been difficult to use the words of Jefferson and Lincoln to support special interests and undermine personal freedom. The defenders of slavery before the Civil War came to reject the thinking of the Declaration of Independence. Some of the most consistent of them turned against not only Jeffersonian democracy but Reformation religion; they dreamed of a South dominated by medieval chivalry and divine-right monarchy.18 For all the overt religiosity of the radical right today, their relation to the civil religious consensus is tenuous, as when the John Birch Society attacks the central American symbol of Democracy itself. With respect to America’s role in the world, the dangers of distortion are greater and the built-in safeguards of the tradition weaker. The theme of the American Israel was used, almost from the beginning, as a justification for the shameful treatment of the Indians so characteristic of our history. It can be overtly or implicitly linked to the ideal of manifest destiny that has been used to legitimate several adventures in imperialism since the early nineteenth century. Never has the danger been greater than today. The issue is not so much one of imperial expansion, of which we are accused, as of the tendency to assimilate all governments or parties in the world that support our immediate policies or call upon our help by invoking the notion of free institutions and democratic values. Those nations that are for the moment ‘‘on our side’’ become ‘‘the free world.’’ A repressive and unstable military dictatorship in South Vietnam becomes ‘‘the free people of South Vietnam and their government.’’ It is then part of the role of America as the New Jerusalem and ‘‘the last best hope of earth’’ to defend such governments with treasure and eventually with blood. When our soldiers are actually dying, it becomes possible to consecrate the struggle further by invoking the great theme of sacrifice. For the majority of the American people who are unable to judge whether the people in South Vietnam (or wherever) are ‘‘free like us,’’ such arguments are convincing. Fortunately President Johnson has been less ready to assert that ‘‘God has favored our undertaking’’ in the case of Vietnam than with respect to civil rights. But others are not so hesitant. The civil religion has exercised long-term pressure for the humane solution of our greatest domestic problem, the treatment of the Negro American. It remains to be seen how relevant it can become 18 See Louis Hartz, ‘‘The Feudal Dream of the South,’’ pt. 4 of The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955).

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for our role in the world at large, and whether we can effectually stand for ‘‘the revolutionary beliefs for which our forbears fought,’’ in John F. Kennedy’s words. The civil religion is obviously involved in the most pressing moral and political issues of the day. But it is also caught in another kind of crisis, theoretical and theological, of which it is at the moment largely unaware. ‘‘God’’ has clearly been a central symbol in the civil religion from the beginning and remains so today. This symbol is just as central to the civil religion as it is to Judaism or Christianity. In the late eighteenth century this posed no problem; even Tom Paine, contrary to his detractors, was not an atheist. From left to right and regardless of church or sect, all could accept the idea of God. But today, as even Time has recognized, the meaning of ‘‘God’’ is by no means so clear or so obvious. There is no formal creed in the civil religion. We have had a Catholic president; it is conceivable that we could have a Jewish one. But could we have an agnostic president? Could a man with conscientious scruples about using the word ‘‘God’’ the way Kennedy and Johnson have used it be elected chief magistrate of our country? If the whole God symbolism requires reformulation, there will be obvious consequences for the civil religion, consequences perhaps of liberal alienation and of fundamentalist ossification that have not so far been prominent in this realm. The civil religion has been a point of articulation between the profoundest commitments of Western religious and philosophical tradition and the common beliefs of ordinary Americans. It is not too soon to consider how the deepening theological crisis may affect the future of this articulation.

The Third Time of Trial In conclusion it may be worthwhile to relate the civil religion to the most serious situation that we as Americans now face, what I call the third time of trial. The first time of trial had to do with the question of independence, whether we should or could run our own affairs in our own way. The second time of trial was over the issue of slavery, which in turn was only the most salient aspect of the more general problem of the full institutionalization of democracy within our country. This second problem we are still far from solving, though we have some notable successes to our credit. But we have been overtaken by a third great problem that has led to a third great crisis, in the midst of which we stand. This is the problem of respon-

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sible action in a revolutionary world, a world seeking to attain many of the things, material and spiritual, that we have already attained. Americans have, from the beginning, been aware of the responsibility and the significance our republican experiment has for the whole world. The first internal political polarization in the new nation had to do with our attitude toward the French Revolution. But we were small and weak then, and ‘‘foreign entanglements’’ seemed to threaten our very survival. During the last century, our relevance for the world was not forgotten, but our role was seen as purely exemplary. Our democratic republic rebuked tyranny by merely existing. Just after World War I we were on the brink of taking a different role in the world, but once again we turned our backs. Since World War II the old pattern has become impossible. Every president since Franklin Roosevelt has been groping toward a new pattern of action in the world, one that would be consonant with our power and our responsibilities. For Truman and for the period dominated by John Foster Dulles that pattern was seen to be the great Manichean confrontation of East and West, the confrontation of democracy and ‘‘the false philosophy of Communism’’ that provided the structure of Truman’s inaugural address. But with the last years of Eisenhower and with the successive two presidents, the pattern began to shift. The great problems came to be seen as caused not solely by the evil intent of any one group of men. For Kennedy it was not so much a struggle against particular men as against ‘‘the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.’’ But in the midst of this trend toward a less primitive conception of ourselves and our world, we have somehow, without anyone really intending it, stumbled into a military confrontation where we have come to feel that our honor is at stake.We have in a moment of uncertainty been tempted to rely on our overwhelming physical power rather than on our intelligence, and we have, in part, succumbed to this temptation. Bewildered and unnerved when our terrible power fails to bring immediate success, we are at the edge of a chasm the depth of which no man knows. I cannot help but think of Robinson Jeffers, whose poetry seems more apt now than when it was written, when he said: Unhappy country, what wings you have! . . . Weep (it is frequent in human affairs), weep for the terrible magnificence of the means, The ridiculous incompetence of the reasons, the bloody and shabby Pathos of the result.

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But as so often before in similar times, we have a man of prophetic stature, without the bitterness or misanthropy of Jeffers, who, as Lincoln before him, calls this nation to its judgment: When a nation is very powerful but lacking in self-confidence, it is likely to behave in a manner that is dangerous both to itself and to others. Gradually but unmistakably, America is succumbing to that arrogance of power which has afflicted, weakened and in some cases destroyed great nations in the past. If the war goes on and expands, if that fatal process continues to accelerate until America becomes what it is not now and never has been, a seeker after unlimited power and empire, then Vietnam will have had a mighty and tragic fallout indeed. I do not believe that will happen. I am very apprehensive but I still remain hopeful, and even confident, that America, with its humane and democratic traditions, will find the wisdom to match its power.19

Without an awareness that our nation stands under higher judgment, the tradition of the civil religion would be dangerous indeed. Fortunately, the prophetic voices have never been lacking. Our present situation brings to mind the Mexican-American war that Lincoln, among so many others, opposed. The spirit of civil disobedience that is alive today in the civil rights movement and the opposition to the Vietnam War was already clearly outlined by Henry David Thoreau when he wrote, ‘‘If the law is of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law.’’ Thoreau’s words, ‘‘I would remind my countrymen that they are men first, and Americans at a late and convenient hour,’’ 20 provide an essential standard for any adequate thought and action in our third time of trial. As Americans, we have been well favored in the world, but it is as men that we will be judged. Out of the first and second times of trial have come, as we have seen, the major symbols of the American civil religion. There seems little doubt that a successful negotiation of this third time of trial—the attainment of some kind of viable and coherent world order—would precipitate a major new set of symbolic forms. So far the flickering flame of the United Nations 19 Senator J.William Fullbright, speech of April 28, 1966, as reported in the New York Times, April 29, 1966. 20 Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 274.

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burns too low to be the focus of a cult, but the emergence of a genuine transnational sovereignty would certainly change this. It would necessitate the incorporation of vital international symbolism into our civil religion, or, perhaps a better way of putting it, it would result in American civil religion becoming simply one part of a new civil religion of the world. It is useless to speculate on the form such a civil religion might take, though it obviously would draw on religious traditions beyond the sphere of biblical religion alone. Fortunately, since the American civil religion is not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality, the reorganization entailed by such a new situation need not disrupt the American civil religion’s continuity. A world civil religion could be accepted as a fulfillment and not as a denial of American civil religion. Indeed, such an outcome has been the eschatological hope of American civil religion from the beginning. To deny such an outcome would be to deny the meaning of America itself. Behind the civil religion at every point lie biblical archetypes: Exodus, Chosen People, Promised Land, New Jerusalem, and Sacrificial Death and Rebirth. But it is also genuinely American and genuinely new. It has its own prophets and its own martyrs, its own sacred events and sacred places, its own solemn rituals and symbols. It is concerned that America be a society as perfectly in accord with the will of God as men can make it, and a light to all nations. It has often been used and is being used today as a cloak for petty interests and ugly passions. It is in need—as any living faith—of continual reformation, of being measured by universal standards. But it is not evident that it is incapable of growth and new insight. It does not make any decisions for us. It does not remove us from moral ambiguity, from being, in Lincoln’s fine phrase, an ‘‘almost chosen people.’’ But it is a heritage of moral and religious experience from which we still have much to learn as we formulate the decisions that lie ahead.

10 Religion and the Legitimation of the American Republic

Civil Religion, Term and Concept In 1967 I published an essay I have never been allowed to forget. In it I suggested there is such a thing as civil religion in America. My suggestion has roused passionate opposition as well as widespread acceptance. The opposition to the idea has shown little unity. Some of my opponents say there is no such thing; I have invented something that does not exist. Some say there is such a thing but there ought not to be. Some say there is such a thing but it should be called by another name, ‘‘public piety,’’ for example, rather than civil religion. Unfortunately for me, my supporters are in even greater disarray. The term ‘‘civil religion’’ has spread far beyond any coherent concept thereof, or at least beyond anything I ever meant by the term. Perhaps the commonest reaction is a puzzled, ‘‘Yes, there seems to be something there, but what exactly is it?’’ Among the professional specialists in American studies there is another reaction: ‘‘We knew it all the time. What Bellah says is nothing new.’’ And then there is perhaps a vague reference to Tocqueville. But, with one or two exceptions, little in the way of conceptual clarity has been forthcoming from the specialists. I would like to try once again to clarify this most troublesome problem. The burden of what I want to say is that the confusion about civil religion is rooted in a confusion about the nature of the American republic and that genuinely to clarify the nature of American civil religion would involve a reform of the American republic. I must admit I am partly to blame for the confusion by my choice of the term ‘‘civil religion,’’ which turned out to be far more tendentious and provocative than I at first realized. I think now the choice of the term was fortunate and the controversies it generated are fruitful. More neutral terms such as ‘‘political religion’’ or ‘‘religion of the republic’’ or ‘‘public piety’’ would not have churned up the profound empirical ambiguities ‘‘civil religion,’’ with its two thousand years of historical resonance, inevitably did. [First published in Society 15, no. 4 (1978): 16–23. Used by permission.]

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On the face of it, what would be more natural than to speak about civil religion, a subject that has preoccupied theorists of republican government from Plato to Rousseau? The founders of this republic had read most of those theorists and were concerned with the problem, even though they did not use the term.1 The difficulty arises because for most of those two thousand years there has been a profound antipathy, indeed an utter incompatibility, between civil religion and Christianity. There is even a question, which I cannot explore here, whether there has not been a historic antipathy between republican government and Christianity. Most Christian political theorists down through the ages have considered monarchy the best form of government (Christian religious symbolism would seem to be much more monarchical than republican), and the great republican theorists—Machiavelli, Rousseau, even Tocqueville—have wondered whether Christianity can ever create good citizens.2 Augustine in the opening books of the City of God denounced Roman ‘‘civil theology’’ as the worship of false gods and the Roman Republic as based on false ideals and therefore as finally no commonwealth at all. Rousseau, in arguing for the necessity in a republic of a civil religion other than Christianity, wrote, Christianity as a religion is entirely spiritual, occupied solely with heavenly things; the country of the Christian is not of this world. . . . Imagine your Christian republic face to face with Sparta or Rome: the pious Christians will be beaten, crushed, and destroyed. . . . But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that it always profits by such a regime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes.3

1 Benjamin Franklin came close when he spoke of ‘‘Publick Religion’’ in his pamphlet of 1750 entitled Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania. See Ralph L. Ketcham, ed., The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 55. 2 Tocqueville wrote in a letter to Gobineau of September 5, 1843: ‘‘The duties of men among themselves as well as in their capacity of citizens, the duties of citizens to their fatherland, in brief, the public virtues seem to me to have been inadequately defined and considerably neglected within the moral system of Christianity.’’ Alexis de Tocqueville, The European Revolution and Civil Religion: The American Case Correspondence with Gobineau, ed. and trans. John Lukacs (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 192. 3 Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Willmoore Kendall (Chicago, Ill.: Gateway, 1954), book 4, chap. 8, pp. 204–223.

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And yet at the beginning of our history we were that mutually exclusive thing, a Christian republic. (Samuel Adams even called us a Christian Sparta.) Or were we? Christianity was never our state religion, nor did we have in Rousseau’s strict sense a civil religion, a simple set of religious dogmas to which every citizen must subscribe on pain of exile. What did we have? What do we have now? That indeed is the question.

Religion and Politics Tension between church and state lies deep in Christian history. The idea of a nonreligious state is very modern and very doubtful. Through most of Western history some form of Christianity has been the established religion and has provided ‘‘religious legitimation’’ to the state. But under that simple formula lie faction, intrigue, anguish, tension, and, on occasion, massacre, rebellion, and religious war. Through much of history the state has dominated a restless church, exploited it, but never destroyed its refusal of final allegiance. On occasion the church has mastered the state, used it for its own ends, and temporalized its spiritual loyalties into a kind of religious nationalism. In all this Christianity is no different from other religions I have characterized as being at the historic stage.4 Even religions that seem to be much more intrinsically political, such as Islam or Confucianism, have for most of their histories been involved in uneasy and unhappy alliances with state power. Relative to the first four caliphs all Muslim rulers have been viewed as at least faintly illegitimate by the religious community. Relative to the ancient sage kings all the Chinese emperors have lacked fundamental legitimacy in the eyes of the Confucian scholars. The very spirituality and otherworldliness of Christianity has provided a certain avenue for reducing the tension not always open to other historic religions: the differentiation of functions, the division of spheres. Yet no solution has ever dissolved the underlying tensions described by Augustine and Rousseau. The tendency has been for every solution to break down into religion as the servant of the state or the state as the servant of religion. Yet there have been great periodic yearnings in Western history to overcome the split, to create a society that would indeed be a Christian re4 See chapter 1.

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public, where there would be no split in the soul between Christian and citizen. Savonarola had such a dream in fifteenth-century Florence, as did the Anabaptists in sixteenth-century Germany and some of the sectarians during the civil war in seventeenth-century England. Most of these experiments were highly unstable and illustrated rather than refuted Rousseau’s argument for mutual exclusiveness. Yet John Calvin in sixteenth-century Geneva created a city that was Christian and republican in an organic way that had few precedents (and that stood curiously behind Rousseau’s own republican theorizing). Church and state were not fused; formal distinctions were sharply maintained. Yet ‘‘Christian’’ and ‘‘citizen’’ were finally two ways of saying the same thing. Even more to the point, the New England colonies in the seventeenth century were Christian republics in a comparable sense. In Massachusetts, for example, only Christians could be citizens, though the church did not control the state and both church and state were governed by their members. Even though the reality of this experiment had evaporated by the early eighteenth century, the memory was still strong in the minds of the founders of the republic. The civil theology of the youthful Hegel in Germany during the decades after the French Revolution shows the yearning for the union of Christian and citizen was still vigorous at the end of the eighteenth century.5 These youthful speculations stand behind Hegel’s mature political theory as well as, curiously, behind the thought of Marx about man and citizen. Could there be a sense in which the American republic, which has neither an established church nor a classic civil religion, is, after all, a Christian republic, or should I say a biblical republic, in which biblical religion is indeed the civil religion? Is that what it means to say we are ‘‘a nation with the soul of a church’’? 6 The answer, as before, is yes and no. The American solution to the problem of church and state is unprecedented, unique, and confused. I shall turn from external speculation and from the introduction of tendentious terms like ‘‘civil religion’’ to the way the tradition has understood itself.

5 See Raymond Plant, Hegel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), chap. 1. 6 See Sidney E. Mead, The Nation with the Soul of a Church (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).

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The Work of the Founders Today the almost Pavlovian response applied to all problems in this area is ‘‘the separation of church and state.’’ That phrase, especially when it is intensified with the unfortunate Jeffersonian image of the ‘‘wall of separation,’’ is pernicious precisely to the degree it seems to offer a clear solution when in fact it creates more difficulties than it eliminates. The first thing to remember is that the phrase ‘‘separation of church and state’’ has no constitutional standing. The first clause of the First Amendment states, ‘‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.’’ That clause has a long history of interpretation that I shall not review here, but it certainly does not mean and has never meant that the American state has no interest in or concern for religion, or churches either, for that matter, and it certainly does not mean religion and politics have nothing to do with each other.7 To the extent the ‘‘wall of separation’’ image leads to those conclusions it distorts the entire history of the American understanding of religion and leads to such absurd conclusions as that religious congregations should have no tax exemption and legislative bodies should not be opened with prayer. To attribute such intentions to the founders of the republic is not only a historical error but a political error about the nature of the republic. Inspection of the second clause of the First Amendment, ‘‘or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’’ should begin to dispel the distortions of the extreme separationist position. The Constitution, while prohibiting a religious establishment, protects the free exercise of religion. It is this second clause to which that other common phrase, ‘‘religious freedom,’’ refers, a phrase that has often been used to sum up the American teaching about religion. This phrase too has a significant Jeffersonian source, for Jefferson pointed to his authorship of a bill for ‘‘establishing religious freedom’’ in Virginia as one of the three things he most wanted to be remembered for. The phrase ‘‘establishing religious freedom,’’ which is not constitutional but which explicates the free exercise clause, suggests the positive institutionalization in this area. Indeed, religious freedom or free exercise is the controlling idea. The prohibition of the establishment of a particular religion is required because it would be an infringement on religious freedom. Even so, today it is not 7 It is worth noting that while the Constitution specifically forbade a nonrepublican form of government in any state, the First Amendment did not forbid the states to establish religion.

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uncommon for the religious freedom concept to be swallowed up in the separation concept because freedom here as elsewhere is interpreted in purely negative terms, as the liberal philosophical tradition tends to treat it. Religious freedom becomes then merely the right to worship any god you please or none at all, with the implication that religion is a purely private matter of no interest or concern to political society. I will argue that ‘‘establishing religious freedom’’ means something much more than that, indeed, that it has a powerful positive political significance. But the difficulty of interpretation is not entirely in the mind of the analyst. It is not just a question of reading late-twentieth-century ideas about religion into the minds of the founders, though there is much of that. The difficulty is rooted in certain fundamental unclarities about the American political experience and the nature of the American regime, unclarities that go back to the formative period of the republic. The basic unclarity rests on whether we are a republic in recognizable relation to the republics of classical and modern times and dependent on that inner spirit of republican character and mores that makes for republican citizenship or whether we are a liberal constitutional regime governed through artificial contrivance and the balancing of conflicting interests. What we wanted was to have our cake and eat it too, to retain the rhetoric and spirit of a republic in the political structure of a liberal constitutional state. In so doing we blurred every essential political consideration, including the place of religion in our public life. Indeed, we artfully used religion as a way of evading the incompatibilities in our political life. For as long as the religious bodies remained vital and central in our public life, the evasion was (at least partially) successful. Today, when religion, more even than our other institutions, is uncertain about itself, the evasion is no longer tenable. But I am getting ahead of myself. The great political philosophers from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Montesquieu (who had such an influence on the founders of the republic) to Tocqueville all believed a political regime is an expression of the total way of life of a people, its economics, its customs, its religion. The way of life correlates with the type of person the society produces and the political capacities that inhere in that person. As Montesquieu said, a despotic society will have despotic customs—the arbitrary use of power, dependence of inferiors on superiors, slavery—that will produce a person primarily motivated by fear, just the right kind of subject for a despotic polity. But a republic will have republican customs—public participation in the exercise of power, the political equality of the citizens, a wide distribution of small and medium property with few very rich or very poor—customs

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that will lead to a public spiritedness, a willingness of the citizen to sacrifice his own interests for the common good, that is, to a citizen motivated by republican virtue. It would be as absurd to expect a people long inured to despotism to create a successful republic as for a republican people to tolerate a despotic regime. And yet these patterns are not fixed. There is indeed constant flux and a tendency toward degeneration—good customs become corrupted and republican regimes become despotic. Since republics go against gravity, so to speak, it is essential if a republic is to survive that it concern itself actively with the nurturing of its citizens, that it root out corruption and encourage virtue. The republican state therefore has an ethical, educational, even spiritual role, and it will survive only as long as it reproduces republican customs and republican citizens.8 But the much newer form of political organization, which I am calling liberal constitutionalism though it grew in the very seedbeds of modern republicanism, developed a markedly different idea of political life, partly in response to a newly emerging economic order. Though formulated by some of the toughest minds in the history of modern philosophy—Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Adam Smith—this tradition gave rise to what would appear to be the most wildly utopian idea in the history of political thought, namely, that a good society can result from the actions of citizens motivated by self-interest alone when those actions are organized through the proper mechanisms. A caretaker state, with proper legal restraints so that it does not interfere with the freedom of the citizens, needs to do little more than maintain public order and allow the economic market mechanisms and the free market in ideas to produce wealth and wisdom. Not only are these political ideas, republicanism and liberalism, different; they are profoundly antithetical. Exclusive concern for self-interest is the very definition of the corruption of republican virtue. The tendency 8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Government of Poland, trans.Willmoore Kendall (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), 29–30, is contemptuous of a people espousing liberty who are not ethically prepared for it: ‘‘I laugh at those debased peoples that let themselves be stirred up by agitators, and dare to speak of liberty without so much as having the idea of it; with their hearts still heavy with the vices of slaves, they imagine that they have only to be mutinous in order to be free. Proud, sacred liberty! If they but knew her, those wretched men; if they but understood the price at which she is won and held; if they but realized that her laws are stern as the tyrant’s yoke is never hard, their sickly souls, the slaves of passions that would have to be hauled out by the roots, would fear liberty a hundred times as much as they fear servitude. They would flee her in terror, as they would a burden about to crush them.’’

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to emphasize the private, particularly the economic side of life in the liberal state, undermines the public participation essential to a republic. The wealth the liberal society generates is fatal to the basic political equality of a republic. And yet the American regime from the beginning has been a mixture of the republican and the liberal regimes and has never been a pure type of either. The republican moment emerged first, however, out of the revolutionary struggle and crystalized in a document, the Declaration of Independence. The liberal moment emerged second, during the complex working out of interests in the new nation, and crystalized in the Constitution. Even that division is too simple, for there are liberal elements in the Declaration of Independence and republican elements in the Constitution, but it does suggest from the very beginning the balance has never been stable. The Declaration of Independence has several central references to God and the Constitution has none at all. It is time, then, to turn to religion as a means of mediating the tensions within the American regime.

Religion in the Early Republic In the early republic religion had two vital locations: in the superstructure and in the infrastructure of the new political regime. It is to the superstructural location of religion that the Declaration of Independence points. By superstructural I mean a locus of sovereignty taken to be above the sovereignty of the state. Perhaps the most striking recognition of this superordinate sovereignty comes from the hand of Madison in 1785 during the debate on the bill establishing religious freedom in Virginia: It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage, and such only, as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, who enters into any subordinate Association, must always do it with a reservation of his duty to the general authority; much more must every man who becomes a member of any particular Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign.

Here Madison confines himself to the superordinate sovereignty of God over the individual citizen, which precedes the sovereignty of political society over him. The Declaration of Independence points to the sovereignty of God over

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the collective political society itself when it refers in its opening lines to ‘‘the laws of nature and of nature’s God’’ that stand above and judge the laws of men. It is often asserted that the God of nature is specifically not the God of the Bible. That raises problems of the relation of natural religion to biblical religion in eighteenth-century thought that I do not want to get into here, but Jefferson goes on to say, We hold these truths to be self evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.

We have here a distinctly biblical God who is much more than a first principle of nature, who creates individual human beings and endows them with equality and fundamental rights. It is significant that the reference to a suprapolitical sovereignty, to a God who stands above the nation and whose ends are standards by which to judge the nation and indeed only in terms of which the nation’s existence is justified, becomes a permanent feature of American political life ever after. Washington and Jefferson reiterate, though they do not move much beyond, the language of the Declaration of Independence in their most solemn public addresses, such as their inaugural addresses or Washington’s Farewell Address. The existence of this highest level religious symbolism in the political life of the republic justifies the assertion that there is a civil religion in America. Having said that, I must also say American civil religion is formal and in a sense marginal, though very securely institutionalized. It is formal in the sparsity and abstraction of its tenets, though in this it is very close to Rousseau’s civil religion. It is marginal in that it has no official support in the legal and constitutional order. It is in this connection that I must again point out the absence of any reference to God, and thus of any civil religion, in the Constitution of the United States. Belief in the tenets of the civil religion are legally incumbent on no one and there are no official interpreters of civil theology. Indeed, because of the formality I have just pointed out, there was very little civil theology to interpret, although we did produce at a critical juncture in our history at least one great civil theologian, Abraham Lincoln. The marginality of the American civil religion is closely connected with the liberal side of our heritage and its most important expression, the Constitution. This side has led many to deny there is a civil religion or that

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there ought to be in America. And indeed, from the point of view of the liberal political idea there need not and perhaps ought not to be. The state is a purely neutral legal mechanism without purposes or values. Its sole function is to protect the rights of individuals, that is, to protect freedom. And yet freedom, which would seem to be an irreducible implication of liberalism on etymological grounds alone, no matter how negatively and individualistically defined, does imply a purpose and a value. Since I believe a pure liberalism is a reductio ad absurdum and a sociological impossibility, I would locate here at least one of the reasons a pure liberal state has never existed and why in America the rhetoric and to some extent the substance of republicanism has always existed in uneasy tandem with liberalism. Precisely from the point of view of republicanism civil religion is indispensable. A republic as an active political community of participating citizens must have a purpose and a set of values. Freedom in the republican tradition is a positive value that asserts the worth and dignity of political equality and popular government. A republic must attempt to be ethical in a positive sense and to elicit the ethical commitment of its citizens. For this reason it inevitably pushes toward the symbolization of an ultimate order of existence in which republican values and virtues make sense. Such symbolization may be nothing more than the worship of the republic itself as the highest good, or it may be, as in the American case, the worship of a higher reality that upholds the standards the republic attempts to embody. Yet the religious needs of a genuine republic would hardly be met by the formal and marginal civil religion that has been institutionalized in the American republic. The religious superstructure of the American republic has been provided only partially by the civil religion. It has been provided mainly by the religious community entirely outside any formal political structures. Here the genius and uniqueness of the American solution is to be found. At the 1976 Democratic convention Barbara Jordan called for the creation of a national community that would be ethical and even spiritual in content. This is what Talcott Parsons calls the ‘‘societal community.’’ It is what might be called in Europe the nation as opposed to the state. It is in a sense prepolitical, but without it the state would be little more than a mechanism of coercion. The first creation of a national community in America, it is now widely recognized, preceded the revolution by a generation or two. It was the result of the Great Awakening of the 1740s, a wave of religious revivalism that swept across the colonies and first gave them a sense of general solidarity. As the work of Nathan Hatch has shown, this religious solidarity

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was gradually given a more political interpretation from within the religious community in the 1750s and 1760s with the emergence of what he has called ‘‘civil millennialism,’’ namely, the providential religious meaning of the American colonies in world history.9 It is the national community with its religious inspiration that made the American Revolution and created the new nation. It is the national community that was, in my sense of the term, the real republic, not the liberal constitutional regime that emerged in 1789. The liberal regime never repudiated the civil religion that was already inherent in the Declaration of Independence and indeed kept it alive in our political life even though the Constitution was silent about it. From the point of view of the legal regime, however, any further elaboration of religious symbolism beyond that of the formal and marginal civil religion was purely private. From the point of view of the national community, still largely religious in its self-consciousness, such elaboration was public even though lacking in any legal status. Here we can speak of public theology, as Martin Marty has called it, in distinction to civil religion. The civil millennialism of the revolutionary period was such a public theology and we have never lacked one since. As a number of scholars have begun to recognize, the problems of creating a national community in America did not decrease with the establishment of the constitutional regime but in a sense became more severe. With the formation of the new nation the centrifugal forces that were restrained during the revolutionary struggle came to the fore and a sense of national community actually declined. To some extent a national community in the new nation was not fully actualized until after the trauma of the Civil War, though that event set in motion new problems that would later create even greater difficulties in maintaining a genuine national community. But, as Perry Miller has pointed out, to the extent we began to create a national community in the early national period it was again religious revivalism that played an important role.10 I would not want to minimize the role of enlightenment thought in complicated relation with the churches that Sydney Mead has so brilliantly emphasized. From my point of view enlightenment religion and ethics were also a form of public theology and played a significant role. Yet Jefferson’s hope for a national turn to Uni9 Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1977). See especially chap. 1. 10 Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), chap. 1.

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tarianism as the dominant religion, a turn that would have integrated public theology and the formal civil religion much more intimately than was actually the case, was disappointed, and public theology was carried out predominantly in terms of biblical symbolism. Even though I have argued that the public theology that came out of the national community represented the real republic, I do not want to idealize it. As with all vigorous young republics it had an element of selfintoxication that has had ominous consequences for us ever after. The ‘‘chosen people’’ or ‘‘God’s new Israel’’ symbolism that was pretty well eliminated from the formal civil religion was common in the public theology, though it also had its critics. The public theology provided a sense of value and purpose without which the national community and ultimately even the liberal state could not have survived, but it was never entirely clear what that value and purpose was. On the one hand it seemed to imply the full realization of the values laid down in the Declaration of Independence but certainly not fully implemented in a nation that among other things still legalized slavery. On the other hand it could imply a messianic mission of manifest destiny with respect to the rest of the continent. It may be a sobering thought, but most of what is good and most of what is bad in our history is rooted in our public theology. Every movement to make America more fully realize its professed values has grown out of some form of public theology, from the abolitionists to the social gospel and the early socialist party to the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King and the farm workers’ movement under Cesar Chavez. But so has every expansionist war and every form of oppression of racial minorities and immigrant groups. The clearest and probably the purest expression of the ethical dynamism I have located in the realm of the public theology broke through at one crucial moment in our history into the civil religion itself in the person of our greatest, perhaps our only, civil theologian, Abraham Lincoln. Basing himself above all on the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, in the Gettysburg Address he called us to complete ‘‘the great task remaining before us,’’ the task of seeing that there is a ‘‘new birth of freedom’’ and that we make real for all our citizens the beliefs upon which the republic is based. In his second inaugural address Lincoln incorporated biblical symbolism more centrally into the civil religion than had ever been done before or would ever be done again in his great somber vision of an unfaithful nation in need above all of charity and justice. It has not been my purpose here to evaluate the whole checkered story of civil religion and public theology in our national history but only to

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point out they have been absolutely integral to one aspect of our national existence, namely, our existence as a republican people. But so far I have spoken only of what I have called the superstructural role of religion in the republic. Now I would like to turn to the infrastructural role.

Religion and the Creation of Citizens As I have already pointed out in describing the classical notion of a republic, there is a necessity in such a regime not only for asserting high ethical and spiritual commitments but also for molding, socializing, and educating the citizens into those ethical and spiritual beliefs so they are internalized as republican virtue. Once again, however, when we look at the liberal constitutional regime we will see a complete lacuna in this area. The state as a school of virtue is the last thing a liberal regime conceives itself to be. And yet here too what the liberal regime could not do the national community as the real republic could. The problem was partly handled through federalism.What would not be appropriate on the part of the federal government could appropriately be done at lower jurisdictional levels. Just as religion was much more open and pervasive at local and even state levels through most of our history than it ever was at the federal level, so the state as educator, and educator in the sphere of values, was widely accepted at lower jurisdictional levels. Robert Lynn has brilliantly shown how the McGuffey readers purveyed a religious and republican ideology, including a powerful stress on the common good and the joys of participation in the public life, during much of the nineteenth century.11 And yet, as important as the public schools have been, the real school of republican virtue in America, as Alexis de Tocqueville saw with such masterful clarity, was the church. Tocqueville said religion is the first of our political institutions. It was a republican and a democratic religion that not only inculcated republican values but gave the first lessons in participation in the public life. More than the laws or the physical circumstances of the country, said Tocqueville, it was the mores that contributed to the success of the American democracy, and the mores were rooted in reli11 Robert Wood Lynn, ‘‘Civil Catechetics in Mid-Victorian America: Some Notes about American Civil Religion, Past and Present,’’ Religious Education 68, no. 1 (1973): 5–27.

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gion. As a classic theorist of republican government would, Tocqueville saw that naked self-interest is the surest solvent of a republican regime, and he saw the commercial tendencies of the American people as unleashing the possibility of the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest. But he saw religion as the great restraining element that could turn naked self-interest into what he called ‘‘self-interest rightly understood,’’ that is, a self-interest that was public spirited and capable of self-sacrifice. In this way Tocqueville showed how religion mitigated the full implications of American liberalism and allowed republican institutions to survive. Late in his life he began to doubt that such a compromise would really work in the long run, and his doubts have been all too fully confirmed by our recent history. Yet for its time and place Tocqueville’s analysis was undoubtedly right. It gives us an essential clue to understand this strange, unique, and perhaps finally incoherent society in which we live. What Tocqueville saw about the role of religion in such a society as ours was well understood by the founders of the republic. It is significant, for example, that John Adams, during his first year as our first vice president under the new liberal constitutional regime, said, ‘‘We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and a religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.’’ 12 And Washington in his Farewell Address wrote, Of all the suppositions and habits which lead to political prosperity Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and cherish them.

Perhaps the recognition by our first and second presidents of the necessity of religion and morality, of the basis in the mores and religious beliefs of a people, for a successful republic, in the rather negative, circuitous, and almost apologetic terms of the quotations, expresses the uneasy compromise between republicanism and a liberal regime I am arguing was characteristic of the new nation. But it also suggests the founders of the republic fully understood the relation between the way of life of a people and their form of political organization. 12 Quoted in John R. Howe, Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 185.

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The Corruption of the Republic It is inevitable, having celebrated only several years ago the two-hundredth anniversary of our republic, that we should look around us to see how well our heritage is understood and how much of it is still operative in our public life. We might have hoped that a political campaign for the presidency in that bicentennial year would have been educative in the high republican sense of the term.We have had such campaigns in the past. In the LincolnDouglas debates the deepest philosophical meaning of our republic and of our history was plumbed by two men of enormous intelligence and sensitivity to the crucial issues. Alas, we did not get that in 1976 or in any campaign since. Perhaps the Illinois farmers who drove into the towns from miles around to hear the Lincoln-Douglas debates were a different kind of people from the millions in their living rooms in front of the television screen. Perhaps there were other reasons. But in recent campaigns what we got was vague and listless allusions to a largely misunderstood and forgotten past and an attitude toward the present that seemed to be determined, above everything else, not to probe beneath the thinnest of surfaces. And yet the great themes I have been probing here were present, not in any articulate form but present in the uncertainty, the groping, the yearning for something that has so slipped out of memory as to be almost without a name. It is the ethical purpose of our republic and the republican virtue of our citizens, or rather the loss of them, that has haunted our recent political life. Our rhetoric speaks in the terms of another day, another age. It does not seem to express our present reality. And yet our politicians and those to whom they speak are surprised and troubled by the lack of fit, concerned less to find a new rhetoric than to find an easy formula to make the old rhetoric apt again. Such an easy formula is the assertion that we must restrain, control, and diminish government, as though the enormous growth of our government were some fortuitous thing and not a sign and symptom of the kind of society in which we live. To ask the questions the 1976 and later campaigns did not ask is to ask whether under the social conditions of late-twentieth-century America it is possible for us to survive as a republic in any sense continuous with the historic meaning of that term. If we discover the republican element in our national polity has been corroded beyond repair, we must consider whether a liberal constitutional regime can survive without it, a question it seems to me not too difficult to answer, but I am prepared to listen to con-

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trary arguments. Finally we must ask, if we have the courage, if both our republic and our liberal constitutional regime lack the social conditions for survival, what kind of authoritarian regime is likely to replace them, remembering that republican and liberal regimes have been in the history of the planet few and brief. Perhaps we can even discern, beneath the battered surface of our republican polity, the form of despotism that awaits us. Of course, I would hope to discover how to do what Machiavelli says is that most difficult of all political things, reform and refound a corrupt republic. But we must not flinch from whatever reality is to be discovered. I have mentioned corruption. ‘‘Corruption’’ is a great word, a political word with a precise meaning in eighteenth-century discourse even though its use has become narrowed and debased with us. Corruption is, in the language of the founders of the republic, the opposite of republican virtue. It is what destroys republics. It might be well for us today to remember what Franklin said on the last day of the Constitutional Convention, September 17, 1787. Old, sick, tired, he had sat through that long hot Philadelphia summer because his presence was crucial to the acceptance of the new document. He was the very symbol of America. He rose on that last day to call for unanimous consent in hopes that that too might help the document be accepted, and he said, ‘‘In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe further that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall have become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.’’ 13 Can we not see in those words the sentiments of an old republican, aware of the compromises contained in the new Constitution but hoping almost against hope that the republican virtue of the people would offset them, at least for a time? Corruption, again using the eighteenth-century vocabulary, is to be found in luxury, dependence, and ignorance. Luxury is that pursuit of material things that diverts us from concern for the public good, that leads us to exclusive concern for our own good, or what we would today call consumerism. Dependence naturally follows from luxury, for it consists in accepting the dominance of whatever person or group, or, we might say today, governmental or private corporate structure, that promises it will 13 Ralph L. Ketcham, ed., The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 401.

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take care of our material desires. The welfare state—and here I refer to the welfare that goes to the great corporations, to most above the median income level through special tax breaks, and to the workers whose livelihood depends on an enormous military budget as much as to the welfare that goes to the desperately poor to keep them from starving—in all its prolixity is the very type of what the eighteenth century meant by dependence. And finally ignorance, that is, political ignorance, is the result of luxury and dependence. It is a lack of interest in public things, a concern only for the private, a willingness to be governed by those who promise to take care of us even without our knowledgeable consent. I would need to explore throughout our society the degree and extent to which corruption in these forms has gone in order to assess whether there is strength enough in our republic for its survival.

Sources of Revival I would also need to look at religion, following today the brilliant sociological analysis Tocqueville made of the role of religion in our public life, a role all the founders of the republic discerned. To what extent do our religious bodies today provide us with a national sense of ethical purpose? Certainly here there are some notable recent examples. The religious opposition to the Vietnam War was certainly more effective than the opposition of those who spelled America with a ‘‘k.’’ And if we have made some significant progress with respect to the place of racial minorities in our society in the last twenty years, it is due mostly to religious leadership. Yet is the balance of American religious life slipping away from those denominations that have a historic concern for the common good toward religious groups so privatistic and self-centered that they begin to approach the consumer cafeteria model of Thomas Luckmann’s invisible religion? And to what extent is the local congregation any longer able to serve as a school for the creation of a self-disciplined, independent, public-spirited, in a word, virtuous citizen? Have not the churches along with the schools and the family, what I have called the soft structures that deal primarily with human motivation, suffered more in the great upheavals through which our society has recently gone than any other of our institutions, suffered so much that their capacity to transmit patterns of conscience and ethical values has been seriously impaired? I am not prepared to say the religious communities, among whom I would include the humanist communities,

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are not capable even today of providing the religious superstructure and infrastructure that would renew our republic. Indeed, I would look to them, as always before in our history, for the renewing impulse, the ‘‘new birth’’ any ethical institution so frequently needs. But the empirical question as to whether the moral capacity is still there on a sufficient scale seems to me open. If we look to my own community, the scholarly community, there is not a great deal to be proud of. We have left the understanding of our basic institutions, as we have left everything else, to the specialists, and with notable exceptions they have not done a very good job of it. Somehow we have never established a strong academic tradition of self-reflection about the meaning of our institutions, and as our institutions changed and our republican mores corroded, even what knowledge we had began to slip away. On the whole it has been the politicians more than the scholars who have carried the burden of self-interpretation. The founders were all political thinkers of distinction. Lincoln’s political thought has moments of imaginative genius—his collected works are still the best initiation into a genuine understanding of the regime under which we live. Even as late as Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge we had presidents who knew our history in intricate detail and understood the theoretical basis of our institutions. In contrast we have never produced a political philosopher of the first rank. The only profound work of political philosophy on the nature of the American polity was written by a Frenchman. Still we have produced works of the second rank that are not without distinction, though they are usually somewhat isolated and eccentric and do not add up to a cumulative tradition. Such works are Orestes Brownson’s The American Republic and Raymond Croly’s The Promise of American Life. But in a barren time we must be grateful for such works as we have. If we turn to these works, we will be referred once again to the great tradition with which I began this chapter. Croly quotes the European American philosopher George Santayana: ‘‘If a noble and civilized democracy is to subsist, the common citizen must be something of a saint and something of a hero. We see, therefore, how justly flattering and profound, and at the same time how ominous, was Montesquieu’s saying that the principle of democracy is virtue.’’ 14 How ominous indeed! In that context we can understand the bicentennial epigram written by Harry Jaffa, one of the few political scientists who con14 Raymond Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 454.

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tinues the great tradition today: ‘‘In 1776 the United States was so to speak nothing; but it promised to become everything. In 1976, the United States, having in a sense become everything, promises to become nothing.’’ 15 One would almost think the Lord has intended to chastise us before each of our centennial celebrations so we would not rise up too high in our pride. Before the centennial he sent us Grant, before the bicentennial, Nixon (in whom we can perhaps discern the dim face of the despotism that awaits us—not a despotism of swastikas and Brownshirts but a despotism of game plans and administrative efficiency). It is not a time for self-congratulation. It is a time for sober reflection about where we have come from and where we may be going.

15 Harry V. Jaffa, How to Think About the American Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1978), 1.

11 The New Religious Consciousness and the Crisis of Modernity

Our research project is a response to the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s. We have been concerned to understand the deepest meaning of that upheaval, that is to say its religious dimension, and to interpret that meaning in the context of modern American history. As it turned out our project got under way in early 1971, just when the upheaval in its most dramatic forms had passed.We ended up studying the successor movements to the counterculture rather than the counterculture in its effervescent stage. But if we are to put our findings in the broadest possible context—and that is what I intend to do in this chapter—then we must begin with the developments in the 1960s that lie immediately behind our study and with the nature of the society in which those developments occurred. The disturbances and outbursts in America in the 1960s were hardly unique in modern history. Indeed in a century where irrationalities and horrors of all sorts—mass executions, mass imprisonments, wars of annihilation, revolutions, rebellions, and depressions—have been common, the events of that decade in America might even be overlooked. But it is precisely the significance of that decade that the irrationalities and horrors of modern history were borne in upon Americans so seriously that for the first time mass disaffection from the common understandings of American culture and society began to occur. Far more serious than any of the startling events of the decade was the massive erosion of the legitimacy of American institutions—business, government, education, the churches, the family—that set in, particularly among young people, and that con[First published as chapter 15 in Robert N. Bellah and Charles Y. Glock, eds., The New Religious Consciousness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 333–352. Used by permission. The book was a report of a research team studying new religious movements in the 1970s, directed by Glock and Bellah, with the participation of graduate students from the Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, and the Religion and Society program of the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California.]

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tinues, if public opinion polls are to be believed, in the 1970s even when overt protest has become less frequent. The erosion of the legitimacy of established institutions among certain sectors of the populations of many European countries—particularly the working class and the intellectuals—began at least a hundred years ago. In many of the newer third-world countries, the nation, state, and modern institutions have not yet gained enough legitimacy to begin the process of erosion. But in America, in spite of a civil war, major social and religious movements, and minor disturbances of occasionally violent intensity, the fundamental legitimacy of the established order had never before been questioned on such a scale. This is in part because that order was itself a revolutionary order, the result of one of the modern world’s few successful revolutions. The messianic hope generated by the successful revolution and nurtured by the defeat of slavery in the Civil War, for long made it possible to overlook or minimize the extent to which the society failed to achieve its ideals. The promise of early fulfillment, which seemed so tangible in America, operated to mute our native critics and prevent mass defection, at least for a long time. But in the decade of the sixties for many, not only of the deprived but the most privileged, that promise had begun to run out. By way of background we may consider those interpretations of reality in America that had been most successful in providing meaning and generating loyalty up until the sixties: biblical religion and utilitarian individualism. The self-understanding of the original colonists was that they were ‘‘God’s new Israel,’’ a nation under God. (From this point of view the addition of the phrase ‘‘under God’’ to the pledge of allegiance in the 1950s was an indication of the erosion of the tradition not because it was an innovation but because it arose from the need to make explicit what had for generations been taken for granted.) In New England this understanding was expressed in the biblical symbol of a covenant signifying a special relationship between God and the people. American society was to be one of exemplary obedience to God’s laws and subject to the grace and judgment of the Lord. The notion of Americans as an elect people with exemplary significance for the world was not abandoned but enhanced during the revolution and the period of constructing the new nation. It was dramatically reaffirmed by Lincoln in the Civil War and continued to be expressed in the twentieth century in the thought of men like William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson. This biblical aspect of the national self-understanding was strongly social and collective even though it con-

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tained an element of voluntarism from its Protestant roots. Its highest conception of reality was an objective absolute God as revealed in scriptures, and its conception of morality was also based on objective revelation.1 A second underlying interpretation of reality that has been enormously influential in American history, utilitarian individualism, was never wholly compatible with the biblical tradition, complex as the relations of attraction and repulsion between the two were. This tradition was rooted ultimately in the sophistic, skeptical, and hedonistic strands of ancient Greek philosophy, but took its modern form initially in the theoretical writings of Thomas Hobbes. It became popular in America mainly through the somewhat softer and less consistent version of John Locke and his followers, a version deliberately designed to obscure the contrast with biblical religion. In its consistent original Hobbesian form, utilitarianism grew out of an effort to apply the methods of science to the understanding of man and was both atheistic and determinist.While the commonsense Lockean version that has been the most pervasive current of American thought has not been fully conscious of these implications, the relation between utilitarianism and Anglo-American social science has been close and continuous from Hobbes and Locke to the classical economists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the social Darwinists of the late nineteenth century and finally to such influential present-day sociologists as George Homans. Whereas the central term for understanding individual motivation in the biblical tradition was ‘‘conscience,’’ the central term in the utilitarian tradition was ‘‘interest.’’ The biblical understanding of national life was based on the notion of community with charity for all the members, a community supported by public and private virtue. The utilitarian tradition believed in a neutral state in which individuals would be allowed to pursue the maximization of their self-interest and the product would be public and private prosperity. The harshness of these contrasts was obscured, though never obliterated, by several considerations. The biblical tradition promised earthly rewards, as well as heavenly, for virtuous actions. The utilitarian tradition required self-restraint and ‘‘morality,’’ if not as ends then as means. But the most pervasive mechanism for the harmonization of the 1 See Bellah, The Broken Covenant (1975), for an analysis of the role of biblical religion in the formation of American society and also for the relations between biblical religion and utilitarian individualism. Two related essays are ‘‘Reflections on Reality in America’’ (1974) and ‘‘Religion and Polity in America’’ (1974).

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two traditions was the corruption of the biblical tradition by utilitarian individualism so that religion itself finally became for many a means for the maximization of self-interest with no effective link to virtue, charity, or community. A purely private pietism emphasizing only individual rewards that grew up in the nineteenth century and took many forms in the twentieth, from Norman Vincent Peale to Rev. Ike, was the expression of that corruption.2 The increasing dominance of utilitarian individualism was expressed not only in the corruption of religion but also in the rising prestige of science, technology, and bureaucratic organization. The scientific instrumentalism that was already prominent in Hobbes became the central tenet of American utilitarianism. The tradition of utilitarian individualism expressed no interest in shared values or ends since it considered the only significant end to be maximizing individual interest, and individual ends are essentially random. Utilitarianism tended therefore to concentrate solely on the rationalization of means, on technical reason. As a result the rationalization of means became an end in itself. This is illustrated in the story about an American farmer who was asked why he worked so hard. To raise more corn, was his reply. But why do you want to do that? To make more money. What for? To buy more land. Why? To raise more corn. And so on ad infinitum. While utilitarian individualism had no interest in society as an end in itself, it was certainly not unaware of the importance of society. Society like everything else was to be used instrumentally. The key term was ‘‘organization,’’ the instrumental use of social relationships. ‘‘Effective organization’’ was as much a hallmark of the American ethos as technological inventiveness. The central value for utilitarian individualism was a term that could also be used to obscure the gap between the utilitarian and the biblical traditions, since it is a central biblical term as well. But for biblical religion, freedom meant above all freedom from sin, freedom to do the right, and was almost equivalent to virtue. For utilitarianism it meant the freedom to pursue one’s own ends. Everything was to be subordinate to that: nature, social relations, even personal feelings. The exclusive concentration on means rendered that final end of freedom so devoid of content that it became illusory, and the rationalization of means a kind of treadmill that was in fact the opposite of freedom. 2 An excellent treatment of the deep inner cleavage in American culture is Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

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That part of the biblical tradition that remained uncorrupted or only minimally corrupted found itself deeply uneasy with the dominant utilitarian ethos. Fundamentalism in America is not simply an expression of backward yokels. Even Bryan’s opposition to evolution was in part an opposition to the social Darwinism that he saw as undermining all humane values in America. But that opposition remained largely inchoate, in part because it could not penetrate the façade of biblical symbols that the society never abandoned even when it betrayed them. It was this dual set of fundamental understandings that the eruption of the 1960s fundamentally challenged. It is important to remember that the events of the fifties were preceded and prepared for by a new articulation of Christian symbolism in the later sixties in the life and work of Martin Luther King. King stood not only for the actualization of that central and ambiguous value of freedom for those who had never fully experienced even its most formal benefits. Even more significantly he stood for the actualization of the Christian imperative of love. For him society was not to be used manipulatively for individual ends. Even in a bitter struggle one’s actions were to express that fundamental love, that oneness of all men in the sight of God that is deeper than any self-interest. It was that conception, so close to America’s expressed biblical values and so far from its utilitarian practice that, together with militant activism, was so profoundly unsettling. We are accustomed to thinking of the ‘‘costs’’ of modernization in the developing nations: the disrupted traditions, the breakup of families and villages, the impact of vast economic and social forces that can neither be understood nor adapted to in terms of inherited wisdom and ways of living. Because it is our tradition that invented modernization we have thought that we were somehow immune to the costs or that because the process was, with us, so slow and so gradual, we had successfully absorbed the strains of modernization.What the sixties showed us was that in America, too, the costs have been high and the strains by no means wholly absorbed. In that decade, at least among a significant proportion of the educated young of a whole generation, occurred the repudiation of the tradition of utilitarian individualism (even though it often persisted unconsciously even among those doing the repudiating) and the biblical tradition too, especially as it was seen, in part realistically, as linked to utilitarianism. Let us examine the critique. The criticisms of American society that developed in the sixties were diverse and not always coherent one with another. In many different forms there was a new consciousness of the question of ends. The continuous ex-

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pansion of wealth and power, which is what the rationalization of means meant in practice, did not seem so self-evidently good. There were of course some sharp questions about the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but beyond that was the question whether the quality of life was a simple function of wealth and power, or whether the endless accumulation of wealth and power was not destroying the quality and meaning of life, ecologically and sociologically. If the rationalization of means, the concern for pure instrumentalism, was no longer self-evidently meaningful then those things that had been subordinated, dominated, and exploited for the sake of rationalizing means took on a new significance. Nature, social relations, and personal feelings could now be treated as ends rather than means, could be liberated from the repressive control of technical reason. Among those who shared this general analysis there was a division between those who placed emphasis on overthrowing the present system as a necessary precondition for the realization of a more human society and those who emphasized the present embodiment of a new style of life ‘‘in the pores,’’ so to speak, of the old society. The contrast was not absolute as the effort to create politically ‘‘liberated zones’’ in certain communities such as Berkeley and Ann Arbor indicates. And for a time in the late sixties opposition to the Vietnam War, seen as an example of technical reason gone mad, took precedence over everything else. Yet there was a contrast between those mainly oriented to political action (still, in a way, oriented to means rather than ends, though it was the means to overthrow the existing system) and those mainly concerned with the actual creation of alternative patterns of living. The difference between demonstrations and sit-ins on the one hand, and love-ins and rock festivals on the other, illustrates the contrast. Political activists shared some of the personal characteristics of those they fought—they were ‘‘uptight,’’ repressed, dominated by time and work. The cultural experimenters, represented most vividly, perhaps, by the ‘‘love, peace, groovy’’ flower children of the middle sixties, believed in harmony with man and nature and the enjoyment of the present moment through drugs, music, or meditation. In either case there was a sharp opposition to the dominant American ethos of utilitarian instrumentalism oriented to personal success. There was also a deep ambivalence to the biblical tradition to which I will return. The question of why the old order began to lose its legitimacy just when it did is not one we have felt equipped to answer. Clearly in the sixties there was a conjuncture of dissatisfactions that did not all have the same meaning. The protests of racial minorities, middle-class youth, and women had

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different causes and different goals. In spite of all the unsolved problems the crisis was brought on by the success of the society as much as by its failures. That education and affluence did not bring happiness or fulfillment was perhaps as important as the fact that society did not seem to be able to solve the problem of racism and poverty. The outbreak of a particularly vicious and meaningless little war in Asia that stymied America’s leadership both militarily and politically for years on end, acted as a catalyst but did not cause the crisis. The deepest cause, no matter what particular factors contributed to the actual timing, was, in my opinion, the inability of utilitarian individualism to provide a meaningful pattern of personal and social existence, especially when its alliance with biblical religion began to sag because biblical religion itself had been gutted in the process. I would thus interpret the crisis of the sixties above all as a crisis of meaning, a religious crisis, with major political, social, and cultural consequences to be sure. Religious upheaval is not new in American history. Time and time again, after a period of spiritual dryness, there has been an outbreak of the spirit. But the religious crisis of the sixties was in more ways a contrast to the great awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than a continuation of them. By all the measures of conventional religiosity the early fifties had been a period of religious revival, but the revival of the fifties proved to be as artificial as the Cold War atmosphere that may have fostered it. The sixties saw a continuous drop in church attendance and a declining belief in the importance of religion, as measured by national polls. It is true that conservative and fundamentalist churches continued to grow and that the major losses were in the mainline Protestant denominations and in the Catholic Church after the full consequences of Vatican II began to sink in. But in terms of American culture, the latter were far more important than the conservative fringe. Although clergy and laity of many denominations played an important part in the events of the sixties, the churches as such were not the locale of the major changes, even the religious ones. Indeed, it was easier for many in the biblical tradition to relate to the political than to the religious aspect of the developing counterculture. The demands for social justice had a close fit with the prophetic teachings of Judaism and Christianity. The struggle for racial equality and later the struggle against the Vietnam War drew many leaders from the churches and synagogues, even though the membership as a whole remained passive. But in spite of the leadership of Martin Luther King and the martyrdom of

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divinity students in the civil rights movement, and in spite of the leadership of the Berrigans and William Sloane Coffin in the peace movement, those movements as a whole remained indifferent if not hostile to religion. By the end of the sixties those churchmen who had given everything to the political struggle found themselves without influence and without a following. For most of the political activists the churches remained too closely identified with the established powers to gain much sympathy or interest. As dogmatic Marxism gained greater influence among the activists during the decade, ideological antireligion increased as well. But the churches were if anything even less well prepared to cope with the new spirituality of the sixties. The demand for immediate, powerful, and deep religious experience, which was part of the turn away from future-oriented instrumentalism toward present meaning and fulfillment, could on the whole not be met by the religious bodies. The major Protestant churches in the course of generations of defensive struggles against secular rationalism had taken on some of the color of the enemy. Moralism and verbalism and the almost complete absence of ecstatic experience characterized the middle-class Protestant churches. The more intense religiosity of black and lower-class churches remained largely unavailable to the white middle-class members of the counterculture. The Catholic Church with its great sacramental tradition might be imagined to have been a more hospitable home for the new movement, but such was not the case. Older Catholicism had its own defensiveness that took the form of scholastic intellectualism and legalistic moralism. Nor did Vatican II really improve things. The Catholic Church finally decided to recognize the value of the modern world just when American young people were beginning to find it valueless. As if all this were not enough, the biblical arrogance toward nature and the Christian hostility toward the impulse life were both alien to the new spiritual mood. Thus the religion of the counterculture was by and large not biblical. It drew from many sources including the American Indian. But its deepest influences came from Asia. In many ways Asian spirituality provided a more thorough contrast to the rejected utilitarian individualism than did the biblical religions. To external achievement it posed inner experience; to the exploitation of nature, harmony with nature; to impersonal organization, an intense relation to a guru. Mahayana Buddhism, particularly in the form of Zen, provided the most pervasive religious influence on the counterculture but elements from Taoism, Hinduism, and Sufism were also influential. What drug experiences, interpreted in Asian religious terms, as Leary and Alpert did

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quite early, and meditation experiences, often taken up when drug use was found to have too many negative consequences, showed was the illusoriness of worldly striving. Careerism and status seeking, the sacrifice of present fulfillment for some ever receding future goal, no longer seemed worthwhile. There was a turn away not only from utilitarian individualism but from the whole apparatus of industrial society. The new ethos preferred handicrafts and farming to business and industry and small faceto-face communities to impersonal bureaucracy and the isolated nuclear family. Simplicity and naturalness in food and clothing were the ideal even though conspicuous consumption and one-upmanship (‘‘Oh, you don’t use natural salt, I see’’) made their inevitable appearance. Thus the limits were pushed far beyond what any previous great awakening had seen toward socialism in one direction, toward mysticism in the other. But perhaps the major meaning of the sixties was not anything positive at all. Neither the political movement nor the counterculture survived the decade. Important successor movements did survive, but the major meaning of the sixties was purely negative: the erosion of the legitimacy of the American way of life. On the surface what seems to have been most drastically undermined was utilitarian individualism, for the erosion of the biblical tradition seemed only to continue what had been a long-term trend. The actual situation was more complicated. Utilitarian individualism had perhaps never before been so divested of its ideological and religious façade, never before recognized in all its naked destructiveness. And yet that very exposure could become an ironic victory. If all moral restraints are illegitimate, then why should I believe in religion and morality? If those who win in American society are the big crooks, why should I not try to be a big crook rather than a little one? In this way the unmasking of utilitarian individualism led to the very condition from which Hobbes sought to save us—the war of all against all. Always before, the biblical side of the American tradition has been able to bring antinomian and anarchic tendencies under some kind of control, and perhaps that is still possible today. Certainly the fragile structures of the counterculture were not able to do so. But out of the shattered hopes of the sixties there has emerged a cynical privatism, a narrowing of sympathy and concern to the smallest possible circle that is truly frightening. What has happened to Richard Nixon should not obscure for us the meaning of his overwhelming victory in 1972. It was the victory of cynical privatism. In this rather gloomy period of American history, and the mood of the youth culture has been predominantly gloomy—not the hope for massive

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change that characterized the sixties but the anxious concern for survival, physical and moral—the successor movements of the early seventies take on a special interest. We may ask whether any of them have been able to take up and preserve the positive seeds of the sixties so that under more favorable circumstances they may grow and bear fruit once again. Some of the successor movements clearly do not have that potential. The Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army (sla) on the one hand, the Krishna Consciousness Society and the Divine Light Mission on the other, are parodies of the broader political and religious movements that they represent, too narrow and in some cases too self-destructive to contribute to the future solution of our problems. About others there may be more hope. To some extent the successor movements, especially the explicitly religious ones, have been survival units in a quite literal sense. They have provided a stable social setting and a coherent set of symbols for young people disoriented by the drug culture or disillusioned with radical politics. What Synanon claims to have done for drug users, religious groups—from Zen Buddhists to Jesus people—have done for ex-hippies. The Krishna Consciousness Society, which grew up amidst the disintegration of Haight Asbury as a hippie utopia, illustrates this function.3 The rescue-mission aspect of the successor movements has had quite tangible results. In many instances reconciliation with parents has been facilitated by the more stable lifestyle and the religious ideology of acceptance rather than confrontation. A new, more positive orientation toward occupational roles has often developed. In some cases, such as followers of Meher Baba, this has meant a return to school and the resumption of a normal middle-class career pattern.4 For others, for example, resident devotees of the San Francisco Zen Center or ashram residents of the 3HO movement, jobs are seen only as means to subsistence, having no value in themselves. While the attitude toward work in terms of punctuality, thoroughness, and politeness is, from the employer’s point of view, positive, the religious devotee has no inner commitment to the job nor does he look forward to any advancement. 3 [References to particular groups in our study are fleshed out more completely in the various chapters devoted to each group in Glock and Bellah, eds., The New Religious Consciousness.] 4 See the interesting study of Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony, ‘‘Getting Straight with Meher Baba,’’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 11, no. 2 (1972).

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In terms of intelligence and education the jobholder is frequently ‘‘overqualified’’ for the position he holds, but this causes no personal distress because of the meaning the job has for him. For many of these groups the ideal solution would be economic self-sufficiency, so that members would not have to leave the community at all, but few are able to attain this. As in monastic orders some full-time devotees can be supported frugally by the gifts of sympathizers, but they are exceptions. Many of the groups also insist on a stable sexual life, in some instances celibate but more usually monogamous, with sexual relations being confined to marriage. Such norms are found not only among Jesus people but in the Asian groups as well. These features of stability should not be interpreted as simple adaptation to the established society, though in some cases that may occur. The human-potential movement may serve such an adaptive function, and perhaps Synanon also does to a certain extent. But for the more explicitly religious groups, stable patterns of personal living and occupation do not mean acceptance of the established order. Sympathizers of the Asian religions tend to be as critical of American society as political radicals, far more critical than the norm. While the survey shows that people sympathetic to the Jesus movement are less critical of American society, the Christian World Liberation Front in Berkeley is atypical in being quite critical. All of these movements share a very negative image of established society as sunk in materialism and heading for disaster. Many of them have intense millennial expectations, viewing the present society as in the last stage of degradation before the dawning of a new era. 3HO people speak of the Aquarian age which is about to replace the dying Piscean age. Krishna Consciousness people speak of the present as the last stage of the materialistic Kali-Yuga and on the verge of a new age of peace and happiness. More traditionally biblical expectations of the millennium are common among Jesus people. All of these groups, well behaved as they are, have withdrawn fundamentally from contemporary American society, see it as corrupt and illegitimate, and place their hope in a radically different vision. We should remember that early Christians too were well behaved—Paul advised them to remain in their jobs and their marriages—yet by withholding any deep commitment to the Roman Empire they helped to bring it down and to form a society of a very different type. An important dimension of variation among the groups we have studied is the degree of openness or closure toward the outside world. This is similar to Bryan Wilson’s contrast between conversionist and introversionist

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sects. However some groups with tightly controlled boundaries—that is, specific and demanding requirements for membership—are also highly conversionist, as in the case of Krishna Consciousness and Jesus movements. Nonetheless, open boundaries are undoubtedly more conducive to rapid expansion. Transcendental Meditation, which claims not to be a religion and has few if any doctrinal or behavioral requirements, has attracted hundreds of thousands, even though many quickly abandon the practice. The Krishna Consciousness movement on the other hand has remained quite small, with no more than three or four thousand members. Recently this movement has shown distinct introversionist tendencies in sending hundreds of its followers permanently to India. Some of the more interesting movements show a range of possibilities or a change over time on the dimension of openness and closure. Zen Buddhism is one of the most pervasive influences on the entire range of countercultural developments. Philip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen was for a time a kind of bible of the counterculture, influencing thousands who had only the most casual acquaintance with Zen meditation. Alan Watts, one of the most influential countercultural gurus, preached essentially a modified Zen. The influence of Zen on everything from psychotherapy to esthetics has been major. Yet full-time membership in a Zen monastery or center is an extremely demanding enterprise, leading in some cases to vows of chastity and poverty. The history of the San Francisco Zen Center from the late 1950s to the present (1975) shows a continuous movement from general intellectual and cultural interest in Zen to high and demanding standards of practice.5 Of course Zen, perhaps more than any other movement of Asian origin, exercises an influence out of all proportion to the number of its full-time devotees. Just for that reason it represents clearly the tension between general cultural influence and a tightly organized in-group that is to be found in many other movements. 3HO has undergone a shift comparable to the Zen Center in moving away from general yoga practice to the specific beliefs and rituals of Sikhism. A slight tendency in the opposite direction is to be found in the Christian World Liberation Front, which has sacrificed some of its ‘‘forever family’’ community for more active ministries, especially in the cultural field with its publications and courses. Political groups probably show something of the 5 My information on the San Francisco Zen Center comes mainly from a Ph.D. dissertation by David Wise: ‘‘Zen Buddhist Subculture in San Francisco’’ (University of California, Berkeley, 1971).

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same spectrum of openness and closedness, but they have not been at the center or our study. On the whole the human-potential groups are open compared to the religious groups, having few requirements for participation, though abstention from drugs and alcohol and avoidance of aggressive behavior may be required of participants during the actual period of training. Acceptance of certain frames of reference (‘‘I am perfect just as I am’’) may be a prerequisite if the training is to make sense, but these views are not seen as doctrinal requirements. In general, the human-potential groups and groups like Transcendental Meditation that are very similar to them may be seen as cults rather than as sects in the traditional sociological sense of those terms. The human-potential groups are not usually membership groups, except temporarily. Their leaders may be charismatic, but are seen more as healers and teachers than as organizational leaders. Both our survey and our qualitative observations indicate that sympathizers of the human-potential movement are less alienated from American society than followers of Asian religions or political radicals. They are, nonetheless, more critical than the norm, and many of their beliefs contrast sharply with established American ideology. A tension exists within the movement over the issue of latent utilitarianism. If the techniques of the human-potential movement are to be used for personal and business success (the training group movement out of which the human-potential movement in part derives had tendencies in that direction), then it is no different from the mind cures and positive thinking of the most debased kinds of utilitarian religion in America. But for some in the movement the whole idea of success is viewed negatively and the training is seen in part as a way of gaining liberation from that goal. The high evaluation of bodily awareness and intrapsychic experience as well as nonmanipulative interpersonal relations place much of the movement in tension with the more usual orientations of American utilitarian individualism. Here utilitarian individualism is a hydra-headed monster that tends to survive just where it is most attacked. We have already considered some of the common themes of the counterculture of the sixties. We may now consider how they have survived and been elaborated in successor movements. Immediate experience rather than doctrinal belief continues to be central among all the religious movements, including the Jesus movement, and in the human-potential movement as well. Knowledge in the sense of direct firsthand encounter has so much higher standing than abstract argument based on logic that one

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could almost speak of anti-intellectualism in many groups. Yet it would be a mistake to interpret this tendency as rampant irrationalism. Even though science is viewed ambivalently and the dangers of scientific progress are consciously feared by many in our groups, science as such is not rejected. There is a belief that much of what is experienced could be scientifically validated. Indeed the human-potential groups (and Transcendental Meditation) believe that their teachings are in accord with science broadly understood. The study of the physiology of the brain during meditation is seen not as a threat but as a support for religious practice. Since reality inheres in the actual experience, explanatory schemes, theological or scientific, are secondary, though scientific explanations tend to be preferred to theological ones because of the general prestige of science. At a deeper level the lack of interest in critical reflective reason may be a form of anti-intellectualism but the conscious irrationalism of groups such as the romantic German youth movement is quite missing. Similarly there is a complete absence of primordial loyalties and hatreds based on race, ethnic group, or even, usually, religion. In spite of the primacy of experience, belief is not entirely missing. In some groups, as we have already seen in the case of 3HO, the stress on doctrine may be increasing. The early phase of the new left was heavily experiential: unless you had placed your body on the line you could not understand the reality of American society. Consciousness raising in racial and women’s groups continues to emphasize the experiential aspect of oppression and the struggle against it. But new-left groups became increasingly doctrinal toward the end of the sixties and remain today more oriented to doctrine than experience in comparison with religious and human-potential groups. A central belief shared by the Asian religions and diffused widely outside them is important because of how sharply it contrasts with established American views. This is the belief in the unity of all being. Our separate selves, according to Buddhism, Hinduism, and their offshoots, are not ultimately real. Philosophical Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism reject dualism. For them ultimately there is no difference between myself and yourself and this river and that mountain. We are all one, and the conflict between us is therefore illusory. While such beliefs are diametrically opposed to utilitarian individualism, for whom the individual is the ultimate ontological reality, there are elements in the Christian tradition to which they are not entirely opposed. Christian theology also felt the unity of being and the necessity to love

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beings. The New Testament spoke of the church as one body of which we are all members. But Christianity has tended to maintain the ultimate dualism of creator and creation which the Asian religions would obliterate. Christian mystics have at times made statements (viewed as heretical) expressing the ultimate unity of God and man and, in mediated form, the unity of God and man through Christ is an orthodox belief. Still, American Christianity has seldom emphasized the aspect of the Christian tradition that stressed the unity rather than the distinction of divinity and man, so that the Asian teachings stand out as sharply divergent. Much of the countercultural criticism of American society related to the belief in nondualism. If man and nature, men and women, white and black, rich and poor are really one then there is no basis for the exploitation of the latter by the former. The ordination of women by Zen Buddhists and 3HO, even though not warranted in the earlier traditions, shows how their American followers interpret the fundamental beliefs. It is significant that from the basis of nondualism conclusions similar to those of Marxism can be reached. But because the theoretical basis is fundamental unity rather than fundamental opposition, the criticism of existing society is nonhostile, nonconfrontational, and often nonpolitical. Nonetheless the effort to construct a witness community based on unity and identity rather than opposition and oppression can itself have critical consequences in a society based on opposite principles. Another feature of Asian religions that has been widely influential is their view of dogma and symbol. Believing, as many of them do, that the fundamental truth, the truth of nondualism, is one, they also accept many beliefs and symbols as appropriate for different groups or different levels of spiritual insight. Dogmatism has by no means been missing in the Asian religions and has been traditionally more important than many of their American followers probably realize. But relative to Christianity and biblical religions generally the contrast holds. Belief in certain doctrinal or historical statements (Jesus is the Son of God, Christ rose from the tomb on the third day) has been so central in Western religion that it has been hard for Westerners to imagine religions for whom literal belief in such statements is unimportant. But the impact of Asian religion coincides with a long history of religion in the West in which particular beliefs have been rendered questionable but the significance of religion and myth in human action has been reaffirmed. Postcritical Western religion was therefore ready for a positive response to Asian religions in a way different from any earlier period. Paul Tillich’s response to Zen Buddhism late in his life

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is an example of this. Thomas Merton’s final immersion in Buddhism is an even better one. Such tendencies, however, are not to be found in the Christian World Liberation Front or other Jesus movements. But in many of the Asian groups and certainly in the human-potential movement there has been a willingness to find meaning in a wide variety of symbols and practices without regarding them literally or exclusively. The danger here as elsewhere is that postcritical religion can become purely utilitarian. This can happen if one fails to see that any religious symbol or practice, however relative and partial, is an effort to express or attain the truth about ultimate reality. If such symbols and practices become mere techniques for ‘‘self-realization,’’ then once again we see utilitarian individualism reborn from its own ashes. Our study began with the thought that the new religious consciousness that seemed to be developing among young people in the San Francisco Bay Area might be some harbinger, some straw in the wind, that would tell us of changes to come in American culture and society.We were aware that studies of American religion based on national samples could tell us mainly about what was believed in the present and perhaps also in the past, since religious views change relatively slowly. Such samples, however, could not easily pick up what was incipient, especially what was radically new and as yet confined to only small groups. Even our Bay Area sample, weighted as it was to youth, picked up only a tiny handful of those deeply committed to new forms of religion, although it did lead us to believe that the new groups had gotten a hearing and some sympathy from a significant minority. Our qualitative studies of particular groups, based on participant-observation field studies, have told us a great deal about them. But to assess what we have discovered with respect to possible future trends remains hazardous. The future will certainly not be determined mainly by the groups we studied.What role they can play will depend very largely on other developments in the society as a whole. Thus in trying to assess the possible meaning and role of our groups in the future, I would like to outline three possible scenarios for American society as a whole: liberal, traditional authoritarian, and revolutionary. The future that most people seem to expect and that the futurologists describe with their projections is very much like the present society but more so. This is what I call the liberal scenario. American society would continue as in the past to devote itself to the accumulation of wealth and power. The mindless rationalization of means and the lack of concern with ends would only increase as biblical religion and morality continue to erode.

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Utilitarian individualism, with less biblical restraint or façade than ever before, would continue as the dominant ideology. Its economic form, capitalism, its political form, bureaucracy, and its ideological form, scientism, would each increasingly dominate its respective sphere. Among the elite, scientism, the idolization of technical reason alone, would provide some coherent meaning after traditional religion and morality had gone. But technical reason would hardly be a sufficient surrogate religion for the masses. No longer accepting the society as legitimate in any ideal terms, the masses would have to be brought to acquiesce grudgingly by a combination of coercion and material reward. In such a society one could see a certain role for Asian religious groups and the human-potential movement—perhaps even for a small radical political fringe. All of these could be allowed within limits to operate and provide the possibility of expressing the frustration and rage that the system generates but in a way such that the individuals concerned were cooled out and the system itself is not threatened. The utilitarian individualism that is latent in all the countercultural successor movements, political and religious, makes this a real possibility. This scenario depicts the society as heading, mildly and gradually, into something like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Lately, however, questions have been raised as to the viability of this direction of development. Perhaps there are inner contradictions that will lead to a drastic breakdown in the foreseeable future. Robert Heilbroner has recently predicted such a collapse, largely as a result of ecological catastrophe.6 But Heilbroner also envisages the possibility that tensions between the rich and the poor nations could bring disaster even sooner than ecological attrition. Even since Heilbroner wrote, the proliferation of atomic weapon capacity in India and the Middle East has strengthened this possibility. Another distinct possibility is worldwide economic collapse bringing social convulsions in train. No matter how the breakdown of the ‘‘modernization’’ syndrome might occur, Heilbroner envisages a relapse into traditional authoritarianism as the most likely result, providing, that is, that the worst outcome, total destruction of life on the planet, is avoided. Simpler, poorer, and less free societies might be all that humans would be capable of in the wake of a global catastrophe. The social and personal coherence that the modernizing societies never attained might be supplied by the rigid myths and rituals of a new hierarchical authoritarian 6 Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (New York: Norton, 1974).

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society. To put it in terms of the present discussion, the collapse of subjective reason, which is what technical reason ultimately is, would bring in its wake a revival of objective reason in a particularly closed and reified form.7 Technical reason, because it is concerned not with truth or reality but only with results, not with what is but only with what works, is ultimately completely subjective. That its domineering manipulative attitude to reality in the service of the subject leads ultimately to the destruction of any true subjectivity is only one of its many ironies. But a new traditional authoritarianism would set up some single orthodox version of what truth and reality are and enforce agreement. Some historically relative creed, belief, and ritual would be asserted as identical with objective reality itself. In this way social and personal coherence would be achieved, but ultimately at the expense of any real objectivity. If a relapse into traditional authoritarianism is a distinct possibility in America, and I believe it is, we might ask what are the likely candidates for the job of supplying the new orthodoxy. Perhaps the most likely system would be right-wing Protestant fundamentalism. We already have a good example of such a regime in Afrikaner-dominated South Africa.8 Conservative Protestant fundamentalism has a large and, by some measures, growing following in America. It has the religious and moral absolutism that a traditional authoritarianism would require, and it is hard to see any close rival on the American scene today. The Catholic Church, which might at an earlier period have been a candidate for such a role, is certainly not, in its post–Vatican II disarray. Some of the more authoritarian of our Asian religions might provide a sufficiently doctrinaire model but their small following in comparison with Protestant fundamentalism virtually rules them out. The future for most of the groups we have studied, all but the Jesus movements, would be bleak indeed under such a neotraditional authoritarianism. It is doubtful if even a group as open as the Christian World Liberation Front could survive. Neoauthoritarian regimes are hard on nonconformity in every sphere. The new Chilean government, for example, not only sets standards of dress and hairstyle but also persecutes Asian religions. 7 The contrast between subjective and objective reason has been developed by members of the Frankfurt School. See, for example, Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (London: Oxford University Press, 1947; Seabury Paperback, 1974). 8 See Dunbar Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), for an excellent analysis of Afrikaner civil religion and its Dutch Calvinist dimension.

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There remains a third alternative, however improbable. It is this that I am calling revolutionary, not in the sense that it would be inaugurated by a bloody uprising, which I do not think likely, but because it would bring fundamental structural change, socially and culturally. It is to this rather unlikely outcome that most of the groups we have studied, at least the most flexible and open of them, would have most to contribute. Such a new order would involve, as in the case of traditional authoritarianism, an abrupt shift away from the exclusive dominance of technical reason, but it would not involve the adoption of the reified objective reason either. In accord with its concern for ends rather than means alone such a revolutionary culture would have to affirm commitment to the quest for ultimate reality. But it would not imagine that any one set of religious or philosophical symbols or beliefs can adequately express that reality. Priorities would shift away from endless accumulation of wealth and power to a greater concern for harmony with nature and between human beings. Perhaps a much simpler, material life, simpler, that is, compared to present middle-class American standards, would result, but it would not be accompanied by an abandonment of free inquiry or free speech. Science, which would ultimately have to be shackled in a traditional authoritarian regime, would continue to be pursued in the revolutionary culture but it would not be idolized as in the liberal model. In all these respects the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the Asian religious groups, the human-potential movement, and even a group like the Christian World Liberation Front, as well as the more flexible of the radical political groups, would be consonant with the new regime and its needs. Indeed many of the present activities of such groups could be seen as experiments leading to the possibility of such a new alternative. Neither safety valve nor persecuted minority, the new groups would be, under such an option, the vanguard of a new age. Such an outcome would accord most closely with the millennial expectations which we have seen are rife among the new groups. Even if an enormous amount of thought and planning were devoted to such an alternative, thought and planning that the small struggling groups we have been studying are quite incapable at the moment of supplying, the revolutionary alternative seems quite utopian. Perhaps only a major shift in the established biblical religions, a shift away from their uneasy alliance with utilitarian individualism and toward a profound reappropriation of their own religious roots and an openness to the needs of the contemporary world, would provide the mass base for a successful effort to establish the revolutionary alternative. To be politically effective such a shift would have to

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lead to a revitalization of the revolutionary spirit of the young republic, so that America would once again attract the hope and love of its citizens. This outcome too at present seems quite utopian. It may be, however, that only the implementation of a utopian vision, a holistic reason that unites subjectivity and objectivity, will make human life in the twenty-first century worth living.9

9 [It might be worth taking a second look at the three possible scenarios outlined at the end of this chapter in the light of what has happened in the thirty years since its original publication. What seems to have emerged is, from the point of view of the original chapter, an unlikely alliance of liberalism (in the classic sense of utilitarian individualism) and traditional authoritarianism, evidenced by the political influence, as predicted, of conservative Protestantism, now allied with a conservative Catholicism that has moved steadily away from the openness of the Vatican II period. The alliance is unlikely in that Catholicism has historically seldom been enthusiastic about capitalism and radical utilitarian individualism. America, however, is different, and for the moment such an alliance seems viable. What was certainly unexpected in 1975, when the fallout from the Vietnam War was still palpable, was that this neoliberal-conservative alliance would find expression in a resurgence of American nationalism. The third, revolutionary, alternative seems as utopian as ever. Time will tell whether an alliance of utilitarian individualism and conservative religion has the resources to deal with the growing ecological, economic, political, and military challenges that face us.]

12 The Kingdom of God in America L A N G U A G E O F FA I T H , L A N G U A G E O F N AT I O N,

LANGUAGE OF EMPIRE

Religion has played a central role in American public life from the first settlement to the present day. In this chapter I want to consider one highly significant way in which religion has influenced our public life: it has provided us with a public language, not only a language of faith, but a language of nation and even a language of empire. As we shall see, even our Constitution was interpreted religiously. There are certainly those who, adopting a rather narrow and rather recent understanding of the First Amendment, believe, or at least vaguely feel, that there is something illegitimate about the use of religion as a source of public language. Of course they would be right if such language ever attained legally coercive authority, for that would indeed involve the establishment of religion, prohibited by the First Amendment. But the use of religion in public discourse, in the noncoercive discussion that goes on between citizens, is not only not prohibited by the Constitution; it is specifically protected by it. That is one of the meanings of the ‘‘free exercise’’ clause of the First Amendment. But even though the use of religious language in public discourse is legitimate as such, it is not without its pitfalls. It is also a legitimate part of public discourse to consider when religious language, used to interpret our common problems, is helpful and when it may be dangerous, either to the faith community, to the national community, or to both. This chapter is a reflection not on the legitimacy but on the appropriateness of the use of certain kinds of religious language in our common life. Perry Miller has argued that John Winthrop’s sermon ‘‘A Model of Christian Charity,’’ delivered on board ship in Salem Harbor in 1630 be[First given as a talk at Old Christ Church, Philadelphia, on October 5, and at the National Cathedral,Washington, D.C., on October 7, 1987. It was published in Religion and the Public Good: A Bicentennial Forum (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1988), 41–61. Used by permission.]

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fore the colonists had even landed, stands at the beginning of American consciousness.1 At that moment Winthrop addressed the settlers as members of a church, though also as people about to establish a society, what Winthrop calls a ‘‘plantation,’’ the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He enjoins the congregation in words almost entirely drawn from the New Testament: For this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities, we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality, we must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.

Then, as he draws toward his conclusion, he says, For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.2

The image of the city on a hill comes, of course, from Matthew 5:14, early in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says, ‘‘You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid,’’ and it serves as one of several metaphors for the kingdom of God. Winthrop then closes his sermon with a quotation from Moses’ last farewell to Israel, Deuteronomy 30, thus bringing in the Exodus and covenant imagery, the primary locus of the kingdom of God idea in the Hebrew Scriptures. H. Richard Niebuhr has argued that the kingdom of God is the master symbol of American Christianity,3 though he did not comment on this sermon of John Winthrop. It is certainly a complex symbol, both in scripture and in Winthrop. The idea of kingdom could not but be political, and in its New Testament usage it pointed back not only to Moses but to the great 1 Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 6. 2 John Winthrop, ‘‘A Model of Christian Charity,’’ in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Puritan Political Ideas (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 92–93. I have modernized the spelling. 3 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1937).

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days of David and Solomon. By endowing Jesus with a Davidic lineage the New Testament certainly alluded to that meaning, yet by showing a Jesus crowned as ‘‘king of the Jews’’ only while dying the death of a political criminal on the cross, it showed that the kingdom of God must certainly have another meaning than worldly power. Jesus proclaimed that the kingdom of God was at hand so that it was actually taking shape in the beloved community of those who took up their cross and followed him. Yet it was also said to be still to come, to be fully realized only when Jesus comes again. And even for those who participate in it now there is something conditional about it. In the passage just before the mention of the city on the hill, Jesus says, using another metaphor for the kingdom, ‘‘Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?’’ (Matthew 5:13). When Winthrop said, ‘‘We shall be as a city upon a hill,’’ he was certainly using the language of faith, but he was also incipiently using the language of nation, for it was not just the church of Jesus Christ, but the plantation of New England that Winthrop was referring to.When Ronald Reagan quoted Winthrop, as he did at the July 4 Statue of Liberty celebration in 1986, but frequently elsewhere as well, he embellished both Winthrop and the New Testament by saying that the Americans have a mission to be ‘‘a shining city upon a hill.’’ We may wonder whether he is not extending the metaphor still further to refer to the American empire in all its wealth and power, thus adding a language of empire to the languages of faith and nation. Winthrop retained a strong sense of the conditional meaning of the city upon a hill metaphor, reminding us that if we are unfaithful we may be consumed out of this good land. With Reagan the element of warning seems to be largely subsumed in the rhetoric of celebration. Already in the seventeenth century Roger Williams worried about extending the language of faith into a language of nation. He would have been amazed indeed to see that language become a language of empire. He admonished Winthrop and his colleagues not to identify Massachusetts with the kingdom of God since ‘‘America (as Europe and all nations) lies dead in sin.’’ 4 His warning was frequently reiterated but not frequently heeded in our subsequent history. It was perhaps inevitable that the colonists, particularly the pious among them, would see themselves under the archetype of the Exodus. Cotton Mather in his biography of Winthrop refers to him as Moses, because he 4 Quoted in Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 110. I have modernized the spelling.

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led his people across the sea to a promised land.5 As Perry Miller has pointed out, the biblical image of the ‘‘errand into the wilderness’’ was powerfully present among the New England settlers.6 It is therefore worth remembering that it was at Sinai that the Hebrew conception of the kingdom of God was most clearly articulated. God replaced Pharaoh as the king of kings; from then on all earthly rulers were deprived of ultimate authority. Certainly the colonists saw themselves as escaping from the thrall of European empire to establish a new society under God in the wilderness. As such the Exodus symbolism had for them the same meaning that liberation theologians have given it in the contemporary third world. Yet there was a troubling element in the Exodus symbolism that unfortunately had powerful social consequences. New England, like ancient Canaan, was not empty. It was all too easy for the colonists to identify the native Americans with the Amalekites, Jebusites and Canaanites that God in the Hebrew scriptures had ordered the children of Israel to replace. It is one of the ironies of that complex story that the Hebrews in escaping from the imperial tyranny of one people should inflict something similar on others. Again it was Roger Williams, almost alone, who protested against that analogy, arguing that the settlers had no right to take the land of others by force and that the American Indians were as much children of God as the English. The New England effort to build a ‘‘peaceable kingdom’’ (another synonym for the kingdom of God) has stood as a paradigm for the American experiment as a whole. It is in many ways an inspiring example, but also one deeply flawed. We need to remember both aspects. Exodus imagery was by no means limited to the seventeenth century. It has reverberated throughout our history, in part because America has been the promised land for many diverse groups who have crossed many different seas to reach these shores, right up to the present. But the period of the revolution and the constitution of the new republic saw a particularly vigorous recrudescence of it. Nicholas Street, for example, preached a sermon in East Haven, Connecticut, in April 1777, entitled ‘‘The American States Acting Over the Part of the Children of Israel in the Wilderness and Thereby Impeding Their Entrance into Canaan’s Rest.’’ 7 He told his fellow 5 Mather’s life of Winthrop is conveniently reprinted as an appendix to Bercovitch, Puritan Origins. 6 Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956). 7 In Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 67–81.

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citizens that it was not enough for them to have escaped from Pharaoh’s oppressions. They must now come to terms with their own wickedness, rather than fall into backsliding and complaining, if they were to establish themselves securely in the promised land. For our purposes an even more interesting sermon is one preached by Samuel Langdon to the General Court at Concord, New Hampshire, on June 5, 1788, entitled ‘‘The Republic of the Israelites an Example to the American States.’’ Langdon was urging that New Hampshire become the ninth state to ratify the new federal constitution and thus put it into effect, an outcome that occurred on June 21. Langdon took as his text a passage from a speech of Moses reported in Deuteronomy 4:5–7: ‘‘Behold, I have taught you the statutes and judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it. Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, who shall hear all these statutes, and say, surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’’ 8 Langdon was not being entirely anachronistic when he argued that the government that God established at Sinai was republican in form. Recent biblical scholarship has confirmed that the Sinaitic covenant did establish a government that was significantly more egalitarian than the imperial models that it replaced. Part of the meaning of the ‘‘kingdom of God’’ there established was its new, more egalitarian form. Langdon said, ‘‘If I am not mistaken, instead of the twelve tribes of Israel, we may substitute the thirteen states of the American Union,’’ and proceeded to argue that ‘‘God in the course of his kind providence hath given you an excellent constitution of government, founded on the most rational, equitable, and liberal principles,’’ which therefore deserves ratification.9 Later still Lyman Beecher, stalwart leader of Connecticut Congregationalism, declared ‘‘Our own republic in its Constitution and laws is of heavenly origin. It was not borrowed from Greece or Rome, but from the Bible. . . . It was God that gave these elementary principles to our forefathers, as the ‘pillar of fire by night, and the cloud by day,’ for their guidance.’’ 10 But Exodus imagery is not the only indication of the centrality of the conception of the kingdom of God at the time of the birth of the republic. Ruth Bloch has shown in great detail the extraordinary resurgence of millennial themes at the time of the revolution, and even into the 1790s, 8 Cherry, God’s New Israel, 93. 9 Cherry, God’s New Israel, 98. 10 Quoted in Niebuhr, Kingdom of God, 174.

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that saw the new nation as inextricably involved with the coming of the kingdom of God in the fullness of times.11 H. Richard Niebuhr, in an influential article entitled ‘‘The Idea of Covenant and American Democracy,’’ 12 has pointed out that biblical ideas of covenant competed with Enlightenment conceptions of contract as basic understandings of the new nation. The contractarian view sees individuals as entering a social contract to establish a government of fair procedures in order that they can maximize their self-interests. Robin Lovin has recently described the contrasting view: A covenant society is one in which the members are bound together by choice, by mutual commitment, more than by chance. A covenant society is one in which the members see their moral obligations as growing out of this commitment, so that they not only hold their neighbors to a higher ethical standard of conduct than they might if they were just thrown together at random; they expect more of themselves and they acknowledge that others who share in the covenant have a right to examine and criticize their behavior. Above all, the covenant creates this sense of mutual accountability not only to one another, but before God. It is not the moral health of each individual which is under scrutiny, but the righteousness or waywardness of the whole society. This sense that there is a common good, a well-being of the whole society that cannot be measured just by summing up the achievements and faults of all the individuals in it, is crucial to the covenant idea.13

Niebuhr argued that it was such ideas as these, rooted in an idea of covenant derived from the covenant at Sinai, still vividly in the minds of the citizens of the new republic, that enriched our understanding of the new nation and laid the basis for a conception of democracy as a genuine quest for the common good, not merely a convenient contract for the pursuit of private goods. It is interesting that in the early days of the republic the emergence of a language of empire came from the contractarian rather than the covenantal view of society. It was not millenarians but those pressing for the legitimacy of individual economic interests who began to speak of America be11 Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 12 H. Richard Niebuhr, ‘‘The Idea of Covenant and American Democracy,’’ Church History 23 (1954): 126–35. 13 Robin W. Lovin, ‘‘Social Contract or a Public Covenant?’’ in Robin W. Lovin, ed., Religion and American Public Life (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), 135.

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coming ‘‘a whole empire,’’ one that ‘‘may be extended farther and farther to the utmost ends of the earth.’’ 14 Moreover, the belief in the unbounded possibility of economic and scientific progress, which sometimes joined with dreams of empire, can be interpreted as a secular form of millennialism. Not all secularists, however, were proponents of empire. Thomas Jefferson came as close to being a pacifist president as we have ever had. He shared the republican suspicion of military establishments and foreign wars as invitations to tyranny. He met British and French interference with our foreign trade with embargoes rather than armaments. It was through no fault of his that the largest accession of territory ever gained by the United States, the Louisiana Purchase, occurred during his presidency. Jefferson had sought to buy only New Orleans as an outlet for American trade on the Mississippi River. It was really the heroic resistance of the slave revolt in Haiti led by Toussaint Louverture that made Napoleon give up his plans for an empire in the new world and offer to sell the whole Louisiana Territory. Americans have never recognized how much they owe to the Haitians for this bloodless acquisition.15 Nonetheless, under Jefferson’s successor, Madison, America undertook a war, the War of 1812, whose purposes were far from clear, but the motivation for which, at least in the war faction of the Republican Party, was imperial. Indeed it could be said that the war was fought for two ends: Canada and Florida. The New England clergy, reflecting perhaps the opposition to the war on secular grounds by many of their parishioners, nevertheless added a principled opposition on the grounds that a war to gain territory by force is never justified.16 It would seem that neither the orthodox language of faith nor the Jeffersonian language of nation gave much support to the imperial aspirations that were so thoroughly balked at the end of the War of 1812, when we were lucky to be able to return to the borders we had had at its beginning. But neither were the dreams of empire, which had, after all, long predated the War of 1812, subjected to searching criticism. The New England clergy did not, so far as I know, turn to chapter 8 of the first book of Samuel to see whether the Americans were 14 Quoted in Cathy Matson and Peter Onuf, ‘‘Toward a Republican Empire: Interest and Ideology in Revolutionary America,’’ American Quarterly 37 (1985): 516. 15 Henry Adams, History of the United States during the First Administration of Thomas Jefferson (1889; New York: Library of America, 1986), vol. 1, chap. 15. 16 Henry Adams, History of the United States during the Second Administration of James Madison (1891; New York: Library of America, 1986), vol. 2, chap. 1.

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not in danger of making the same mistake as the ancient Hebrews, namely abandoning their covenant heritage in order to imitate the great empires around them. The Mexican-American War of 1845 raised again the question of empire and called out a complex of responses that would be well worth analysis, although the issues were still far from clear. It is in situations of war that issues of national survival, extension of empire, and the incompatibility of violence and faith come to intense public scrutiny. While elements of empire had been present in the American experience from the first forcible acquisition of Indian land, it was not till the very end of the nineteenth century, at the time of the Spanish-American War, that faith, nation, and empire seemed to flow together in a new synthesis, not without challenge, but enormously attractive to many of our citizens. The religious response to imperialism was prepared by a growing identification of Protestant millennialism and secular ideas of progress, including the then popular ideas about the role of race in history. Even among supporters of the Social Gospel, Anglo-Saxon superiority was taken for granted. Josiah Strong, a reforming clergyman, in his enormously popular book Our Country, published in 1885, developed a conception of racial progress that was more cultural than biological, but was still stunning in its implications: The unoccupied arable lands of the earth are limited and will soon be taken. . . . Then will the world enter into a new stage of its history—the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled. . . . Then this race of unequaled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it—the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization—having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind will spread itself over the earth. . . . Can anyone doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the ‘‘survival of the fittest’’? . . . Nothing can save the inferior race but a ready and pliant submission. . . . The contest is not one of arms, but of vitality and civilization.17

But when, in 1898 in the war with Spain, it did come to a contest of arms, the Protestant clergy on the whole did not flinch. The Presbyterian Interior heard in the war ‘‘the ringing of the bell of Divine Providence calling those who have the gospel of the world’s salvation to see and to seize 17 In Winthrop S. Hudson, ed., Nationalism and Religion in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 115.

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this new, this august opportunity for preaching it in a world-empire that has so long been waiting for it.’’ The Baptist Standard published articles on the ‘‘imperialism of righteousness.’’ 18 But it was the irrepressible Senator Albert J. Beveridge who outdid even Josiah Strong in the fusion of socialDarwinist racism with religion: ‘‘The American Republic is a part of the movement of a race,—the most masterful race of history,—and race movements are not to be stayed by the hand of man. They are mighty answers to Divine commands. Their leaders are not only statesmen of peoples— they are prophets of God.’’ 19 Catholic prelates were somewhat more restrained in their celebration of this war with a Catholic nation, but their sentiments were not in the end very different. Archbishop John Ireland saw God through the war assigning ‘‘to this republic the mission of putting before the world the ideal of popular liberty, the ideal of the high elevation of all humanity.’’ 20 Protestants and Catholics alike seemed to be prepared to believe that America ‘‘can conquer but to save.’’ Nor was there an essentially different understanding among secular progressives who identified the nation with democracy, science and progress. Woodrow Wilson articulated a public philosophy with strong overtones of Protestant millennialism in leading America into World War I as a crusade to make the world safe for democracy, and men like John Dewey and Herbert Croly, who hardly shared his religious enthusiasm, were glad to join him on secular grounds. Yet it was the profound disillusionment brought on by World War I and its aftermath that gave widespread expression to doubts that had been building as to the validity of the fusion of faith, nation and empire. I would like to dwell for a moment on two of the critical precursors because they both used the symbolism of the kingdom of God to undercut the prevailing consensus. American Protestants, as we have seen, had long been fascinated with the millennium, the coming kingdom of God. The decades before World War I had seen a hardening of the distinction between two views: postmillennialism, which saw Christ coming at the end of the millennium, and premillennialism which saw him as coming, after catastrophic disruptions, at its beginning. Postmillennialism was the natural position of the liberals 18 Quoted in Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, vol. 1, The Irony of It All 1893–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 308. 19 Quoted in Marty, Modern American Religion, 1:310. 20 Quoted in Marty, Modern American Religion, 1:307.

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for whom the achievements of secular culture were the gradual preparation for the millennial age. Premillennialism was growing among those who were increasingly disillusioned by those secular achievements and whose only hope for the future was direct divine intervention. Those who expected an imminent apocalypse hoped to limit their relation to the principalities and powers of this world and live in accordance with the teachings of Jesus. Such views led many of them to a pacifist position of opposition to the war and to American involvement in it. In 1915 The King’s Business, the leading premillennial magazine, held that for God there is ‘‘ ‘neither Greek nor Jew,’ . . . English, German or American.’’ The editors, therefore, held that ‘‘we must never forget our brethren, and we must show our love for one another in every way possible. . . . ‘Vengeance’ belongs to God not to us. . . . Our part is to feed our hungry enemy (Rom. XII:20) and to ‘overcome evil with good.’ ’’ 21 In 1917 leading liberal theologians, particularly at the University of Chicago, began an unrestrained attack on the premillennialists for undermining patriotism and threatening national security. Professor Shirley Jackson Case of Chicago charged that money to support the premillennialists was coming from German sources. ‘‘The American nation,’’ he argued, ‘‘is engaged in a gigantic effort to make the world safe for democracy.’’ Therefore, ‘‘it would be almost traitorous negligence to ignore the detrimental character of premillennial propaganda. . . . In the name of religion we are told that the world cannot appreciably be improved by human efforts.’’ 22 That the premillennialists not long after, under enormous pressure, largely abandoned their opposition to the war does not change the emblematic nature of the moment when they put the language of faith above the language of nation and empire. Nor can we fail to be instructed by the hysteria with which a liberal theologian defended his identification of Christianity with the American mission to make the world safe for democracy. My second example is the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce, who, though a member of no church, developed a remarkable philosophy of community on the basis of New Testament teachings. In his most important book, The Problem of Christianity, published in 1913, he took the ‘‘Kingdom of Heaven’’ as proclaimed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount 21 George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 144–145. 22 Marsden, Fundamentalism, 146–147.

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as the beginning of a community whose meaning has only gradually unfolded.23 Royce attributed extraordinary importance to Paul as the one who understood that Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom of heaven meant the creation of a community that would ultimately be universal. For Royce the ‘‘detached individual’’ outside any community is lost, but any community, such as the nation, that would absolutize itself, would express only another form of ‘‘the individualism of the detached individual.’’ He argued that the life of community, so essential for the moral and spiritual life of human beings, can be realized finally only in the ‘‘great community’’ that includes the entire human race.24 It is interesting in this connection to see Royce speaking out already in 1905 in his essay ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices,’’ opposing the ‘‘scientific’’ racism so prominent in his day, and defending the dignity of Asians and Blacks. He concludes the essay by writing, ‘‘For my part, then, I am a member of the human race, and this is a race which is, as a whole, considerably lower than the angels, so that the whole of it very badly needs race-elevation. In this need of my race I personally and very deeply share. And it is in this spirit only that I am able to approach our problem.’’ 25 Royce was appalled by World War I and, like the premillennialists, tried for a while to stay above the struggle. After the sinking of the Lusitania, on which several of his friends and former students were lost, he came to identify the Allied cause with the cause of humanity, in spite of his deep attachment to German culture. His family and friends believed that his anguish over the war hastened his death in 1916.26 Henry May has argued that by the end of World War I the near establishment of what he has characterized as Progressive Patriotic Protestantism came to an end, unable to cope with the collapse of its worldview that the war brought about.27 Certainly the Protestant hegemony in American cul23 Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (1913; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 135–136 and passim. 24 Josiah Royce, ‘‘The Hope of the Great Community’’ (1916), in The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 2:1145–1163. 25 Josiah Royce, ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices’’ [1905], in Basic Writings, 2:1089–1110. 26 John Clendenning. The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), chap. 10. 27 Henry F. May, Ideas, Faiths and Feelings: Essays on American Intellectual and Religious History, 1952–1982 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 171– 172. Chap. 9 of this book, ‘‘The Religion of the Republic,’’ was suggestive in my reflections for the present chapter.

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ture had been broken and religious communities, Protestants included, had become more skeptical of identifying national and religious commitments. Yet not only have religious groups continued to be active in our public life, religious language has continued to provide a source for public discussion. I would like to conclude by considering two books by H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr that have clarified our understanding in this area and two pastoral letters of the American Catholic bishops that are exemplary of current practice. In 1937 H. Richard Niebuhr published a book, The Kingdom of God in America, whose title I have chosen for this essay. The book is an effort to determine the genuine religious impulse of American Christianity, and to distinguish it, so far as possible, from the cultural or social use of religion for nonreligious ends. Niebuhr distinguishes three aspects of the kingdom on which American Protestants have focused successively in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries: divine sovereignty, reign of Christ, and coming kingdom. We have seen examples of all three aspects already in this essay. Rather than rehearse his argument I would like to develop its implications for the appropriate and inappropriate use of religious language in public life. The sovereignty of God is a central tenet of biblical teaching made indelible in the consciousness of Jews and Christians in the events of the Exodus and covenant at Sinai. Niebuhr characterizes it as it was understood by the early colonists: These early American Protestants believed in the kingdom of God, but it was not a society of peace and concord to be established by men of good will; it was rather the living reality of God’s present rule, not only in human spirits but also in the world of nature and of human history. His kingdom was not an ideal dependent for its realization on human effort; men and their efforts were dependent upon it; loyalty to it and obedience to its laws were the conditions of their temporal and eternal welfare.28

With such a God it was possible for human beings to enter a covenant relationship if they accepted his sovereignty and the obligations that flowed from it. The religious community was understood as founded on just such a covenant relationship. The idea of a covenant society generalized beyond the church to the understanding of civil society undoubtedly lies behind some of the noblest achievements of the American experiment. But it was subject to a subtle perversion. Niebuhr describes the danger well: 28 Niebuhr, Kingdom of God, 51.

The Kingdom of God in America 297 The old idea of American Christians as a chosen people who had been called to a special task was turned into the notion of a chosen nation especially favored. . . . As the nineteenth century went on the note of divine favoritism was increasingly sounded. Christianity, democracy, Americanism, the English language and culture, the growth of industry and science, American institutions—these are all confounded and confused. The contemplation of their own righteousness filled Americans with such lofty and enthusiastic sentiments that they readily identified it with the righteousness of God. . . . Henceforth the kingdom of the Lord was a human possession, not a permanent revolution. It is in particular the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxon race, which is destined to bring light to the gentiles by means of lamps manufactured in America. Thus institutionalism and imperialism, ecclesiastical and political, go hand in hand.29

The idea of the reign of Christ is rooted in the proclamation of Jesus that the kingdom is at hand and has come into being with his presence in the world. Niebuhr sees the reign of Christ as experienced above all as the fruit of repentance: The kingdom of Christ was the rule of sincerity in lives which had been made to understand the deviousness and trickery of the well loved ego as it skulks and hides in the labyrinthine ways of the mind, and which, having been made to see that they lived by forgiveness and not merit, needed no longer to defend themselves against themselves, their fellow men and God. The kingdom of Christ was the liberty of those who had received some knowledge of the goodness of God and who reflected in their lives the measure of their knowledge and devotion.30

Since the beloved community that actualizes the reign of Christ sees itself as founded on the self-giving of God in Jesus Christ, it is called to a life of neighbor love without limit. Out of such an understanding many of the humanitarian impulses of nineteenth-century America had their origin, notably the antislavery movement. Nonetheless, as with the idea of the sovereignty of God, the idea of the reign of Christ was subject to perversion if it gave rise to self-righteousness. A particularly dangerous temptation was intoxication with the goodness of the end, so that one forgets the quality of the means. Even in so noble a cause as opposition to slavery, for the Christian, resort to violence is a catastrophic failure. For Niebuhr, as for Lincoln, the Civil War stands as a stern judgment on a nation that believed itself to be Christian but did not know how to solve its gravest problem by the application of the teachings of Christ. 29 Niebuhr, Kingdom of God, 179. 30 Niebuhr, Kingdom of God, 105.

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The third aspect of the kingdom of God that Niebuhr singles out is the coming kingdom, the focus on the millennium that we have seen has been so powerful in America. This great idea has been associated with some of the noblest impulses of Americans but also has its characteristic distortions. Where it has become literalistic it has gotten bogged down in complex theories and numerical calculations. The temptation to self-righteousness, the characteristic American perversion, can appear when there is too quick an identification of the coming kingdom with the American project. Such a temptation is most effectively opposed when the coming kingdom is seen as judgment as well as consummation. Theodore Weld, the great antislavery evangelist, reminded his fellow citizens that millennial hope cannot be separated from the day of wrath when he said, The land is full of blood. . . . The poor have cried and ears have been stopped and hearts have been steeled; and avarice has clutched the last pittance, and lust has gored itself with spoil, and prejudice has spurned God’s image with loathing, and passion has rushed upon the helpless and trodden down the needy in the gate; and when iniquity has been visited by terrible rebuke, it has swelled with pride and gnashed with rage, and cursed the poor and blasphemed God— scorning repentance and defying wrath to the uttermost. . . . What can save us as a nation but repentance—immediate, profound, public, proclaimed abroad, wide as our infamy and damning guilt have gone! 31

It was particularly easy for American liberals to forget the elements of judgment and repentance and to imagine that the kingdom would come in America smoothly and inevitably. Niebuhr gives his incisive characterization: The idea of the coming kingdom was robbed of its dialectical element. It was all fulfillment of promise without judgment. . . . In its one-sided view of progress which saw the growth of the wheat but not the tares, the gathering of the grain but not the burning of the chaff, this liberalism was indeed naively optimistic. A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.32

Thus in 1937 H. Richard Niebuhr completed his survey of the Christian vision as applied to American life and assessed its strengths as well as its distortions.We can apply his insights to our present situation with the help of his brother Reinhold, who published in 1952, at the height of the Cold 31 Niebuhr, Kingdom of God, 159. 32 Niebuhr, Kingdom of God, 193.

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War, a book that advances the insights of The Kingdom of God in America an important step forward. H. Richard saw the central tension between the community of faith and the nation, and he argued that the language of faith had to be true to itself if it was to provide genuine insight to the nation. To translate the language of faith into the language of the nation by eliminating religious transcendence was for him not only a total failure to understand the idea of the kingdom of God in any of its aspects, but a prelude to disaster. He saw the problem of empire, but it was not central to his argument. By 1952 America had become, almost overnight, the head of the greatest empire the world had ever known, and one locked in a Cold War with another empire of lesser although immense power. Consequently the scope of Reinhold’s The Irony of American History is much more global than that of The Kingdom of God in America. In many ways the book is a product of its time, one-sided in its views, and expressing a brittle anticommunism that seems paranoid today. That being the case it is all the more remarkable that Reinhold Niebuhr produced a book which is a profound critique of America and a severe warning to America at the peak of empire. By ‘‘irony’’ he means to point out the deep connection between our achievements and our failures, to which we remain blind as long as we do not see ourselves as sinners, something that Americans, whether they go to church or not, are loath to do. Far from an assertion of American virtue, The Irony of American History is a call for repentance: We cannot expect even the wisest of nations to escape every peril of moral and spiritual complacency; for nations have always been constitutionally selfrighteous. But it will make a difference whether the culture in which the policies of nations are formed is only as deep and as high as the nation’s ideals; or whether there is a dimension in the culture from the standpoint of which the element of vanity in all human ambitions and achievements is discerned. But this is a height which can be grasped only by faith. . . . The God before whom ‘‘the nations are as a drop in the bucket and are counted as small dust in the balances’’ is known by faith and not by reason. . . . The faith which appropriates the meaning in the mystery inevitably involves an experience of repentance for the false meanings which the pride of nations and cultures introduces into the pattern. Such repentance is the true source of charity; and we are more desperately in need of genuine charity than of more technocratic skills.33

33 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner’s, 1952), 149–150.

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In closing the book, even though he has excoriated the Communists, he reminds us that both sides are in need of contrition and that there is still the possibility of reaching out to the other side. Finally, he says that if we should perish the primary cause would be, not ‘‘the ruthlessness of the foe,’’ but ‘‘that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.’’ 34 Indeed, hatred and vainglory are the besetting sins of empire. Today the empire, though still immensely powerful, is crumbling. Our problems are enormous, at home and abroad. The naive optimism and selfconfidence that characterized us for so long is missing, and, nostalgically, many of us wish it to return. What are the lessons we can learn from the ways in which Americans have used religious language, particularly the language of the kingdom of God, to understand our common problems? Under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment it is perfectly legitimate for the language of faith to operate as a public language in America. It is of vital importance that we use the language of faith to reflect on the problems of nation and empire—only in that way can the members of faith communities bring their deepest insights to public attention. But it is a doubtful and dangerous enterprise to use the language of faith as a language of nation and certainly as a language of empire. To see the nation as a community that has entered a covenant to pursue the good in common, with all participating, and to care especially for those most in need, is admirable. But insofar as the nation is based on coercion and coercion is not part of the kingdom of God, then the language of faith applied to the nation must always be analogical, not literal. And so far as we use it at all in our civic life we must be committed, as was Martin Luther King Jr., to the use of nonviolence. It is a more normal function of the community of faith to call the nation to repentance than to congratulate it on its righteousness. With respect to empire the tension grows more acute. Jews and Christians have had a long history of misfortune at the hands of empire. That God’s new Israel has become the world’s most powerful empire is a truth so chilling that most Americans, religious or not, would rather not think about it.35 Some of us know and others of us would rather not know that the Contras in Nicaragua are not fighting for democracy but for the control of Central America by the American empire. We were never bothered by 34 Niebuhr, Irony, 174. 35 See Walter Russell Mead, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), for a helpful analysis.

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dictators in Nicaragua as long as they were our dictators. We have heard those in high places use the language of faith to justify empire when they speak loosely of Armageddon, shining cities, and evil empires. But to do so is even more deeply troubling than to use the language of faith to justify a nation, for an empire rests on the coercion of other nations and its essence is vast military power. Of course empires too exist under the sovereignty of God and may sometimes (Reinhold Niebuhr would say ironically) work for good. Yet if the nation requires judgment, then all the more does empire. Many speaking the language of faith today call for the creation of a new international order based on justice and participation to replace the division of the world into competing empires armed to the teeth. Reinhold Niebuhr would remind us to be realistic, but the present impasse of empires does not seem to be realistic, and we might seek with all deliberate speed to find more humane and politically viable alternatives. It seems to me that in their recent pastoral letters the American Catholic bishops have been exemplary in their use of religious language to speak to public concerns. Both of the letters I will cite draw centrally from the imagery of the kingdom of God. In their 1983 Pastoral Letter on War and Peace the bishops begin with a section entitled ‘‘Peace and the Kingdom,’’ in which they say, As disciples and as children of God, it is our task to seek for ways in which to make the forgiveness, justice and mercy and love of God visible in a world where violence and enmity are too often the norm. When we listen to God’s word, we hear again and always the call to repentance and to belief: to repentance because though we are redeemed we continue to need redemption; to belief, because although the reign of God is near, it is still seeking its fullness.36

The 1986 Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy closes with a section entitled ‘‘Commitment to a Kingdom of Love and Justice,’’ in which the bishops say, The fulfillment of human needs, we know, is not the final purpose of the creation of the human person. We have been created to share in the divine life through a destiny that goes far beyond our human capabilities and before which we must in all humility stand in awe. . . . We have to move from our devotion to independence, through an understanding of interdependence, to a commitment to human solidarity. That challenge must find its realization in the kind of community we

36 The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response, a Pastoral Letter on War and Peace, National Conference of Catholic Bishops, May 3, 1983, pp. 17–18.

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build among us. Love implies concern for all—especially the poor—and a continued search for those social and economic structures that permit everyone to share in a community that is a part of a redeemed creation (Rom. 8:21–23).37

Of course those injunctions do not tell us exactly what to do, although both letters have many valuable suggestions about possible implementation. But their highest value, and in this they are exemplary of the place of the language of faith in public life, is to remind us that there is a larger stage on which we perform our public action and that the final judgment does not belong to us.

37 Economic Justice for All, a Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy, National Conference of Catholic Bishops, November 18, 1986, pp. 182–183.

13 Citizenship, Diversity, and the Search for the Common Good

The motto E pluribus unum appeared on the Great Seal of the United States adopted by Congress in 1782 and clearly referred to the formation of one nation out of thirteen states. The Preamble to the Constitution, speaking in the name of the people, gives as its first purpose ‘‘to form a more perfect union.’’ Certainly there were many concerned with the protection of the diversity symbolized in the notion of states’ rights—they were prominent among the opponents of the new Constitution—but the Constitution itself emphasizes the unum more than the e pluribus. Perhaps this primary concern with unity was inevitable in the infancy of a still fragile republic that would face threats of dissolution for many decades. Our situation is quite different. The American nation faces many problems, but dissolution into its constituent states is not one of them. Under these circumstances anxiety about the protection of diversity is more salient in the minds of many than worries about unity. The commonest contemporary term for diversity is ‘‘pluralism.’’ Our culture is pluralistic, and that pluralism, we are told, is in need of nurture and encouragement. In this context the ‘‘search for the common good,’’ which is my central concern here, may even sound threatening. I know from previous experience that many will find the very idea of the common good problematic in a pluralist society. They will object that there can be no quest for the common good in a pluralist society because there can be no common good in a pluralist society. The essential critical question is, ‘‘Whose common good?’’ or, more belligerently, ‘‘Who are you to talk about the common good?’’ Won’t any notion of the common good be just some particular idea reflecting the interests of some particular group trying to force itself on the rich diversity of American pluralism? [Delivered at a symposium at DePauw University in the spring of 1987. It was published in Robert E. Calvert, ed., The Constitution of the People: Reflections on Citizens and Civil Society (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 47–63. Used by permission.]

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In meeting this objection I must develop what I take to be a defensible idea of pluralism that is compatible with the notion of the search for the common good. In so doing I will attempt to distinguish this defensible idea of pluralism from what I believe are two inadequate versions of it. In one of its versions pluralism is almost synonymous with individualism. Not only society as a whole but every group and every subgroup is said to be pluralistic, and the logical conclusion of that line of thought is to reduce society to its constituent individuals. After all, are we not, each of us, indelibly different? That is one of the deepest beliefs of our society. It is just this kind of individualistic pluralism that can provide the basis for a radical rejection of the idea of the common good by mounting an attack on the good itself. Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan argued that there is no Good in itself but only the goods of individuals. The idea of the Good always involves the idea of a right way of life—a life lived together and enacted in common practices that are good in themselves. Such ideas were seen as oppressive by some early modern social thinkers who preferred to think of individuals pursuing personal advantage, goods, interests. Society, they argued, will be torn apart by sectarian warfare if we try to establish the common good, but if we try more modestly to regulate the pursuit of interest and leave morality to the inner life of individuals, then we can have a peaceful society. John Locke drove the point home toward the end of the seventeenth century, concluding, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, that religion was a private matter and of no legitimate concern of public authority.1 In this tradition the idea of ‘‘the common good’’ is replaced by the idea of ‘‘the public interest,’’ which turns out to be not something good in itself but merely the sum of all the private interests. Now the problem with this individualistic notion of pluralism, what I would call shallow pluralism (for example, the Wall Street Journal review of Habits of the Heart, which argued that people obey traffic lights, the credit system works, what’s the problem? Who needs community?), is that it has never described what we are really like. Indeed it is doubtful if a society based on interest alone could even exist. Stephen Douglas, in his great debate with Abraham Lincoln over whether slavery should be extended to the new states being formed from the territories, took the line of the public interest. If the people want slavery, let them have it—one 1 Locke believed he had ‘‘proved that the care of souls does not belong to the magistrate. . . . The care, therefore, of every man’s soul belongs unto himself, and is to be left unto himself.’’ Treatise of Civil Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1937), 186–187.

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simply sums individual interests. But Lincoln asked whether the interest was morally defensible or not. If slavery is absolutely wrong, then it is tragic that it is permitted in the Constitution, but it certainly must not be allowed to spread to new states, regardless of what the population in those states might wish.2 Here we have a strong notion of good opposing a strong notion of interest, and even though the good has not always won in American politics we have never been allowed to forget the necessity to seek it. The second inadequate notion of pluralism is what I would call communalist pluralism. It is less likely than individualist pluralism to criticize the idea of the good or even the common good except at the level of the society as a whole. Each community is seen as having its own idea of its own common good, radically different from the idea of other communities. If individualistic pluralism sees society as a limited contract entered into by individuals to maximize their self-interest, communalist pluralism sees society as resting on uneasy treaty relations between communities so autonomous as virtually to be subnations. People who think of pluralism in communalist terms have a variety of communities in mind. Often these are racial or ethnic, such as the black community or the Japanese American community. Sometimes they are religious, such as the Evangelical community or the Catholic community. The word ‘‘community’’ is used so loosely in America that in recent years it has appeared in such expressions as ‘‘the gay community.’’ Even women are sometimes spoken of as a community. But there is a serious question of what ‘‘community’’ means in any of these expressions. Often people have in the back of their minds a rather romantic idea of the old ethnic communities in our larger eastern cities, where recent immigrants collected in close proximity to each other and maintained a whole set of institutions, churches, clubs, newspapers, and a wide variety of commercial establishments, often using the native language. Today in cities like Los Angeles we can see Korean or Vietnamese communities that approximate this type. Yet in America such geographically bounded communities have usually been transient. Most of the older ethnic groups can no longer be located in specific neighborhoods, or such concentrations are small remnants of what was formerly the dominant pattern. A student of mine studying ‘‘the Japanese American community’’ in San Francisco discovered that almost 2 The Lincoln-Douglas debates can be found in Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 1989).

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no Japanese live in Japantown any more. With the exception of a couple of retirement homes, most Japanese have moved to middle-class neighborhoods in San Francisco or to the suburbs. What was once Japantown is now the location of the Japanese Cultural Center and a collection of shops, restaurants, and cultural institutions, many of them financed with Japanese rather than Japanese American money. Even blacks, subjected to a segregation more systematic and stringent than any other group, have moved in large numbers out of the ghettos, which in consequence are the depopulated and impoverished fragments of what they once were. In Habits of the Heart we tried to give the much abused term ‘‘community’’ a concise and coherent meaning. We defined it thus: ‘‘A community is a group of people who are socially interdependent, who participate together in discussion and decision making, and who share certain practices that both define the community and are nurtured by it.’’ We differentiated what we called communities in the strong sense, as just defined, from what we call lifestyle enclaves, composed of people who share patterns of dress, consumption, and leisure activities but who are not interdependent, do not make decisions together, and do not share a common history. Many groups that are called communities in America are really closer to lifestyle enclaves, including some of those I have mentioned above.3 But even the strongest communities seldom if ever meet the definition that is implied by the idea of communalist pluralism. For true examples of the latter we would have to go to Northern Ireland or Lebanon. There we do indeed find communities that are subnations, radical in their separateness, and in latent or actual armed conflict with their neighbors. In such situations loyalty to the communal group is absolute. It is only there that a common good exists; there is no sense of a common good in the larger society, or that sense has become so submerged as to be inaccessible. We have had such instances in America, but they are not normal. The most striking example divided us into two nations, one slave-holding and one free, and led to the Civil War. But there are a few others: the Mormons in their early history, certain groups of radical survivalists in rural America today, and the American Indians, but the latter is a special case that I will consider later. If groups that meet the full definition of communalist pluralism are rare and transient, then we can see that communalist pluralism is an inadequate expression of the reality of pluralism in America. Having disposed of the two inadequate notions of pluralism, how can we 3 Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton, Habits of the Heart (1985), 333–335.

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define a defensible conception? What we need is a notion of plural communities that are not easily decomposed into their constituent individuals but that are far from total in their demands; that have boundaries but that encourage a good deal of give and take across those boundaries. Such an idea of community is possible because all of us belong to more than one community and there is no community to which we belong exclusively without having some of our roles outside of it. This means that we are constantly shifting between being insiders and outsiders with respect to all the significant communities to which we belong. In principle that allows for openness and flexibility. It may, however, tempt us to think of ourselves as disengaged individuals, only tenuously and voluntarily connected to any community. It is only in complex societies that the notion of multiple and flexible community membership becomes possible, and it is not until modern times that such an idea becomes fully legitimate. In tribal societies and in premodern complex societies, all-encompassing community membership was the norm. Modern nationalism emerged at a unique moment in the history of communal identities. It served to break the hold of the traditional particularistic communities of kinship, region, and religion, but it substituted an identity that could be as absolute in its demands as any traditional one. While nationalism remains a powerful force everywhere in the world, including in our own country, its excesses have brought it into disrepute and subjected it to searching criticism.We can differentiate between patriotism, which is love of country, and nationalism, which is idolatrous worship of country.We can be patriotic while asserting many loyalties that transcend the nation, such as to religion, science, and art, and that involve us in quite concrete communities that are international in scope. Yet disillusionment with nationalism may serve only to disaggregate people into private and transient loyalties. In short the third conception of pluralism for which I am arguing is difficult to maintain and involves balancing between the conflicting pull toward radical individualism on the one hand and absolutist communalism on the other. Perhaps some historical examples might be helpful in clarifying the issues. We might begin with a look at how the founders of our country saw the problem of unity and diversity. We have already seen that E pluribus unum meant in the first instance the creation of one nation out of thirteen colonies, each of which had its own particular history for a hundred or a hundred and fifty years before independence and had learned to work together only in the crisis of independence itself. There were differences

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in their economies, the degree to which they depended on agriculture, slave agriculture, commerce, fishing, and shipping. Some New England colonies had Congregational establishments, some southern colonies had Anglican establishments, and the middle colonies had no religious establishments at all. But among the various forms of diversity that had to be reconciled, the one that we would think of first, cultural diversity arising from a multiethnic, multiracial population, was not prominent in the thinking of the founding generation. For one thing there was not much ethnic diversity among the white population, although there were Dutch in New York and Germans in Pennsylvania. Nor, by contrast with European societies, was colonial America a class-divided society. Assimilating relatively small numbers of northwest Europeans in an overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon white population of the ‘‘middling rank’’ was not viewed as a major problem. On the other hand racial diversity was seen more as a threat to unity than a creative challenge to it. Although there were a few voices raised in favor of the emancipation of the slaves already in the late eighteenth century, there was little reflection on the inclusion of blacks in a genuinely multiracial society. Southerners, like Jefferson, who opposed slavery in principle but could not see how the issue was to be resolved practically, thought ultimately the resolution would come only through radical separation, either a return of blacks to Africa or the establishment of separate political entities here. In the North segregation was considered the only acceptable solution. A similar solution was assumed in relation to Indians, whose status as separate nations was accepted in principle. However, these nations were constantly required to move westward as their more immediately accessible lands were desired by white settlers. In the 1830s America was so little a multiracial society in the sense of unity in diversity that Alexis de Tocqueville, in the longest and gloomiest chapter in Democracy in America, predicted a war of racial extermination between the three races as the only solution to the racial problem in America. We may be glad that Tocqueville, who was right in so many of his predictions, was wrong in that one.4 It is commonly assumed that the inability to accept racial and cultural diversity and to develop a positive sense of pluralism derived from communal absolutism. For example, it was the arrogant assumption of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon race and culture that made white Americans un4 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), vol. 1, pt. 2, chap. 10.

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willing to include others in a genuinely multiracial, multicultural society. I would suggest that radical individualism was just as inhospitable to the acceptance of genuine difference. Let me give an example. Jefferson’s views on slavery and blacks are too complex and too controversial to be dealt with briefly,5 but his views on American Indians are simpler. Jefferson had great respect for the Indian peoples. Some of his addresses to Indian leaders are quite moving. As president he did what he could to ensure that Indians were treated with justice and their claims legally recognized. But two paragraphs of his second inaugural address are most revealing: The aboriginal inhabitants of these countries I have regarded with the commiseration their history inspires. Endowed with the faculties and rights of men, breathing an ardent love of liberty and independence, and occupying a country which left them no desire but to be undisturbed, the stream of overflowing population from other regions directed itself on these shores; without power to divert, or habits to contend against, they have been overwhelmed by the current, or driven before it; now reduced within limits too narrow for the hunter’s state, humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts; to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to maintain their place in existence, and to prepare them in time for that state of society, which to bodily comforts adds the improvement of the mind and morals. We have therefore liberally furnished them with the implements of husbandry and household use; we have placed among them instructors in the arts of first necessity; and they are covered with the aegis of the law against aggressors from among ourselves.6

We may be already uneasy at Jefferson’s confidence in the rightness of attempting to turn Indians into yeoman farmers of the sort he thought were the backbone of the American republic. But the next paragraph is alarming indeed: But the endeavors to enlighten them on the fate which awaits their present course of life, to induce them to exercise their reason, follow its dictates, and change their pursuits with the change of circumstances, have powerful obstacles to en-

5 See David Greenstone, ‘‘Adams and Jefferson on Slavery: Two Liberalisms and the Roots of Civic Ambivalence,’’ in Calvert, ed., The Constitution of the People, 20–32, for an extensive discussion of this issue. 6 Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 520. Jefferson accepts the myth of the Indians as hunters without realizing that most of those in the eastern states were primarily agriculturalists.

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counter; they are combated by the habits of their bodies, prejudice of their minds, ignorance, pride, and the influence of interested and crafty individuals among them, who feel themselves something in the present order of things, and fear to become nothing in any other. These persons inculcate a sanctimonious reverence for the customs of their ancestors; that whatsoever they did, must be done through all time; that reason is a false guide, and to advance under its counsel, in their physical, moral, or political condition, is perilous innovation; that their duty is to remain as their Creator made them, ignorance being safety, and knowledge full of danger; in short, my friends, among them is seen the action and counteraction of good sense and bigotry; they, too, have their anti-philosophers, who find an interest in keeping things in their present state, who dread reformation, and exert all their faculties to maintain the ascendancy of habit over the duty of improving our reason, and obeying its mandates.7

In this paragraph Jefferson reveals a complete antipathy to traditional Indian culture, whose communal conception of landholding consistently opposed the notion of dividing tribal land into individual family farms and succeeding in the world on the basis of individual enterprise. But Jefferson’s antipathy is not based on any alleged superiority of Anglo-Saxon race or traditional culture. Rather, it is based on the rejection by the Indians of the ideas of reason and progress as Jefferson understood them. Interestingly enough this passage had a double meaning. There is no reason to believe that Jefferson did not mean what he said to apply to the Indians. But its more salient and only thinly disguised intent was to attack the New England Federalists and particularly the New England clergy whom he saw as standing behind them. Jefferson had rejoiced at the near destruction of the Episcopal Church in Virginia following disestablishment there and looked forward to a similar result once the last remnants of establishment (not outlawed at the state level by the First Amendment) were eliminated in Massachusetts and Connecticut. So it was the New England clergy who were the crafty medicine men, holding their people in the thrall of ignorance, bigotry, and ancestral custom and opposing innovation, reason, and progress.8 It may come as a shock to learn that Jefferson’s views on religious freedom involved no love of religious diversity. Jefferson was an early example 7 Jefferson, Writings, 520–521. 8 See Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson, 1801–1809, ed. Earl N. Harbert (New York: Library of America, 1986), 606–607.

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of what could be called a religious individualist—he said, for example, ‘‘I am a sect myself’’—and he believed his views were based on reason and free inquiry. Rejecting what he called the ‘‘demoralizing dogmas of Calvin,’’ he advocated Unitarianism in theology, which he hoped would soon replace all other religious beliefs. ‘‘I rejoice,’’ he wrote in 1822, ‘‘that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of one only God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.’’ His hostility was particularly directed toward Presbyterians (among whom he included New England Congregationalists), of whom he writes, Their ambition and tyranny would tolerate no rival if they had power. Systematical in grasping at an ascendancy over all other sects, they aim, like the Jesuits, at engrossing the education of the country, are hostile to every institution which they do not direct, and jealous at seeing others begin to attend at all to that object. The diffusion of instruction, to which there is now so growing an attention, will be the remote remedy to this fever of fanaticism; while the more proximate one will be the progress of Unitarianism. That this will, ere long, be the religion of the majority from north to south, I have no doubt.9

Denouncing the fanaticism of his opponents, he nonetheless looked forward to that ‘‘ascendancy’’ of his own views ‘‘over all other sects’’ which he accused them of desiring. Jefferson would be quick to point out the difference. The Calvinists and Jesuits are characterized by priestcraft, creeds, and confessions of faith, whereas his Unitarianism keeps ‘‘within the pale of common sense’’ of the enlightened individual.10 Yet it is just the community-forming capacity of religion, its rootedness in traditional practices, and its nurturance by trained specialists, that Jefferson would undermine, whether among his fellow citizens or among the Indian tribes.11 Jefferson’s individualism was tempered by a residual Christianity—he did believe in the moral teachings of Jesus and in the Golden Rule—and 9 Fortunately Jefferson did not live to see his beloved University of Virginia headed by a theologically conservative Presbyterian minister. 10 Jefferson, Writings, 1459, 1464. 11 Jefferson’s legacy is to be seen in the wholesale rejection by frontier Christianity in the nineteenth century of the ideal of an educated clergy and in the reliance of Evangelicalism on what Richard Hofstadter called the ‘‘religion of the heart.’’ See his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), pt. 2.

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by his republicanism, his belief that citizens must act together for the common good. But his complex intelligence also embraced a strong dose of individualistic liberalism, as in his views on religion, that would grow progressively stronger in succeeding generations. It is interesting to observe Jeffersonian themes in the great apostle of American individualism, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s religious individualism was so radical that he found even Unitarianism too confining and celebrated the essentially solitary spiritual quest of every individual. Like Jefferson he strongly contrasted tradition and innovation. Indeed he saw American culture as divided by a schism between ‘‘the party of the Past and the party of the Future,’’ or, as he sometimes called them, the parties of ‘‘Memory and Hope.’’ And as with Jefferson there is no problem of knowing which side Emerson was on. He tells us to ‘‘desert the tradition’’ because ‘‘the perpetual admonition of nature to us, is, ‘The world is new, untried. Do not believe the past. I give you the universe a virgin today.’ ’’ 12 Perhaps nothing in all American literature has had a greater influence on our culture than Emerson’s single essay ‘‘Self-Reliance,’’ which spells out the individualistic creed and advises us to stand loose to involvement in any community. As the relentless credo of individualism grew ever stronger in America from the late nineteenth century on, it is easy to see how the idea of the common good became harder and harder to understand. Only the summing of individual goods was intelligible, and by the middle of the twentieth century that gave rise to the public opinion poll, itself a misnomer, for it merely sums private opinions and substitutes for, rather than encourages, the development of a genuine public opinion. Fortunately individualism never dominated the entire field. Not only did the older churches have a stronger doctrine of our social nature than Jefferson or Emerson would have agreed with, but just as Emerson was beginning to write, millions of Catholic immigrants arrived, bringing with them a clearer understanding of social solidarity and the common good than that of even the most Calvinist of Protestants. Yet among the most significant voices raised in this discussion toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was that of the philosopher Josiah Royce, who developed the most articulate philosophy of community that we have yet seen in America. 12 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 100–101.

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Although Royce does not mention Emerson in this connection, it is possible that he was influenced by Emerson’s terminology when he spoke of communities of memory and of hope. But Royce does not speak of a schism between the two parties; rather he sees memory and hope as belonging together in any healthy conception of community. He begins one of his major books, The Philosophy of Loyalty, by commenting on just such attitudes toward the past as Emerson’s. ‘‘One of the most familiar traits of our time is the tendency to revise tradition, to reconsider the foundations of old beliefs, and sometimes mercilessly to destroy what once seemed indispensable.’’ 13 Royce accepts the inevitability of criticism yet seeks to discover the true meaning that was latent in the old traditions. Those traditions were often better in spirit than the fathers knew. . . . Revision does not mean mere destruction. We can often say to tradition: That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die. . . . Let us bury the natural body of tradition. What we want is its glorified body and its immortal soul.14

What Royce advocates is the life of a community rooted in memory, reverent yet critical of the past, and expectant of the future, cherishing not a blind hope but a hope nurtured by reflection and interpretation. What he fears is what he calls ‘‘the individualism of the detached individual, the individualism of the man who belongs to no community which he loves and to which he can devote himself with all his heart, and his soul, and his mind, and his strength.’’ That sort of individualism has ‘‘never saved men and never can save men. For mere detachment, mere self-will, can never save men. What saves us on any level of human life is union.’’ Yet Royce is averse to communal absolutism. A tendency to make any community absolute, for example the national community, he equates with the individualism of the detached individual. For a community that does not see itself as part of other communities behaves like a detached individual. Ultimately for Royce all communities come together in what he calls ‘‘the great community’’ or ‘‘the beloved community,’’ which is the human race, seen in a religious perspective. It is interesting in this connection to see Royce speaking out in 1905 in his essay ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices,’’ opposing the ‘‘scientific’’ racism so prominent in his day and defending the dignity of Asians and blacks. He concludes the essay by writing, ‘‘For 13 Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 3. 14 Royce, Philosophy, 11–12.

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my part, then, I am a member of the human race, and this is a race which is, as a whole, considerably lower than the angels, so that the whole of it very badly needs race-elevation. In this need of my race I personally and very deeply share. And it is in this spirit only that I am able to approach our problem.’’ 15 Just as Royce saw vigorous and effective individuals strengthening communities, so he saw strong and effective communities strengthening larger societies. He lamented the decline of local loyalties in America and offered the notion of ‘‘provincialism,’’ not in a pejorative but in a positive sense, as an antidote. He thought a vigorous provincialism would strengthen national life, not weaken it, for he believed that genuine communities, oriented toward past and future, living out of memory and hope, are communities of interpreters capable of communicating with other such communities in search of the common good.16 It has been difficult to maintain continuity with ideas such as those of Royce in the twentieth century. John Dewey already in the 1920s lamented the decline of a genuine public which he understood in terms not far from Royce as a community capable of discourse about the common good.17 Instead we have seen the rise of what Alasdair MacIntyre calls ‘‘bureaucratic individualism.’’ 18 This is an individualism less heroic than Emerson’s, resigned to the pursuit of private good within the large, bureaucratic structures that generally dominate our society. Bureaucratic individualism produces a public discourse dominated by experts and technocrats arguing about who has more effective means to increase economic productivity and national power. These means need no end to justify them; it is assumed that they will increase the sum of individual benefits. Yet our best minds have frequently pointed out the poverty of an understanding of public life as the quest for private benefits modulated by bureaucratic management. Walter Lippmann, writing in 1955, spoke of ‘‘the hollow shell of freedom.’’ He said that ‘‘the citadel is vacant because the public philosophy is gone, 15 The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 2:1154, 1110. 16 Royce, Philosophy of Loyalty, 245–248. See also ‘‘Provincialism,’’ in Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, 2:1067–1088, and Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 17 See John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Henry Holt, 1927), chap. 4. 18 See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 33.

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and all that the defenders of freedom have to defend in common is a public neutrality and a public agnosticism.’’ 19 In 1962 John Courtney Murray offered a stunning judgment: And if this country is to be overthrown from within or from without, I would suggest that it will not be overthrown by Communism. It will be overthrown because it will have made an impossible experiment. It will have undertaken to establish a technological order of most marvelous intricacy, which will have been constructed and will operate without relations to true political ends: and this technological order will hang, as it were, suspended over a moral confusion; and this moral confusion will itself be suspended over a spiritual vacuum. This would be the real danger resulting from a type of fallacious, fictitious fragile unity that could be created among us.20

Certainly American society in the twenty-five years since Murray wrote those words has shown many symptoms of moral confusion and spiritual vacuum. In the late sixties and early seventies our society was torn apart by controversy over our involvement in a war whose means seemed far more terrible than any attainable end could justify. Then we underwent the unprecedented experience of events leading up to the resignation of a president, who otherwise would have been impeached, and the sordid tale of the unscrupulous manipulation of power that was revealed at that time. By the middle of the 1970s measurable confidence in all major American institutions was at an all-time low. And only ten years later we went through a similar experience. Under an administration that came into office asserting that the period of national doubt was over, we witnessed a new wave of doubt whose implications we cannot yet fathom. In the fall of 1984, President Reagan, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, declared, ‘‘This is the age of the individual, this is the age of the entrepreneur.’’ It was part of the ethos of that administration to legitimate a spirit of private acquisition such as we had not seen in many decades, and when the harvest came in it was evident in the daily newspaper headlines. It would seem that Ivan Boesky was only the first of many members of our highest financial circles who put private greed above fiduciary responsibility. Nor was the age of the individual and the entrepreneur confined 19 Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy (New York: Mentor Books, 1955), 88.

20 John Courtney Murray, ‘‘Return to Tribalism,’’ Catholic Mind 60 (January

1962): 5–12, as cited in Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1984), 85.

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to the stock exchange. Apparently there were those in the White House who would have run our government in that fashion. President Reagan’s admiration for Oliver North suggested that North’s failings and those of his confederates were not merely private weaknesses of their own. But while that administration encouraged the spirit of what Royce called ‘‘the individualism of the detached individual’’ to a unique degree, it simultaneously saw fit to encourage the revival of communal absolutism on the part of the Christian right. And so we saw on the public stage proposals for a ‘‘Christian America’’ with an agenda not open to public discussion but pursued with triumphalist self-righteousness. Headlines of the day suggested that even the heartland of religious communal absolutism is not immune to the entrepreneurial power plays that led to disgrace in Wall Street and the White House. Yet what we did not see, between rampant individualism on the one hand and communal absolutism on the other, is anything that Lippmann or Murray would have recognized as a public philosophy concerned with the common good. It was in hope of reviving a discussion concerning a public philosophy, of reinvigorating traditions that can still speak to us, and of encouraging the communities of memory and hope that are still to be found among us that my four coauthors and I published Habits of the Heart. Many of our academic colleagues have assured us that our effort was vain. The forum is empty and the voices are stilled they tell us. Or they worry that our sympathy for communities of memory, such as the family and the church, will only encourage regressive patriarchalism and fundamentalist bigotry. They did not see that our attitude toward tradition was that of Royce: not unthinking acceptance, but active and critical reappropriation. And perhaps they did not appreciate our position because they too are devoted to the individualism of the detached individual. What could be more detached than the assertion of the critical intellectual that there is no hope for America? Yet in spite of much criticism and many doubts we have been heartened by the wide variety of groups actively involved in American life who have found our work helpful. These include civic groups, charitable groups, labor and business groups, but above all religious groups, and from an extraordinarily wide spectrum: American Indians, Buddhists, Jews, Catholics, mainline Protestants, and Evangelicals. This is not surprising, for among the communities of memory and hope in America religious groups take a prominent place. Nor do most of them, including most Evangelicals, see themselves as communal absolutists. Rather, they would be prepared to accept Reinhold Niebuhr’s conception of the role of religious groups in

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American life. Niebuhr spoke of a ‘‘religious solution of the problem of religious diversity’’: This solution makes religious and cultural diversity possible within the presuppositions of a free society, without destroying the religious depth of culture. The solution requires a very high form of religious commitment. It demands that each religion, or each version of a single faith, seek to proclaim its highest insights while yet preserving an humble and contrite recognition of the fact that all actual expressions of religious faith are subject to historical contingency and relativity. . . . Religious toleration through religiously inspired humility is always a difficult achievement. It requires that religious convictions be sincerely and devoutly held while yet the sinful and finite corruptions of these convictions be humbly acknowledged; and the actual fruits of other faiths be generously estimated.21

In that spirit, each religious community brings the insight of its own tradition to bear on our common problems while remaining open to discussion and persuasion by others who bring different insights. I would like to close with one example to show that this Roycean conception of diversity, what we might call deep pluralism, is not dead: The example of the American Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter ‘‘Economic Justice for All.’’ The pastoral letter draws on the Bible, the church fathers, and modern Catholic social teaching to address critical issues in our economic life today. The letter does not offer dogmatic solutions to particular problems but calls for further discussion and judicious action with respect to them. But rather than the particular policy recommendations, what I want to discuss here briefly is the fundamental framework of the letter, which expresses so eloquently the argument I am trying to make. The letter asserts firmly that ‘‘Human life is life in Community.’’ It roots this teaching in the most central tenets of Christian faith, in Jesus’s commandments to love God with all one’s heart and one’s neighbor as oneself. Indeed, it finds community central to the Trinitarian conception of God as the very focus of Christian belief. And it draws from this fundamental belief an inescapable norm for social life: ‘‘Human dignity, realized in community with others and with the whole of God’s creation, is the norm against which every social institution must be measured.’’ From the norm flows the obligation to perform personal acts of charity by individuals, families, and the church itself. But the norm is not exhausted by personal 21 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York: Scribner’s, 1944), 134–135, 137–138.

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acts of charity. The bishops argue for the importance of citizenship as an essential expression of the norm: The virtues of citizenship are an expression of Christian love more crucial in today’s interdependent world than ever before. These virtues grow out of a lively sense of one’s dependence on the commonweal and obligations to it. This civic commitment must also guide the economic institutions of society. In the absence of a vital sense of citizenship among the businesses, corporations, labor unions, and other groups that shape economic life, society as a whole is endangered. Solidarity is another name for this social friendship and civic commitment that make human moral and economic life possible.22

I am not a Roman Catholic but an active member of another communion, yet I and others like me have been involved with the letter both in the hearings that led up to it and in discussions that have followed. In this letter we have an example of a community of memory and hope, drawing on its own deepest resources but opening up a discussion in fellowship with other citizens about the common good. If this discussion, and others like it, can broaden and eventuate in lively debates that will affect policy decisions, then there is still hope for us as citizens of America and of the larger world. The letter and the process it has stimulated are exemplary in showing us how we can draw on our diversity to nourish the virtues of citizenship in pursuit of the common good.

22 U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Pastoral Letter, Economic Justice for All: Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy, November 18, 1986 (Washington: U.S. Catholic Conference, 1986), paras. 25, 63, 64, and 66.

14 Is There a Common American Culture?

I might begin my discussion somewhat facetiously by asking the question, not whether there is a common American culture, but how is it that a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion is devoted to this question in a society with so powerful and monolithic a common culture as ours? The answer, however, is obvious: it has become part of the common culture to ask whether there is a common culture in America. K. Anthony Appiah, professor of Afro-American studies and philosophy at Harvard, in a review of Nathan Glazer’s book We Are All Multiculturalists Now (whose very title makes the point) quotes the book as saying: ‘‘The Nexis data base of major newspapers shows no reference to multiculturalism as late as 1988, a mere 33 items in 1989, and only after that a rapid rise—more than 100 items in 1990, more than 600 in 1991, almost 900 in 1992, 1200 in 1993, and 1500 in 1994.’’ Appiah adds, ‘‘When it comes to diversity it seems we all march to the beat of a single drummer.’’ 1 There is something very congenial to multiculturalism in common American culture, but such congeniality is not to be assumed as natural or shared in all societies today. It is worth looking at the contrast case of France. Rodney Benson, a graduate student in my department, is writing a most interesting dissertation, which, among other things compares the fate of multiculturalism in France and the United States.2 Benson describes a [Originated as a plenary address to the American Academy of Religion on November 22, 1997. It was published first in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 613–625, and then in a somewhat expanded version as ‘‘Is There a Common American Culture? Diversity, Identity and Morality in American Public Life,’’ in William H. Swatos Jr. and James K. Wellman Jr., eds., The Power of Religious Publics: Staking Claims in American Society (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1999), 53–67, 207–208. It is this expanded version which is included here. Used by permission.] 1 K. Anthony Appiah, ‘‘The Multiculturalist Misunderstanding,’’ New York Review of Books 44, no. 15 (October 9, 1998): 32, quoting from Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7. 2 [Now completed. See Rodney Dean Benson, ‘‘Shaping the Public Sphere: Journalistic Fields and Immigration Debates in the United States and France, 1973– 1994’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2000).]

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nascent French multiculturalism of the late 1970s and early 1980s as ultimately being rejected by virtually the entire ideological spectrum in favor of a universalistic republicanism in the late 1980s, just when multiculturalism in the United States was taking off.Why American culture has been so singularly receptive to multiculturalism as an ideology is a point to which I will return. But first, a sociological point about why there not only is but has to be a common culture in America: culture does not float free from institutions. A powerful institutional order will carry a powerful common culture. An example of just how important this relation between culture and institutions is comes from the recent reunification of Germany. In the last days of the German Democratic Republic the protesters chanted ‘‘Wir sind ein Volk,’’ and the chant stirred euphoria among West Germans as well. But the painful and unexpected experience of living together was made vivid to me by an outstanding Harvard doctoral dissertation filed earlier this year by Andreas Glaeser, using the integration of East and West German police officers into a unified police force in Berlin as a microcosm, which showed that they were not, after all, ‘‘ein Volk,’’ but indeed ‘‘zwei.’’ 3 It wasn’t just that the ‘‘Ossies’’ and the ‘‘Wessies’’ (‘‘Easterners’’ and ‘‘Westerners’’) had different views on common problems, they had different and to some degree mutually unintelligible ways of thinking about the world altogether. Forty-five years of radically different institutional orders had created two cultures that to this day are very far from united, although the experience of a unified institutional order will, almost certainly, though not without time and pain, ultimately reunite them. The United States, surely, has an exceptionally powerful institutional order. The state in America, even though it is multileveled and, to a degree, decentralized, has an enormous impact on all our lives. For example, the shift in marriage law in the late sixties and early seventies toward ‘‘no-fault divorce’’ was a response to but also an impetus for the emergence of ‘‘divorce culture’’ in America as a serious competitor to ‘‘marriage culture.’’ The state is even responsible to a degree for the construction of multiculturalism through the little boxes that must be checked on a myriad of forms. Haven’t you ever been tempted to check them all or to leave them all empty? If the state intrudes in our lives in a thousand ways, the market is even more intrusive. There is very little that Americans need that we can produce for ourselves any more. We are dependent on the market not 3 [Now published as Andreas Glaeser, Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).]

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only for goods but for many kinds of service. Our cultural understanding of the world is shaped every time we enter a supermarket or a mall. I taught a senior seminar of about twenty students in the spring of 1997, roughly divided into one-fourth Asian American, one-fourth Hispanic, one-fourth African American, and one-forth Anglo.What was remarkable was how easily they talked because of how much they shared. Beyond the ever present state and market, they shared the immediate experience of coping with a vast state university, with its demands and its incoherence. Education, which is linked largely though not exclusively to the state, and television (and increasingly the Internet) linked to the market, are enormously powerful purveyors of common culture, socializers not only of children but of all of us most of our lives. Not only are we exposed from infancy to a monoculture, we are exposed to it monolingually. The cultural power of American English is overwhelming and no language, except under the most unusual circumstances, has ever been able to withstand it, which is what makes the English Only movement such a joke. As Appiah notes, 90 percent of California-born Hispanic children of immigrant parents have native fluency in English and in the next generation only 50 percent of them still speak Spanish. One more generation and you can forget about Spanish.When third-generation Asian Americans come to college they have to learn Chinese or Japanese in language classes just like anyone else—they don’t bring those languages with them. Appiah contrasts our society with his own experience growing up in Ghana, where there were three languages spoken in the household: English, Twi, and Navrongo. ‘‘Ghana,’’ he writes, ‘‘with a population smaller than that of New York State, has several dozen languages in active daily use and no one language that is spoken at home—or even fluently understood—by a majority of the population.’’ 4 Ghana is multilingual and therefore multicultural, in a way that we, except for first generation immigrants, have never been. When language, which is the heart of culture, goes, then so, in any deep sense, does cultural difference. I don’t say identity, which is something I will come back to, but culture. Serious multicultural education would begin by teaching native English speakers a second language, but that, unlike most of the rest of the world, almost never happens in the United States. The half-hearted effort to teach Spanish in California public schools results in very few native English speakers with a secondary fluency in Spanish. Why don’t most Americans speak another language? Because we don’t have to—everyone in the world speaks English—or so 4 Appiah, ‘‘The Multiculturalist Misunderstanding,’’ 31.

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we think. Tell me about multiculturalism. (The truth is that American culture and American English are putting their stamp on every other culture in the world today.) There are exceptions, though they are statistically small, but I had better talk about them. Enclaves of genuine cultural difference, centered on a language different from English, can persist, or even emerge, under special conditions: where socioeconomic status is low and residential segregation is effective. A particularly poignant example is the emergence among one of the oldest groups of English speakers in America, African Americans, of enclaves of black English dialects in a few inner cities in the northeastern United States that are mutually unintelligible with standard American English. This can happen under conditions of hypersegregation where opportunities to participate in the larger society are almost completely denied. Native American languages survive on a few reservations, though many are dying out, even with strenuous efforts to maintain them. Since there is much less hypersegretation of Hispanics or Asians than of blacks, enclaves of Spanish or Korean or other Asian languages have the generational transience of, say, Polish or Italian a hundred years ago. If I am right, there is an enormously powerful common culture in America and it is carried predominantly by the market and the state and by their agencies of socialization: television and education.What institutions might withstand that pressure and sustain genuine cultural difference? In simpler societies kinship and religious communities might do so, but in our society families and churches or synagogues are too colonized by the market and the state to provide much of a buffer. They may give a nuance, an inflection, to the common culture, but families and even religious communities are almost always too fragile to provide a radical alternative. Nevertheless such nuances and inflections are important, not only in their own right, but because they can provide the wedge through which criticism of the common culture, and the possibility of altering it, can occur. What, then, is the content of this common culture? If we realize that the market and the state in America are not and have never been antithetical, and that the state has had the primary function, for conservatives and liberals alike, of maximizing market opportunities, I believe I can safely borrow terminology from Habits of the Heart and say that a dominant element of the common culture is what we called utilitarian individualism.5 In terms of historical roots this orientation can be traced to a powerful 5 Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton, Habits of the Heart (1985).

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Anglo-American utilitarian tradition going back at least as far as Hobbes and Locke, although it operates today quite autonomously, without any necessary reference to intellectual history. Utilitarian individualism has always been moderated by what we called expressive individualism, which has its roots in Anglo-American romanticism, but which has picked up many influences along the way from European ethnic, African American, Hispanic, and Asian influences. Here, too, the bland presentism of contemporary American culture obliterates its own history. Our Anglo students do not come to college with a deep knowledge of Jane Austen or Nathaniel Hawthorne any more than our Japanese American students bring a knowledge of Lady Murasaki or Natsume Soseki.What they bring, they bring in common: Oprah Winfrey, ER, Seinfeld, Nike, Microsoft, the nba, and the nfl. If the common culture is predominantly Euro-American, or, more accurately, Anglo-American, in its roots, the enormous pressure of the market economy, and the mass media and mass education oriented to it, obliterate the genuine heritage of Anglo-American, European, African, and Asian cultures with equal thoroughness. And yet, and yet. . . . Nestled in the very core of utilitarian and expressive individualism is something very deep, very genuine, very old, very American, something we did not quite see or say in Habits. Here I come to something that will be of especial interest to this audience, for that core is religious. In Habits we quoted a famous passage in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: ‘‘I think I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores.’’ 6 Then we went on to name John Winthrop, following Tocqueville’s own predilection, as the likeliest candidate for being that first Puritan. Now I am ready to admit, although regretfully, that we, and Tocqueville, were probably wrong. That first Puritan who contained our whole destiny might have been, as we also half intimated in Habits, Anne Hutchinson, but the stronger candidate, because we know so much more about him, is Roger Williams. Roger Williams, banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony by John Winthrop, founder of Providence and of the Rhode Island Colony, was, as everyone knows, a Baptist. The Baptists in seventeenth-century New England were a distinct minority, but they went on to become, together with other dissenting Protestants, a majority in American religious culture from the early nineteenth century. As Seymour Martin Lipset has recently 6 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence and ed. J. P. Meyer (1835, 1840; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 279.

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pointed out, we are the only North Atlantic society whose predominant religious tradition is sectarian rather than an established church.7 I think this is something enormously important about our culture and that it has, believe it or not, a great deal to do with why our society is so hospitable to the ideology, if not the reality, of multiculturalism. What was so important about the Baptists, and other sectarians such as the Quakers, was the absolute centrality of religious freedom, of the sacredness of individual conscience in matters of religious belief.We generally think of religious freedom as one of many kinds of freedom, many kinds of human rights, first voiced in the European Enlightenment, and echoing around the world ever since. But Georg Jellinek, Max Weber’s friend, and, on these matters, his teacher, published a book in 1895 called Die Erklärung der Menschen- und Bürgerrechte, translated into English in 1901 as The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens, which argued that the ultimate source of all modern notions of human rights is to be found in the radical sects of the Protestant Reformation, particularly the Quakers and Baptists.8 Of this development Weber writes, ‘‘Thus the consistent sect gives rise to an inalienable personal right of the governed as against any power, whether political, hierocratic or patriarchal. Such freedom of conscience may be the oldest Right of Man—as Jellinek has argued convincingly, at any rate it is the most basic Right of Man because it comprises all ethically conditioned action and guarantees freedom from compulsion, especially from the power of the state. In this sense the concept was as unknown to antiquity and the Middle Ages as it was to Rousseau.’’ Weber then goes on to say that the other rights of man were later joined to this basic right, ‘‘especially the right to pursue one’s own economic interests, which includes the inviolability of individual property, the freedom of contract, and vocational choice.’’ 9 I will have to return to the link to economic freedom, but first I want to talk about the relation between the sectarian notion of the sacredness of conscience and what we mean by multiculturalism today, starting with the Baptist Roger Williams. It is worth remembering that one of the sources of Williams’s problems 7 See Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1996), 19–20. For a detailed contrast of the influence of church and sect religion in America, see E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (New York: Free Press, 1979). 8 Georg Jellinek, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens [Die Erklärung der Menschen- und Bürgerrechte, 1895] (New York: Holt, 1901). 9 Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed.Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (1921– 1922; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1209.

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was his unhappiness with John Winthrop’s assertion that the Massachusetts Bay Colonists were building ‘‘a city upon a hill,’’ because, in Williams’s view, it was somebody else’s hill! The hill belonged to the native Americans, and if the other Puritans were inclined to overlook that, Roger Williams wasn’t. When Williams was banished from Massachusetts Bay in January of 1636, he probably would not have survived the winter in Rhode Island without the ‘‘courtesy’’ of the Indians, with whom he had, not surprisingly, an excellent relationship. Of this courtesy he wrote, in his charming doggerel: The courteous pagan shall condemn Uncourteous Englishmen, Who live like foxes, bears and wolves, Or lion in his den. Let none sing blessings to their souls, For that they courteous are: The wild barbarians with no more Than nature go so far. If nature’s sons both wild and tame Humane and courteous be, How ill becomes it sons of God To want humanity.10

Williams would have nothing to do with the idea that Europeans were superior to Indians. He wrote, ‘‘Nature knows no difference between Europe and Americans [that is, Native Americans] in blood, birth, bodies, God having of one blood made all mankind (Acts 17) and all by nature being children of wrath (Ephesians 2).’’ And he admonished his fellow Englishmen: Boast not, proud English, of thy birth and blood, Thy brother Indian is by birth as good. Of one blood God made him and thee and all, As wise, as fair, as strong, as personal. By nature, wrath’s his portion, thine no more, Till grace his soul and thine restore. 10 Perry Miller, Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 61–62.

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Make sure thy second birth, else thou shalt see Heaven ope to Indians wild, but shut to thee.11

We know that the passage of the Virginia act for religious freedom and of the First Amendment to the Constitution (and it was no accident, following Jellinek and Weber, that it was indeed the First Amendment), of which I will have more to say in a moment, depended on an alliance of enlightenment deists like Jefferson and Madison, and dissenters, largely Baptists. The fundamental Baptist position on the sacredness of conscience relative to government action is brought out in a passage discovered by Lipset in The First New Nation. The idea must seem quaint to us today, but in 1810 congress passed a law decreeing that mail should be delivered on Sundays. In 1830 a Senate committee reported negatively on a bill to abolish Sunday mail delivery. The report, written by Richard Johnson, a Kentucky senator and an active Baptist leader, argued that laws prohibiting the government from providing service on Sunday would be an injustice to irreligious people or non-Christians, and would constitute a special favor to Christians. The report spelled out these principles: The constitution regards the conscience of the Jew as sacred as that of the Christian, and gives no more authority to adopt a measure affecting the conscience of a solitary individual than that of a whole community. . . . If Congress shall declare the first day of the week holy, it will not satisfy the Jew nor the Sabbatarian. It will dissatisfy both and, consequently, convert neither. . . . It must be recollected that, in the earliest settlement of this country, the spirit of persecution, which drove the pilgrims from their native homes, was brought with them to their new habitations; and that some Christians were scourged and others put to death for no other crime than dissenting from the dogmas of their rulers. . . . If a solemn act of legislation shall in one point define the God or point out to the citizen one religious duty, it may with equal propriety define every part of divine revelation and enforce every religious obligation, even to the forms and ceremonies of worship; the endowment of the church, and the support of the clergy. . . . It is the duty of this government to affirm to all—to the Jew or Gentile, Pagan, or Christian—the protection and advantages of our benignant institutions on Sunday, as well as every day of the week.12

11 Miller, Roger Williams, 64. 12 Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 164–165.

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My fellow sociologist of religion Phillip E. Hammond has written a remarkable book, With Liberty for All: Freedom of Religion in the United States, which I have been privileged to see in manuscript, detailing the vicissitudes of this sectarian Protestant concern for the sacredness of the individual conscience as it got embodied in the First Amendment to the Constitution and has been given ever wider meaning by the judicial system, especially the Supreme Court, ever since.13 For Hammond, the key move was to extend the sacredness of conscience from religious belief to any seriously held conviction whatever. A key moment in this transformation was the Court’s decision to extend the right of conscientious objection to military service to those whose beliefs were not in any traditional sense religious, but were fervently held nonetheless. Individual conviction and conscience have become the standards relative to which even long-established practices can be overturned. Hammond argues that Roe v. Wade is an example of the extension of this principle, and that its logic will ultimately lead to the legitimation of gay marriage. In the course of the extension of the sacredness of individual conscience from religion to the entire range of belief, Hammond argues, the sacred core of the conscience collective, the very sacred center of our society, what might even be called our civil religion, has moved from the churches to the judiciary. Whether we need to go that far with Hammond could be argued, but he has surely uncovered something very important about our society, something deeper than utilitarian or expressive individualism, the sacredness of the individual conscience, the individual person. And, I might add as an aside, here, in the city of San Francisco, where you can probably do almost anything within reason and still not raise an eyebrow, it is all ultimately thanks to the Baptists, even though some Baptists today find it rather upsetting! It is with this background in mind that I think we can understand why multiculturalism as an ideology is so appealing to Americans today, but why the emphasis on culture is so misleading. A common culture does not mean that we are all the same. Common cultures are normally riven with argument, controversy, and conflict. Those who imagine that in Habits of the Heart we were arguing for homogeneous ‘‘communities’’ languishing in bland consensus could hardly have gotten us more wrong. Difference between communities (and we must also remember that there are differences within communities, starting with the family, which someone re13 Subsequently published as Phillip E. Hammond, With Liberty for All: Freedom of Religion in the United States (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998).

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cently defined as ‘‘the place we go to fight’’), even when the cultural differences between them are remarkably thin, such differences can give rise to significant differences in identity. Identity is not the same thing as culture, but it can be just as important. Remember Bosnia, where Serbs, Croats, and Muslims share a common language and probably 99 percent of their culture, but where the memory of ancestral religion, in a highly secularized society, has led to murderous conflicts of quite recently constructed political identities.14 And yet in America the rise of identity politics on a local or a national scale, probably signifies something else, something much closer to the core of our common culture. Again, Anthony Appiah has put it well: But if we explore these moments of tension [between groups in contemporary America] we discover an interesting paradox. The growing salience of race and gender as social irritants, which may seem to reflect the call of collective identities, is a reflection, as much as anything else, of the individual’s concern for dignity and respect. As our society slouches on toward a fuller realization of its ideal of social equality, everyone wants to be taken seriously—to be respected, not ‘‘dissed.’’ Because on many occasions disrespect still flows from racism, sexism, and homophobia, we respond, in the name of all black people, all women, all gays, as the case may be. . . . But the truth is that what mostly irritates us in these moments is that we, as individuals, feel diminished. And the trouble with appeal to cultural difference is that it obscures rather than diminishes this situation. It is not black culture that the racist disdains, but

14 William Finnegan describes the hunger for identity but the shallowness of cultural resources for it in Antelope Valley, a recently developed suburb of Los Angeles. For example, he mentions a girl named Mindy who became a Mormon but before that had ‘‘wanted to become Jewish. But that had turned out to be too much work. Becoming a Mormon was relatively easy. All this was before Mindy got addicted to crystal methamphetamine and became a Nazi, in the ninth grade.’’ Finnegan’s article concludes: ‘‘Martha Wengert, a sociologist at Antelope Valley College, said, ‘This area has grown so fast that neighborhoods are not yet communities. Kids are left with this intense longing for identification.’ Gangs, race nationalism, and all manner of ‘beliefs’ arise from this longing. I thought of Debbie Turner’s inability to comprehend Mindy’s enthusiasm for the likes of Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler. ‘The kids reach out to these historical figures,’ Dr. Wengert said. ‘But it’s through TV, through comic books, through word-of-mouth. There are no books at home, no ideas, no sense of history.’ ’’ These identities that lack any cultural depth are nonetheless powerful enough to be literally matters of life and death for the young people involved. William Finnegan, ‘‘The Unwanted,’’ New Yorker 73, no. 37 (December 1, 1997): 60–78.

Is There a Common American Culture? 329 blacks. There is no conflict of visions between black and white cultures that is the source of racial discord. No amount of knowledge of the architectural achievements of Nubia or Kush guarantees respect for African Americans. No African American is entitled to greater concern because he is descended from a people who created jazz or produced Toni Morrison. Culture is not the problem, and it is not the solution.15

If the problem is disrespect for the dignity of the person, then the solution is to go back to that deepest core of our tradition, the sacredness of the conscience and person of every individual. And that is what a great deal of the ideology of multiculturalism is really saying: We are all different; we are all unique. Respect that. But there is another problem, a very big problem, and its solution is hard to envision. Just when we are moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing. This is in part because of the fact that the religious individualism that I have been describing is linked to an economic individualism which, ironically, knows nothing of the sacredness of the individual. Its only standard is money, and the only thing more sacred than money is more money.What economic individualism destroys and what our kind of religious individualism cannot restore, is solidarity, a sense of being members of the same body. In most other North Atlantic societies a tradition of an established church, however secularized, provides some notion that we are in this thing together, that we need each other, that our precious and unique selves aren’t going to make it all alone. That is a tradition singularly weak in our country, though Catholics and some high church Protestants have tried to provide it. The trouble is, as Chesterton put it, in America even the Catholics are Protestants. And we also lack a tradition of social democracy such as most European nations possess, not unrelated to the established church tradition, in which there is some notion of a government that bears responsibility for its people. But here it was not Washington and Hamilton who won but Jefferson and Madison, with their rabid hatred of the state, who carried the day. Roger Williams was a moral genius, but he was a sociological catastrophe. After he founded the First Baptist church he left it for a smaller and purer one. That, too, he found inadequate, so he founded a church that consisted only of himself, his wife, and one other person. One wonders how he stood even those two. Since Williams ignored secular society, money took over in Rhode Island in a way that would not be true in Massachu15 Appiah, ‘‘The Multiculturalist Misunderstanding,’’ 35–36.

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setts or Connecticut for a long time. Rhode Island under Williams gives us an early and local example of what happens when the sacredness of the individual is not balanced by any sense of the whole or concern for the common good. In Habits of the Heart we spoke of the second languages that must complement our language of individualism if we are not to slip into total incoherence. I was not very optimistic then; I am even less so today. Almost the only time this society has ever gotten itself together has been in time of war, and I am sure that my understanding of America is deeply formed by experiencing the depression as a child and the Second World War as an adolescent. It is not easy to hear those second languages today, and some of those who are too young to have shared my experiences seem hardly able to recognize them even when they hear them. But the poignant reality is that, without a minimal degree of solidarity, the project of ever greater recognition of individual dignity will collapse in on itself. Under the ideological façade of individual freedom, the reality will be, is already becoming, a society in which wealth, ever more concentrated in a small minority, is the only access to real freedom. ‘‘The market’’ will determine the lives of everyone else. So, much as we owe the Baptists, and I would be the first to affirm it, we cannot look to them for a way out. All you have to do is look at the two Baptists in the White House to see that. And yes, I know Hillary is a Methodist—I meant Clinton and Gore. But, if I can pull myself back from the abyss, which sometimes in my Jeremiah mood is almost the only thing I can see, I can describe even now resources and possibilities for a different outcome than the one toward which we seem to be heading. By the time we came to publish the 1996 edition of Habits of the Heart we realized that even the biblical and civic republican traditions, which we had called ‘‘second languages,’’ had made their own contribution to the kind of individualism that we had largely blamed on utilitarianism and expressivism in the first edition. This does not mean, however, that the second languages haven’t still much to teach us, even if what we have to learn from them must pass through the fires of self-criticism from within these traditions themselves. Our situation is curiously similar to that of post-Communist Eastern Europe in at least one respect.Vaclav Havel and others have opposed an effort to distinguish too sharply between the guilty and the innocent in the former Communist regimes, since it was the very nature of those regimes to draw almost everyone into some kind of complicity. The line between guilt and innocence ran through rather than between individuals, it was argued. I think of the banner in an East German church shortly after the fall of the Ber-

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lin wall that read: ‘‘We are Cain and Abel.’’ With respect to our American individualism, even in its most destructive forms, it is useless to try to sort out the good guys from the bad guys. We are all complicit, yet change is never impossible. Here I would like to return to the reference to nuances and inflections in our common culture that I made early in this discussion. Recognizing that we are all, of whatever race and gender, tempted to exalt our own imperial egos above all else, we can still find those social contexts and those traditions of interpretation, which can moderate that egoism and offer a different understanding of personal fulfillment. Every church and synagogue that reminds us that it is through love of God and neighbor that we will find ourselves helps to mitigate our isolation. Every time we engage in activities that help to feed the hungry, cloth the naked, give shelter to the homeless, we are becoming more connected to the world. Every time we act politically to keep the profit principle out of spheres where it ought not to set the norms of action we help to preserve what Jürgen Habermas calls the lifeworld, and, incidentally, to prevent the market from destroying the moral foundations which make itself possible.16 It must be obvious from the example of recent history that without the legal and ethical culture of public morality a market economy turns into Mafia gangsterism. We still have more of what has come to be called ‘‘social capital’’ than many other nations, but it cannot be taken for granted. It survives only when we in our religious and civic groups work strenuously to conserve and increase it. It is the special responsibility of those of us who are intellectuals to appropriate and develop our cultural resources, even while criticizing them. William Dean, in his The Religious Critic in American Culture, has given us a splendid example of the work that needs to be done. He draws heavily from the tradition of American Pragmatism, especially William James, and from contemporary thinkers as diverse as George Lindbeck and Cornel West, to argue for the necessity of conventions, and indeed sacred conventions, for a viable culture. He speaks of the ‘‘religious critic’’ as a public intellectual, situated not just in the university, but in third sector institutions, including churches, working to criticize, but also to reclaim a viable myth of America.17 16 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). 17 William Dean, The Religious Critic in American Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).

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Thus I still believe that there are places in the churches, and other religious and civic organizations, and even nooks and crannies in the universities, to which we might look. But the hour is late and the problems mount. In this hour of need in our strange republic, it is up to us to teach the truth as we discern it.

15 Flaws in the Protestant Code T H E O LO G I C A L R O OT S O F A M E R I C A N I N D I V I D U A L I S M

In the modern world, I would argue, national cultures are still distinctly different from one another, and although not homogeneous, are homogenizing: that is, each national society has a culture that, while allowing for difference, nonetheless presses in the direction of a single dominant profile. While the recent emphasis on diversity within nation states has made us aware of long overlooked differences, these differences should not obscure the degree to which national cultures continuously expand their hegemony. This is to put in more abstract terms the argument of Habits of the Heart that America has a first language, composed of two complementary aspects, utilitarian and expressive individualism, and also second languages, namely biblical and civic republican languages that have tended to get pushed to the margins.1 Already in the introduction to the new paperback edition of Habits my coauthors and I suggested that the individualism which is America’s dominant cultural orientation was not solely derived from eighteenth-century utilitarianism and nineteenth-century romanticism, but had roots in both of our second languages as well. In my November 1997 address to the American Academy of Religion, ‘‘Is There a Common American Culture?’’ I took the argument a step further, reaching almost to the point from which I want to begin this chapter. There I argued that beyond the homogenizing effect of television, education, and consumerism, and deeper even than utilitarian and expressive individualism, there was a still, small voice, a tiny seed, from which our current cultural orientation derives. That seed was the insistence, from America’s earliest history, of dissenting Protestantism on religious freedom guaranteed by the state, a seed from which has grown all the extensions of individual rights that have marked our subsequent history.2 [Versions of this chapter were given as lectures in several institutions in the late 1990s, but it was first published as ‘‘Flaws in the Protestant Code: Some Religious Sources of America’s Troubles,’’ Ethical Perspectives 7, no. 4 (2000): 288–299. Used by permission.] 1 Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton, Habits of the Heart (1985). 2 [See chapter 14 in this volume.]

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I began that talk by asking somewhat facetiously the question, not whether there is a common American culture, but how is it that a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion was devoted to this question in a society with so powerful and monolithic a common culture as ours? The answer, I said, was obvious: it has become part of the common culture to ask whether there is a common culture in America. I then went on to link the extraordinary receptiveness to the idea of multiculturalism in America, as opposed to many other societies, France for example, to our individualistic culture: ultimately it goes back to that deepest core of our tradition, the sacredness of the conscience and person of every individual. And that is what the ideology of multiculturalism is really saying: We are all different; we are all unique. Respect that. The next step in my argument was suggested to me by a paper by my colleague in the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, David Vogel.3 Vogel has looked at the twenty-one richest nations in today’s world. His purpose in this study was to understand why, although all rich nations have embraced the cause of environmentalism, some have done so much more enthusiastically than others. He divides the twenty-one nations into two groups: eleven he denominates as light green, concerned mainly with the quality of air and water that directly affect their population; and ten he denominates as dark green, concerned with the whole ecosphere, with endangered species, rain forests, ozone holes, and all the rest. Now his stunning discovery, and I think it was a discovery because he had no notion of this before he undertook the study, is that all but one of the ten dark green countries (the exception is Austria), are of Protestant heritage and none of the eleven light green countries are. The latter include six Catholic countries, one Greek Orthodox country (Greece), one Jewish country (Israel), and three Confucian/Buddhist countries (Japan, Korea, and Taiwan). But the correlations don’t stop there. Vogel found that the Protestant countries compared to the non-Protestant countries are the richest (Japan is an exception here), have been rich the longest, are the most modern and have been modern the longest, are the most democratic and have been democratic the longest, as well as having the most vibrant civic cultures. So Max Weber’s argument was, it seems, even more general than he thought: not only is there a correlation of Protestant heritage with mod3 David Vogel, ‘‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Environmentalism: Exploring the Cultural Roots of Contemporary Green Politics,’’ Zeitschrift für Umweltpolitik und Umweltrecht 3 (2002): 297–322.

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ern economic prosperity, but with successful democracy, and, as Vogel discovered, strong environmentalism as well. Vogel’s discovery led me to the recognition that there are cultural codes embedded in national cultures and that those cultural codes, however transformed over time, are ultimately derived from religious beliefs. The language of cultural code is not uncommon today, but I have not previously used it. I’m not sure of the derivation of the phrase, but perhaps it can be traced back to Clifford Geertz’s argument that culture patterns operate something like genetic programs. To quote a passage from his famous 1966 article ‘‘Religion As a Cultural System.’’ Culture patterns [are] sources of information that—like genes—provide a blueprint or template in terms of which processes external to themselves can be given a definite form. As the order of bases in a strand of dna forms a coded program, a set of instructions, or a recipe, for the synthesis of the structurally complex proteins which shape organic functioning, so culture patterns provide such programs for the institution of the social and psychological processes which shape public behavior. Though the sort of information and the mode of transmission are vastly different in the two cases, this comparison of gene and symbol is more than a strained analogy of the familiar ‘‘social heredity’’ sort. It is actually a substantial relationship, for it is precisely because of the fact that genetically programmed processes are so highly generalized in men, as compared with lower animals, that culturally programmed ones are so important; only because human behavior is so loosely determined by intrinsic sources of information that extrinsic ones are so vital.4

I want to push beyond Geertz and use a dangerous analogy from Chomsky to argue that there are ‘‘deep’’ cultural codes and surface ones. The deep cultural codes are the ones most likely to be derived from religion and, though easier (because cultural) to change than genetic codes, are far less malleable than the fads and fashions that inundate us daily. This is because deep cultural codes are so taken for granted, and operate at such a level of generality, that they may be effective even when, perhaps especially when, they are not recognized as such. I want to illustrate my point by drawing further on Vogel’s article and on the environmental historian Donald Worster, whom he cites.5 It is impor4 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 92–93. 5 Donald Worster, ‘‘John Muir and the Roots of American Environmentalism,’’

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tant not to confuse a Protestant heritage country with a Protestant country. Although there are very few Protestants in any light green country, there are significant numbers of Catholics in several dark green countries: Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, for example. Drawing on Ronald Inglehart’s values studies for corroboration, Vogel argues that historically Protestant culture overrides religious pluralism.6 As Vogel puts it, ‘‘for the purpose of my analysis all Americans are Protestants regardless of what particular religion they practice, just as are all Germans.’’ Vogel seems to be confirming G. K. Chesterton’s famous remark that ‘‘in America, even the Catholics are Protestants.’’ Conversely, Vogel quotes Inglehart as saying, ‘‘The societies that are historically Catholic still show very distinct values from those that are historically Protestant— even among segments of the population who have no contact with the church today. These values persist as part of the cultural heritage of given nations.’’ 7 But the relation between Protestantism and dark green ideology gets even more interesting when we learn that the religious group least concerned with the environment in America today is Evangelical Protestants, from whose tradition Vogel argues, such ideology derives. Evangelical Protestants are more likely to evince an older Protestant mastery-overnature orientation. How then does Vogel explain the correlation of Protestantism and dark green environmentalism? He does so in two ways. Following Worster he shows that the origin of modern American environmentalism was in Evangelical Christianity. Worster has a fine essay on John Muir tracing his development from fervent Evangelical Protestant to pantheistic environmentalist. But even more important to Vogel’s point is the structural continuity even when explicit religious connection is disavowed: ‘‘Contemporary dark green environmentalism is best understood not as an expression of Protestant religion(s), but rather as a secularized version of it.Without making or acknowledging any explicit connection to religious beliefs or practices, dark green environmentalism draws on the in Donald Worster, ed., The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 184–202. 6 Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 98. 7 Ronald Inglehart and Marita Carballo, ‘‘Does Latin America Exist? (And Is There a Confucian Culture?): A Global Analysis of Cross-Cultural Differences,’’ Political Science (March 1997), 43.

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rhetoric and imagery of Protestantism.’’ Vogel points to several structural similarities: First, both dark green environmentalists and Protestants share a deeply pessimistic view of the world, one in which man is wicked and has committed multiple sins. For Protestants, the sins are against God, for environmentalists they are against nature. For the former, the ‘‘wages’’ of this sin are eternal damnation; for the latter it is the impending destruction of the eco-sphere. Both share an essentially apocalyptic vision. Thus if we continue in our present behaviors and values we are doomed. It is only by radically changing our ways—which include both our behaviors and our values—that we can possibly be ‘‘saved.’’ The notion of Calvin and other Protestant reformers that we live in a depraved world filled with sinners bent on their own destruction echoes in much contemporary ‘‘dark green’’ environmental rhetoric.

Second, Vogel notes the common importance of asceticism, expressed by the environmentalists in a concern for recycling, walking rather than driving, and so forth. Third is moralism: both Protestants and environmentalists are quick to make strong moral judgments. ‘‘By contrast,’’ he writes, ‘‘non-Protestant cultures tend to exhibit a higher degree of tolerance for inconsistency.’’ Fourth, he notes, Protestantism is a ‘‘highly egalitarian religion.’’ This is a feature that links Protestantism to democracy. What the environmentalists do is extend the concept of the rights of man to include the rights of nature. ‘‘If people are equal in God’s eyes, then so are natural objects such as whales, trees, animals, and rivers.’’ Fifth,Vogel argues, just because Protestantism has a weakened sense of liturgy and sacramentalism it is open to an aesthetic appreciation of nature. Indeed it is largely on Protestant soil that romanticism as an aesthetic movement has evolved. Environmentalism clearly has inherited the nature mysticism that Protestants have been prone to. Finally, and ironically, Protestantism and environmentalism are connected in that they both share an ethic of mastery, the very ethic that, Vogel says, ‘‘has, correctly, been associated with the ruthless subjugation of nature.’’ But environmentalism gives the notion of mastery a new twist, or, we might say the cultural code undergoes a mutation. As Vogel puts it, ‘‘if one believes that control or mastery of the world is possible, one can just as readily choose to treat it well as dominate over it. In any event, it is people who are ultimately responsible for nature.’’ 8 8 Vogel, ‘‘The Protestant Ethic,’’ 316–320.

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To sum up what I think the connection between Protestantism and environmentalism means for the understanding of how cultural codes operate, let me quote Donald Worster: ‘‘Protestantism, like any religion, lays its hold on people’s imagination in diverse, contradictory ways and that hold can be tenacious long after the explicit theology or doctrine has gone dead. Surely it cannot be surprising that in a culture deeply rooted in Protestantism, we should find ourselves speaking its language, expressing its temperament, even when we thought we were free of all that.’’ 9 One implication of my argument is that it severely undermines the notion of a predominantly or exclusively ‘‘secular public sphere’’ in America. The public sphere as it developed in our history and as it is institutionalized above all in the First Amendment is, as I have already argued in different terms, part of the deep Protestant cultural code. Whatever may be true of revolutions elsewhere, the American Revolution was not anticlerical. Indeed, the Protestant clergy provided the ideological legitimation and the day-to-day agitation and propaganda that made the revolution successful. The First Amendment was neither a secular barrier to religion nor a condescending gift of religious freedom from a secular elite to religious citizens. The First Amendment was as much the product of the demands of religious dissenters as it was the product of enlightened deists. William McLoughlin has written the history of the contribution particularly of the Baptists to American religious freedom in a way quite consonant with the views of Georg Jellinek, whom I mentioned in connection with Weber.10 Jefferson would probably not have been elected in 1800 without the support of the dissenting sects, and Jefferson himself was, in his own way, a religious man. His sympathies lay with the Unitarians, then as now a quintessential dissenting Protestant sect. Concerning the ‘‘progress of Unitarianism,’’ Jefferson wrote in 1822, ‘‘That this will, ere long, be the religion of the majority from north to south, I have no doubt.’’ 11 One of the most spectacularly wrong predictions ever made, but indicative of Jefferson’s sympathies. In short, the American public sphere was not something invented by secularists from which religious groups were to be kept out or into which they might be gingerly invited if they were properly obsequious. The 9 Worster, ‘‘John Muir,’’ 200. 10 William Gerald McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). For Jellinek and Weber, see this volume, chap. 14, notes 9 and 10 respectively. 11 Thomas Jefferson, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1464.

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American public sphere was a Protestant invention into which Catholics, Jews, and nonbelievers were invited, and later Muslims and Buddhists as well, and one whose religious form influences its present secular inhabitants, like environmentalists, far more than they are aware of. If we were not, through most of our history anticlerical, we have become so in a sense in the last fifty years, when it is religious people who are treated as interlopers in the public sphere and secularists who claim to have owned it all along. Thus if faith belongs by birth in the public sphere, we must still contend with those who have lately come to think otherwise. I would insist that there is no neutral civic language that requires that we check our particularistic commitments at the door. Liberal language is situated in history and suffers from the problems of particularism that we all do. Civic conversation is the place where we bring our horizons together with those of others, in an effort to find, difficult though the process is, common ground. It does not behoove any group in the civic dialogue to claim that its own language is the lingua franca into which all other languages must be translated. Even though liberals seem incapable of understanding why this is a mistake, it is a particularly egregious one in a society whose public language has continuously drawn on religion from the beginning to the present. But if faith has a place in the public sphere that has never been simply secular, if faith belongs there, what does it have to say? No one who knows my work would expect me to preach American triumphalism and to laud the beneficence of Protestantism for giving our country wealth, democracy, judicial protection of individual rights, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and even the public sphere. On the contrary, I recently came across something that Vaclav Havel said at Stanford in 1994, which resonated in my soul: ‘‘The role of the intellectual is, among other things, to foresee like Cassandra various threats, horrors, and catastrophes.’’ Now I am quite charmed to think of myself as Cassandra, since I usually think of myself as Jeremiah. I also wonder about the cultural code in Bohemia, remembering the formative influence of Jan Hus, because Havel, though not a churchman, does seem to speak with the Protestant prophetic, even apocalyptic, voice much of the time. Now you will see the fiendish twist that I will give to the idea of a deep cultural code. Just as a genetic code can produce a highly successful species, successful because specialized for a particular environment, but then, perhaps at its moment of greatest success, because of a dramatic change in that environment, the code can lead to rapid extinction. So a cultural code which has long enjoyed remarkable success in many fields can lead a civilization into abrupt decline if it disables it from solving central

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problems, perhaps problems created by its own success.12 And yet the cultural code, however deep, is not a genetic code: it can be changed, although sometimes it takes a catastrophe to change it. What, then, is the flaw in the cultural code that could produce threats, horrors, and catastrophes? If the period of the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century was a period of rampant economic excesses, rivaled perhaps only by our own moment, excesses that would be brought under partial control by the development of many regulatory agencies beginning with those proposed by Theodore Roosevelt, we should not forget that it was a period of great institution building. The 4H movement was founded in 1900, the naacp in 1909, Camp Fire Boys and Girls in 1910, Kiwanis in 1915, and the Community Chest in 1918. These are only a few of the many voluntary associations and societies that would have such an important influence on how life was lived in American small towns, big cities, and suburbs at least up until the 1960s and 1970s. These associations, together with the churches and, in many areas, both urban and rural, still vibrant extended families, provided a protective integument against the creative destruction of the market economy, itself, of course, based on economic freedom, which, if not a Protestant invention, was, as Weber noted, early on linked to the fundamental freedom of the human person so that it, too, is closely related to our deep cultural code. But since the early 1970s many of these groups and associations have been in sharp decline, the churches holding out the longest, but even they are beginning to show signs of weakening.13 One recent study reported by Robert Wuthnow found that 75 percent of the public said that the ‘‘breakdown of communities’’ is a serious national problem. Although 90 percent said it is important to participate in community organizations, only 21 percent said they did so.14 What has been happening in our society in the last 12 Jared Diamond in his book Collapse writes: ‘‘The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.’’ Quoted in Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2004), in New Yorker (January 5, 2005): 72. 13 For evidence of these changes, see Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 14 Robert Wuthnow, Loose Connections (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 68.

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twenty or thirty years that has led 75 percent of our people recently to complain of the ‘‘breakdown of community’’? What has been happening can be summed up in the title of Wuthnow’s recent book: Loose Connections. People aren’t plugged in very tightly to groups and associations: they may volunteer a few hours a week for a while, but they won’t join an organization which will expect their loyalty and commitment for the long haul, or at least they are much more reluctant to than once they were. ‘‘Loose connections’’ is a powerful metaphor and I can’t help drawing a conclusion from it that Wuthnow doesn’t stress: loose connections can be dangerous, can lead to a fire, can lead to catastrophe. Wuthnow pairs the metaphor of loose connections with another metaphor that partly explains it: porous institutions. Porous institutions are ones that don’t hold individuals very securely; porous institutions are ones that leak. In a world of porous institutions it is hard to have any connections that are not loose. One thinks of the family: whereas in 1960 one in four marriages would fail, today one in two will. And a lot of things go along with that. The fastest growing category of households is those with one member, which now amount to 25 percent of all households. Families, as we know, do not necessarily consist of two parents and their children. Husbands and wives drift in and out, often bringing children from a former marriage with them, resulting in what is called ‘‘blended families.’’ However successfully families are coping with these conditions, there is always the uncertainty: will this marriage last? will my parents divorce? Work, the other great source of personal identity besides family for most Americans, has also become increasingly porous. Arlie Hochschild in her book The Time Bind reports a factory worker in a corporation she studied saying, ‘‘In the last 30 years while I’ve had this job, I have had two marriages, and several girlfriends in between. This job is my family.’’ Unfortunately, Hochschild reports, he was about to be downsized.15 In Habits of the Heart we talked about jobs, careers, and callings as three increasingly engaged ways of thinking about work.16 But not only have jobs become transient and insecure, careers are increasingly vulnerable to change.Wuthnow writes: ‘‘The median number of different careers listed by people aged 45 or over in the U.S. labor force is now three; the traditional pattern of working in only one career now typifies only 21 percent of all workers aged 45 15 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Holt, 1997), 45. 16 Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton, Habits of the Heart, 65–71.

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Flaws in the Protestant Code or over.’’ 17 If job and career are uncertain, then we may wonder how many

people actually find a calling. Most of the attention to changes in the workforce has been directed to the business world, where downsizing has led to the loss of millions of relatively secure, well-paying jobs. Job growth has surpassed job loss, but many if not most of the new jobs both pay less and have fewer benefits. Part-time and temporary employment has boomed. So-called outsourcing means that work formerly done by regular employees is now done by contracted workers without benefits. But pressures that are apparent in the business world are felt in every sector of American life. For-profit hmos have turned formerly independent physicians into, in effect, hired employees, with less and less control over the conditions of their work. Law firms have seen a similar change as attention to the bottom line has led to the firing of partners that would formerly have been unthinkable. Although attracting less public attention, the academic field has been particularly hard hit by the effect of bottom line pressures on employment practices. Wuthnow notes that ‘‘in American higher education the proportion of faculty who were in part-time positions rose from 32 percent in 1980 to 47 percent in 1996.’’ 18 At a time when student enrollment is increasing, regular faculty slots have been shrinking. Tenure is not being abolished; it is simply dying by attrition. I am interested not only in the cold external facts but in their human consequences. Because I know the personal travail these circumstances cause I want to say a little more about these changes in the academic world, but they are representative of changes throughout our society. Robert Darnton describes what life is like for the many who ‘‘fall into the floating population of adjuncts, lecturers, and part-time teachers of all varieties’’: ‘‘Most independent or adjunct scholars have to scramble for a living, picking up odd jobs wherever they can find them, usually for inadequate pay, insufficient benefits, and no recognition. We may be producing the intellectual equivalent of the Okies and Arkies from the dustbowl years—migrant academic workers with lap-top computers who live out of the back seats of their cars.’’ 19 Because some of our recent graduates, even in a department as highly ranked as Berkeley’s sociology department, have found themselves in just such situations, I can think of 17 Wuthnow, Loose Connections, 62. 18 Wuthnow, Loose Connections, 63. 19 Robert Darnton, ‘‘The New Age of the Book,’’ New York Review of Books, March 18, 1999, p. 6.

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students I know and care about who are just such academic Okies and Arkies today. Wuthnow links the increasing porosity of our basic institutions of family and work to the decline of traditional voluntary associations. If we can’t be sure about our marriage or our job tomorrow, we’re not likely to take on a long-term commitment to the Rotary Club, the pta, or the naacp. But there is another consequence with major negative implications. When people have loose connections and live in porous institutions then their level of trust begins to fall. We are not surprised to hear that the proportion of Americans who reply that they trust the government in Washington only some of the time or almost never has risen steadily from 30 percent in 1966 to 75 percent in 1992. But are we prepared to hear that the proportion of Americans who say that most people can be trusted fell by more than a third between 1960, when 58 percent chose that alternative, and 1993, when only 37 percent did? 20 If Robert Putnam is right in his book Bowling Alone, then decline in associational membership and public trust are the two most important indices of a decline in what he calls social capital. Social capital is the basic resource that societies can call upon to solve their problems. It is indispensable in a democracy: you can do without social capital in an authoritarian regime—the government will do it all. But where you rely on citizen participation, social capital is what makes it possible. Along with declining associational membership and public trust the decline in the percentage of the population that votes in national, state, and local elections is another symptom of our underlying problem. Our democratic institutions along with our familial and work institutions are all in trouble. No wonder people are worried about the ‘‘breakdown of communities’’ and are not as ecstatic as we might expect under conditions of surface prosperity. If we see a variety of symptoms that all is not well in our society, in spite of surface appearances, what is there about our deep cultural code that might be a significant part of the problem? Just when we are in many ways moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing. This is in part because of the fact that our invincible individualism, deriving as I have argued from the dissenting religious tradition in America, is linked to an economic individualism that, ironically, knows nothing of the sacredness of the individual. Its only standard is money.What economic individualism destroys and what our kind of reli20 Putnam, Bowling Alone, 37, 140.

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gious individualism cannot restore, is solidarity, a sense of being members of the same body. In most other North Atlantic societies, including other Protestant societies, a tradition of an established church, however secularized, provides some notion that we are in this thing together, that we need each other, that our precious and unique selves aren’t going to make it all alone. Let me make two suggestions about how certain central Protestant beliefs have been vulnerable to distortion. Max Weber credited the great universalistic religions that arose in the first millennium b.c. with a strong rejection of magic. The Jewish prophets taught us that no worship of idols, no propitiation of spirits with sacrifice or incense, would save us. As Micah says ‘‘And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’’ (Micah 6:8) The Reformers took the opposition to magic very seriously, attacking the doctrine of transubstantiation and other Catholic practices that they deemed magical. In their fear of idolatry they, in effect, pushed God out of the world into radical transcendence. With the doctrine of predestination Calvin (or if not Calvin, as some scholars now believe, then some of his followers) described a God who had preordained everything that can occur before the beginning of time. It was natural for some philosophers and scientists to move from that idea to a deterministic physical universe without a personal God at all: ‘‘I have no need of that hypothesis,’’ as one of them said. So Calvin’s powerful doctrine of divine transcendence paradoxically opened the door to atheistic naturalism. Even more ominously, into the empty space left by the absence of God came an understanding of the self as absolutely autonomous that borrows an essential attribute of God to apply to the self. Since Calvinism as a consistent doctrine hardly survived the eighteenth century, I am arguing for this aspect of the Protestant cultural code as having made its ambiguous contribution quite some time ago. There is a second Protestant religious source of our problem that is, however, very much alive and well today. This is the near exclusive focus on the relation between Jesus and the individual, where accepting Jesus Christ as one’s personal Lord and Savior becomes almost the whole of piety. When this happens then the doctrine of the God-Man can slip into the doctrine of the Man-God. The divinization of the self is often called Gnosticism, and Harold Bloom in his interesting book The American Religion sees Gnosticism as the quintessentially American religion.21 He says so not as a critic 21 Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).

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but as a believer, for he proclaims himself a Gnostic. He sees the Evangelical Protestant focus on the personal relation of the believer to Jesus as one of the major sources of American Gnosticism. If I may trace the downward spiral of this particular Protestant distortion, let me say that it begins with the statement ‘‘If I’m all right with Jesus, then I don’t need the church,’’ which we heard from some of the people we interviewed for Habits of the Heart. It progresses, then, to the Sheilaism that we described in that book. A woman named Sheila Larson defined her faith as: ‘‘It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.’’ 22 But Sheilaism seems positively benign compared to the end of the road in this direction which comes out with remarkable force in an interview recounted in Wuthnow’s Loose Connections. A man in his late twenties who works as a financial analyst describes the individualism that ‘‘you’re just brought up to believe in’’ as follows: ‘‘The individual is the preeminent being in the universe. There’s always a distinction between me and you. Comity, sharing, cannot truly exist.What I have is mine, and it’s mine because I deserve it, and I have a right to it.’’ 23 Let us hope he knows not what he says. The general tendency of American Evangelicalism toward a private piety pulls everyone influenced by it very much in this direction. Some may think that Jesus-and-me piety is very different from the individual as the preeminent being in the universe, but I am suggesting that they are only a hair apart.24 If I have located our problem rightly then religious faith not only belongs in the public sphere, it has a particularly central responsibility for the present state of our common life, for it has, especially when combined with the ideology of economic freedom with which it has long been linked, contributed the deep cultural code which has led us into our present perilous situation. One way of putting what is required is to say, drawing from the work of William Dean, that we need a searching religious criti22 Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton, Habits of the Heart, 221. 23 Wuthnow, Loose Connections, 250. 24 Francis Schüssler Fiorenza describes just how close they are: ‘‘It is my guess that, despite a Christian critique of modern society as secular and irreligious, modern social values have surreptitiously become identified as Christian values. Has not a kind of capitalistic cult of individual self-reliance, a worship of individual achievement, and a trust in one’s own ability to save oneself crept into the belief system of the religious right and become more important than the worship and trust in God? Have not this individualism, self-sufficiency, and localism become the idols to whom the Christians have begun to offer their sacrifices and burnt offerings?’’ in ‘‘From Darkness to Light?’’ Harvard Divinity Bulletin 22, no. 2 (2000): 27.

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history, so unconscious and even counterintuitive, that I think it is a major task of religious intellectuals to uncover them and then, if I may use the analogy, to suggest some genetic reengineering of the deep cultural code. For if I am right and our present deep cultural code is leading us toward threats, horrors, and catastrophes, such a reengineering may be our most urgent necessity. I must also caution, however, that the code has escaped the control of religious groups, as I have suggested with many examples, and so a reengineering of the deep cultural code at the religious level would be only the beginning, though I think the most important beginning, of the reengineering of our American code altogether. I cannot here undertake this task of religious criticism, but I can offer a few pointers. Our deep cultural code is the product of and most congenial to the dissenting wing of our Protestant tradition. I am thinking above all of those communions with a radical congregational polity: not only the Baptists, but Quakers, Congregationalists (including the present ucc), and Unitarian-Universalists, a grouping that clearly cross-cuts any usual division of American Protestant denominations. In spite of the undeniable contribution of these groups to our high culture and to our popular culture, I believe we must look elsewhere for the resources to alter our current course at the deepest religious level. The key question is ecclesiological: is the church primarily a collection of individuals, each of whom has accepted Jesus Christ as his or her personal Lord and Savior, or is it the Body of Christ? If, without denying the importance of personal salvation, we see that at this moment what we need above all is an understanding of ourselves as belonging to One Spirit and One Body, then we need to emphasize the physical signs of such belonging in the sacraments, above all the Eucharist. Another way of putting our situation is to say that we do indeed need a Catholic moment in America, and catholic both in a capital ‘‘C’’ and a small ‘‘c’’ sense of the word. To put the issue sharply: the dominance of Protestantism, for historical reasons, in what I am calling the American cultural code is responsible for many of our present difficulties and we badly need an infusion of what Andrew Greeley, drawing from Clifford Geertz but also from David Tracy, calls ‘‘the Catholic imagination’’ if we are to overcome those dif25 William Dean, The Religious Critic in American Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).

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ficulties. Greeley, my fellow sociologist and a Catholic priest, speaks of a Catholic imagination (sometimes he says sacramental imagination) that is different from the Protestant imagination and he paints the contrast in stark terms: The Catholic tends to see society as a ‘‘sacrament’’ of God, a set of ordered relationships, governed by both justice and love, that reveal, however imperfectly, the presence of God. Society is ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘good,’’ therefore, for humans and their ‘‘natural’’ response to God is social. The Protestant tends to see society as ‘‘God-forsaken’’ and therefore unnatural and oppressive. The individual stands over against society and not integrated into it. The human becomes fully human only when he is able to break away from social oppression and relate to the absent God as a completely free individual.26

This is not entirely fair, as it overlooks the community-forming capacity of Protestantism so evident earlier in our history, but it does help us understand Margaret Thatcher’s otherwise nearly unintelligible remark, ‘‘There is no such thing as society,’’ a quintessentially Protestant thing to say. Earlier versions of social realism can certainly be found in Protestantism, such as the emphasis on covenant and on stewardship, but those ideas sound quaint today and are hardly usable in public, whereas the sacredness of the individual trumps all cards. Paul Tillich juxtaposed a Protestant principle with a Catholic substance to be found in every kind of Christianity. It is clear to me that we have in our cultural code tilted too far toward the Protestant side and that we badly need a Catholic correction. The most fundamental practice that tells us who we are as Christians is worship. The very concreteness of the sacramental tradition is difficult for free-floating middle-class Americans, even Catholics, to understand. If I find that I live in porous institutions with loose connections, how can I understand that this bread and this wine is the actual body and blood of Christ and that by participating in the Eucharist I become immediately and physically one with the body of Christ, and so one with the whole of God’s creation? Yet for Protestants as for Catholics not only the Word but the sacraments are necessary for our salvation. The sacraments pull us into an embodied world of relationships and connections, a world in which, to quote Greeley, ‘‘humans [are] integrated into networks, networks that 26 Andrew M. Greeley, The Catholic Myth: The Behavior and Beliefs of American Catholics (New York: Scribner, 1990), 45. See also Andrew M. Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

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reveal God,’’ rather than a world in which individuals attempt to escape from society.27 All orthodox Christians believe that both Word and sacrament are necessary for our salvation, and nothing I say should be interpreted as diminishing the importance of the Word, although what we need especially today is the Gospel of John and the letters of Paul. But Protestantism must resist the temptation of one-sidedness as Tillich describes it: ‘‘The classical combination ‘word and sacrament’ means, in the first place, ‘the word as well as the sacrament.’ Next it signifies, ‘the sacrament through the word.’ And it has often been used, especially in Protestantism, as ‘word without sacrament.’ ’’ 28 Today, however, all of us, Protestants and Catholics, need that tangible, physical act of participating in the body and blood of the crucified and risen Christ. The sacrament of communion is the most profound religious expression of the virtue of solidarity as Pope John Paul defines it, ‘‘a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good, that is to say, to the good of all and of each individual.’’ It is in that moment that we become members one of another, that we not only partake of the Eucharist but can actually become Eucharist, ourselves completing ‘‘what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions,’’ as Paul says in Colossians, by self-giving love for the whole world. In that light we would see that the unrestrained market destroys every social relation and that only a major strengthening of the social control of the market, involving not only national but international controls, will move us in the next decade to recover our connections with each other and the natural world that ultimately make life worth living. Finally, I don’t want to locate blame in any particular quarter. If in America even the Catholics are Protestants, then even high church Protestants are Evangelicals. Is not this very talk a kind of Evangelical sermon? Our situation is curiously similar to that of postcommunist Eastern Europe in at least one respect. Vaclav Havel and others have opposed an effort to distinguish too sharply between the guilty and the innocent in the former communist regimes, since it was the very nature of those regimes to draw almost everyone into some kind of complicity. The line between guilt and innocence ran through rather than between individuals, it was argued. I think of the banner in an East German church shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall that read: ‘‘We are Cain and Abel.’’ With respect to our Ameri27 Greeley, Catholic Myth, 47. 28 Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 98.

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can individualism, even in its most destructive forms, it is useless to try to sort out the good guys from the bad guys. We are all complicit, which is to say that we all need conversion. I will give Havel the last word: ‘‘Given its fatal incorrigibility, humanity probably will have to go through many more Rwandas and Chernobyls before it understands how unbelievably short-sighted a human being can be who has forgotten that he is not God.’’

16 The New American Empire

I have been pondering for quite some time just how to describe the new American Empire, but now, quite suddenly, my task has become much simpler. On September 20, 2002, the White House issued George Bush’s ‘‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,’’ which describes the new empire with crystal clarity. America will strike any nation or any group that it deems dangerous, whenever and however it feels necessary, and regardless of provocation or lack thereof. America invites allies to join in these ventures but reserves the right to act with or without allies. No nation will be allowed to surpass or even equal American military power, and indeed other nations are advised to limit or destroy any ‘‘weapons of mass destruction’’ they may have, and that includes Russia, China, and India. Only the United States will have large reserves of wmd, apparently because only we can be trusted to use them justly. Although the document several times uses the time-honored phrase ‘‘balance of power,’’ it is very unclear what that phrase can mean in a situation where we have all the power and no one else shall have the capacity to provide a balance. On top of the declaration of absolute military supremacy throughout the globe, the document reiterates, in the epigraph to chapter 3, Bush’s intention to ‘‘rid the world of evil,’’ first uttered on September 14, 2001, in the National Cathedral. Apparently what even God has not succeeded in doing, America will accomplish. One may wonder how the George Bush who as a candidate in the 2000 electoral campaign so often sounded like an isolationist (we’re not into nation building) now sees himself as world ruler. Even more problematically, we can wonder how a nation whose third president advised it to avoid ‘‘foreign entanglements’’ finds itself the sole center of the entire globe. Actually there is a deep relation between these apparently contradictory stances: individualistic nationalism or national individualism.We will go it alone, either by withdrawing from the world, or by dominating it. Ameri[First published in Commonweal 129, no. 18 (October 25, 2002): 12–14. © 2002 Commonweal Foundation, www.commonwealmagazine.org. Used by permission.]

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cans expect individuals to act alone, so it is not surprising that they expect their nation to as well. In human history empires are a fact of life; they have not been all bad. In his interesting book, War before Civilization, Lawrence Keeley argues that the Roman Empire was one of the most peaceful periods in history— fewer men under arms, and fewer civilians killed in war than in most of history. The British Empire during its heyday, roughly from the Napoleonic Wars to World War I, maintained a degree of tranquility in the world that encouraged unprecedented economic growth. But both the Romans and the British intended to build an empire; the Americans, on the other hand, have become an empire almost by default, leaving us in no way prepared for imperial responsibilities. I cannot here more than suggest the course of empire that the United States has taken. Continental expansion was indeed ‘‘manifest destiny,’’ intended to allow our growing population to occupy the continent. Beyond that, however, compared to other empires in history, our aims for direct rule were modest, peaking in the acquisitions that resulted from the Spanish-American War of 1898, and modestly diminishing (with the independence of the Philippines) since. The American Empire has grown through the extension of what has classically been known as spheres of influence rather than direct rule. The first and perhaps archetypal step was the Monroe Doctrine that declared the entire Western Hemisphere free from European expansion. It was motivated as much by our deep-seated isolationism, our desire not to be encroached upon, as by a wish to dominate, though economic, political, and on occasion military domination did indeed follow. After another episode of isolationism between World Wars I and II (symbolized by our refusal to join the League of Nations that our own President Wilson had designed), we found ourselves after World War II as one of only two great powers in the world, and again, I would argue, we were more concerned that the Soviet bloc not encroach on the ‘‘free world’’ than in dominating the latter, although here, too, the record is ambiguous. So for forty-five years after World War II our imperial sphere of influence was the entire noncommunist world, quite an expansion compared to the Monroe Doctrine. It is the third great expansion of our sphere of influence in the midst of which we now live. After the collapse of the Soviet sphere in the period 1989–1991 we became the only great power and our sphere of influence became the globe. America’s rise to world dominance was, however, not only military and

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political. It was economic and cultural, and again, I believe, without anyone ever quite intending it. Based on our relatively undamaged economy at the end of World War II, when the economies of all our rivals were in ruins, we became the economic dynamo of the postwar era. Even when Japan and Europe (especially Germany) became serious economic rivals, it was our model of economic life that exerted pressure on all other nations, as it does today in the so-called Washington consensus embraced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Our economic freedom, which has ambivalently fascinated the world, is closely related to our cultural freedom that rouses similar ambivalence. Vaclav Havel, the president of the Czech Republic, in his 1995 graduation address at Harvard, made a telling observation: One evening not long ago I was sitting in an outdoor restaurant by the water. My chair was almost identical to the chairs they have in restaurants by the Vltava River in Prague. They were playing the same rock music they play in most Czech restaurants. I saw advertisements I’m familiar with back home. Above all, I was surrounded by young people who were similarly dressed, who drank familiar-looking drinks, and who behaved as casually as their contemporaries in Prague. Only their complexion and their facial features were different—for I was in Singapore.

In one sense what Havel is talking about is globalization. But if you think about it, where, if not from America, did the rock music, the familiarlooking drinks, the clothes, and even the casual behavior originate? Informality and individuality are American trademarks, but so are consumerism, mass entertainment, and the ideology of the free market. There are certainly parts of the world that have not been touched by these cultural influences, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban, but it is remarkable how soon the transistor radios and the beauty parlors appeared once the Taliban were gone. There is almost no major city in the world where a scene such as that described by Havel could not be found. And although the language spoken in most of those restaurants would not be English, if you entered one, and spoke in English, chances are you would be understood. So, on top of global military, political, and economic power, the United States has hegemonic cultural and linguistic influence. How are we to interpret this many-dimensional American globalization? One way would be to say that everyone in the world now has two nationalities: the one they were born with and American. Or we could go farther and say we are not a country, we are the country. When Timothy Garton Ashe visited Belgrade and Pristina right after the

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Kosovo War, he asked young soccer players about their beliefs. Much as they hated each other they agreed on one thing: both groups wanted to be like Americans. When Ashleigh Banfield interviewed young Iranians in Teheran in February of 2002 she asked if they hated America. They said, no they love American things and want to be like Americans. But this love of American things has to be profoundly ambivalent, and mixed with envy stimulated by the many American things they know they don’t have. The Oxford Catholic scholar Nicholas Boyle has put this situation in Hegelian perspective: It precisely corresponds to the Hegelian model in that a universal process—the establishment of a global free market—is understood, and is correctly understood, as legitimating the particular features of the national life and being actualized through them. World-historical developments, according to Hegel, are realized only in the history of particular states, and if globalization is the dominant world-historical process of the last century and a half, Americanization— first of America and then of the world—is the particular form in which it is realized. . . . The universal process of globalization has to become concrete in a particular form and it does so in the particular form of Americanization. Beyond individual statehood, for all of us, lies America.

Yet it is the central point I want to make that the American polity is in no way prepared for this world-historical role that has been thrust upon us, making it doubtful we can sustain the hegemony the national security document asserts. We remain a profoundly provincial, monolingual nation. Our present president, whether legitimate or not, is in some ways typical: when Bush visited Europe after taking office it was said that it was his first trip to that continent. It is not just his ignorance (which has played into the hands of the small cabal of foreign policy advisors that in fact makes the decisions) but his lack of interest in the rest of the world that is typical. Most Americans are not interested in the rest of the world and certainly don’t know much about it. Foreign news has been in decline as a proportion not only of televsion news, but even of newspaper reporting for decades. Our degree of national pride is unmatched in the world. Even before 9/11 the National Opinon Research Center found that 90.4 percent of Americans agree with the statement ‘‘I would rather be a citizen of America than of any other country in the world’’ (rising to 97.2 percent after 9/11). Only slightly fewer Americans agreed with the statement that ‘‘America is a better country than most other countries.’’ After 9/11 almost half of our people agreed with the statement ‘‘the world would be a better place if people from other countries were more like the Americans.’’ In his

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cover letter to the national security strategy document Mr. Bush asserts that there is ‘‘a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.’’ The document itself makes it clear that all other nations not merely should, but must, follow this single model— or else. It is one of the ironies of history that the national culture that embodies the world spirit today is hostile to government and committed to the enhancement of the freedom of individuals to pursue their self-interest with as little interference as possible. The trouble is that when this American ideology gets translated into the international realm it means that the United States must be allowed to act freely, unfettered by international institutions, including specifically the United Nations, but also unfettered by any other compact, covenant, or international agreement. Does Mr. Bush realize that when he calls the United Nations ‘‘irrelevant’’ and compares it to the League of Nations should it not bow to our will, he is doing just what the Germans, Italians, and Japanese did in the 1930s: making the League of Nations ‘‘irrelevant’’ by refusing to abide by its decisions? The list of the agreements that we have either broken or refused to sign is too long to list here. The reason why even the most innocent-sounding of them, such as the treaty to protect the rights of children, are rejected is that they encroach on American sovereignty; the absolutely sovereign American self must not be fettered. The American administration justifies its insistence on immediate action by arguing that the United Nations has shown a lack of backbone in doing anything about the menace of Saddam. Of course, when we had the chance in 1991, we didn’t do anything about him either. Most nations in the Middle East and the rest of the world would be glad to see Saddam go, but they fear the evil they do not know more than the evil they know: an invasion has incalculable risks. The American campaign against Saddam is clearly a consequence of 9/11, yet the rest of the world is not convinced that 9/11 has made Saddam any more dangerous than he was before. We may yet get the Security Council to authorize force on our terms, but we will pay a price for the arm-twisting we have employed, and we can expect little help from other nations in dealing with the dangerous and certainly expensive consequences of military action. The nemesis of empires has always been overextension: military failures abroad and bankruptcy at home. The doctrine spelled out in the September 2002 National Security Strategy document seems to be headed exactly in that direction. Nicholas Boyle, after saying, ‘‘Beyond individual statehood, for all of us, lies America,’’ goes on to say: ‘‘And that is true for

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Americans too, though for them it is true in a special, paradoxical, and not necessarily comfortable way. To be the chosen intermediary of the world spirit is to be chosen in the end for destruction,’’ a destruction to which ‘‘America is not immune.’’ It does not take a Hegelian to know that the assertion of absolute power provokes the assertion of absolute counterpower. Last year, a day after September 11, a front-page editorial in the French newspaper Le Monde stated and restated the phrase, ‘‘We are all American.’’ But a year later, on September 10, 2002, the same writer, JeanMarie Colombani, in the same paper observed that ‘‘the solidarity reflex from one year ago has been drowned in a wave that leads one to believe that, in the world, we have all become anti-American.’’ Even if an ‘‘antiAmerican’’ is still a kind of ‘‘American,’’ it is not the kind that should give us cheer. Is there any way to reverse, or even slow, the fateful course upon which we appear to be set? Could we use our vast imperial power to transcend the idea of empire? Imperare means command, and in the modern world the idea of government by command has been replaced, at least in principle, by government by the consent of the governed. Could we give up command and replace it by the profoundly American principle of consent arising from public discussion, not force? Instead of decreeing the ‘‘single model’’ which the whole world must follow could we instead work for a network of treaties, agreements, even international police forces, in which all the plurality of nations can participate? Instead of sabotaging every treaty, could we not promote as the principle of international order the democracy we claim to support—not ‘‘I am the king of the mountain and you will do what I say’’—but all of us bound by a thousand ties of interdependence? Some might think my argument unrealistic in a world where nationstates often place their own interests above all else. I would argue that in the present world the very idea of national interests needs to be rethought. It is in the ultimate best interest of every nation that transnational institutions replace nation-state power politics. China and/or India could become economic superpowers in the next half-century and our military dominance could falter. It is surely in our interest to connect all nations, great and small, in agreements that limit weapons and mandate arbitration rather than assuming we will always have the capacity to dominate the world by force. My great fear is that this latest American outburst of ‘‘the arrogance of power’’ will mobilize most of the world against us. To look at the headlines or watch the evening news it does not appear that many at the highest level of United States government share such a fear. We have embarked

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on an endless ‘‘war on terrorism’’ in which the invasion of Iraq is only the next step—until exhaustion sets in. A chance for another course, another role for America in the world, depends ultimately on the reform of our own culture. A culture of unfettered individualism combined with absolute world power is an explosive mixture. A few religious voices have been raised to say so.1 The question of the hour is whether our fellow citizens, much less our leaders, are ready to hear such voices.

1 See Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11, special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 2 (Spring 2002), which contains an essay of mine, ‘‘Seventy-Five Years,’’ that develops the themes of this chapter in considerably greater detail.

17 God and King

I count myself honored to be a long-standing friend of Stanley Hauerwas. I am probably one of several of Stanley’s friends whose friendship with him is in good part constituted by an ongoing argument. In my case the argument has been over the meaning of America and of the relationship between the American nation and the Christian church. In his contribution to my festschrift, ‘‘On Being a Christian and an American,’’ 1 he furthered that argument. In this chapter I am doing likewise. Before beginning my substantive argument I need to remind the reader that my views have changed over time, as I am sure have Stanley’s. I entered the discussion with my 1967 article ‘‘Civil Religion in America’’ because of my anguish over the Vietnam War, though quite unwillingly as at that time I was primarily preoccupied with Japan.2 My concern was to discover the resources in America’s religious self-understanding that could provide critical leverage for opposing the war. By using Rousseau’s term ‘‘civil religion’’ to describe those resources, I unwittingly set off a barrage of publications and a major debate over whether there was such a thing and, if there was, whether it was a good or a bad idea. I have long since ceased to use the term, nor am I at all interested in the controversy it sparked, though I have learned that for many I am forever identified with that article and that term. When I published that article, though I considered myself a Christian, I was not a member of any church, and I was concerned almost exclusively with the nation and not the church. Without going into the story of my changing views over the past nearly forty years, let me just say that I am now much closer to Stanley’s position than I was initially in that I see my first loyalty as to the church, not to the nation. That doesn’t mean that I feel no responsibility to the nation, nor does Stanley, but that [First published in a festschrift for Stanley Hauerwas in L. Gregory Jones, Reinhard Hütter, and C. Rosalee Velloso Ewell, eds., God, Truth, and Witness: Engaging Stanley Hauerwas (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2005), 112–130. Used by permission.] 1 Stanley Hauerwas, ‘‘On Being a Christian and an American,’’ in Richard Madsen et al., eds., Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 224–235. 2 Bellah, ‘‘Civil Religion in America’’ (1967).

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for both of us the relationship between church and nation is problematic to say the least. Finally, and here too I think Stanley would agree with me, I do not see the church as exclusively ‘‘religious’’ and the nation exclusively ‘‘political.’’ Both nation and church are religious and political. That is the theme of this chapter. More specifically, I want to examine the relation between the Christian church and liberalism, a central theme of Stanley’s work. Like Stanley, I am critical of the philosophical liberalism that is a product of the Enlightenment, though my criticism may be somewhat more tempered than Stanley’s.3 But whereas Stanley traces the baleful influence of liberalism on American Christianity primarily to liberal Protestant theologians from Rauschenbusch to the Niebuhrs to the present, I would argue that the link between Protestantism and liberalism long precedes the twentieth century and is, in fact, constitutive of them both. But I want to start by putting the whole question of the relation of religion and politics in a deep historical framework. I have taken as my title ‘‘God and King’’ because I believe historically these two terms were born together and have not ceased to be mutually entangled ever since. Drawing on my lifelong work on religious evolution, I would argue that in pre-state societies neither God nor king exists. In such societies there are powerful beings, ancestors, spirits of the mountains and rivers, and so on in great number, but there is no creator god who rules the cosmos as a whole. And in such societies there are elders, chiefs, war leaders, and such, but no kings whose claim to rule is absolute. It is worth remembering that pre-state societies were small-scale affairs, a few hundred or a few thousand people were organized loosely in bands, villages, or chieftainships. The early state saw an enormous increase in scale, from hundreds to hundreds of thousands or millions in some cases. Aggregations of such size, overriding ancient small-scale local solidarities, demanded new forms of self-understanding and social cohesion. 3 My position is close to that of Charles Taylor, particularly as expressed in his ‘‘A Catholic Modernity?’’ in James L. Heft, ed., A Catholic Modernity? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 13–37. Assuming that Taylor means by ‘‘modernity’’ the same thing in a broad sense as ‘‘liberalism,’’ I would agree with him when he suggests that he and his fellow Catholics ‘‘gradually find [their] voice from within the achievements of modernity, measure the humbling degree to which some of the most impressive extensions of the gospel ethic depended on a breakaway from Christendom, and from within these gains try to make clear to [themselves] and others the tremendous dangers that arise within them’’ (36–37).

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It is with the early state, in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, in north China, in Meso-America and Peru, as late as the eighteenth century in Hawai’i, that we see high gods and kings emerge together, often suddenly and terrifyingly. Human sacrifice is almost missing in pre-state societies but appears on a remarkable scale in all the early states, particularly China, the new world, and Hawai’i; on a lesser scale but not missing in the early state in Egypt and Mesopotamia. In almost every case ritual human sacrifice declined rapidly after the state was established, though we can ask whether every state is not based in some way or other on human sacrifice. The relation between high god and high king was everywhere close in archaic states, sometimes amounting to identity. Early dynasty (ca. 3100– 2700 b.c.) kings in Egypt were identified with the sky-god Horus; kings in Mesopotamia were identified as gods sporadically in the third millennium b.c.; the king in Shang China had a special relation to Di or Shang Di, the ‘‘god above’’ in the late second millennium b.c.; and from the beginning of the first millennium b.c. the Chinese king was styled Son of Heaven, just as the Egyptian pharaoh from the mid-third millennium b.c. was styled Son of Re, the sun god. The Japanese emperor, in some circles to this day, is believed to be descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu. In all these archaic societies the king was high priest, the chief and indispensable mediator and intercessor between humans and the gods. There was no church and no state as separate entities; there was only a single religiopolitical community. I want to argue that this archaic substratum has never completely disappeared, not in Japan and not in America—even the American president is at some level the lineal descendent of these archaic divine kings.4 While it is tempting to see the transition from tribal society to the early state as a ‘‘fall,’’ that is not my intention. It is true that early states are associated with an enormous increase in organized violence, so there is no reason to idealize them. It is also true that many early states inaugurated periods of sustained peace, making possible the rise of cities and of civilization, as indexed by the emergence of literature, monumental architecture, and the arts, so that they need not be demonized either. If, as Thorkild Jacobsen argued for ancient Mesopotamia (though the same was more or less true in all the archaic cases), the cosmos was seen as a state and the state as embedded in the cosmos, then it was the king 4 For my views on the comparison between Japan and the United States in this regard, see Bellah, ‘‘Epilogue,’’ in Madsen et al., eds., Meaning and Modernity, 259–264, and the introduction to Bellah, Imagining Japan (2003), 1–62.

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who was the focus of order in society and nature.5 Though kings claimed to embody eternal order, and it was in those early states that eternal order in the cosmos was first imagined, the order they embodied inevitably broke down. Empires disintegrated; civil war ravaged the land; and intermediate periods, to use the Egyptian term, occurred, during which the lack of centralized rule and large-scale social chaos created major ‘‘problems of meaning,’’ as Max Weber put it. It was often in these periods that new understandings, new revelations we could even say, appeared. In smallscale pre-state societies shamans and priests often received messages from the spirits, but they were usually concerned with domestic and local issues: why so and so was sick, why the harvest in such and such a village was so bad this year. But in the intermediate periods of early civilizations new conceptions of cosmic order, new ideas about ultimate reality appeared, and we can discern the early intimations of what used to be called ‘‘higher religions.’’ Apparently a notion of the divine as having a concern for the welfare of humans was widespread enough to arouse reproaches in Egypt during the First Intermediate Period (ca. 2150–2040 b.c.), or in the memory of it in the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2040–1650 b.c.). The ‘‘Admonitions of Ipuwer’’ complains that not only the king, but also ‘‘the god’’ have been derelict in their duty of taking care of the people. Ipuwer reproaches the god who brought human beings into existence: ‘‘Where is he today? Is he asleep? His power is not seen.’’ 6 But a remarkable defense of the ‘‘all-lord’’ is mounted in Coffin Text 1130 from the Middle Kingdom, a text that Jan Assmann believes belongs in the developing tradition of wisdom literature. The text is an apology for the god against such accusations as Ipuwer’s. In order to ‘‘still the anger’’ the god recounts his ‘‘four good deeds’’: (1) I performed four good deeds in the threshold of Light-land: I made the four winds, So that everyone could breathe in his time. That is one of my deeds. 5 Thorkild Jacobsen, ‘‘The Cosmos as a State,’’ in Henri Frankfort et al., eds., Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (1946; Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1949), 137–199. 6 Jan Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (1984; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 171. For a complete translation see Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 1, The Old and Middle Kingdoms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 149–163.

God and King 361 (2) I made the great flood, so that the poor man would have use of it like the rich man. That is one of the deeds. (3) I made each one like his fellow and forbade that they do evil. But their hearts resisted what I had said. That is one of the deeds. (4) I caused that their hearts cease forgetting the West, so that offerings would be made to the deities of the nomes. That is one of the deeds.7

What is striking about this text is the emphasis on equality. The god has given the wind (the prevailing north wind brings blessed cool to Egypt’s otherwise desert heat), and the inundation of the Nile to all, rich and poor alike. And he made all humans alike, forbidding them to do evil. It is humans, not the god, who have created oppression and caused the difference between rich and poor, strong and weak. The king is not missing— the god has created rulers to protect the weak—but the focus is not on glorifying the king but on justifying the god. I have noted that in the late Shang dynasty (ca. 1200–1045 b.c.—it is only from the late Shang that we have texts) the king was the only mediator between the people and the high god Di—just as Di orders (ling) the natural elements, so the king orders (ling) his subordinates—but it should be noted that Di was not always favorable to the king—he could be responsible for enemy attacks on the Shang. From the surviving Shang documents we have no idea why Di turned against the king, no indication that the king was being punished for a moral fault, but this idea becomes explicit in the ideology of the succeeding Zhou dynasty (Early Zhou, 1045–771 b.c.). For the Zhou, Tian (Heaven) usually replaced Di as the term for the high god, and Tian was very concerned with the moral behavior of rulers. In Zhou thought it was the evil deeds of the late Shang kings, particularly the last one, which caused Heaven to transfer its mandate (Tian ming) to the new dynasty. Implicit in this idea was that kingship is conditional. Should wicked kings arise, the mandate could once again be transferred. This idea persisted throughout the history of imperial China, being used to justify existing rulers, as well as, in the name of a changed mandate, their challengers. 7 Assmann, Search for God, 174–175, and commentary, 174–177. For a complete translation of the text see Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 1:131–133.

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What I want to demonstrate by these examples is that even in several of the mature archaic societies, though cosmos and state were still tightly fused, at least a crack was opened between god and king; some idea of a judgment transcending the existing society had appeared. With the axial age (roughly the first millennium b.c., but dates vary in different societies and the idea of the axial age is not based on absolute chronology) that crack widens into a chasm. Kings do not disappear—they never do—but they are no longer the primary channel for relating the human and the divine; all existing institutions, including political ones, stand under divine judgment. Let me consider only some moments in our own tradition. Surely the archetypal moment is the Exodus narrative, with its confrontation between Moses, the man of God, and Pharaoh, worshipper of idols, but also claimant of divinity itself. In the Hebrew Scriptures Egypt is rivaled only by Babylon as the very epitome of evil, and for the same reason: pride in self and rejection of God. Ezekiel puts it clearly when he writes that Pharaoh is a ‘‘great dragon’’ who says, ‘‘My Nile is my own; I made it for myself’’ (Ezekiel 29:3). As we have seen above, this is not a fair charge: the Egyptians believed the god created the Nile, not the pharaoh. But the Israelite indictment of Egypt, as evidenced in Jeremiah, which Walter Brueggemann calls ‘‘staggering, both in its sheer quantity and in its hyperbolic fierceness,’’ was not intended to be fair. Egypt was charged, above all, not so much with its oppression of Israel but with its defiance of Yahweh.8 Behind the demonization of both Egypt and Babylon was Israel’s deep suspicion of the claim to divine kingship that was never absent in the great archaic monarchies, however tempered over time. The great institutional achievement of Israel was to found a society not on the rule of one man who claimed to unite heaven and earth, but on a covenant between God and a people. That is the significance of the events at Sinai after the Exodus from Egypt. But such a new community, like the old one, had to be simultaneously political and religious—there was as yet no clear distinction between these realms—and therefore had to have a leader. The Egyptian king, however much he became the servant of the god rather than a god himself, never gave up the titles of Horus and Son of Re. Moses could make no such claim. He was God’s prophet, nothing else. Yet his sheer responsibility as leader in so desperate an enterprise made him at times look like a king and even act like a king. Michael Walzer in 8 Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1997), 505.

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Exodus and Revolution points out that there were two sides to Moses as leader: a Leninist side and a social democratic side.9 The Leninist side is most clearly evident in the incident following Moses’ discovery that while he was on the mountain receiving the commandments of the Lord the people had made for themselves a golden calf which they proceeded to worship. This is an incident that my students, even those who knew the Bible well, usually did not remember until it was pointed out to them. Moses called to those ‘‘on the Lord’s side’’ and the sons of Levi gathered around him. Then Moses said to them: ‘‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor.’ ’’ The sons of Levi did as Moses commanded, and about three thousand of the people fell on that day. Moses said, ‘‘Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of a son or a brother, and so have brought a blessing on yourselves this day.’’ (Exodus 32:27–29)

Walzer calls this the first revolutionary purge. It must surely also be called the first revolutionary terror. The Exodus narrative insists that Moses was not a king, an important point to which we shall return, but in Exodus 32 he acts like a king. As David Malo, himself a member of the old Hawaiian aristocracy, put it with respect to the Hawaiian king: ‘‘The edicts of the king had power over life and death. If the king had a mind to put someone to death, it might be a chief or a commoner, he uttered the word and death it was.’’ But if the king chose to utter the word of life, the man’s life was spared.10 Moses claimed that the word was the Lord’s but its human voice was Moses’, and on this earth it is the state that authorizes the word of life and death; the spokesperson of the state is always, somehow or other, a king, even when, especially when, he claims the word comes from the Lord. Exodus 32 is not the only place in the Exodus narrative where terrible things happen to those who oppose Moses, but Walzer insists the Leninist side is not the whole story. There is another Moses, a social-democratic Moses, who leads by teaching, exhortation, and example, not by violence; who defends the people from the wrath of God, asking the Lord not to 9 Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 66. 10 David Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities (1898; Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1951), 57.

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make a catastrophic end to the project that He had initiated.11 Most important, however ‘‘necessary’’ revolutionary violence may have been, and there have always been those down through the ages who have argued for that necessity, what emerged was a new political form, a people in covenant with God, with no king as ruler. Moses is a teacher and a prophet, not a king, and the Torah underscores this point not only by God’s prohibition of Moses’ reaching the Promised Land, but by the account of his death. Moses died in the land of Moab and ‘‘no one knows his burial place to this day’’ (Deuteronomy 34:6). Walzer points out that there could be no greater contrast to the Egyptian pharaoh, whose tomb was so central to his identity. Moreover, Moses was not the father of kings—the Bible tells us almost nothing about his descendents.12 But it remains an open question, as far as I am concerned, whether former slaves could have been transformed into a covenant people without Moses’s Leninist side.13 But if Moses, in spite of his Leninist moments, was not a king, there would be kings in Israel. This is not the place to tell the whole complex and in the end sad story, or to try to disentangle the monarchist and antimonarchist strands in Hebrew Scripture. But it is worth remembering that 11 Walzer, Exodus, 66–68. 12 Walzer, Exodus, 126. 13 Machiavelli famously called Moses a ‘‘prophet armed,’’ and went on to say that ‘‘all armed prophets win, and unarmed ones fall’’ because people are variable and the prophet must be ready ‘‘to make them believe by force.’’ The Prince, chap. 6, in Niccolò Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham: Duke University Press, 1965), 1:26. (Machiavelli is silent about the ways in which unarmed prophets may also ‘‘win.’’) In The Discourses, 3.30.4, Machiavelli discusses the passage from Exodus 32 quoted above and writes, ‘‘He who reads the Bible with discernment will see that, before Moses set about making laws and institutions, he had to kill a very great number of men who, out of envy and nothing else, were opposed to his plans.’’ The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli, trans. Leslie J. Walker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 1:547. It is also of interest that Machiavelli insists that if a new commonwealth is to be formed or an old one thoroughly reformed, there must be one sole authority. He writes in The Discourses, 1.9.2, in a context where Moses is mentioned as an example, ‘‘One should take it as a general rule that rarely, if ever, does it happen that a state, whether a republic or a kingdom, is either well-ordered at the outset or radically transformed vis-à-vis its old institutions unless this be done by one person. It is likewise essential that there should be but one person upon whose mind and method depends any similar process of organization.’’ Walker, trans., Discourses, 1:234. This observation might be helpful in understanding the overwhelming emphasis on the single ruler in all the early states.

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in Israel, unlike archaic societies such as ancient Mesopotamia, where the gods ‘‘sent down’’ kingship from heaven, the king was not God’s idea but the people’s. In 1 Samuel 8 we hear the people asking the aged Samuel for ‘‘a king to govern us, like other nations.’’ When Samuel, though displeased, conveys their wishes to the Lord he receives this reply: ‘‘Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. . . . Now then, listen to their voice, only—you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them’’ (1 Samuel 8:5, 7, 9). God’s warning, as recounted by Samuel, tells the people that the king will take their sons for his army and their daughters for his servants; he will take the best of their fields and vineyards and olive orchards for his courtiers; he will subject the people to corvée labor and heavy taxes. He concludes: ‘‘He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day’’ (1 Samuel 8:17–18). And so Israel, which had, after all, never been able to escape the violent conflicts of the Iron Age, entered the concert of nations in the ancient Middle East, with, of course, varying fortunes. And problematic though the Israelite monarchy was, it is again an open question whether Israel would have survived without it. Perhaps without a state, largely modeled on the states surrounding it, a tribal Israel would have been crushed and absorbed by neighboring empires, so that we would not know that it ever existed. The great prophets, beginning in the eighth century b.c., who had so much to do with shaping the biblical tradition, were, as Max Weber reminded us, very much prophets of foreign policy, and the foreign policy they advocated was often at odds with that of the kings.14 In fact it was the very vulnerability of the Israelite states in the face of resurgent power from Egypt and Mesopotamia that gave rise to the great preexilic prophets in the first place. In the face of extreme danger, they were vehement in their criticism of their own kings and people. They counseled submission more often than resistance, not because they liked the great powers—they denounced Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon as strongly as they denounced Israel and Judah—but because they placed their trust in Yahweh not in the nation. They called for repentance for sin and trust in God, not reliance on national power. They predicted doom for all the nations, including their 14 Max Weber, Ancient Judaism (1921; Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952), 267–269.

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own, and, as it turned out, their predictions were right on all points. If they were around today they would probably be called anti-American, utopian, pacifist, even, can we say, ‘‘sectarian’’? Were the prophets religious or were they political? Clearly for them the distinction makes no sense. They were intensely concerned with the nations—in that sense they were intensely political—but their politics was the politics of God. In this sense as in so many others, the Hebrew prophets were forerunners of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was not ‘‘spiritual’’ as opposed to ‘‘political,’’ any more than was Jeremiah. In a book that I taught to undergraduates for many years, The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder argued that Jesus was far from apolitical, but that his politics was the politics of God, not of the nations.15 Nonetheless, Jesus was mindful of the nation of Israel, viewing his mission as primarily to Israel, though, through Israel, to all the nations.16 The Kingdom of God may be ‘‘within you,’’ but it was to be realized in a community, first of all in a reformed Israel. As Yoder argues, it was the intensely political message of Jesus that drove the Romans to execute him, but the politics of Jesus was neither the politics of insurrection nor of collaboration, but of nonviolent witness. Yoder’s view that Matthew 5:39, ‘‘Do not resist one who wrongs you,’’ remains the fundamental text for Christian politics is a position hard to refute. Any Christian who would act on other grounds must do so in fear and trembling. Yoder’s careful reading of Romans 13 makes it clear that Paul, while accepting the legitimacy of existing political authority, does not do so unconditionally; in particular, he does not say that Christians are called to do military service.17 As one more indication of the politics of God that Jesus represented, we can point to the reappearance of the symbol ‘‘king’’ used with respect to Jesus. There is not only the ironic inscription that the Romans put atop the cross, but the fact that Christians early on referred to Jesus as ‘‘Lord,’’ a term normally used for the emperor. Christ is the Lamb of God but he is also Christ the King, now as before. And if Christ is the true king, what are the kings of this world? Both the prophets and Jesus preached to communities that on the whole refused to heed them. That some within those communities did heed them and try to live by their words was critical for the survival of what would 15 John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1972). 16 On this point see especially Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus and Community (1982; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), chap. 1, ‘‘Jesus and Israel,’’ 7–29. 17 Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 193–214, especially 205.

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become Judaism and Christianity, but those followers existed as communities called out of the surrounding world and did not exercise political authority within it. When Israel did regain political autonomy under the Maccabeans, a full-scale religiopolitical crisis ensued, but one whose full consequences were aborted by the overthrow of the Maccabean kingdom. The establishment of Christianity after Constantine was not short lived. We have been living with its consequences to this day. I do not consider the Constantinian moment to be a catastrophe as sometimes Yoder and Hauerwas have seemed to do. It was a moment full of both challenge and opportunity for the church, but what historical moment has not been? Above all, what else could one expect? All across the Old World in the centuries before and after Christ great empires were institutionalizing religions that had originated as movements withdrawn from and often critical of political power structures. Asokan India had institutionalized Buddhism, Han China had institutionalized Confucianism, Sassanid Persia had institutionalized Zoroastrianism; so it was hardly unexpected that the Roman Empire would institutionalize Christianity. The question was, who would use whom? After the axial age the claim to royal divinity (except in far-off Japan) was no longer believable; the next best thing would be to have an established church anoint a ruler as king by divine right, chosen by God. In the case of Christianity, the church could use the resources of the state to alleviate the condition of the poor and to build up a substantial Christian culture. On the other hand, the state could use the church to solidify its exploitative power and to brand potential rebels as heretics. But the very opposition to which establishment gave rise, above all the movement of monasticism that sought to recover the ethic of the early church when the established church was viewed as corrupt, was creative, giving rise to new social and spiritual forms that would serve well in subsequent centuries. To summarize what was going on we can say that the old archaic substructure in which king and god were fused continued in a new guise in the imperial establishment, but at the same time the creativity of communities accepting only the sovereignty of God continued to thrive in the very pores, so to speak, of that establishment. Fast forward to the Reformation. The Protestant churches challenged the old establishment symbolized in the figures of emperor and pope, asserting the autonomy of the church, the priesthood of all believers, and a community based on a covenant with God, beyond the state. But in several ways Protestants compromised with state structures, producing new forms of establishment. This occurred most obviously in Lutheran lands, where the prince replaced the pope as the highest church authority.Where

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Calvinism predominated, the process was more complex. I think Philip Gorski is right that Calvinism was the chrysalis of the modern democratic state.18 Geneva was already a republic, but Calvin revolutionized it (not without a Leninist touch—the execution of Servetus, for example) into a self-governing church in a self-governing state. The new covenant people was at first a ‘‘guided democracy,’’ as was Israel under Moses, but Calvinist discipline created people who could take responsibility for themselves, religiously, politically, and, not insignificantly, economically. The result was that Holland, England, and, above all, New England became the demonstration experiments for modern political and social life. The Reformation was, of course, more than Lutheranism and Calvinism. What George Williams called the Radical Reformation had its own authentic understanding of what it meant to be a covenant people, and its politics resembled what Yoder, himself a Mennonite, called the politics of Jesus.19 Although the churches of the Radical Reformation were important witness communities in several parts of the world, they never, like the Lutherans and Calvinists, embraced the state, but were not infrequently persecuted by it. The Counter-Reformation Catholic Church was also an important player in the religiopolitical space of modernity. It picked up a number of organizational techniques from the Protestants and intensified its disciplinary structures for both clergy and laity. Like the Lutherans and Calvinists it was not averse to being established in some of the new post-Reformation states, but its transnational presence gave it leverage in relation to the modern nation-state that Protestant churches seldom had. In trying to understand the American experience, however, we must focus on Calvinism. Calvinists placed a particular stamp on modern nationalism, especially in England but even more in New England, by taking their covenant theology so seriously that they thought of themselves as a chosen people, God’s New Israel, fusing church and nation into a religiopolitical whole. It has often been pointed out that the Protestant Reformation paved the way for modern nationalism by breaking the hold of the international church and replacing it with state churches instead. ‘‘The glory of God was replaced by the glory of the nation; by a curious dialectic the Reformation paved the way for this development.’’ 20 But in the Ameri18 Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 19 George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962). 20 Francisco O. Ramirez and John Boli, ‘‘On the Union of States and Schools,’’

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can case it was not so much the replacement as the fusion of the glory of God with the glory of the nation that was most in evidence in colonial New England, and to more than a small degree, ever since. Thus the conflation of church and nation that Hauerwas tends to blame on twentieth-century liberal Protestant theologians was there from the beginning of the European settlement on our shores.21 But the New England Congregationalist establishment, however important in the first phase of American nation-building, was not to be the truly formative religious influence on American national self-understanding. Rather it was the dissenting churches, first of all the Baptists, and then the Methodists, who, by the early nineteenth century, not only represented the great majority of American Protestants, but also united with secularizing deists such as Thomas Jefferson, to oppose the very idea of establishment and create a liberal republic instead. What in terms of present-day talk of culture wars might appear to be an unlikely alliance, was both effective and enormously influential in our subsequent history. Dissenting Protestants and Enlightenment liberals turned out to have surprisingly much in common.22 Though their religious views could hardly be more different, they agreed on the importance of separation of church and state, and on the sanctity of individual belief. Both were deeply committed to individual autonomy as a central value; both were deeply suspicious of the state; both were more comfortable with voluntary associations in the civic sphere and individual entrepreneurship in the economic sphere than with bureaucracy or government direction. Both, and the alliance continues to this day, believed in the idea of strong society, weak state. This is the legacy that dominates American culture now as before, and it did not originate with twentieth-century liberal Protestant theologians—it goes far deeper than that. It is a classically liberal position, but those who today call themselves conservatives and vilify the term ‘‘liberal’’ hold it fervently. In fact, in in George M. Thomas, John W. Meyer et al., eds., Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society, and the Individual (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1987), 194. 21 Conrad Cherry, God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971). 22 James E. Block, in his important book A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), shows the deep affinity between Calvinist Protestantism and liberalism from the seventeenth century on. Both placed central emphasis on the agency of autonomous individuals. Without denying there have been tensions between these two strands of the American tradition, Block shows how they have grown ever more closely intertwined throughout our history.

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America there has never been such a thing as conservatism, except very marginally, and all we have are varieties of liberalism. Another thing that tended to unite secular liberals and dissenting Protestants was their belief in the virtue of the American nation (note: not the government, as Americans are wont to call the state) as a beacon of freedom, a liberator of other nations, as, indeed, a redeemer nation. The dark side of our history—slavery, genocide, terrorism 23—have usually dropped below the radar screen in America’s self-understanding. As George W. Bush said not long after 9/11, ‘‘Why do they hate us when we’re so good?’’ I have taken this long excursus into history for one purpose: to understand better what Stanley Hauerwas is asking when he says, ‘‘Let the world be the world and let the church be the church,’’ particularly when he has America in mind. I am suggesting that church and world are more deeply entangled than he seems to imagine, that the entanglement goes much deeper than liberal Protestant theology, and that it is even difficult to see where church leaves off and world begins in our country. It sometimes looks as if we have returned to the old archaic fusion and lost the axial chasm altogether. I want to pursue my inquiry by asking what the American ‘‘world’’ has become right now and where we are to find the ‘‘church’’ that is to be the church. Edward Rhodes in a very important article has come up with the best characterization of America’s current world project: liberal empire.24 Rhodes compliments the Bush administration for spelling out this concep23 David Little in a roundtable discussion on terrorism in a recent issue of Harvard Magazine points out that the only place in international humanitarian law where the word ‘‘terror’’ appears is in two 1977 protocols that supplement the Geneva Conventions protecting victims of armed conflict: ‘‘The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence, the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population, are prohibited.’’ Jessica Stern then responded: ‘‘But what about the carpet bombing specifically with the aim of terrorizing the civilian population? Does that fit into our definition? What about dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I think that has to fit into our definition, because it’s very clear from the documents the purpose was to terrorize the civilian population.’’ It would seem that the United States, now engaged in a ‘‘war on terrorism,’’ not so long ago perpetrated the greatest acts of terrorism in human history. David Little and Jessica Stern in ‘‘Understanding Terrorism: A Harvard Magazine Roundtable,’’ Harvard Magazine (January–February 2002), 39. 24 Edward Rhodes, ‘‘The Imperial Logic of Bush’s Liberal Agenda,’’ Survival 45, no. 1 (2003): 131–153.

God and King 371 tion with crystal clarity, although its roots go far back in our history.25 The

key documents are Bush’s West Point address of June 2002 and his national security strategy document of September of that year.26 In spite of the fact that Bush in both documents denies that America seeks ‘‘empire,’’ what both of them describe is nothing if not a description of empire: America will strike any nation or any group that it deems dangerous, whenever and however it feels necessary, and regardless of provocation or lack thereof. America invites allies to join in these ventures but reserves the right to act with or without allies. No nation will be allowed to surpass or even equal American military power, and indeed other nations are advised to limit or destroy any ‘‘weapons of mass destruction’’ they may have, and that includes Russia, China, and India. Only the United States will have large reserves of weapons of mass destruction, apparently because only we can be trusted to use them justly. Although the document several times uses the time-honored phrase ‘‘balance of power,’’ it is very unclear what that phrase can mean in a situation where we would have all the power and no one else would have anything to balance it with.27 Our enormous power will be used not only to inhibit the power of others but also to disseminate throughout the world what the national security document calls ‘‘a single sustainable model for national success,’’ which it defines as ‘‘freedom, democracy, and free enterprise,’’ and the West Point address defines as ‘‘the single surviving model of human progress, based on non-negotiable demands.’’ In other words, all other nations had better 25 I have given a brief sketch of that prehistory in ‘‘Seventy-Five Years,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly (2002). 26 George W. Bush, ‘‘Remarks by the President at 2002 Graduation Exercise of the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York,’’ June 3, 2002, and ‘‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002,’’ both available at the http//www.whitehouse.gov website. 27 The American empire is not simply rhetorical, but quite material as well. Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), points out that the United States has over seven hundred acknowledged military bases overseas, and probably over one thousand including those that are not acknowledged. These bases are located in every part of the globe, are manned by a half million military personnel and serviced by another half million civilians. The empire is ruled, outside the bases themselves, through client states, a kind of empire that predates the nineteenth-century European obsession with annexation. Because American rule is indirect we can deny we have an empire because ‘‘we have no territorial ambitions,’’ that is, other than total global hegemony.

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look like the United States pretty soon, or else. That is what it means to be a liberal empire. Bush’s position is not unprecedented. He himself in his West Point address quotes General George C. Marshall as telling the West Point class of 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor: ‘‘We’re determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle, our flag will be recognized throughout the world as the symbol of freedom on the one hand, and of overwhelming power on the other.’’ But Rhodes points to a still earlier moment when he writes, ‘‘This is Wilsonianism with a vengeance.’’ 28 Bush is determined to make the world safe for (American-style) democracy far more forcefully than Woodrow Wilson ever envisioned.29 There is, of course a deep inner contradiction in the agenda of liberal imperialism, which it is Rhodes’s main concern to point out: liberal democracy by definition is something people must choose; to attempt to enforce it by military violence undermines its very premise. That is one of several lessons we should be learning in our current occupation of Iraq. But for the moment I am trying to understand the cultural meaning of American liberal imperialism more than its policy consequences. A significant element in the Bush doctrine is his insistence, as at West Point, on ‘‘moral clarity.’’ What moral clarity involves is clarity about right and wrong but above all about good and evil, and, make no mistake, our enemies are evil. Americans who have grown up with comic books know what this kind of moral clarity is all about. There is the superhero that stands for ‘‘truth, justice, and the American way,’’ and there is the evil genius who plans to destroy the city, the country, or the world.30 In this scenario, in the Iraq war Bush was the superhero (‘‘Mission accomplished’’) and Saddam Hussein was the evil villain, so that, apparently, the capture of Saddam (‘‘We got him’’) to many Americans meant that the whole thing was over and our troops could come home. But pitting the liberal empire against evil has much deeper cultural-religious roots than a mano-a-mano contest between a good Bush and an evil Saddam. In America we live in the midst of a culture almost invisible to the educated elite, but very visible to perhaps a third or more of the American 28 Rhodes, ‘‘Imperial Logic,’’ 133. 29 While it is important to note that President Bush frequently invokes the central American symbol of democracy, it is quite another question whether his actions at home or abroad actually exemplify that ideal. 30 John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, Myth of the American Superhero (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002). See also their Captain America and the Crusade against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003), an earlier version of which was published in 1973.

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population: the culture of conservative evangelical Christianity. Millennialism has been an element in Christianity from the beginning, though its fortunes have waxed and waned over the centuries. Millennialism was a prominent feature of early Protestantism and in America has never slipped far below the surface. It is very much alive today. In 2003 the eleventh novel in the ‘‘Left Behind’’ series, Armageddon, was published.31 In eight years, this series has sold fifty-five million copies. It is, as the title of the eleventh book in the series indicates, concerned with the end-times. I cannot spell out in detail this particular version of millennialism, with its extraordinary resonance in today’s America, though most readers of this book will have a sense of it. All I need do is point out that the end-times with which the series is concerned involve the final battle between good and evil, Christ and anti-Christ, Christ and Satan. It is in this context that I think we have to understand the constant use of the words ‘‘evil’’ and ‘‘evildoer’’ in Mr. Bush’s rhetoric since 9/11. The most breathtaking reference to evil appeared first in Bush’s remarks at the National Cathedral on September 14, 2001 (right after 9/11), when he said it is our responsibility to history to ‘‘rid the world of evil,’’ a pledge reiterated in the national security strategy document a year later. Mr. Bush has frequently referred to himself as a born-again Christian, but what version of Christianity would envision that human beings can ‘‘rid the world of evil’’? For example, it is hard to imagine a Catholic making such a claim. But in the present atmosphere of conservative evangelical Christianity, such a claim makes sense if it is put in the context of the end-times. In that context it is not Bush as mere human being who will rid the world of evil, but Bush as one chosen by God who will undertake that task.We have heard much of Bush’s sense that he was called by God to the presidency, such as the ‘‘defining moment’’ before the 2000 election, described in his campaign autobiography, when he heard a sermon about Moses being called by God to lead his people out of Egypt, from which he concluded that God had called him to be president of the United States. And as with Moses, it is not only the leader who is chosen but the people he leads. In his 2003 state of the union address he spoke of ‘‘our calling, as a blessed country, to make the world better.’’ 32 31 Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages (Carol Stream, Ill.: Tyndale House, 2003). See Joan Didion’s review, ‘‘Mr. Bush & the Divine,’’ New York Review of Books 50, no. 17 (November 6, 2003): 81–86. 32 See the useful discussion of ‘‘Bush’s Religious Language’’ by Juan Stam in

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So here we are again, in spite of our extraordinarily ambiguous history, as God’s chosen people, called to rid the world of evil in the end-times. One could speak of a new Constantinianism, for America is the center of a world empire and its leader is God’s choice. If that is the world in which we in America currently live, what does it mean to let the world be the world? Even more to the point, how in this situation can the church be the church? Do most American Christians look with horror on the assumption that our nation and our leader are divinely ordained? Some do, but there is reason to think that most are in perfect agreement with these extraordinary claims. A recent survey found that, though most Americans disavow the word ‘‘empire,’’ they do affirm what the author, Carl Bowman, calls ‘‘American Eminence.’’ His American Eminence Index is based on the level of agreement with the following propositions: Without America’s leadership, the world would rapidly decline. America is a force for good in the world. Americans must lead the world into the 21st century. The U.S. should remain the world’s dominant military power. America’s culture is superior to most other cultures. The world would be better off if more nations embraced American values. America should pursue its own agenda even if the United Nations opposes it.33

And where is the church with respect to this index? Persons for whom ‘‘religion is very important’’ have ‘‘much higher views of American eminence’’ than others. But among religious persons there are significant differences: Protestants, in general, have a more eminent view of America’s global role than Catholics, and Christians have a stronger view than non-Christians or secular Americans. When the Protestant camp is divided into evangelicals and nonevangelicals, the Americanist views of the former stand out. Indeed, preliminary findings suggest that evangelicalism is the single largest predictor of a strong view of American eminence. . . . [E]vangelicals are much more inclined to believe that the world would be better if people of other nations could simply be more like us.34 the December 22, 2003, issue of The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/doc/ 20031222/stam). 33 Carl F. Bowman, ‘‘Survey Report: The Evidence for Empire,’’ Hedgehog Review 5, no. 1 (Spring 2003), 79. 34 Bowman, ‘‘Survey Report,’’ 80.

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I don’t want to exonerate the liberal Protestant theologians from Hauerwas’s charges that they took the church for granted and often in effect abandoned it in an effort to improve the nation. But the fact that they did consciously what conservative Protestants were doing unconsciously, gave them the possibility of critical distance and reappraisal. It would be hard to imagine Reinhold Niebuhr or his brother embracing the call for America to rid the world of evil, nor is it their successors who are most vociferously doing so, though some of the intellectually sophisticated defenders of the ‘‘war on terrorism’’ as a just war come very close. And Catholic voices have not been entirely absent in praise of the righteous empire and its global mission. But I think it undeniable that it is bedrock popular evangelical Christianity that has most uncritically embraced the new Constantinianism. And if that is the church, then what does it mean to let the church be the church in today’s America? That we live in a society that recapitulates the archaic fusion of religion and state in a way unique among modern nations (Japan excepted) is a challenge to all of us both as Christians and as Americans. It is not new. I think I first experienced it viscerally when John Kennedy was assassinated and the nation experienced three days of utter shock and horror. I thought at the time, ‘‘the king is dead; this is not a secular response,’’ even though I participated in it. I think I would probably be in agreement with Stanley if he said, ‘‘Now more than ever we need the politics of Jesus; specifically some kind of linkage between the Mennonite and the Catholic traditions.’’ The problem is how do we instantiate that today in a society that seems once again to confuse God and king.

Part III UNIVERSITY AND SOCIETY

Scholars and teachers owe loyalty to the institutions that make their work possible and to the larger society that makes those institutions possible. The chapters collected in this section reflect on problems of academic life today in relation to problems in the larger society. Some of the issues have been around for a long time and have to do with the meaning of education under conditions of modernity; other issues arise from recent developments in the larger society, particularly the subjection of the university, along with all spheres of life, to increasingly intense economic rationalization. All these chapters, but particularly chapters 18, ‘‘The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry,’’ and 21, ‘‘The True Scholar,’’ challenge the modern separation of fact and value and seek to retrieve some older ways of thinking in which the two are seen as overlapping. Both these chapters start from the observation that in reality scholarship and teaching are value-laden, even when carried out by proponents of value neutrality. But if our theory tells us that what seems to be unavoidable is, in fact, a mistake, then perhaps there is something wrong with the theory. Every serious scholar and teacher has to deal with this issue. What is offered here are not solutions, but help along the way in thinking about the problem. In arguing that theoretical reason and practical reason can never be entirely separated, the chapters in this section draw upon insights worked out in part I of this volume in the essays on Weber, Durkheim, and Rousseau as well as in the introduction to Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society (1973) and in ‘‘Social Science as Public Philosophy,’’ the appendix to Habits of the Heart.1 The idea that all social institutions are efforts, imperfect at best, to embody moral values and necessarily become moral dramas about how those values are to be put in practice is spelled out in ‘‘Institutions in Sociology and Public Philosophy,’’ the appendix to The Good 1 In Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart (1985), 297–307. The appendix was drafted by Bellah.

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Society, and applied to the university in chapter 5, ‘‘Education: Technical and Moral,’’ of that book.2 Surely one reason for the insistence on the clear distinction between fact and value, and the definition of what we do in the university as purely cognitive, is a defensive move. If our only task is to provide knowledge, but no evaluation of it, then we can perhaps more easily defend ourselves from those who would challenge the values we do in fact teach and attempt to replace them with values that are more acceptable to influential sectors of society. But if the university is not simply a value-free knowledge factory, then we should seek better ways of defending ourselves. Higher education is essential in technologically advanced society, but the university as we know it is not the only way technical education could be provided. The strong continuities between traditional and modern universities raise the question of why the society should pay for such expensive luxuries. The humanities, for example, the area where the continuity with tradition, however much contested today, is the strongest, could be seen as expendable on a sheer cost-benefit basis. The effort to show that the humanities actually help make better technicians is pretty thin. A viable defense of the humanities, and of the natural and social sciences as part of a humanistic education, must be on the ground that they are intrinsic goods, since their value lies in the kinds of human life and awareness they make possible, however difficult it may be to make that case under current conditions. Chapters 19, ‘‘Class Wars and Culture Wars in the University Today,’’ and 20, ‘‘Freedom, Coercion, and Authority,’’ attempt to deal with some of the pressures, internal and external, facing higher education today, and with the reasons why a humanistic education, in which ethical concern is as central as cognitive concern, is still a good that society ought to treasure. Chapter 22, ‘‘Education for Justice and the Common Good,’’ originally delivered in the context of Catholic higher education, argues that the Jesuit mission of education for justice is a defensible goal in higher education generally, though how it would be phrased in public universities is indeed a challenge. Nonetheless, justice is an essential virtue in a free society; education for justice is hardly a sectarian idea in a democracy. It may be 2 In Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton, The Good Society (1991), 287–306, 145–178. The appendix and chapter 5 were drafted by Bellah.

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easier to talk about it in private, particularly religious, institutions, but it is not easy to practice it in any modern university. This final chapter in the section goes farthest in suggesting some of the ways higher education can be part of the ethical formation of students, and, indeed, of faculty as well.

18 The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry

My argument is simple. In classical times social inquiry concerned itself with the effort to discern the best society. Modern social thought since Machiavelli and Hobbes has sought to understand the conditions for a good society, one that was understood to be independent, strong, expansive, and/or reasonably fair to its citizens. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century social science claimed at times to be a purely theoretical enterprise having no concern with either best or good societies. The great exemplars, however, have all been powerfully guided by ethical aims—Tocqueville and Marx obviously, but Durkheim and even Weber, as I will show. Even when ethical aims are eschewed and there is the conscious intention to construct an ‘‘explanatory science,’’ as in the case of some contemporary sociologists, normative commitments are clearly present. If social inquiry is, as Aristotle said, a practical science, one indelibly linked to ethical reflection, then we might even use the term ‘‘moral sciences’’ interchangeably with ‘‘social sciences.’’ In support of this position, let us first look briefly at the natural sciences, which have served as models for the social sciences, before considering the history of the ethical direction that has always guided social inquiry. Physics, the archetypal case of a modern natural science, has served as a model both for philosophers of science and for sociologists; theoretical structures, paradigms in the Kuhnian sense, are well established, and well-conducted experiments can render determinate answers to theoretical questions. Yet it was in the physical sciences that absolute objectivity was first brought into question. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle suggested that the observer is never entirely outside the system observed and will have a certain effect on it. In physics, however, things are tidy enough that the effects of the observer can themselves be calculated. The observer and the observed can be viewed mathematically as parts of a single system whose properties are understandable, and thus our knowledge of physical nature is not seriously undermined. [First published in Norma Haan, Robert N. Bellah, Paul Rabinow, and William Sullivan, eds., Social Science as Moral Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 360–381. Used by permission.]

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In biology things are not so neat. The observer is still not identical with the observed, but observer contamination can reach much less readily calculable levels than in physics. Research findings can even be credited or discounted in terms of informal gossip about the habits and personal character of the investigator, and experiments frequently come out differently when conducted in different laboratories. As a result, what biologists tend to trust is not so much the result of experimental predictions as the ability to take apart some bit of living matter and put it back together again. If one can analyze and synthesize something, then one may fairly well claim to understand it. That is both more and less than what physicists can usually do. What happens when we take the same framework that we have just applied to physics and biology and use it to look at the social sciences? Actually, Hobbes used the model I have just described for biology as the basis for his claim for creating a social science. If we can take apart and put back together social things, said Hobbes, then it is pretty certain that we can understand them. And can’t we do that with social things such as laws, relationships, and groups? Perhaps we can; but if so, the uncertainty principle reaches unmanageable proportions. We do not know whether what we have created, and so ‘‘understood,’’ is the result of any natural necessity or the product of our own moral imagination. We cannot be sure whether we have really observed something or persuaded, cajoled, or forced it into existence. That being the case, perhaps it would be best to admit that in the social sciences inquiry always has an ethical aim. Then we can be conscious of that aim and discipline our cognitive faculties to the practical task at hand. This notion of social science as practical reason is radically different from the conception of a theoretical social science that is then ‘‘applied.’’ In the notion of applied or policy science, the ends of action are taken from outside the intellectual enterprise, for example, from policy makers or public opinion or consumer choice. The purpose of social science then is simply to provide the most effective means to predetermined ends. Social science as practical reason must, on the contrary, make ends as well as means the objects of rational reflection. Platonic social science is more concerned with the ends than the means of action. The Republic opens with a discussion of justice and considers whether justice is the rule of the stronger or the willingness to suffer rather than commit evil; unless some clarity is gained about that issue, all else is secondary. Plato’s central device for social reflection is the linkage be-

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tween types of personal character and types of societies. What kind of society would it be, he asks implicitly throughout the Republic, in which a good person is also a good citizen? To that end Plato performs a series of what Weber would have called ‘‘thought experiments,’’ in which he considers social arrangements that on the face of them might be thought bizarre or even comical, to see what light they might shed on his problem. The suggestions about the equality of women, the abolition of the family and private property, and the philosopher-king are all made with this end in view. Analysis of contemporary society goes hand in hand with a utopian critique. It would be hard to think of a text that tells us more about the mediations between personal ethical development and forms of social life.What we have is not a book of ‘‘philosophy,’’ in the modern academic sense, but a profound analysis of social life that simultaneously illuminates as perhaps no other work does the ethical ends of human action. Aristotle was more empirical than Plato. He does not indulge in Platonic thought experiments but gives us a much fuller record of what the variety of Greek social arrangements was actually like. Yet we know that his Ethics and Politics were written as a single unified treatise. Since it was clear to Aristotle that the end of society (polis) is the good life, it was essential that he undertake an analysis of virtue in the Ethics in order to specify what the good life is before turning to the actual variety of social arrangements in the Politics. It is, of course, in its analysis of virtue that the Ethics provides the principles of the typology of regimes in the Politics. Societies can be classified in terms of the ways they do indeed help or hinder the realization of the good life. With Machiavelli we have entered a different world. He is quick to inform us that, unlike the ancient philosophers, he is not interested in telling us how the world should be but how it actually is. Yet his Prince and Discourses, for all their apparent immoralism, have passionate ethical ends in view. The Prince is not just a set of instructions to a new ruler about how to maintain and extend his power, though it is that also. The new prince that Machiavelli envisages exists for the purpose of unifying Italy and guaranteeing its independence from its powerful neighbors. The Discourses was written as a guidebook for free republics and their statesmen about how to maintain, expand, and revive their institutions in order to secure free citizenship within and independence or imperial rule without. It is true that there is precious little ethical reflection in Machiavelli. He does not bring ethical aims—even the good he so obviously desires— within the sphere of rational consideration. He does develop an implicit

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anthropology that shows the human desire for strength, freedom, and independence to be ‘‘natural.’’ It is that fundamental intentionality that he refers to as ‘‘virtue’’ (virtu), which for him is more a naturalistic motive than an ethical norm. That virtue in this sense is ‘‘natural’’ is suggested by the fact that Machiavelli finds it most often among ‘‘uncorrupted’’ peoples. But what is natural is not universal precisely because there are conditions that can corrupt men and divert them from their natural course. Of course, corruption too is ‘‘natural,’’ which adds another level of complexity to Machiavelli’s thought. But whatever may be the implications of Machiavelli’s fundamental anthropology, which had major consequences for all subsequent modern social thought, his work is clearly directed toward certain commonly shared social norms that provide the moral passion for the whole intellectual enterprise. Of course, his work is not an ethical injunction without cognitive analysis; it is the moral passion that opens the space for the cognitive analysis—the two are inseparable. Therefore, Machiavelli’s work is at the same time a profound analysis of the nature of certain kinds of societies (in fact, more can be learned about the current problems of the American republic from his Discourses than from any contemporary work of American political science), a reflection (largely implicit) about the ends of man, and an effort at persuasion that the ends he desires are admirable and attainable (in that highest and truest sense, it is a work of rhetoric). However different its fundamental presuppositions, in its combination of the analytic, the ethical, and the rhetorical, Machiavelli resembles Plato and Aristotle. Hobbes is a particularly good example for our purposes. More explicitly than Machiavelli, he rejects the classical model of practical reason. There is no point in talking about the good society because there is no point in talking about the good: there is no such thing. ‘‘Good’’ is only a word that people use to indicate what they desire. There are as many ‘‘goods’’ as there are desires. Hobbes’s empiricism, unlike Machiavelli’s, uses the newly prestigious model of natural science as an underpinning. Thus, Leviathan is a scientific work that replaces all previous metaphysical speculations on social and political things. Yet the way Hobbes goes about setting up the basic terms of his science through the thought experiment of the state of nature is profoundly revealing. If the truth of the human condition in the state of nature is that man is fundamentally individual, that tells us not only something about what is socially possible but about what is socially desirable. ‘‘So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind,

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a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death,’’ says Hobbes. ‘‘And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.’’ 1 With such a creature it becomes the role of the state to assure a basic security so that the ‘‘desire of Power after power’’ can be restrained and the bloody consequences of that quest for power avoided. Hobbes’s moral aim, then, is not the good, or even a good, so much as survival itself, the essential precondition for the pursuit of the multitude of private goods. Thus, it is clear that Hobbes’s powerful and in some respects unsurpassed social psychology (foreshadowed by Augustine, elaborated by Freud) had a profound moral implication and purpose. And of course Leviathan is a masterpiece of rhetoric—it seeks to persuade its readers to act for social peace. Alexis de Tocqueville, even compared with his great ancient and early modern predecessors on whom we have already touched, is a reticent writer. He hints that he is founding a new political science (‘‘A new political science is needed for a world itself quite new’’),2 but he never quite spells it out. His idea of virtue is largely modern but at moments has classical overtones. Self-interest is obviously a profound reference point for his fundamental anthropology, yet Tocqueville believes that the passion for liberty, which is also indelibly human, is not just an expression of selfinterest but can at moments override it. ‘‘In fact, those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it long. . . . The man who asks of freedom other than itself is born to be a slave.’’ 3 What is explicit is the overriding moral purpose of his work. Providence ensures that equality will steadily advance as the dominant principle of social organization; it is up to us whether that equality will be despotic or free. Democracy in America is one long argument for the possibility and desirability of freedom, but it is also an extraordinarily ambitious example 1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1968), pt. 1, chap. 2, p. 161. 2 Alexis de Tocqueville, introduction to Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1969), 1:12. 3 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1955), pt. 3, chap. 3, p. 168.

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of what our contemporaries would call empirical social inquiry. Though some of his research can be faulted, what Tocqueville achieved remains quite staggering to all future investigators. The book is unrivaled as an analysis of a total society, culture, and modal personality and of how they fit together. But it is always ethical and political in its intent and a superb example of rhetoric. One might dismiss those I have discussed so far as ‘‘literary,’’ ‘‘humanistic,’’ or ‘‘philosophical’’ precursors of the genuine social science, with its purely cognitive intent, which has emerged in the last century or so. That is peculiarly difficult to do in the case of Tocqueville (which is why I include him), because he is increasingly recognized as a master of modern social analysis in spite of his antique moralizing. I would like to show now that the ambiguities about the relation between the cognitive and the ethical aspects of social inquiry that are already present in early modern social thought continue in the work of those who have in fact defined modern social science. Marx is an interesting example but almost too easy, the tension as well as the unity between moral passion and analytic rigor being altogether clear. I would like to concentrate on the examples of Emile Durkheim, the very model of a positivist social scientist, and Max Weber, who explicitly eschewed value judgments in social investigation. At first glance, Durkheim is an unpromising example for my argument. Deliberately rejecting the graceful literary tradition of humane moralizing about society so popular in France, he chose for his hero (disregarding Tocqueville quite deliberately) one of the worst stylists in the history of France, Auguste Comte. Though Durkheim never actually did much with the almost unreadable writings of the great positivist and inventor of the word ‘‘sociology,’’ he used him to legitimate his own enterprise as indubitably scientific. Yet for Durkheim (as for Marx), ‘‘science’’ keeps oscillating between being a model of method and a symbol, a rhetorical device for moral persuasion. It is not so much that Durkheim only pretended to be scientific as that he saw science itself as one element in a set of moral ideals which he thought it possible to realize in the Third Republic.4 It is certainly not so that Durkheim first created scientific sociology and then placed it at the service of the Third Republic. The very concept that was the cornerstone of his sociology from the beginning had profound moral and political implications that determined the practical meaning of 4 I have argued the case at length in the introduction to Bellah, ed., Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society (1973).

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his science. That concept is, of course, ‘‘society’’ itself. By deliberately rejecting the entire tradition of early modern social thought that derived society from the individual (through some version of the social contract) and by making society prior to the individual, Durkheim returned, without admitting it, to the Aristotelian definition of man as a political (social) animal. Since Durkheim did not view society as a contrivance whereby individuals fulfilled their random desires, he could raise questions again in a new way about the good society and about the importance of shared moral beliefs. Durkheim’s practical activities, which were considerable, were not extraneous to his scientific enterprise but flowed directly from it. It was insight that he had to offer, insight that was simultaneously cognitive and moral, in part because it was the cognition of a fundamental morality. As scholars, Durkheim said, ‘‘above all, we must be advisers, educators. It is our function to help our contemporaries know themselves in their ideas and in their feelings, far more than to govern them.’’ 5 As a student of Rousseau, Durkheim knew that who educates a people in a sense governs it. In any case, in holding up the mirror to his society, Durkheim did not hesitate to enter the struggle, to argue and persuade, to attempt to show what the true patrimony of modern France was. In his essay ‘‘Individualism and the Intellectuals,’’ he argues that an ethical individualism is the true collective representation of modern society. It is that end toward which modern society tends and which defines its good. He rejects too negative a definition of that individualism that would see it defined exclusively in terms of freedom. Thus, Durkheim stunningly transcends the whole tradition of modern liberalism: Now political freedom is a means, not an end; its worth lies in the manner in which it is used. If it does not serve some end which goes beyond itself, it is not simply useless; it becomes dangerous. It is a battle weapon; if those who wield it do not know how to use it in fruitful struggles, they soon end by turning it against themselves. . . . Thus we cannot limit ourselves to this negative ideal. We must go beyond the results achieved, if only to preserve them. If we do not finally learn to put to work the means of action we have in our hands, they will inevitably lose their worth. Let us therefore make use of our liberties to seek out what we must do and to do

5 Emile Durkheim, ‘‘The Intellectual Elite and Democracy,’’ in Bellah, Emile Durkheim, 59. Emphasis in original.

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it, to smooth the functioning of the social machine, still so harsh on individuals, to place within their reach all possible means of developing their abilities without hindrance, to work finally to make a reality of the famous precept: to each according to his labor! 6

For all the vigor with which he entered the fray, there remains something ambiguous about how Durkheim derived his ethical standards and political goals. Though differing profoundly in the content of his ideas from his early modern predecessors, he was tempted to follow their example in thinking about society ‘‘scientifically’’ by deriving the ethical ends of action from empirical investigation. This was in part a rhetorical device. It was an effective argument to turn the tables on the conservatives in the Dreyfus affair and to demonstrate that it is defending the rights of individuals that is really true to the French tradition. But it was more than that. Durkheim never wished to derive norms from existing society in a conformist way. He admired the great nonconformists who died for their unpopular views, such as Socrates and Jesus, but he tended to explain them as those who discerned better than others what the future course of society would be. They reflected, thus, not the present but the future social consensus. Durkheim was loath to say that they in part created that future consensus; that would have broken the façade of science too completely and revealed his enterprise as indeed an example of practical reason—which, as a matter of fact, in spite of his final hesitation, I believe it was. I will return to the question of how we do derive these norms after discussing the work of Max Weber. Weber would seem to be, if anything, an even more unpromising example than Durkheim for the argument that social inquiry is always intrinsically linked to ethical aims. No one has ever argued more eloquently that the relation between scientifically discoverable means and ethical ends is extrinsic and that science has nothing whatever to say about ends. In his essay ‘‘Science as a Vocation’’ (published in 1919), Weber writes: If you take such and such a stand, then, according to scientific experience, you have to use such and such a means in order to carry out your conviction practically. Now, these means are perhaps such that you believe you must reject them. Then you simply must choose between the end and the inevitable means. Does the end ‘‘justify’’ the means? Or does it not? The teacher can confront you with

6 Emile Durkheim, ‘‘Individualism and the Intellectuals,’’ in Bellah, Emile Durkheim, 55–56.

The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry 389 the necessity of choice. He cannot do more, so long as he wishes to remain a teacher and not to become a demagogue.7

This is Weber’s decisionism: with respect to the ends of action, science has nothing to say; we must simply find our own demon and obey it.8 Those who would claim anything more are excoriated: Science today is a ‘‘vocation’’ organized in special disciplines in the service of self-clarification and knowledge of interrelated facts. It is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of the contemplation of sages and philosophers about the meaning of the universe. This, to be sure, is the inescapable condition of our historical situation.We cannot evade it so long as we remain true to ourselves. And if Tolstoi’s question recurs to you: as science does not, who is to answer the question: ‘‘What shall we do, and, how shall we arrange our lives?’’ or, in the words used here tonight: ‘‘Which of the warring gods should we serve? Or should we serve perhaps an entirely different god, and who is he?’’ then one can say that only a prophet or a savior can give the answers. If there is no such man, or if his message is no longer believed in, then you will certainly not compel him to appear on this earth by having thousands of professors, as privileged hirelings of the state, attempt as petty prophets in their lecture-rooms to take over his role.9

But after all, what is Weber? By not answering, he answers. The ominous image of Isaiah’s watchman hovers over the end of the essay, and certainly meeting the ‘‘demands of the day’’ and obeying our demon is a kind of answer. Still, it is an extrinsic answer. If we turn to Weber’s ‘‘Politics as a Vocation’’(published in 1919), the issue becomes somewhat clearer. At the very beginning of this essay, Weber makes what appears to be almost a definitional aside that has enormous implications for his whole sociological project and its ethical implications: ‘‘But what is a ‘political’ association from the sociological point of view? What is a ‘state’? Sociologically, the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends. . . . Ultimately, one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely the use of physical 7 H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 151. 8 Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 156. 9 Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 152–153.

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Aristotle and following Hobbes. For Aristotle, the end of the state is the good life for the citizens; for Hobbes, the state monopolizes violence in order that anyone can survive. In making his choice, Weber is not merely stating a scientific truth; he is opting for a whole view of humanity, of person and society in interrelation. And making the choice he does also has profound intrinsic ethical implications. Indeed, it already determines the outcome of the central ethical conflict of the essay, that between the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of ultimate ends. Since the ethics of responsibility involves, above all, responsibility for the use of force, it is sociologically realistic. Since the ethics of ultimate ends, illustrated most often by Weber as the ethics of acosmic brotherly love, rejects the use of force, it is sociologically unrealistic. Weber’s sociology, in this instance, is clearly not neutral between these two options, however torn Weber was personally. Actually,Weber’s polytheism, his conflict between the ‘‘warring gods,’’ is less radical than it first appears. However numerous the spheres (‘‘Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions’’ 11 contains perhaps the most complete description), there are two options that seem especially to pull Weber over and over again, and they are precisely those contrasted in ‘‘Politics as a Vocation.’’ One is political power and the other is salvation religion. It is, I believe, the conflict between these spheres that determines the whole structure of Weber’s lifework and its unresolved tensions, including the tensions between science and ethics. Before turning to that point, I want to remark on one brief moment when the two spheres came together because Weber seemed to know something that he could not know from the perspective of his own fundamental presuppositions. Suddenly, late in ‘‘Politics as a Vocation,’’ he tells us that he knows what a mature man is. One is tempted to say, ‘‘If you know what a mature man is, then surely you know what a good society is, and that would imply a very different sociology.’’ Let us listen to the words in which the warring spheres have been temporarily overcome and Weber sounds like Aristotle, who also used the mature man (spoudaios)12 as a measure in ethical reflection: However, it is immensely moving when a mature man—no matter whether old or young in years—is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of his con-

10 Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 77–78. 11 Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 323–359. 12 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, III3a29–35.

The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry 391 duct and really feels such responsibility with heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere he reaches the point where he says: ‘‘Here I stand; I can do no other.’’ That is genuinely human and moving. And every one of us who is not spiritually dead must realize the possibility of finding himself at some time in that position. In so far as this is true, an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements, which only in unison constitute a genuine man—a man who can have the ‘‘calling for politics.’’ 13

But aside from this passage it is much more usual for Weber to emphasize the conflict than the reconciliation. Power, particularly the rationalized power of the modern state, and religion, particularly the ethical prophecy of brotherly love, seem to be on a total collision course. There can be no Buddha, Jesus, or Saint Francis, says Weber, in the streets of the modern City.14 Because of the fundamental presuppositions of his sociology, power must be more important than brotherly love. Yet Weber’s soul rebels against that conclusion. Some of his last essays include an extraordinary nostalgic idealization of acosmic mysticism. The conflict seems to determine the main outlines of his lifework. For all his interest in economics,Weber produced primarily a sociology of politics and a sociology of religion. For all his yearnings for religion, his theoretical commitments told him that it is power that counts. That presupposition determined even his sociology of religion. For it is Calvinism, not Franciscan or Tolstoyan mysticism, that was his focus of attention, and Calvinism is important because of the contribution it made to rationalization, which is ultimately the rationalization of power. In ‘‘Religious Rejections of the World’’ (published in 1915), Weber shows his ambivalence by speaking of Calvinism as succumbing to ‘‘the world dominion of unbrotherliness’’ 15 and saying its spiritual elitism makes it no longer a genuine religion of salvation. It is thus only a religion that has ceased to be genuinely and fully religious that can have a powerful impact on the world. This fundamental ambivalence runs through all his work, as Jeffrey Alexander makes clear.16 In his major treatises on the non-Western religions, Weber gives an analysis of social and economic structures and of political and class interests that is complete in itself and sufficient to ex13 Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 127. Emphasis in original. 14 Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 357. 15 Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 357. 16 Jeffrey Alexander, Theoretical Logic in Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), vol. 3.

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plain capitalism’s failure to appear. The analysis of religion that follows has the same conclusion but is not really integrated with this more structural analysis. In ‘‘The Social Psychology of the World Religions’’ and elsewhere,Weber goes to great lengths to insist on the independent causal significance of religion and of ideas in general. Ideas are the ‘‘switchmen’’ of history.17 And yet in practice this position is inconsistently carried through. The famous Protestant Ethic argument about the importance of religion in the emergence of modern rational capitalism comes into question when seen from the point of view of the massive effort in Economy and Society 18 to find many sources of the unique Western pattern of rationalization. What I am suggesting is that the irresolution in Weber’s work is in part a reflection of an irresolution in Weber’s life. He made intellectual commitments that he clearly found attractive (his nationalism was, though not blind, intense) but that also had ethical implications that he found repugnant. The direction that he saw the development of the power state taking, and more generally the consequences of the rationalization of modern life, did not give him any comfort. ‘‘Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness.’’ 19 The pathos of some of Weber’s later writings cannot be explained away by the narrow problems of German society, though specifically German problems undoubtedly added to his gloom. I am not trying to say that Weber’s pessimism was unjustified—perhaps it was not—but only that the lack of resolution of intellectual and ethical issues that led to his ‘‘polytheism’’ undoubtedly increased its intensity. There is a consistency and wholeness, both as a person and in his conception of his social role, about Durkheim that puts him in sharp contrast with Weber and that is related to the more unified architecture of Durkheim’s thought (though Durkheim too was not without his dark forebodings). Yet to take some of Weber’s statements about the disjunction between means and ends literally and to believe that his sociology was a collection of neutral scientific truths that could be equally useful to policy makers of different persuasions would be a travesty of his accomplishment. Riven with inner tensions though it is,Weber’s corpus is a profound commentary on the human condition in the twentieth century. It is at once 17 Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 280. 18 Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 19 Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 128.

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intellectually and morally passionate and in the final essays extraordinarily intense rhetorically. I would like now to use Weber’s most famous typology for a purpose he did not intend, namely, to attempt an answer to the question I previously raised and deferred about the sources of the ethical aims that guide social inquiry. We can use the categories of traditional, charismatic, and rational for this end, particularly if we see that the categories are not exclusive but deeply interrelated. Tradition provides us with ethical aims in several important ways. Social inquiry is always responsive to some extent to the problems of the society where such inquiry arises. Thus, socially current notions about what is a good society, a satisfactory marriage, an able person, and so on, will always affect the investigator. A profound ethical crisis in society may impel the investigator to begin work in the first place, as with most of the thinkers we have discussed, and clarifying existing moral conflict may be one of his major motives.While taking moral definitions current in his society as a major reference point for his inquiry, the investigator will seldom do so uncritically, for he is the inheritor not only of the general social tradition but of the particular tradition of social inquiry itself. That tradition provides not only intellectual tools but, simultaneously, ethical interpretations of human action. In modern societies, both the general social tradition and the tradition of social thought are multiple, diverse, and partially in conflict. Though individuals will, through accidents of birth and education, feel closer to some strands of tradition than to others, there will always also be an element of choice. That is why, even in drawing on tradition for the sources of our ethical reflection, charisma (in a somewhat extended sense) and reason are always involved. Of course, charisma and reason are part of the substance of tradition itself. Traditions often form around individuals who embody and live out certain ethical intentions in a particularly vivid way. They make a certain ethical possibility real because of the sheer vitality of their example, not because of argument. Such, for our present purposes, we might call charismatic figures. Rational reflection too becomes part of tradition; not only reason as a value but the tools of rational thought have to be transmitted. But for the individual faced with an ethical choice, reason and charisma are present realities that are to some degree in tension with tradition. Tradition may be followed because it is familiar, because it belongs to oneself and one’s group. But the self-conscious individual is never wholly satisfied with that, but wants to know the reason for the tradition,

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wants to examine it critically. And such an individual also wants to experience it, not as an outer form but as an inner conviction that gives meaning to life. Such experience is more apt to come from committed practice than from argument alone. In actuality, all the elements are found together. No one of us is without tradition—indeed, a multiplicity of traditions. One finds oneself believing in and practicing several of them. One uses one tradition (for example, social inquiry) to criticize another (for example, the norms of society). One reflects on the logical coherence of and the empirical evidence for different traditional views. One experiences life as flowing from ethical commitments that one has made. In this process of reception, practice, and reflection it is quite arbitrary to decide what is cognitive and what normative, when we are being scientific and when ethical. Indeed, intellectual acuteness and ethical maturity in this area go hand in hand. Wisdom is the traditional word that includes both. If this way of putting it is right, then it is not surprising that ethical reflection is not extrinsic to the work of the most significant social thinkers. To disjoin social inquiry from ethical concerns would impoverish it cognitively. Without a reference point in traditions of ethical reflection, the very categories of social thought would be empty. The construction of an entirely new abstract vocabulary would render the enterprise opaque, as some critics have argued is the case with the work of Talcott Parsons. While an arid formalism does on occasion diminish the usefulness of Parsons’s work, even his more obscure vocabulary is usually easily traceable to sources in the tradition of modern social thought, and the ethical impetus of his work as a whole is reasonably clear.20 Nonetheless, in Parsons even more than in Durkheim and Weber, the powerful ethical aim of his intellectual enterprise remained mute relative to the often repeated claim that he was establishing a genuinely scientific sociology. While adding to that string of unfulfilled declarations, extending over so many generations, that scientific sociology is about to begin, Parsons’s work exemplifies a new element of professionalization that characterizes the middle and late twentieth century.21 It is science as profession (in an ironic development beyond Weber) that deprives much of Parsons’s 20 These issues are discussed in Bellah, ‘‘The World Is the World through Its Theorists (1979); and in Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘‘Sociology for Liberals,’’ New Republic, June 2, 1979, pp. 10–12. 21 On this point see Michel de Certeau, ‘‘History: Ethics, Science, and Fiction,’’ in Norma Haan, Robert N. Bellah, Paul Rabinow, and William Sullivan, eds., Social Science as Moral Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 125–152.

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work of the rhetorical power of his great predecessors and that comes close to depriving it as well of the ethical force that it genuinely contains. Yet even today we see the forlorn recurrence of proclamations about the establishment of a true social science. In some recent examples, while ideology is as difficult to banish as ever, ethical energy and intellectual vigor appear to be vanishing, not surprisingly, together. Randall Collins may serve as an example. In the preface to his Conflict Sociology, Collins informs us that his pursuit of sociology is not for its practical benefits or for ideological justifications but as ‘‘a coherent, powerful, and verified set of explanatory ideas.’’ He tells us that ‘‘there is a powerful science in the making.’’ But the beginning of the third paragraph of the preface gives the game away: This book focuses on conflict because I am attempting to be realistic, not because I happen to think conflict is good or bad. After reading this book, anyone who still judges explanatory concepts in terms of their value biases will not have grasped what it is about. Past theorists who have done most to remove our thinking from the murk of artificially imposed realities that populate our everyday worlds have found a guiding thread for explanation in the existence of plurality and conflict. Their lead is worth special emphasis right now, when there is so much potential for getting our science straight, and so many vestiges of utopian unreality burdening our habitual modes of analysis.22

Collins would have us believe that his decision to focus on conflict has no moral dimension, that it is purely cognitive, motivated only by the desire to escape ‘‘the murk of artificially imposed realities’’ and the ‘‘vestiges of utopian unreality.’’ By choosing to concentrate on plurality and conflict, however, Collins is hardly avoiding concepts that ‘‘populate our everyday worlds.’’ These are among the commoner coin of contemporary American ideology. The real polemical intent lies elsewhere—not in a critique of the everyday world, but in opposition to another strand in the tradition of social inquiry, namely, functionalism or systems theory. This becomes clear in Collins’s first chapter, which is entitled ‘‘Why Is Sociology Not a Science?’’ where, in a section on ideology, we come across the following stunning sentence: ‘‘Conflict theory is intrinsically more detached from value judgments than is systems theory.’’ 23 Max Weber is then invoked as an authority for the idea that detachment is good and as an example of an archetypal ‘‘conflict theorist.’’ 22 Randall Collins, Conflict Sociology (New York: Academic Press, 1975), ix–x. 23 Collins, Conflict Sociology, 21.

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We must keep in mind the purpose of Collins’s book. Its subtitle is ‘‘Toward an Explanatory Science,’’ and the last paragraph of the preface begins with a familiar claim: ‘‘Looking back, historians will see a great intellectual revolution in the twentieth century—the establishment of a true social science.’’ 24 What then are the first principles of this nonideological, valuefree explanatory social science? The first of the ‘‘general principles of conflict analysis’’ that applies to ‘‘any empirical area’’ is, ‘‘Think of people as animals maneuvering for advantage, susceptible to emotional appeals, but steering a self-interested course toward satisfactions and away from dissatisfactions.’’ 25 Principles two and three are rather prolix but have to do with the fact that people take advantage of inequalities in resources, but the fourth principle is quite clear: ‘‘Ideals and beliefs likewise are to be explained in terms of the interests which have the resources to make their viewpoint prevail.’’ 26 It would seem that the fundamental principles of this revolutionary twentieth-century explanatory science are identical with those in book 1 of Leviathan, published by Hobbes in 1651 (also with an announcement that social science had now begun), but what was indeed revolutionary in Hobbes has since become the common coin of AngloAmerican popular ideology. If Hobbes’s effort to create a dispassionate social science was founded on the passionate moral concern to discover a basis for social peace in a world at war, what can we say about Collins’s ethical concern, despite his denial of one? Or is Collins’s book the great exception, a purely scientific endeavor with no ethical aim at all? I have been able to discover only one paragraph on ethics in his book of nearly 550 pages: The field of ethics as well cannot but benefit from the development of a social science. This development, as I have demonstrated, cannot be carried out without a firm understanding of the distinction between value judgments and logical and descriptive statements. Ethics is always an area of the ultimately arbitrary, but concerns itself with drawing out the consequences from these choice points, or tracing courses of action back to them. With the aid of social science, ethics can move beyond its conventional middle-class Christian biases built into some notion of rationality, interest, or the concept of ‘‘good’’ itself, to a far more sophisticated view of the choices that confront us.27

24 Collins, Conflict Sociology, x. 25 Collins, Conflict Sociology, 60. 26 Collins, Conflict Sociology, 61. 27 Collins, Conflict Sociology, 547.

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At least we learn what Collins does not like: ‘‘conventional middle-class Christian biases.’’ But, after all, what is the purpose of this profusion of words, postulates, propositions, and causal principles that repeat in antiseptic fashion a fair bit of received sociology (with significant omissions, reworkings, and waterings down)? In the final paragraphs, as we might expect, Collins finally allows himself to express some direct moral purpose. Theoretical and explanatory developments in the social science, it seems to me, can have their greatest impact in making us aware of the plurality of realities, the multiplicity of interests, and the tricks used to impose one reality upon others. Here sociology may have a liberating effect. Illusions, after all, are primarily on the side of the oppressors. With new technological developments providing new resources for the ongoing conflict between man and man, this widespread sophistication could be of considerable importance. Despite much romantic hankering after the past, and its use as an ideal with which to flay the trends of the present, has been [sic] a long slow progress, at least in the world of the intellect. For all its ups and downs, its effects over the last few centuries have been increasingly libertarian. The social science of the future thus may have something to contribute to free our minds still further from illusions, and to make it possible for all people to share the gifts that have hitherto been reserved for the very aggressive and the very lucky.28

This optimistic conclusion is something of a non sequitur, for it follows immediately after the assertion that ‘‘stratification’’ will somehow survive technological advance and the ‘‘have-nots’’ will continue to be exploited. At least the ethical purpose of social science is finally clear. It is to enlighten us and liberate us from our illusions, the ‘‘murk of artificially imposed realities’’ and the ‘‘vestiges of utopian unreality.’’ Just possibly, though we cannot count on it, this mental liberation may have something to do with a better society. One could not accuse Collins of moral passion and certainly not of utopian dreaming. If by dressing up current ideological commonplaces, deprived of any fervor, as explanatory science Collins has at least given us a full-scale example of how not to proceed, what are the alternatives? It seems to me there is only one. In the social sciences we study the same kinds of beings that we are. Unlike the natural scientists, we are not ‘‘outside’’ what we 28 Collins, Conflict Sociology, 548–549. [My response to Collins here was published in 1983. More recently I have come to respect and admire his work, as can be seen in my references to him in this volume—in the introduction and chapter 6, ‘‘Durkheim and Ritual.’’ My view of his earlier work remains unchanged.]

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study and certainly not ‘‘above’’ it. To imagine that we are is to deprive those we study of their dignity by treating them as objects. It is also to imagine that we understand them better than they understand themselves because our heads are not filled with the muddled ideas, false consciousness, traditions, and superstitions (murk and vestiges) that theirs are. It is to imagine that we are enlightened and free of illusions. As a result, we are unable to see that we too have unexamined presuppositions, that we are ourselves involved in promises and commitments, our thoughts and feelings partly molded by symbols we have been given by tradition and do not consciously fully understand. In the social sciences we are not outside what we study and not above it. We can undertake our inquiry only by continuing our dialogue with those we study and relative to whom we are as much students as teachers. In all the sciences we are involved with what we study, and it is difficult to tell where what we study leaves off and we begin. But in the social sciences this involvement is inextricable. We are certainly fooling ourselves if we think we pass no judgments on those we study. For these reasons it is extremely unlikely that sociology can ever be a paradigmatic science in Kuhn’s sense. The choice of fundamental categories in the social sciences cannot be other than ethical as well as cognitive. What we say human beings fundamentally are has inevitable implications about what they ought to be.We have noted above in the case of Weber how the choice of a fundamental anthropology made some ethical options ‘‘realistic’’ and others not. Just because our categories reveal a fundamental stance toward the world, there is not apt to be the consensus that occurs in the natural sciences. Like philosophy and literary criticism, social science is much less cumulative or progressive than is natural science. What creates coherence and continuity in social science is not consensus around a theoretical paradigm but concern for practical problems in the world. Social science was itself the product of a particular kind of social crisis, the crisis of the transformation of traditional society into modern society. Part of this change was the transformation of traditional consciousness into critical consciousness, though that transformation is never completed but remains a permanent tension. Every one of the great theorists asked the questions, ‘‘Why is modern society so different from all other societies, and how can we understand its characteristics?’’ The question always contained the corollary, explicit or implicit, ‘‘What are we going to do about it?’’ If social science is a continuing reflection on the contradictions and paradoxes of modern society and the dilemmas for action that it

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creates then, in the Aristotelian sense of the word, it is practical science. That means, in the first place, that it is a reflection on what must be done. But if social science is to be practical in this classical sense of the word, it means something very different from technological application on the model of the natural sciences. It means, above all, the participation of the social scientist in the process of social self-understanding. No one has seen better than Edward Shils the implication of this point of view for the definition of social science. The self-understanding of a society is not likely ever to be a wholly consensual affair; it is far more likely to be an act performed by only a few persons in that society. But those few persons to interpret their society correctly must see themselves as parts of it and not as isolated observers who have no affinity with it. This does not mean that they must approve of all that goes on in their society or that they must avoid reference to conflicts, exploitation, manipulation, and coercion. It does mean that the sociologist who interprets his society is also interpreting it to itself and that he is at the same time interpreting himself as a part of it. The sociological theory here under discussion—both on the level of relatively concrete middle principles and on that of more abstract analysis—is a discipline fundamentally alien to technological application; it is not capable of becoming a technological science. . . . . . . The real deficiency of technological sociology, which would remain despite its scientific rigor, its moral naiveté, and its harmlessness (hitherto) is its failure to grasp that the true calling of sociology is to contribute to the selfunderstanding of society rather than its manipulated improvement.29

In The Last Half-Century, Morris Janowitz gives us a good example of social science as practical because of its contribution to social selfunderstanding.30 Janowitz takes as his central category ‘‘social control,’’ a rather ambiguous concept. He argues persuasively that the idea of social control in the sociological tradition has primarily to do with the selfcontrol of participating citizens and groups in a democratic republic rather than with the central control of bureaucratic administration. Political selfregulation in this sense is the key to the legitimacy and survival of demo29 Edward Shils, The Calling of Sociology: Essays on the Pursuit of Learning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 39, 76. 30 Morris Janowitz, The Last Half-Century: Societal Change and Politics in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

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cratic industrial societies. Thus, Janowitz speaks to his fellow citizens about the conditions for the very survival of citizenship. In his epilogue, he deals rather subtly with the role of the social scientist in this situation. He wishes to avoid turning social science into a direct resource for ideological slogans, on the one hand, or a policy science to be used by decision makers, on the other. He suggests, rather, an indirect, clarifying educational role, similar to the one I have described for Durkheim and close to Shils’s idea of social self-understanding. One need not agree with Janowitz in his choice of concepts or in his practical stance to see that he has seriously considered what kind of enterprise social science is. It is this kind of conscious, self-critical consideration that makes his book worth arguing with in a way that Collins’s Conflict Sociology is not. But a practical social science is not concerned only with the great problems that modern society presents to us. It is also concerned with the criteria by which one can judge whether an outcome is good or not. In asking, ‘‘What must we do?’’ one cannot take for granted the ends of action defined by any given group. One must inquire into the validity of the claims. One must ask, ‘‘What is a good society?’’ or perhaps even, ‘‘What is the best society?’’ This means keeping open the boundary that we now draw academically between social science on the one hand and philosophy on the other. A major social theorist at work today who keeps these doors open and asks the ultimate normative questions is Jürgen Habermas. In Knowledge and Human Interests 31 Habermas asks about the conditions for a good society today, and in his subsequent work he continues to refine the issue. Habermas ranges across many of the major resources of contemporary continental and Anglo-American philosophy and social science to shed light on these problems. Quite aside from his substantive achievements, he has succeeded through his intellectual seriousness and integrity in showing that the normative issue belongs at the head of our agenda, something social science for a long time has not wished to believe. Because good social science is always morally serious, we can transpose Weber’s saying that only a mature man can have the calling for politics into the statement that only a mature person can have the calling for sociology. Moral vacuity creates cognitively trivial work. The sterility of much sociological research is due to moral infantilism and not to the fact that ‘‘our science is still young.’’ In particular, reductionism as an explanatory device is due to moral timidity or cowardice or—this is why reductionism 31 Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971; German ed., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968).

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and determinism are so attractive to the young—plain moral confusion. That people are ‘‘animals maneuvering for advantage’’ or that ‘‘ideals and beliefs . . . are to be explained in terms of . . . interests’’ are assertions that are often enough true. But in the interesting and decisive cases, these reductionistic statements are false, and as generalizations they are worthless, if not pernicious—pernicious because to the degree that they are rhetorically persuasive, they act as self-fulfilling prophecies. They help to create the moral cretinism they describe. No mature person, in Weber’s terms, believes such things, and no viable social science can be built on them.32 Power and meaning always go together in human action, and we forget it at our peril. But that solves no moral dilemmas. Indeed, it only heightens the moral stakes. The morally profound person who understands that is rare, and that person’s works will be precious, no matter what the era. Perhaps that is another reason why social science is not cumulative and we still have much to learn from the ancients. To listen, to reflect, to criticize, to respond—these are the tasks of social inquiry today, as they always have been. They are not tasks that will yield to cleverness. No child prodigy by dint of a phenomenal iq has ever made much contribution to them. They require our full personhood. To accept these tasks is itself a form of moral discipline.

32 For similar reflections, see Shils, Calling of Sociology, 87–88.

19 Class Wars and Culture Wars in the University Today W H Y W E C A N ’ T D E F E N D O U R S E LV E S

It has become obvious for quite some time that the American university is under siege. Ours is not the only institution to be so beset, but, after decades of public favor, we are not used to taking a defensive posture. Further, it is not at all obvious that the academic profession is in any position to defend itself because of the growing divisions among us, divisions that are intensifying, both materially and intellectually, all the time. Contention in the university is normal, even desirable, but we have come close to losing the common ground that can be the only basis for self-defense. Let me turn to some objective facts that have begun to have serious consequences for us in the university. The disintegration of the postwar institutional order, spurred on by Thatcherism, Reaganism, and then by the end of the Cold War, has been going on for quite some time, but those who celebrate that disintegration as well as those who are alarmed by it appear only recently to have begun to describe it accurately. One way of putting it is to say that all the primary relationships in our society, those between employers and employees, between lawyers and clients, between doctors and patients, between universities and students are being stripped of any moral understanding other than that of market exchange. Business has no obligation to its employees, the communities where it operates, or the larger society. The same forces that are uprooting decades-long practices in industry are to be found at work in medicine, education, and even in the church and the family. To put it in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, we could say that the economic field is encroaching even more than ever on the autonomy of the other fields. For a thoroughly chilling description of the new America where ‘‘market forces’’ are to determine every aspect of our lives, read Newt Gingrich’s To Renew America, published in 1995, when he still had thoughts of running for president.1 Instead of medicine we have the health care industry; [First published in Academe 83, no. 4 (July–August 1997): 22–26. Used by permission.] 1 Newt Gingrich, To Renew America (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).

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instead of the university we have the education industry. These are not metaphors but the direct imposition of the logic of the economic field on the other fields. Gingrich argues that doctors, for example, should be seen not as authorities but as employees, and we should see ourselves not as patients but as customers, shopping for the best medical buy to be had. Similarly, professors have no right to tenure, since they too are merely employees, put there to supply customers with educational services, and again at the lowest possible cost. In an article entitled ‘‘Anger in the Academic Workplace’’ Judith Sturnick well describes the feelings that arise when those called to university teaching find things changing rapidly beneath their feet: The academic workplace as we knew it, and to which we committed our professional lives, is slipping away from us. The process of change has left us in the grip of grief, and anger is a particularly strong phase of that mourning. Restructuring, which was merely a threat four years ago, is now a reality. . . . Although our much-vaunted autonomy may have been as much fiction as fact, we no longer believe we have control over our own destiny. Public support for higher education is a tattered garment. Downsizing has left us with fewer people and more work to be done. The quality of our lives has been affected at every level. . . . The destruction of the mythos of community has cut a wide swath across our collective psyches.2

The university has never been a particularly egalitarian institution, but the inequalities we are experiencing today mirror what is going on in the larger society. Robert Reich describes the emerging three-class typology of our current socioeconomic life when he speaks of our three classes as an ‘‘overclass,’’ living in the safety of elite suburbs, an ‘‘underclass quarantined in surroundings that are unspeakably bleak, and often violent,’’ and a new ‘‘anxious class’’ trapped in ‘‘the frenzy of effort it takes to preserve their standing.’’ 3 The most striking feature of this new class system in the university is the appearance of a genuine underclass. We have sensed for quite some time that such a thing existed but the evidence now is overwhelming. Cary Nelson describes the plight of very large numbers of graduate students today. He begins by asking a riddle: ‘‘In three letters, what is the name of 2 Judith Sturnick, ‘‘Anger in the Academic Workplace,’’ Academic Workplace 7, no. 1 (Fall–Winter 1996): 5. 3 As reported in ‘‘Labor Chief Decries Middle-Class Squeeze,’’ San Francisco Chronicle, September 25, 1994, p. A2.

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a lengthy and expensive cultural enhancement program for term employees in the academy—employees, in other words, who have been hired for a fixed term and no longer? . . . The answer is the Ph.D.’’ 4 The crushing fact is that many, perhaps most, of these Ph.D.’s who staff our courses in any large university (Nelson says graduate students teach over two-thirds of the courses, about five hundred courses a year, in his English department at the University of Illinois) will never get a tenure-track job. Heavily exploited before receiving the degree, afterward they may spend some years as itinerant part-timers and eventually, after eight or ten or fifteen years, they will have to find a different line of employment, at what cost to their own self-esteem and the viability of their families we can only imagine. This growing body of temporary or term employees is our academic underclass. The overclass, of course, are the academic stars, the winners in the academic division of our winner-take-all society. These are professors whose salaries are not 225 times that of the average worker, as are the salaries of ceos, but are nonetheless several times those of beginning assistant professors and an even larger multiple of the stipends of graduate student teaching assistants. When they are holders of chairs they may have released time from teaching and lavish funds that pay, among other things, for travel and for research assistants, something of which I have some firsthand knowledge. I need not mention the even more extravagant salaries and perquisites that go to administrators in some of our public and private universities. The academic anxious class are those tenured or tenure-track professors who, as Judith Sturnick puts it, are already dreaming of retirement at the age of forty, whose idealistic commitment to the profession no longer makes sense, who are overburdened with increased teaching loads and unprepared students. Like other members of the anxious class, their salaries have barely kept up with inflation, and even tenure isn’t very comforting if their unit or even their institution seems threatened with economic inviability. At a place like Berkeley it is mainly the assistant professors who make up the anxious class, but at more vulnerable institutions it may include most of the faculty. This growing tripartite class division within the university creates major strains on whatever sense of common interest remains, making the solidarity in defense of academic autonomy increasingly difficult. The bitter4 Cary Nelson, ‘‘The Academic Workplace,’’ Academe, November–December 1995, p. 18.

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ness of the Yale teaching assistants’ strike is an indication of how destructive academic class struggle can be. I must say frankly that I support the teaching assistants—unionization is the only way to protect themselves from extreme exploitation—but unionization does not sit well with my sense of what the university ought to be. As a corollary I would like to find some way to hold down high-end salaries of both administrators and academic stars, but in view of antitrust legislation and the mood of the times this might, ironically, be harder to do than recognize unions for teaching assistants. If there are sharp material divisions within the university, there are also sharp intellectual ones. I will not comment on the fact that many of our colleagues do not think of themselves as intellectuals at all but only as specialists within disciplines or subdisciplines and their sense of collective solidarity does not extend beyond those limits. I will turn instead to another kind of disjunction now widespread in the university, not the contrast between fields of specialization but the contrast between competing academic ideologies. Let me draw on Gerald Graff’s book Beyond the Culture Wars: An undergraduate tells of an art history course in which the instructor observed one day, ‘‘As we now know, the idea that knowledge can be objective is a positivist myth that has been exploded by postmodern thought.’’ It so happens the student is concurrently enrolled in a political science course in which the instructor speaks confidently about the objectivity of his discipline as if it had not been ‘‘exploded’’ at all. What do you do? the student is asked. ‘‘What else can I do?’’ he says. ‘‘I trash objectivity in art history, and I presuppose it in political science.’’ To some of us these days, the moral of [such] stories would be that students have become cynical relativists who care less about convictions than about grades and careers. In fact, if anything is surprising, it is that more students do not behave in this cynical fashion, for the established curriculum encourages it. The disjunction of the curriculum is a far more powerful source of relativism than any doctrine preached by the faculty.5

Graff proposes to overcome these breaks in intellectual discourse by having, say, positivists and postmodernists teach together so that the disjunctions can be faced and the students may better understand them, which is a step in the right direction, but may not be enough. The most helpful book I know for thinking about fundamental intellectual conflicts in the 5 Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars (New York: Norton, 1992), 92.

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contemporary university is Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. MacIntyre reminds us that the reigning paradigm in the present university is of relatively recent origin, arising together with the research university in the late nineteenth century. This is the paradigm of what MacIntyre calls encyclopaedia, though what he means is the paradigm of science as the only valid form of knowing. He reminds us that this paradigm came to power through ousting another paradigm, what he calls tradition, one rooted in Christian theology and the Greek and Latin classics. This older paradigm has never been completely banished, although theology has been pretty successfully confined to divinity schools that are clearly marginal to the conception of the research university. The third competing paradigm is relatively recent as a major force in the university, although it goes back at least as far as Nietzsche. This is what MacIntyre calls genealogy, but is pretty much what we mean today by postmodernism. As the reference to Nietzsche indicates, the third paradigm represents a profound doubt about the whole Enlightenment scientific enterprise, a question about whether its claim to truth is only a form of will to power. The recent rise of postmodernism in the university is undoubtedly related to doubts about the whole modern project brought on by a series of crises in the twentieth century to which there is no end in sight. While the remaining defenders of premodern tradition also have their doubts about science as the only basis of truth, they cannot join hands with the postmodernists, whose assumptions they reject. The postmodernists return the compliment by asserting that tradition too has no objective authority but is, like modernity, based only on a will to power. These are oversimplifications, yet I think they get at deep, apparently intractable differences in the university that no amount of conversation of the sort Gerald Graff advocates is likely to resolve. MacIntyre sums up our situation as follows: Hence debate between fundamentally opposed standpoints does occur; but it is inevitably inconclusive. Each warring position characteristically appears irrefutable to its own adherents; indeed in its own terms and by its own standards of argument it is in practice irrefutable. But each warring position equally seems to its opponent to be insufficiently warranted by rational argument. It is ironic that the wholly secular humanistic disciplines of the late twentieth century should thus reproduce that very same condition which led their nineteenthcentury secularizing predecessors to dismiss the claim of theology to be worthy of the status of an academic discipline. The outcome can be summarized as follows. We have together produced a

Class Wars and Culture Wars 407 type of university in which teaching and enquiry in the humanities (and often enough also in the social sciences) are marked by four characteristics. There is first a remarkably high level of skill in handling narrow questions of limited detail. . . . Secondly, in a way which sometimes provides a direction for and a background to these exercises of professionalized skill, there is the promulgation of a number of large and mutually incompatible doctrines, often conveyed by indirection and implication, the doctrines which define the major contending standpoints in each discipline. Thirdly, insofar as the warfare between these doctrines becomes part of public debate and discussion, the shared standards of argument are such that all debate is inconclusive. And yet, fourthly and finally, we still behave for the most part as if the university did still constitute a single, tolerably unified intellectual community, a form of behavior which testifies to the enduring effects of the encyclopaedists’ conception of the unity of enquiry.6

MacIntyre feels the kind of debate Graff calls for will only be discouraging, because interminable and insoluble, given fundamentally different starting points, and that the solution might better be to divide our universities in three categories: traditional, scientific, and postmodern. At least then students would get some coherent sense of the world and not be tempted by cynicism and nihilism. The direction I would go in is less radical than that of MacIntyre, but more demanding than that of Graff. One reason I hesitate to go all the way with MacIntyre is that the three categories he has so acutely analyzed are within many of us as well as between us. Although part of me is deeply rooted in the world of tradition, not only religiously but philosophically (in Germany I understand I am sometimes referred to as a left-wing Aristotelian, an odd designation for them since they presume Aristotelians will be right-wing), I would be lacking in self-knowledge if I did not recognize how profoundly I have been formed by the Enlightenment and even by its positivist offspring, nor would I be honest if I denied that I have learned from the postmodern critiques of modernity. Rather than opt for a situation that would force me to choose between parts of myself, I would attempt to find some common ground in defense of which a broadly based collectivity of academic intellectuals might stand. Perhaps MacIntyre’s emphasis on moral inquiry can provide an avenue for the exploration of this possibility. An effort in this direction by Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg in their book The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought might be ex6 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 7–8.

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emplary for more disciplines than economics. They distinguish between analysis and vision: ‘‘By analysis,’’ they write, ‘‘we mean the process of deducing consequences from initial conditions, of attending scrupulously to chains of reasoning, and of guarding against the always present temptation to substitute demagoguery for intellectual exchange.’’ 7 By vision they point to what for most economists remains ‘‘precognitive,’’ that is notions of ‘‘the rightness or wrongness, the inevitability or malleability, of the arrangements of power and prestige that we discover in all human societies.’’ These elements, which they call ‘‘political and moral,’’ actually form the basic concepts, such as ‘‘class, property and even power itself’’ that provide the place where analysis begins.8 For Heilbroner and Milberg ‘‘vision’’ is that kind of moral and political seeing which provides the ‘‘primitive concepts’’ of the social sciences, that is, the concepts that are themselves not scientifically derivable (though they certainly have historical, moral and political derivations) but which provide the foundations of analysis. It is precisely this aspect of vision that drops below the consciousness of positivist science, which nonetheless cannot do without primitive concepts any more than the rest of us. Contemporary economists who ignore the question of vision and attempt to confine themselves to analysis end up deriving their primitive concepts from common sense or from an abstract deductive schema called ‘‘rational actor theory,’’ which in the Anglo-Saxon world is only another version of common sense. Heilbroner and Milberg argue that vision must be a conscious part of the social scientific enterprise, as was the case, for example, with John Maynard Keynes, even though it is more like art than science: a new vision is a new way of seeing, just as Manet, in Pierre Bourdieu’s example, allowed us to see the world in a new way. Nonetheless the moral and political bases of such visions are available to, and require, criticism and reformulation. The research university has never in fact pursued pure science cut off from the environing world. From the beginning it has been mobilized by business and government for purposes quite beyond the university itself. War, which looms so large in the twentieth century, has always mobilized the university, never more than in World War II, but also in its long aftermath of the Cold War.We might remember that the University of California made the atomic bombs for the United States military for forty-five years 7 Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg, The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4. 8 Heilbroner and Milberg, Crisis of Vision, 14.

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and still is in charge of monitoring the weapons to see that they maintain their effectiveness and designing potential new ones, a function many of us in the faculty have long opposed but which we have never managed to eliminate. With the end of the Cold War, mobilization for economic competitiveness has become very much the order of the day, with a wide variety of effects in both public and private universities. What I would suggest is that, rather than imagining that the university can escape such mobilization and return to an ivory tower that never existed, we might ask whether the purposes to which the university is put are the right ones, the ones we as intellectuals would autonomously choose? Are we a good university contributing to a good society when we concentrate on war or economic competitiveness, but think much less about the environment or poverty or the new world disorder? More fundamentally, can we construct a vision of the social world that is not dominated by the contemporary economic or political fields but has at least a degree of moral autonomy? In a common effort to think about the political and moral bases of our inquiry we could call on the insights of traditional, scientific, and postmodern intellectuals, not in order to attain an unreachable, and even an undesirable, consensus, but to regain the initiative in defining our own enterprise, which is, after all, neither to become functionaries for the prevailing economic and political powers nor to secede into the guarded, gated, communities that elite research universities are tempted to become. A good place to begin would be to consider how we can resist the destructive consequences of growing class polarization in the larger society and in our own institution.

20 Freedom, Coercion, and Authority

Discussions of higher education these days frequently attempt to balance ‘‘freedom and responsibility.’’ Such a concern is not unexpected in these rapidly changing times. Freedom is the highest American value, something before which every academic administrator and every faculty member regularly genuflects.We all want ‘‘freedom from’’ outside interference, and we reaffirm the traditional understanding of ‘‘academic freedom.’’ But we know we live in a society and cannot exist outside it. Therefore we pair our central totem of freedom with another moral term, ‘‘responsibility.’’ The autonomy which we ask must be balanced by something we give in return, by responsibility toward our students, the communities in which our institutions live, the public which finances our work, and the nation and world of which we are citizens. I think the pairing of freedom and responsibility is a fruitful one and that we can learn much from reflecting on it. But I want to take on a harder task in this chapter: to discuss a much more troubling term than responsibility, to argue that freedom must be balanced not only by responsibility, but by authority. I will begin by questioning the tendency of liberal social philosophy to think that social life can be satisfactorily conceived as a conflict between freedom and coercion. First of all let me say that by liberal I do not mean what is called ‘‘liberal’’ in current American politics, but the classical liberalism that lies at the root of American politics from right to left, and that is today, in the form of neo-laissez-faire or neocapitalist ideology, if anything more evident among so-called conservatives than among so-called liberals. What is missing in the polarity between freedom and coercion is authority, which liberals tend to equate with coercion, but which an older tradition of political philosophy held was the condition of freedom, not its antithesis. Classical political philosophy has always held that when authority disappears, freedom collapses into coercion. The form in which the standard logic of freedom and coercion works today is to equate the ‘‘market’’ with freedom, whereas government, and indeed all the nonmarket features of social life, as, for example, tenure, are equated with coer[First published in Academe 85, no. 1 (January–February 1999): 16–21. Used by permission.]

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cion. This way of thinking is peculiarly American, and deeply rooted in an Anglo-American tradition of social thought, but is now increasingly shared by the rest of the world. It is particularly attractive to former Communist societies who have suffered an intense form of state coercion. It is not only the state, however, that can be coercive, but the market as well. When the market is not moderated by responsible government and the operation of a variety of nonmarket mechanisms throughout society, then the market can become very coercive indeed, can become totalitarian. I think this is what is happening to our society generally and to higher education in particular. And I will ask whether there are today in an antiauthoritarian age, any forms of authority that might help prevent market freedom from catapulting us into an ‘‘iron cage’’ of total coercion, and again with special reference to higher education. ‘‘Authority,’’ as I will use the term, refers to a normative order, even to what has been called ‘‘a higher law,’’ which provides conceptions of a good society and a good person, and sets limits on what kind of behavior is acceptable in society. In this conception authority—reference to a normative order or a higher law—can be and in certain circumstances ought to be challenged, and must respond to such challenges with good reasons. But, as in science, where everything cannot be doubted at once, an effective normative order and the authority derived from it must be taken for granted much of the time. The equation of authority with coercion, and its general delegitimation, I would argue, opens the door to tyranny. I want to use ‘‘authority’’ rather than ‘‘responsibility’’ as my contrast term to ‘‘freedom’’ because, I will argue, responsibility, in more than one sense, is a source of our problem, is even a reason why we have lost the capacity to speak with authority. I want to argue for the double-edged nature of responsibility by starting with the relation between higher education and the state during World War II. In a period of general mobilization, such as a great war, especially a war which most people believed was morally just, like World War II, it is natural that the university would feel responsible to help out. Not only natural scientists but social scientists were mobilized to assist the war effort, and many campuses devoted themselves to the training of military officers and specialists. Under such circumstances, even though universities abdicated much of their independence in order to assist in the war effort, there was very little unease among administrators or professors. The cause was obviously just, and the mobilization, it was assumed, was temporary. In previous wars, most obviously in World War I, universities had collaborated with the war effort and then quickly returned to ‘‘normal’’ after the war was over. But the aftermath of World

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War II was different. It was followed not by ‘‘normalcy’’ but by the Cold War. Especially during the early decades of the Cold War, but to more than a small degree during its whole forty-five-year history, universities continued what can only be considered, compared to their history before World War II, an unusually close association with government, tailoring many programs, particularly in the natural and social sciences—I think of the area studies programs of which I was a beneficiary—to Cold War needs. During these long Cold War decades universities generally and the great research universities in particular, grew dependent on federal funding not only for particular programs but for general overhead support. Many of us were worried by these developments. During the Vietnam War they gave rise to much criticism and, in some cases, student violence. I remember vividly that twice during the late sixties, the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies at Berkeley was bombed. As the Center for Japanese Studies, of which I was chair, was on the floor above the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, these attacks came close to home, so to speak, though the bombings were at night when the offices were empty. Though the students had a most exaggerated view of the activities of the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, where, they claimed, the Vietnam War was ‘‘being planned,’’ they were not entirely wrong in seeing that enterprise like many others, including my own center, as serving in part as information-gathering institutions for the more effective pursuit of Cold War aims. Just how deeply Cold War collaboration was corrupting to universities has been brought home recently by the publication of Rebecca Lowen’s book about Stanford, Creating the Cold War University, published, somewhat poignantly, by the University of California Press, in 1997. If Lowen is right, the Stanford administration ruthlessly tailored academic decisions to Cold War needs, considering such fields as classics and natural history irrelevant because they did not contribute ideologically or financially to the Cold War university that Stanford had become. But I must at once add that at the University of California, where at least at the Berkeley campus we never treated classics the way Stanford did, we undertook one of the greatest of all Cold War academic responsibilities, namely the running of the nuclear laboratories, including Los Alamos, where the atomic bombs were designed and produced, something which many faculty members, myself included, fought for years, but which still goes on, though the mission of the labs today, it is declared, is only to guarantee the functional effectiveness of existing bombs. While the evaluation of the Cold War in retrospect must certainly be

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complex (not everything we did even in World War II is above criticism— I think of the carpet bombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the Soviet empire was a real threat and our vigorous response to it did, surely, help to end it. My point is not that academic mobilization for Cold War aims was in any simple sense wrong, but that it had a very unfortunate consequence. It led us to defend our institution in terms of an extrinsic contribution, a utility, a responsibility, if you will, to an extrinsic end. It muted our capacity to pay attention to our own intrinsic ends, even to ask the question, ‘‘What is higher education for?’’ We lost the authority to speak of our own intrinsic values when we spoke so incessantly of our contribution to external ends, however good they might be. And since our engagement with government during the Cold War years was also to more than a small degree an engagement with industry, so closely linked to government in many Cold War projects, it was natural, perhaps, when the Cold War so abruptly and unexpectedly ended, for us to continue to justify our work by its external contributions, now not to government in its Cold War effort, but to industry and the economic prosperity of our people. A college education has been a road to upward economic mobility from the beginning in America, and the expansion of higher education in the twentieth century, particularly after World War II, has enabled millions of young people from working-class backgrounds, often the first in their families to go to college, to enter middle class occupations and significantly better their standing in society. That is an achievement of which we can be justly proud, and President Clinton’s proposal to make a college education as universal in the twenty-first century as a high school education is today is a noble one. But to make the upward mobility of our students our primary mission is a serious distortion of everything we stand for, or ought to stand for. It has further consequences in the ideological climate of the present day: it makes us simply a sector in the market economy, the ‘‘higher education industry,’’ as it is frequently called, and subject to all the strictures that apply to any other part of the market economy. This self-understanding is particularly tempting in an economy that is shifting from mass production to information as its most essential component. Aren’t we the ones who will make our students at home in the information age, computer-literate ‘‘symbolic analysts,’’ as members of the new elite have been called? What better way to justify ourselves in an era of tight resources (though we might ask ourselves why resources are tight in a high-growth economy)? And after all, isn’t there even a moral aspect to this self-justification: we contribute to freedom when we contrib-

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ute to a free economy and to producing graduates who can use their skills to live lives with a greater abundance of choices. What a lovely marriage of freedom and responsibility. We have come of late in America to identify freedom with the free market. Indeed democracy is so closely associated with the free market that they are almost identified, and if a society, like mainland China, has a free market but not democracy, then experts are ready to assure us that ‘‘inevitably’’ they will gain political democracy too. But it is just this assumption I want to challenge. What is freedom in the market is tyranny in other spheres, in the professions and in politics. What is critical in a decent society is the autonomy of the spheres.When money takes over politics only a facade of democracy is left. When money takes over the professions decisions are made on the basis of the bottom line, not professional authority. This is just the issue that is becoming acute in medicine with the growing dominance of for-profit hmos. And this, I submit, is the issue when the bottom line begins to dominate decisions in higher education. There are several ways in which the tyranny of the bottom line drives academic decisions.When the university is seen simply as part of the economy, then the normal pressures for market efficiency set in, and the consequences are nowhere more ominous than in the sphere of personnel decisions. Contemporary industry is very concerned with controlling labor costs, and downsizing is a common mechanism to do so. In the academy downsizing takes a subtle form. It is difficult to cut the number of instructors, since there are a certain number of classes that must be taught, and in public universities, often increasing enrollment is putting pressure to increase the number of classes. Nonetheless, in some instances, colleges and universities have resorted to simple downsizing by cutting faculty, increasing the teaching load, and increasing class size. Far more common, however, is to reduce the percentage of faculty who are tenured or tenure track and increase the number of part-time and/or temporary instructors, at considerable savings in salaries. During the recession years of the early nineties, the University of California cut its tenured or tenure-track faculty by about 10 percent—some say more—with vague promises to restore the positions later. I have no firm statistics, but as I have observed the faculty in the last several years, I see no indication that the cuts are being restored, nor do I believe they ever will be. The institutional consequences of increasing the proportion of part-time and temporary instructors were discussed at length in the January–February 1998 issue of Academe, and I will not repeat what was written there, but the consequences are all bad in terms of academic purposes other than economic efficiency, and the recommen-

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dations coming from a conference of ten academic associations published there is that the proportion of part-time and adjunct faculty should be decreased, not increased. Another negative consequence of the tyranny of the bottom line is the tendency to encourage, or at least not discourage, relations between research laboratories, particularly in the natural sciences, and business, blurring the line between nonprofit and profit-making concerns. Since criticisms of these trends have been widespread in recent years, I will not pause to discuss them here. A feature of the tyranny of the market that I do want to devote some space to is an obvious consequence of seeing higher education as simply part of the market economy, namely consumer sovereignty. If we are simply supplying a market product, why shouldn’t the consumer be sovereign? Sometimes consumer sovereignty is dressed up in terms of responsibility to students, a concern for course evaluations and outcome assessments, even ‘‘faculty productivity.’’ While I am certainly not unsympathetic with a concern to improve teaching, I am worried that in stressing the responsibility of the teacher we forget the responsibility of the student. It is the teacher, not the student, who knows what the student needs to learn; otherwise why is the student there at all? But the model of an economic transaction starts from a fixed preference in the mind of the consumer, who simply shops for the best way to fulfill that preference. In the teacher-student relation, which is not intrinsically an economic one, there can be no fixed preference in advance. I am opposed to the whole notion of outcome assessment, not only in the university but even in kindergarten, because it denies the essentially creative and unpredictable nature of the learning experience.We are not mere transmitters of predigested information, on which the student may be tested at the end of the course. What we teach are ways of thinking, even ways of feeling, and what the students learn often surprises us as much as it does them, which is as it should be. If you want information, go to an encyclopedia or to the World Wide Web, not to college. College is supposed to teach you what to do with information, how to think with and about it, and there are no algorithms for doing that. I am not foolish enough to imagine that we can ever ignore the very real utilitarian aspect of higher education for students, and the fact that, as I have already implied, it has its own legitimacy. But there is a way of combining the idea of education for career advancement, and education for character, citizenship, and culture and that is through the idea of calling, vocation, profession in the deepest sense of that word. Professionals,

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and that is what we are in the business of doing—educating future professionals—need not be hired guns, selling their expertise to the highest bidder. We can help them see that through their profession they can contribute to the larger aims of society, that professional ethics is not some last-minute add-on, but the very core of the meaning of professionalism. It was never easy to make this link, but it is a task more urgent than ever. It is a task that becomes difficult indeed when the university is equated with a shopping mall, something that fundamentally undermines the teacher-student relation. Students who come to school with a consumer mentality have difficulty accepting, even provisionally, institutional authority or the authority of their professors. They are, I would argue, coerced by their preexisting desires, and unable to take advantage of the freedom that openness to the intrinsic values of the institution would make possible. I was disturbed, but not surprised, when a few years ago I heard that a student in the Stanford Business School had, after the first couple of class meetings, shouted at a very able young sociologist the school had hired, ‘‘I didn’t pay $40,000 dollars to listen to this bullshit,’’ and then walked out of the class. But I have recently heard of a couple of instances where undergraduates at state institutions, in arguing about a grade, said to the instructor, ‘‘I’m paying for this course,’’ as though they felt they weren’t getting the value paid for. I have not heard of anything quite so crude happening at Berkeley, but I have had several angry students come up after a lecture in which I had mentioned Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, telling me that I had no right to mention so many names they had never heard of. I’m afraid I told them that if they hadn’t heard of them that was their problem and they should look them up. In short, I was not surprised to read a story in the San Francisco Chronicle last January reporting the annual ucla survey of college freshmen with the headline, ‘‘College Freshmen Called the Laziest in a Generation.’’ But it’s not just laziness that leads undergraduates to think that professors shouldn’t use words or names they don’t know rather than that they should look them up—it’s the attitude that college is a consumer marketplace. It is this consumer attitude, the university as a place to meet preestablished needs, that tempts some to say that we need to emphasize learning rather than teaching. The teacher is simply a facilitator in helping the student find the necessary information leading to career enhancement; perhaps ultimately all the student will need is a computer for ‘‘distance learning’’ without a teacher at all. I would argue, however, that it is only through the genuine interaction of teacher and student that the deepest kind of learning occurs, and especially the idea of professional knowledge as em-

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bedded in a context of ethical responsibility. Only a teacher who can model that in his or her own life and teaching can really transmit it to students, and that can happen even in a large lecture course, but not, I believe, through a computer screen. In the current cultural atmosphere in America where economic criteria dominate every sphere, how can we resist the pressure of the free market to coerce us into abandoning every one of our defining beliefs for the sake of economic efficiency? It is here that I think we must make a claim to legitimate authority, to the authority to expect students to look things up rather than be spoon-fed, but much more than that. It is the authority to say that contributing to a vibrant economy or even helping students get good jobs, is only one of our purposes, and probably not the most important one. An effective democracy requires informed and thoughtful citizens. Traditionally it was administrators who articulated one of the central purposes of the university to be the education of citizens. In a complex world where the democratic citizen is called on to understand and make decisions about a myriad of issues this function is more important than ever, but few university presidents today, and not many professors, talk about it with the same enthusiasm as they speak of the critical contribution we make to the economy. While I believe that academic leaders—presidents, chancellors, deans —can make a significant contribution to public understanding of our purpose and value, one that goes well beyond economics, and that they could do better in this regard than many of them have been doing lately, I believe that an articulate professorial defense of our mission is at least equally essential. Here I am faced with the reality that few professors see themselves as representatives of the academy as a whole, even of the institutions where they teach. Most of them, most of us, feel a primary identification and loyalty to our discipline. (As I will point out in a minute, administrators often encourage such a narrow identity rather than seek to broaden it.) So, even though I have never been a disciplinary tribalist and have moved easily between fields all my life, let me nonetheless start from where most professors are and attempt to show how even in their disciplinary identity they can offer a broader definition of their role than a utilitarian world is used to hearing. Let me turn to a leading figure in the last generation of American sociologists, Edward Shils, who articulated what he spoke of as ‘‘the calling of sociology.’’ This calling, he said, is not to provide society with clever techniques for social manipulation—we might mention opinion polling and focus groups—but rather something altogether different. ‘‘The real

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deficiency of technological sociology,’’ he wrote, ‘‘which would remain despite its scientific rigor, its moral naiveté, and its harmlessness (hitherto) is its failure to grasp that the true calling of sociology is to contribute to the self-understanding of society rather than to its manipulated improvement.’’ 1 This, at least to me, seems a splendid definition of the calling of my profession.What is our purpose, what are we here for, what is the good we pursue? It is to contribute to the self-understanding of society, so that both individually and collectively we can make sense of our world, can orient our action, and can make better decisions in many spheres—family, community, nation, and, to be sure, economy as well. I would think, and I suppose Shils would have agreed, that a good deal of technical work in sociology can ultimately contribute to an increase in social self-understanding. But I am also aware, as was Shils, that technical sophistication can become an end in itself, a form of disciplinary narcissism, outweighing any larger conception of our calling. I remember when, a few years ago, my department at Berkeley received an outside review, as all Berkeley departments periodically do, we were chided by the review committee for inadequate formalization, mathematicization, and computerization. Fortunately, at Berkeley such reviews have no coercive power, and I suspect that, although we have more than a little technical sophistication, a similar review committee would find us deficient in these regards to this day, even though we remain among the top three departments in the national ratings. But what struck me in the review committee report was the failure to mention the fact that seven or eight members of our department had made significant contributions to public discussion far beyond the discipline. For example, Todd Gitlin’s work on the media and the Vietnam War, Arlie Hochschild’s work on two-earner families, or a book on American habits of the heart, two of whose coauthors are also members of our department, received no attention from the reviewers. Although the Berkeley department has managed to weather such criticism, at other institutions the focus on technical sophistication rather than social self-understanding can have serious consequences. At another campus of our university, I am told, the Department of Sociology was forbidden by the dean to make a junior appointment of anyone who had not published an article in the American Sociological Review or the American Journal of Sociology, the two most prestigious reviewed journals in our field. Now it’s not just that most articles, with some notable exceptions, 1 Edward Shils, The Calling of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 76.

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in these journals are boring, but that a survey of members of the American Sociological Association a few years ago found that a majority admitted that they couldn’t understand most articles published in the American Sociological Review that gives me pause. Neither of these journals is a vehicle for reaching a larger public nor, apparently, even for reaching most sociologists. In a situation where hiring, promotion, and tenure often depend largely on technical expertise, and where most of that expertise has little practical application, why should anyone care whether our discipline lives or dies? I would argue that Shils’s definition of the calling of sociology can be generalized to all the disciplines in the academy, and that we had better become aware of it if the university as we have known it is to survive in an uncomprehending and inhospitable world. Technical expertise can receive justification of sorts where it has practical payoff. I can envision a university of the future where every field that lacks practical payoff will have been jettisoned.When I hear of so-called liberal arts colleges most of whose undergraduate majors are in business administration, law enforcement, nursing, and communications, and philosophy or religious studies majors are few and far between, I think we are already most of the way there. Some disciplines have long understood themselves as contributing to social self-understanding. History, for instance, and not only our own national history, but the history of the world’s peoples, helps us know where we have come from and therefore, in part, where we are, as members of the human species. The disciplines that study literature also have the capacity to hold up a mirror to us and enlarge our humanity. I believe the natural sciences, as part of a liberal arts curriculum, help us understand the cosmos of which we are a part, and thus enhance our sense of who we are. A relatively new field helps illustrate Shils’s point in an area that cuts across the distinction between the natural and the social sciences: environmental studies. A field that combines natural and social sciences to show us what we are doing to the environment would seem to be of the greatest importance, and many campuses have been increasing resources in this area. Not without problems, however. Business and agricultural interests have put pressure on the University of California through legislative influence to decrease the emphasis on ecological and environmental studies, which might threaten the economic growth of our state. This is the kind of issue that makes the traditional idea of academic freedom so important, and the protection of tenure that is essential to it. In this example our obligation

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to contribute to the self-understanding of society runs into a head-on collision with the idea of the education industry as just one more part of the global economy. By now most of my readers will have probably figured out my strategy. By quoting a leading sociologist about the importance of contributing to the self-understanding of society, I have ended up defending the traditional purpose of a university education, the ideal of Bildung: to produce not technicians but educated human beings, persons of broad cultural sympathies, knowledgeable, ethical, and aesthetically sensitive. You may say that that is an elite ideal, and so it is. In spite of our commitment to the democratization of education, the university remains one of the most stratified institutions in America. And just as polarization increases in every other field, so perhaps only a few elite institutions will be able to maintain the traditional conception of higher education. I think of Rollins College in Florida that, some fifteen years ago, abolished the undergraduate business major and put in a classics major, and has been thriving ever since, though not exactly a role model for many other institutions. But I have also been told of a recent religious studies graduate who taught a course on religion for the University of Phoenix, for them a frill to be sure, but who found her students eager and inquisitive, willing to work and to learn. And I have a friend who recently taught a course on French literature at a community college who found the students in this utterly nonutilitarian course to be enthusiastic and able. So is our future a real education for the few and a little frosting on the utilitarian cake for the many? I am afraid if we do not mount a better defense of our own intrinsic purposes than we have for quite a while, even a good education for the few may not long survive. Any effective defense would require that we speak with authority about the aims and goals of higher education, about its intrinsic goods, about the kind of institution it ought to be and the kind of graduates it ought to produce. I am reasonably confident that finding the courage to do that will enhance our self-respect and strengthen our capacity to fulfill our calling.

21 The True Scholar

Using ‘‘The True Scholar’’ as my title may sound rather quaint in serious academic discourse today. Yet I think, on occasion and perhaps unreflectingly, we still use the expression.When we say of someone that he or she is a true scholar, or a true scientist, we mean not only that he or she is knowledgeable or skillful, though we do mean that, but that the person has qualities of character, of stance toward the world, that I think are clearly normative or ethical, not merely cognitive. In our common use, then, though not in our reigning philosophies, the true and the good are not two different things, but aspects of one thing. Everything I want to say in this essay is an effort to make that common sense perception more conscious and defensible in the argument about what scholarship in its multiple meanings, including teaching, is all about. Let me turn to that cantankerous but very intelligent philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, to open my argument. He writes: What contemporary universities have characteristically lost, both in their practice and in their theorizing, is an adequate grasp of the relationship between the intellectual and the moral virtues. . . . For while the university thinks of itself as a place of enquiry, it happily rejects the thought that such enquiry should be envisaged as having any one overall telos or good and that that good might itself be adequately intelligible only as an ordered part of the human good. What goods enquiry is to serve and how they are to be envisaged is instead to depend upon the choices and preferences of the enquirers and of those who supply their material resources. [RB: I shall return to that.] For academic freedom on a liberal view of it requires that rival beliefs about the human good, including denials that there is such a good, should be encouraged to coexist in a university which is itself to be uncommitted. [RB: Here I would differ to some degree with MacIntyre in that I think one of our problems is that arguments about the human good are not encouraged at all in the contemporary university.] What enquiry needs from those who practice it is not moral character, but verbal, mathematical and problem-solving skills. A few qualities of character are of course highly valued: industriousness, a show of deference to one’s professional superiors and [First published in Academe 86, no. 1 (January–February 2000): 18–23. Used by permission.]

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to the academic system, cheerful collegiality, and sufficient minimal honesty to ensure reliability in reporting research findings. For these are qualities of character functionally necessary, if skills are to be successfully put to work. [RB: Here I would note that even the most value-free conception of scholarship nonetheless requires some virtues, however limited, and implies others, not so limited.] But there is no overall end to be served by those qualities or those skills, no agreed or presupposed ultimate good in view. What is the outcome? It is fragmentation, so that by and large what goes on in one area of enquiry has little or no connection with what goes on in other areas.1

Here I would suggest that the fragmentation that MacIntyre accurately points out is perhaps the result not so much of the lack of a notion of the human good as by the presence of a kind of notion of the human good that is left undiscussed. I will be returning to this matter. A major source of our problem (or what I think is our problem—I don’t expect that everyone will agree) is the iron curtain drawn by Immanuel Kant between the cognitive and the ethical, between, in his terms, pure reason and practical reason. According to Kant, and we are all of us in the university more or less Kantian in this regard, there is an unbridgeable gap between the two realms, so that we cannot get to one from the other but each requires a beginning from scratch on its own terms. As a result, our modern quasi-Kantian university has decided to commit itself to cognitive inquiry and push ethical inquiry to the margins, a subfield in philosophy or something we’ll let the professional schools worry about. I will be arguing that the quasi-Kantian university carries a much more substantive ethical message than it admits to, but before going into that I want to explore alternative possibilities. While for Plato the Good, the True, and the Beautiful have an ultimate unity, for Aristotle there is a clear distinction between the intellectual and the moral virtues, and it was Aristotle more than Plato who influenced the subsequent tradition in the West. So, long before Kant, we have a problem with how the two sets of virtues are to be related. But for Aristotle, unlike Kant, there is a relationship, one set forth in the Nicomachean Ethics, though sufficiently unclearly that it continues to be debated by scholars. While from one point of view wisdom, sophia, is the highest virtue (and I would remind you that wisdom is not to be equated with scientific knowl1 Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘‘The Mission of a Dominican House of Studies in Contemporary North America,’’ unpublished ms. (1991).

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edge in the post-Kantian view), from another point of view the governing virtue is phronesis, inadequately translated as prudence or practical reason, not to be equated with Kant’s practical reason. Let me translate phronesis as ‘‘judgment,’’ remembering that this is judgment in a very high sense of the term. One could say, pushing Aristotle just a bit, that judgment is the most theoretical of the practical virtues and the most practical of the theoretical virtues: in other words it is the place they come together. Judgment in this use of the term involves a sense of proportion, of larger meaning, of what a situation requires, at once cognitively and ethically. When we say that an action or a person is ‘‘truly human’’ we are using phronesis, judgment.We are saying simultaneously that this action or person is such as humans can be and such as they ought to be.We are not saying that this is what human beings on average are, but we are also not saying that this is what human beings in some ideal and unrealizable sense ought to be. Similarly when we call something inhuman, like ethnic cleansing, we are saying that it falls below not only the level of what humans ought to do, but what we expect human beings to do. I would also argue that in describing an event like the massacres at Kosovo without using the term ‘‘inhuman’’ or one of its synonyms would be mistaken. It would not only be an inaccurate description of what happened, but it would give a wrong moral evaluation of what happened, for it would not be neutral at all. It would imply, whether intentionally or not, that this action was not only normal but acceptable. I would argue that, and not only in the humanities and the social sciences, we use judgment in this sense all the time, and could not conduct the scholarly enterprise without it. Thus we rely not only, as MacIntyre claimed, on the ‘‘functional virtues’’ supportive of a limited view of scholarship, but as a matter of empirical fact on judgment, which, as I am using it, is one of the highest virtues. But MacIntyre’s criticism is correct insofar as we do not take responsibility for what we are doing, we claim to be devoted to pure cognitive inquiry without any other intent, and we argue that the only normative basis for our inquiry is freedom, not taking conscious responsibility for the fact that, as I would argue, freedom without judgment would self-destruct. Let me illustrate my point with a natural scientist. I would say that E. O. Wilson is a true scholar, a true scientist. By which I don’t mean that he agrees with me, because he certainly doesn’t. There is nothing I detest so much in our current intellectual life as sociobiology (well, we will see that there is one thing that I detest even more). Nor is it just that I admire Wil-

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son’s forthright stand in favor of environmentalism, with which I do agree, though that is part of it. What I admire about Wilson that leads me to call him a true scholar or scientist is the passion with which he pursues his work and his conviction (mistaken in my view, at least if we think of his overall theory and not of his many superb studies) that he is contributing to the human good. I also admire his attempt in Consilience to overcome fragmentation in our cultural life, when so many refuse even to see the problem, even if I don’t believe he has chosen the right way to do so.2 Nor do I think I am alone in my admiration for him. I think Wilson’s stature in the scholarly world is related to this assessment of him as a person, though it is also enhanced, alas, because his views contribute to certain reigning paradigms in our culture. I celebrate Wilson because he is a mind to be reckoned with and worth reckoning with at every level. And he is far from alone in the American academy. So, though I intend to be as critical as MacIntyre in these remarks, I do hope to be somewhat more benignly critical, and to insist that in spite of many disturbing tendencies in theory and practice, all is not wrong and indeed a lot is as it should be. Let me address where I do think we have gone wrong. In Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry MacIntyre describes three notions of what the university is today, which I will call, adapting his terminology, traditional, positivist, and postmodernist.3 Traditional is of course where we came from, the tradition of liberal education with its strong ties to the classics and in America to theology. It has been gradually displaced from the last decades of the nineteenth century by the positivist model of untrammeled inquiry, embracing subjects never included in the older curriculum (it is worth remembering that the great achievements of early modern science took place almost entirely outside the university) and throwing off the narrow conception of what a classical and Christian education ought to be, but also, in part inadvertently, throwing out any defensible notion of phronesis or judgment that might have held the enterprise together in the face of positivism’s penchant for fragmentation. Quite recently, postmodernism has arisen in part as a criticism of what it believes is the false cognitive neutrality of the positivist university and has argued, not without evidence, that the university exists only to support existing structures of power, particularly in the areas of class, race and gender. But postmodernism rejects 2 E. O. Wilson, Consilience (New York: Knopf, 1998). 3 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1990).

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tradition as much as positivism as just one more form of power play and so is unable to bring back any notion of judgment as a governing virtue. Indeed, the very idea of a governing virtue would be abhorrent to our postmodernist friends, even though, I would argue, they can no more do without it in practice than can the positivists. But changes in the university, and therefore necessarily in scholarship, over the last one hundred years are not due only to changing intellectual understandings: they are also due to changes in the relation of the university to society. For one thing the university has never been a place devoted solely to the formation of character or to pure inquiry. The university has always been, in America as elsewhere, an avenue of social mobility. One’s life chances are enhanced by attaining a university degree—about that there is plenty of empirical evidence as far back as one can go. Mobility aspirations have long placed pressures on universities but for a long time they were gentle pressures. By and large the university’s authority to tell upwardly mobile young men, and later young women, what they needed to know was not basically challenged. And the liberal arts as a central core of the curriculum continued to draw most students even after the positivist model of the university had gained dominance. But in recent decades and in part because a much higher percentage of the relevant population goes to college but perhaps even more due to changes in our environing culture, students have begun more and more to tell us what they want to know, with drastic consequences for the curriculum, and so for hiring, and so for scholarship, that I will describe in a moment. In a world of consumers, consumer students now make decisions, for better or for worse, that were once made by faculty. But consumer students are not the only pressures that universities have faced. Universities, and so scholarship, have been seen as serving external purposes, above all for the state and for the economy. The most influential outside purpose deriving from the state by far has been the pressure to contribute to war efforts. The university was mobilized, if briefly, during World War I; more totally during World War II; but even more significantly, for the long twilight period of the Cold War lasting until just about a decade ago. During these years universities grew accustomed to large government research grants, not only in the natural sciences, but in the humanities and social sciences as well, for things like area studies. Since the end of the Cold War the external purpose that the university is supposed to serve above all has been the economy, though economic usefulness has been a university purpose to some degree at least since the founding of land

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grant colleges in the nineteenth century. I have written of these pressures in the preceding chapter 4 so I won’t do more than mention them here. I think it might be helpful to look at some evidence of changes in the university relative to my theme. My theme, as I said at the beginning, is the true scholar, and the true scholar, I will argue, requires, at least in the long run, a true university, or at least something like one. I have suggested that the very notion of a true university depends on the survival of what MacIntyre means by traditional inquiry, one in which the link between the intellectual and the moral virtues is not entirely broken, one in which something like judgment has at least a degree of influence. Now it is clear what area in the current understanding of the university is closest to this understanding, even though it is at the moment rent by civil war, namely, the humanities. So let us look at the fate of the humanities in recent decades. Fortunately I can refer to a recent survey of trends in the humanities by James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield entitled ‘‘The Market-Model University: Humanities in the Age of Money’’ (sometimes there’s a lot in a title).5 I would like to quote some of the most important findings: Humanities represent a sharply declining proportion of all undergraduate degrees. Between 1970 and 1994, the number of B.A.s conferred in the United States rose 39 percent. Among all bachelors degrees in higher education, three majors increased five- to ten-fold: computer and information sciences, protective services, and transportation and material moving. Two majors, already large, tripled: health professions and public administration.

Already popular, business administration doubled. In 1971, 78 percent more degrees were granted in business than in English. By 1994 business enjoyed a 400 percent advantage over English and remained the largest major. English, foreign languages, philosophy, and religion, as well as history, all suffered absolute declines. They then point out: 4 Bellah, ‘‘Freedom, Coercion, Authority’’ (1999), [included as chapter 20 in this volume]. 5 James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, ‘‘The Market-Model University: Humanities in the Age of Money,’’ Harvard Magazine 100, no. 5 (May–June 1998): 48–55, 111. The argument of this article has subsequently been extended into an impressive book: James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005).

The True Scholar 427 Measured by faculty salaries—a clear sign of prestige and clout—the humanities fare dismally. On average humanists receive the lowest faculty salaries by thousands or tens of thousands of dollars; the gap affects the whole teaching population, regardless of rank. Humanists’ teaching loads are highest, with the least amount of release and research time, yet they’re now expected, far more than three decades ago, to publish in order to secure professorial posts. Humanists are also more than others, increasingly compelled to settle for adjunct, part-time, non-tenured appointments that pay less, have little or no job security, and carry reduced benefits or none.6

There’s even more, but I don’t want to be too depressing. Perhaps these trends cannot be found everywhere, but there is a useful inset in the article about my own alma mater. It shows that the same trends have occurred at Harvard: fewer majors, lower salaries, higher teaching loads in the humanities, even if, compared to many schools the humanities are not too badly off. But it would seem that few schools have entirely escaped these trends. Having observed that by all measures ‘‘the humanities’ vital signs are poor,’’ our authors seek an explanation and find it in what they call the Age of Money: When we termed the last 30 years the Age of Money, we were in part referring to the dollar influx of research grants, higher tuitions, and grander capital improvements. But there’s another, more symbolic, aspect to the Age of Money, and one not less powerful for being more symbolic. The mere concept of money turns out to be the secret key to ‘‘prestige,’’ influence, and power in the American academic world.

They argue that there are ‘‘three Criteria for the power of money in Academia, whose rule is remarkably potent, uniform, and verifiable. Academic fields that offer one (or more) of the Three Criteria thrive; any field lacking all three languishes.’’ And this by any measure you would want to take. ‘‘In the Age of Money,’’ they continue, ‘‘the royal road to success is to offer at least one of the following’’: A Promise of Money. The field is popularly linked (even if erroneously) to improved chances of securing an occupation or profession that promises above average lifetime earnings.

6 Engell and Dangerfield, ‘‘The Market-Model,’’ 50.

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The True Scholar A Knowledge of Money. The field itself studies money, whether practically

or more theoretically, i.e., fiscal, business, financial, or economic matters and markets. A Source of Money. The field receives significant external money, i.e., research contracts, federal grants or funding support, or corporate underwriting.7

If this picture of the contemporary university is true, and it would be hard to argue that it does not contain at least some truth, then our life together in the university is governed, again to the extent that this description is true, by neither the intellectual nor the moral virtues but by a vice: namely cupidity, acquisitiveness, or just plain avarice, the same vice that dominates our society as a whole in the Age of Money. To the extent that this is true, and I think it is not the whole truth, it has come about, I believe, more through default than intention: it is the result of many small decisions made by administrators and faculty concerned to keep their institutions afloat in a changing society. Yet to the extent that we are dominated by one of the classic vices rather than the intellectual and moral virtues, we have ceased to be a true university and therefore it is increasingly difficult for us to be true scholars. I must now pursue my critical inquiry at least one step further and discuss the emergence of a master theory in the social sciences that mirrors changes in the general society—namely, what is called rational choice or rational actor theory, which as you might have guessed, is the one theory I detest even more than sociobiology. In America, and to some extent in the world, we seem to have returned in the last thirty years to something like the last decades of the nineteenth century, that is, laissez-faire, unconstrained, capitalism. And just as the strident capitalism of the late nineteenth century was mirrored by the theory of social Darwinism, so the rise of neo-laissez-faire capitalism in the last thirty years is mirrored by the rise of rational choice theory—more subtle, more technically sophisticated than social Darwinism, but, I would argue, an offspring of the same lineage which ultimately goes back to utilitarianism, the commonsense philosophy of the Anglo-American world at least since the eighteenth century. Rational choice theory, which as we will see in a moment, was not originally received with open arms in economics, is now taken as common sense there and has spread out into many neighboring disciplines: political science, sociology, law, even religious studies, where it enjoys quite a vogue. Now you may ask what’s wrong with that? Isn’t it perfectly appro7 Engell and Dangerfield, ‘‘The Market-Model,’’ 52.

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priate that a new theory should rise and have widespread currency in the university? I will argue in response that this theory is not only too uncomfortably close to general trends in our society, such as what has happened in the humanities in the last thirty years, but also what has happened to medicine, the family, religion, and so on, but also that the theory is itself an apologia for just the dominant vice I described as taking over society and with it our universities. If the theory were true, however, we would just have to admit not only that acquisitiveness is the fundamental human motive, but that, as it was put in the 1980s, ‘‘greed is good.’’ If rational choice theory is true, then we were mistaken all these years, in all the religions and philosophies of mankind, in thinking cupidity a vice—no, rather it is our chief virtue. The full implications of that we are only beginning to learn in our society and our universities today. Yet I think a powerful argument can be mounted against rational choice theory as an adequate explanation of the human condition, and that consequently all is not lost in the defense of the intellectual and moral virtues. Before suggesting that counterargument, however, I want to talk a bit about the history of rational choice theory, because the history of something often tells us a great deal about it. I learned about this history only recently from a graduate student in the history of science at Berkeley, S. M. Amadae, who has completed a brilliant and illuminating dissertation on the history of rational choice theory, ‘‘Rational Choice Theory in Economic, Political and Policy Science, 1944–1975: A New Chapter in Economic and Political Liberalism.’’ 8 Surprisingly, this is the first attempt to write the history of this influential movement. Do you know what institution is primarily responsible for the emergence of rational choice theory after World War II? Take a guess. I’ll give you a hint—it’s not a university. No, it’s the rand Corporation. I’m sure we have all heard of the rand Corporation, but I wonder how many readers, like me, never knew exactly what it was or when it began. It began in 1946, and its most significant founder was Donald Douglas, of the Douglas Aircraft Company (thus its Santa Monica location), with the initial infusion of ten million dollars from the United States Air Force. It was an effort to maintain the collaboration of scientists, scholars, and the military after the end of World War II in a quasi-governmental, quasi-private institution. I can’t go into the whole history of rand, but it became closely associated with 8 [Now published as S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).]

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the Ford Foundation in the 1950s, and involved the participation of virtually every major contributor, in no matter what field, to the emergence of rational choice theory. To quote Amadae directly: ‘‘Locating the development of the conceptual apparatus for rational choice theory within the national security environment counters a basic myth frequently perpetuated about the origin of rational choice theory.’’ The myth, she says, consists of two parts: (1) that the idea of the rational actor in the rational choice sense was always at the heart of economics, and (2) that rational choice theory involves the export of economic models to other disciplines. The recognition of the importance of rand, however, allows for a correct understanding. She writes: This lineage [that is, the origin of rational choice theory in rand] reveals two crucial facts which are otherwise hopelessly obscured. The conceptual framework for rational choice theory was developed to solve strategic, military problems and not problems of economic modeling. Furthermore, this idea set was developed to inform policy decisions, not merely retrospectively to analyze behavior as the social sciences often claim of their own methodology. Thus, the first strategic ‘‘rational actor’’ as conceptualized in game theory and the decision sciences was a nation-state locked in the icy and treacherous grip of the Cold War. The theory of rational action had interlocking descriptive, normative, and prescriptive components, and was developed to inform action respecting nuclear strategy and complex questions of weapons procurement.

Indeed, the first real classic of rational choice theory in economics was Kenneth Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values,9 published in 1951 but written largely in 1948 when Arrow was at rand, where he had been, according to Amadae, ‘‘assigned the task of deriving a single mathematical function which would predict the collective political outcomes for the entire Soviet Union.’’ I don’t want to dispute at all that rational choice theory had become by the 1980s central in economics, nor that in recent years economic rational choice theory has had an enormous influence, particularly through the University of Chicago Economics Department, on many other fields, including my own, partly because of the direct personal relationship between the economist Gary Becker and the sociologist James Coleman at Chicago. I want to set the record straight on the origin of rational choice theory, however, by showing that it did not originate in disinterested theorizing 9 Kenneth Joseph Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: Wiley, 1951).

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in some university ivory tower but in the very practically oriented rand Corporation and that it had, in that context, as Amadae puts it, ‘‘interlocking descriptive, normative, and prescriptive components.’’ Probably the single most important theoretical source of rational choice theory was Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, published in 1944, a book which was regarded as unimportant to mainstream economists until Arrow’s work had finally been absorbed by them.10 Whatever one thinks of game theory, rational choice theory as developed at rand was prescriptive, and it did indeed determine action. Its first great empirical test came when one of its primary devotees, not a professor but a former president of the Ford Motor Company and then secretary of defense, Robert McNamara (and I won’t develop the chain which links McNamara to rand but it is a tight one), had a chance to use it as the basis of decision making in the Vietnam War. I think it is safe to say that that test was not a success. And the reason was that the North Vietnamese would not behave as rational actors are supposed to behave because they had absolute value commitments, or ideological zealotry, or whatever you want to call it, which simply was not explicable in rational actor terms. I want to suggest two things from this example. One is that rational choice theory is wrong, not because much human action cannot be explained in such terms—much human action can indeed be explained in such terms—but because all human action cannot be explained in such terms. For a theory that claims to be total, the existence of such exceptions is fatal, particularly when the decisions the theory cannot explain turn out not to be minor cases of unexplained variance, but decisions critical to the understanding of human action. Let me give you an example of the flaws of rational choice theory from my own experience. An early review of Habits of the Heart published, interestingly enough, in the Wall Street Journal, was by William Riker of the University of Rochester. Riker said, in effect, what are the authors of Habits talking about? We have traffic lights, the credit system works, who needs community? That response remained to a degree mysterious to me until I finally learned of Riker’s position as the leading American exponent of rational choice theory in political science. You may think I have gone a long way round, given that my topic is ‘‘The True Scholar,’’ but I haven’t. I hope to have shown, and could show in much greater detail if there were space, that a theory, born not in the 10 John Von Neumann, and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944).

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university but in the intense engagement of the Cold War and as a tool for the prosecution of that war, is now ensconced in the university and taught to students as scientific truth. When Gary Becker writes A Treatise on the Family 11 to show that choices involving marriage and family are explicable in terms of each individual maximizing his or her competitive, strategic, self-interest, is that a treatise about the True or the Good? Or, indeed, is it about virtue or vice? Is there any way of teaching that as though it had no practical intent? Even a student who says, ‘‘Well, I’m not really like that,’’ will conclude, ‘‘If other people are, then I had better behave in strategic terms or I will be taken advantage of.’’ Gary Becker’s wife, as we know, turned out to be one of his best students. In their divorce decree she asked for a declaration that if he won the Nobel Prize she would get half of the stipend. He, thinking that a very unlikely possibility, agreed. She won. I haven’t left much time for my counterargument, but I can think of no better place to begin than the recent book of the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals.12 De Waal argues that strategic action for the individual’s benefit as the sole or main explanation of action is not true even in the animal realm. He shows that the presence of generosity to the point of self-sacrifice, is documented for higher mammals, including not only our nearest primate relatives, but whales and dolphins as well. According to de Waal, not only sympathy and nurturing, but even a sense of justice, are things we share with higher mammals, are part of our nature. Indeed if that were not the case we would not be social—here de Waal rediscovers one of the deepest truths of sociology, namely Durkheim’s argument for the fundamentally normative nature of social existence. As de Waal puts it: ‘‘If group life is based on a social contract, it is drawn up and signed not by individual parties, but by Mother Nature. . . . Even in our species, which prides itself on free will, we may find an occasional hermit who has opted for reclusion; yet we never encounter someone who has consciously decided to become social. One cannot decide to become what one already is.’’ 13 I think the empirical evidence for the fundamentally social, and therefore normative, character of human life is overwhelming and that it is only the ideological blinders of our current cultural mood that 11 Gary Stanley Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). 12 Frans B. M. de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 13 de Waal, Good Natured, 170.

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leads so many people, including academics, to overlook it. I don’t expect to make any converts with these brief assertions, and I am fully aware of the convoluted explanations of ethical and unselfish behavior which the rational choice school can supply. I merely want to assert that those of us who would defend the intellectual and moral virtues, and judgment as the virtue where they come together, and true scholarship and a true university which is dependent on that virtue, have a lot of evidence going for us, not only in the social sciences but also in biology, not to speak of the humanities. Let me conclude by recounting an exchange between one of my ablest recent students and myself. He wrote, quoting a well-known French sociologist, that all human action is motivated by a competitive struggle to increase some form of capital. I said to him, ‘‘Is that true of you? Are you just out to increase your capital? How could I ever trust you if that were true?’’ I don’t say there was an instant conversion, but my reaction had a very sobering effect on him. It began by his saying, ‘‘I never thought of applying this theory to myself.’’ Well, theories do apply to ourselves and they have tests that are both empirical and ethical, and often it is impossible to tell where the cognitive leaves off and the ethical begins. Scholars live in a world, and the world we live in right now is dominated, as Engell and Dangerfield point out, by money. If we believe that the struggle for strategic advantage is the truth about human beings, then we should realize that we are not just teaching a scientific truth, we are preaching a gospel. We have been there before in our intellectual history and we decided that it was wrong; but a lot of things we imagined had gone away have returned in recent years. And if we don’t think that the struggle for strategic advantage is the whole truth about human beings then in our scholarship and our teaching what we say will be at the same time scientific and ethical. Put differently, that would be to begin consciously to accept that our work is governed by the virtue of judgment, at least in aspiration. That alone would be an enormous contribution in our present situation. The postmodern view that the regime of knowledge and the regime of power are the same is false, like all such absolute theories, but like many false theories it has a grain of truth: knowledge of the true and the good is always involved with power. To be true scholars we must realize that we will be engaging not with ivory tower abstractions alone but with the real world and with real consequences. The best work being done at many of our universities today, is, I believe, an expression of that realization.

22 Education for Justice and the Common Good

My title, ‘‘Education for Justice and the Common Good,’’ may seem like bringing coals to Newcastle, since Jesuit higher education has long been committed to education for justice, and a concern for the common good lies at the foundation of all Catholic social teaching. Still, I think it worthwhile taking up this subject once again, because education for justice and the common good is not something obvious in the context of American society or American higher education today. It is more intelligible in the context of Catholic higher education, with its obligation to understand and interpret a long tradition of Catholic social teaching, than it might be in other kinds of colleges and universities. But Catholic higher education in general and even Jesuit colleges and universities are not immune to the surrounding culture, so that the first answer to the question, what is education for? might well not be justice and the common good. I want to take as my text for this afternoon a passage from Decree 4 of Jesuit General Congregation 32, the document that committed the Society of Jesus to the service of faith and the promotion of justice: We should pursue and intensify the work of formation in every sphere of education. . . . We must help prepare both young people and adults to live and labor for others and with others to build a more just world. Especially we should help form our Christian students in such a way that animated by a mature faith and personally devoted to Jesus Christ, they can find Him in others and having recognized Him there, they will serve Him in their neighbor. In this way we shall contribute to the formation of those who by a kind of multiplier-effect will share in the process of educating the world itself.1 [First published in Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education 25 (Spring 2004): 28–37. Used by permission. It was based on a talk to Jesuit educators at the University of Santa Clara on October 17, 2003, and draws heavily on the work of my colleague and former coauthor William M. Sullivan, who is currently directing a study of professional education at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. See, in particular, his Work and Integrity: The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism in America, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005).] 1 Documents of the Thirty-first and Thirty-second General Congregations of the Society of Jesus (St. Louis, Mo.: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1997), 411–438, para.

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That is the meaning of education that I will want to explicate here. Let me call to your attention the verb ‘‘form’’ and the noun ‘‘formation’’ in that passage. I will return to the idea of formation in relation to issues of justice and the common good. But first I want to consider three common answers to the question, what is education for today? I’m not saying that these three answers are wrong and education as formation for justice and the common good is the right answer. Actually I believe all the answers are right, and if they are seen as rightly ordered, they are complementary and not contradictory. But I’m afraid at the moment these answers seem more like ‘‘rival versions,’’ to take a phrase from a recent book by Alasdair MacIntyre, than they do like complementary parts of a whole.2 The traditional answer to the question, what is education for?, and one very much alive and well in Jesuit higher education, is that it is for the cultivation of the liberal arts; its purpose is the formation of cultured, educated individuals with the wisdom and judgment necessary to provide leadership to the larger society. While the liberal arts curriculum includes the sciences, natural and social, its core is the literary, philosophical, and theological traditions that have for well over two thousand years allowed our ancestors to make sense of their world and to act responsibly in it. Although the liberal arts understanding of higher education has not disappeared, it has been under overt or covert attack for over a century as the answer to the question, what is education for?, and the second and third answers have been offered as substitutes for it. Since the rise of the research universities at the end of the nineteenth century, the purpose of higher education has been seen as the disciplined search for new knowledge—in a broad sense of the term, science—and not the transmission and interpretation of tradition central to classical liberal arts education. It is worth remembering that early modern natural science was pursued largely outside the universities, and that it was only late in the nineteenth century 60.109. I am indebted to Si Hendry, S.J., for this reference. This passage is beautifully explicated in ‘‘Commitment to Justice in Jesuit Higher Education,’’ a talk by Rev. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., Superior General of the Society of Jesus, delivered at Santa Clara University on October 6, 2000. It is further developed by several articles in the spring 2001 issue of Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, a copy of which was kindly sent to me by Joseph Palacios, S.J. 2 Alasdair Macintyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).

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that science began to be central in higher education. But the idea of the disciplined pursuit of new knowledge spread from the natural sciences to the other disciplines, even the humanities, as the central concern of higher education. It is interesting how this idea has been transmitted to students. I recently heard a professor of religious studies say that when he asked a variety of college students what higher education was for he got a remarkably uniform answer: it is to learn critical thinking. It is the ideal of natural science, based on universal doubt and the criticism of all received opinions that is being transmitted to students. The actual practice of ‘‘ordinary science,’’ as Thomas Kuhn taught us, is something rather different: filling in the gaps of received research traditions, something that goes on indefinitely until the next paradigm revolution occurs. But the idea of higher education as critical thinking or, simply, criticism, is widespread among students and faculty today. A third answer to the question, what is education for? is rather simple and probably dominant today: the purpose of higher education is job preparation, or more specifically, preparation to get a good job. It is not surprising that this answer makes sense for college-age young people in a society where all institutions are oriented to the bottom line and they are encouraged to look out for themselves as their main task in life. So it is natural that they think a lot about the jobs they are preparing for, especially the kind of jobs that will produce the income to make possible a good style of life. If a smattering of liberal arts and some capacity for critical thinking can be picked up along the way, then that is all to the good, but those are frills if the main purpose is job preparation. My coauthor Ann Swidler in a recent paper suggests the educational cost that is often paid by too exclusive a concern for the utilitarian benefits of higher education. She describes it as disinvestment in anything that doesn’t have fairly immediate payoff: There is also disinvestment as parents decide that college-age children should work to pay most of their expenses. I regularly teach college students who work 20 or 30 hours a week. Some cannot afford to be full-time students, but others work because neither they nor their families think of their education as an endowment worth collective sacrifice. . . . Many students take pride in having supported themselves through college, without realizing that while their efforts speak well for their character, energy, and efficiency, they are foregoing the enduring benefits of a rich, full education and the self-development it permits. Many come to think of their education in purely instrumental terms, just as they may their work lives—an accumulation

Education for Justice and the Common Good 437 of credits toward a degree that will help them in the labor market. The idea that the college years allow time for the development of deeper understanding of history, cultures, and societies outside one’s own, a deepened appreciation of one’s own history and traditions, and for reflection on the purpose and meaning of one’s life in society—the appropriation of a cultural endowment that is our birthright, won through generations of those who came before—this conception of education is all but lost.3

Here Swidler is clearly lamenting the loss of the liberal arts understanding of higher education and its replacement by a utilitarian understanding, or, to take a broader view, a practical understanding of higher education. Now where do justice and the common good as an answer to the question, what is education for? fit in to this threefold set of answers? I think we would have to say that they don’t really fit easily into any one of the three, but have implications for all of them. Certainly justice and the common good belong in the third category, properly understood, that is, they are eminently part of practical life, though not in the narrow sense of utilitarian job preparation. Justice and the common good are part of our practical participation in the world as citizens, but also very much in the occupational and professional fields as well. As I said at the beginning, I am not arguing that any of these three answers is wrong except when it becomes exclusive or severely downplays the other two. Much as I decry the invasion of the money world into higher education, I know that preparation for participation in the world of work has always been and still is a legitimate concern for higher education, especially when it grows organically out of liberal arts education and the capacity for critical thinking. To help us understand why justice and the common good are central in a broad understanding of education as job preparation let me give you, borrowing from my colleague William Sullivan, whose work I will be drawing from throughout this essay, a couple of conspicuous examples of engaged professionalism.4 Take the case of a giant pharmaceutical company whose profits derive in large part from the efficient production and sales of large quantities of a widely prescribed antibiotic drug. Because of the magnitude of the consequences, including not only deaths but lots of bad publicity 3 Ann Swidler, ‘‘Saving the Self: Endowment versus Depletion in American Institutions,’’ in Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, eds., Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 51. 4 See Sullivan, Work and Integrity, 1–30.

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and large legal costs, potentially defective or contaminated production of its drugs is not something the company can take lightly. A few years ago, the engineers responsible for the drug’s production reported to their superiors that there was a small, but statistically real possibility that some part of a major run of the drug might be contaminated. The company quickly convened a high-level meeting of managers, including the head of engineering for the drug, as well as the physician who served as medical director, and the firm’s chief legal counsel. As the facts became clear, the marketing and finance managers began to argue that so small a likelihood of adverse consequences had to be weighed against the effects on the bottom line of canceling a twelve-million-dollar production run. The engineers, for their part, pointed out that absolutely pure production was, after all, a statistical definition. The chief legal counsel fended off the issue by declaring it ‘‘medicine’s call.’’ The attention, and the pressure, then focused on the medical director. Almost as instinct, he reported, he decided that he had to invoke the classic medical norm: Do no harm. Taking a deep breath, the physician went on record as vetoing release of this batch of the drug, costing the company twelve million dollars. Subsequently, contamination was discovered in some batches of the drug, so that the company’s higher management later upheld the doctor’s judgment. In order to understand the doctor’s decision, and why it was, as he said, ‘‘almost as instinct,’’ we have to assume that it did not come simply from his having taken a course in medical ethics in medical school, or that he consulted a handbook of decision making prepared by a philosophical ethicist. Rather, it was his character, formed in family, church, and college, as well as in medical school, that he was drawing on, a character that had internalized the virtues, and, in particular, the virtue of justice and a concern for the common good. A second example: In the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster of September 11, 2001, perhaps no one experienced the tragedy more intimately than one of the building’s designers, the structural engineer Leslie E. Robertson.5 A former principal in the engineering firm that had partnered with the architects of the Twin Towers in the 1960s, Robertson described his situation this way: ‘‘The World Trade Center was a team effort, but the collapse of the World Trade Center is my responsibility, and that’s the way I feel about it.’’ Structural engineers work with architects to enable complex buildings to stand and function. They also work 5 The following quotations from Robertson are reported in an article about him by John Seabrook, ‘‘Tower Builder,’’ New Yorker, November 19, 2001, pp. 64–73.

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with both architects and firefighters to define and implement standards for public safety in buildings. In the case of the World Trade Center, the design had represented a relatively untested novelty in the 1960s. The buildings consisted of an outer steel tube linked to an inner core that carried the building’s functional infrastructure by lightweight floor trusses. The novelty of no interior bearing walls was made possible by the progress in materials engineering that followed World War Two. Inside, the wtc towers contained vast, completely open office spaces on every floor. In the attacks, it was just those open floors, and the use of lightweight fireretardant covering on the trusses instead of heavier concrete, that permitted the rapid spread of the fire. (Famously, Robertson had taken into account a Boeing 707’s probable impact on the structure. But, of course, the huge heat of the fire produced by the explosion of a much bigger plane was beyond those calculations.) ‘‘Remember,’’ Robertson pointed out, ‘‘this wasn’t a corporate headquarters—a monument building. It was a profitmaking proposition.’’ The predicament for structural engineers such as Robertson is that in planning and design, as well as in the setting of minimal safety standards, the participants all work within ‘‘an economy of wealth, image, and fame’’ that strains against the engineer’s commitment to safe structures. In fact, though, ‘‘A lot of things worked well—people got out,’’ continued Robertson. ‘‘I guess I’m proud of that.’’ At the same time, the dimensions of the tragedy have continued to haunt him. ‘‘It’s a tremendous responsibility, being an engineer. It’s not so beautiful as science. I have a lot of tough nights. . . . I go to sleep for a little bit, but I wake up thinking—I have so many thoughts.’’ What bothers this engineer, in spite of the fact that the buildings stood long enough for the great majority of the occupants to escape, are the questions, did I act rightly, did I act justly, was I thinking enough about everyone who would inhabit these buildings, when I was designing the building? Sullivan argues that the kind of engagement shown by these two professionals exhibits what can be called ‘‘civic professionalism.’’ This is the practice of a profession in which technical expertise and judgment are deployed not only resourcefully but for public-regarding ends and in a publicregarding way. Thus beyond expertise, and certainly beyond the question of profit, the professional must ask, Is this right? Is this just? What are the public implications of what I am doing? Unfortunately, too often professionals don’t ask those questions—one thinks of those responsible for the design of the Ford Pinto, or recently, the executives at Enron or Arthur Anderson. But it is the responsibility of higher education, as it prepares

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people to enter the occupational world, to try to make sure that they always do ask those questions, that they never let the bottom line determine all the decisions. Our common life, our common safety, depends on that kind of job preparation, which is indeed academic, but never ‘‘just academic.’’ As I have already implied, I don’t want to use these examples as an argument for adding ethics courses in professional education or even in undergraduate education, as though ethics is some kind of technical fix that we can just add on to the existing ‘‘education industry.’’ A deep concern for justice and the common good as part of one’s character is not an add-on that can be attained from a one-shot course in ethics. Rather it is a matter of what has traditionally been called formation. In the Catholic tradition formation has been used particularly for the process of entering the religious life, becoming a priest or a nun, but it really applies more generally to all of us as we learn what it is to become a responsible adult. William Sullivan, in his work as director of the professional education project of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has discovered that in theological education the question of ‘‘formation’’ has become increasingly salient.6 The need for such a term arose from changing demographics among aspirants to the ministry, priesthood, and rabbinate. Traditionally, candidates for the clergy came from families with long experience in the religious tradition for which the candidate was being trained. Such candidates possessed what is sometimes termed ‘‘tacit knowledge’’ or experiential knowledge of the particular religious tradition. In recent decades, however, increasing numbers of men and women are coming to seminaries with much less informal exposure to traditional religious practice. They lack long familiarity with the mores and sensibility of the community that they are being prepared to lead. Or, to put it differently, they have not been ‘‘formed’’ by life experience so that they can feel the community’s tradition as ‘‘second nature.’’ To address this perceived lack of intuitive engagement, some denominations have developed, as part of professional preparation, self-conscious pedagogies of immersion in the community’s ethos and ways. The aim of such efforts is to shape or form, consciously, a deep engagement with the central practices and meanings thought to be necessary for anyone aspiring to religious leadership in that community. Without such deep, intuitive understanding, it is thought, clergy are not able to function effectively. I want to argue that if this is a problem for theological education, it is also a problem for college education. We can no longer, if we ever could, 6 See Sullivan, Work and Integrity, 217–221.

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assume very much about the formation our students have received before they come to us. Neither the family nor primary and secondary education seem to be doing a very good job these days in this regard. I remember some years ago a sociologist at the College of Notre Dame on the peninsula consulted me about a study she was doing of family traditions of Catholic spirituality. In her interviews with practicing Catholics in good standing in their parishes she asked about their family traditions and was told almost uniformly, ‘‘We don’t have any traditions, sister, but we’d love it if you’d teach us some.’’ Bill Sullivan, who taught for some years at LaSalle University in Philadelphia before going to the Carnegie Foundation, told me how frustrating it was in teaching courses on Augustine and Thomas to find that his students, most of whom had had parochial school education and had gone to mass most of their lives, knew virtually nothing about the Christian tradition, not even the Bible, that they had presumably heard read every week of their lives. Just in one ear and out the other, or perhaps television had usurped the space where religious formation might have occurred. But I’m afraid these specifically Catholic examples are only the tip of the iceberg. Those of us who have taught at a secular institution such as the University of California at Berkeley have found a remarkable lack of what social scientists call ‘‘cultural capital’’ in the students coming to us from secondary school. And it’s not only in class that we find formation lacking. The ballooning of student services budgets in recent years is due to the fact that students bring behavior difficulties with them to college that have not been resolved in their earlier years. What I am suggesting is that whether we like it or not, or even whether we understand it or not, formation is more than ever a central aspect of college education today. And if we consider where formation might occur, while for Catholic students in a Catholic college a program in Catholic studies might make sense, more generally it must be through the liberal arts curriculum that formation takes place. Indeed at the core of liberal education, as Sullivan has pointed out, is what the classical Greeks called paideia, the same word they used for what we call ‘‘culture.’’ When Cicero translated that term into Latin, he coined the word humanitas. The Latin word conveys something of the existential flavor of the Greek original. This kind of education is above all a kind of shaping of the person. Knowledge is a result of ‘‘reason,’’ understood as insight into the structure of reality, and the cosmos is understood as a meaningful order of value. Thus, education is a kind of reflexive training of insight, allowing the student to gradually grasp—and imitate—the order of the whole. Historically, this was the animating ideal of education and

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knowledge embedded in the classical heritage. Appropriated, with modifications, by historic Christianity, it received its American institutional form in the liberal arts curriculum taught in the liberal arts college. I think one of the great advantages that Jesuit institutions have is that this understanding of liberal arts education still makes (some kind of?) sense to you. In secular and particularly in public universities this whole idea has come under increasing attack. First of all there is the attack on the very idea of a canon, without which liberal arts education makes no sense at all, but the questions, whose canon? who decides the canon? why isn’t the canon more inclusive? and so on, are serious questions and must be answered. Canons have always changed and obviously must continue to do so, but throwing out the idea of a canon altogether is simply a total abdication of responsibility; it would be the end of liberal arts education. The second attack on the liberal arts idea overlaps with the first, though its roots are deeper than political correctness. This is the objection that we now know so much that we could never teach it all, so we shouldn’t even try to teach substance, but only methods. While it is true enough that we now have the canons of all the great traditions available to us and the problem of selection is prodigious, I believe that the real basis for this argument comes from the second understanding of higher education that I discussed at the beginning, that is, that the basis of higher education is not in the liberal arts but in science, and the emphasis above all is on ‘‘critical thinking.’’ I might take as an example my alma mater, Harvard College. As an undergraduate I had the benefit of the general education program that was put in effect in the immediate years after World War II, an effort to include liberal arts education in a great research university. But thirty years later the general education curriculum no longer made sense to the Harvard faculty and was replaced by what was called the core curriculum (like the general education curriculum, widely imitated elsewhere). What the core curriculum did was to substitute method for substance. Thus when Martha Nussbaum, then teaching at Harvard, wanted to offer a course on the ethics of Plato and Aristotle in the humanities part of the core curriculum, the course was rejected. Nussbaum was told that they didn’t want a course on Plato and Aristotle but a course on ‘‘moral reasoning,’’ so she resubmitted her course under the title ‘‘The Moral Reasoning of Plato and Aristotle’’ and it was accepted. I gather that now, under President Summers, the wheel is turning once again as he argues for a return of ‘‘substance’’ to the undergraduate curriculum, though I’m not at all sure what kind of substance he has in mind.

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Nonetheless, this second model for higher education, which the Harvard core curriculum was taking as normative, derives from the Enlightenment’s notion that genuine knowledge is Wissenschaft or ‘‘science,’’ and I’m afraid that the substance Summers has in mind is just more science. In this view reason no longer means insight into a value-laden structure of nature. Instead, reason is identified with procedures for the testing— and correcting—of claims to truth. Hence, rational education is not about shaping the self in relation to the world, not about such things as justice and the common good. Rather, it consists in learning to test and criticize beliefs with the object of building up a body of well-established ‘‘facts’’ and principles or laws of how things work. In this view through the use of appropriate methods we accumulate valuable information. Such a scientific education shapes a detached, critical mind, not an engaged one. The scholar, in so far as he or she is a scholar, should be, to use Max Weber’s term, value neutral. If this kind of education does not grow organically out of a notion of liberal arts as formation, it also does not eventuate in ethical practice. About what is called ‘‘policy,’’ science must remain agnostic. It supplies only information to those with the responsibility to ‘‘apply’’ it. However inadequate I think this second model of higher education as science is, I don’t in the least want to deny its achievements, or its educational value. Indeed freeing science from the embrace of metaphysics and theology was a necessary precondition for its healthy development. Approaching nature with objectivity and distance has proved enormously fruitful in the production of accurate information. It has also provided new powers to control and transform the natural processes understood in this way, as the achievements of modern technology powerfully demonstrate. The neat, bounded quality of the observer’s stance is one of the charms of scientific theory. The pursuit of science provides a sense of security, so welcome compared to the uncertainty and anxiety of decision that pervades the realm of practice. To a greater or lesser degree the disciplined knowing that is characteristic of science dominates the disciplines that make up the university curriculum, and it is part of our responsibility as scholars to communicate that to our students. But in the broader perspective of liberal arts education, it is important to remember that science can produce information but not meaning. What characterizes the humanities, however, in at least partial contrast to the natural and social sciences, is the centrality of issues of meaning. In the humanities too, we need ‘‘knowledge about’’ but that is always secondary to ‘‘the meaning of.’’ In his famous essay ‘‘Science as a Vocation’’

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Max Weber wrote, ‘‘Who—aside from certain big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences—still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world?’’ He goes on to quote Tolstoy approvingly when the latter said, ‘‘Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ ’’ 7 But these are just the questions that higher education as liberal arts must face. If, in our desire to avoid indoctrination, we deprive our students of the knowledge of how the great traditions have answered these questions we are surely short-changing them. We are giving them no help with the questions that precede and follow scientific inquiry.We are avoiding the question, why should I study this in the first place, why should I study this instead of that? We are avoiding the question of what to do with scientific knowledge once it is attained. And above all we are giving them no help in trying to make sense of their lives. In the face of this situation, Sullivan suggests an understanding of a modern version of higher education as involving a threefold circuit. The starting point is the formation that begins in childhood and secondary education but continues more critically and reflexively in the humanities and humanistic social science curriculum. Here formation means the understanding of self and world, of the meaning and value of society and nature, and of the kind of person who is courageous, moderate, just, wise, and responsible, in a word, virtuous. The second movement of higher education is disciplinary and is concerned with methods, analysis, and criticism. The relation between the first and second movements should ideally be dialectical: formation does not, I hope, mean the creation of fundamentalists who know all the answers, but of persons with a sense of the meaning and value of life who are also open to criticism, even of their most basic beliefs, where new facts seem to demand it. Nor should we be producing scientists who are so wedded to positivistic methods that they can never ask the questions of the value relevance of their research. The third movement in this threefold circuit is, as I suggested at the beginning, practice, not in the utilitarian sense, but in the Aristotelian sense of practical reason, which involves ethics as much as expertise. In one sense practice is more the focus of professional education than of college education, but the third movement can’t wait until professional school; it 7 Max Weber, ‘‘Science as a Vocation,’’ in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 143.

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already begins in college. Service learning is one obvious example. Studies have shown that when service learning is done on a purely individual basis, an accumulation of volunteer hours to put on one’s resume, it has little educational effect. But where service learning is integrated into actual course work, where it is done together with others, and, above all, where it takes place in a context of ongoing reflection about the meaning and value of the work, it can have life-changing consequences. In terms of my argument, service learning as part of the threefold circuit of modern liberal arts education can be a powerful kind of teaching and a powerful expression of education for justice, but without that context it amounts to little. There is a danger of thinking of the practical moment too narrowly in terms of something like service learning. That would approximate just the dichotomy between theory and application that I believe needs to be avoided. In humanities classes we are always confronting students with implications for their own lives.When I used to teach the sociology of religion, I used a comparative and historical framework in which I tried to explain the various traditions, as their adherents understood them, before analyzing them sociologically. One day after a class when I had tried to set forth the Confucian understanding of the world, with some passion, I admit, because I find it attractive, a student dropped a note on my desk as he was leaving class.When I opened and read it, it said, ‘‘Scratch one Presbyterian, add one Confucian.’’ I wasn’t trying to convert anyone. I was just doing what a teacher of Plato or Shakespeare would do—try to get the student to understand the material. How can we criticize what we don’t understand? But I was not sorry that this student ‘‘got it’’ that Confucianism is a serious existential position well worth considering in the framework of one’s own life. In the social sciences, however much we claim value neutrality, most of us with any insight into what we are doing, know that we are seldom neutral.When we teach about poverty, or gender, or race do we not usually imply that the facts we have uncovered suggest all is not well, that things could be better than they are? And in the natural sciences I think things are not so different. One of our most influential living biologists, E. O. Wilson, has argued fervently for biodiversity and the ecological cause. It is hard for those who study gorillas or chimpanzees in the wild not to become active in the effort to preserve them. Atomic scientists have been famously concerned about the danger of atomic weapons, and so on down the line. In short, in every field in the college curriculum we would really have to work hard to avoid communicating to students that there are practical implications of what we are teaching, that questions of justice and the

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common good are intrinsic to our subject matter. Of course we must avoid indoctrination, but raising questions that all of us as citizens must try to answer is part of our job. To sum up the threefold circuit that could characterize a modern liberal arts education we can think of it as characterized by three phases: the formative, the critical or scientific, and the performative. These are not just three ‘‘rival versions,’’ or three kinds of enterprise going on side by side, though often they are viewed that way. It is the essence of thinking of higher education as practical reason in the Aristotelian sense that we see these as three mutually engaged phases. If, on the other hand, we remain fixated on one of the phases, various kinds of pathology ensue. If we think our obligation is exclusively to tradition, we lose the sense of a living tradition responding to the world and become traditionalists, devoted more to the defense of embalmed texts than to their possible current application. Or if we are devoted to the critical or scientific phase alone, we run the risk of cynicism on the one hand, or positivism on the other, as though ‘‘the facts’’ ever speak for themselves. To be fixated on the performative phase is to imagine that the moral issues are clear and our only obligation is to act, a position one might call romantic activism, one all too attractive, I’m afraid, to students in time of stress. In remembering that the three phases should always go together, I think your Catholic tradition provides you with something that is largely lacking in the secular education dominated by positivism: namely, the practical syllogism. If the major premise is that human rights are to be respected and the minor premise is that in some situation human rights are being violated, then the logical conclusion is not just about knowledge but about action.What is the just thing to do about it? The practical syllogism doesn’t tell us what to do about the situation. For that we need all the wisdom and all the knowledge and all the judgment we can bring to bear on it. But the practical syllogism tells us we can’t just stand idly by. Often the reality is, we can’t do much; but the obligation to do what we can remains. It is here that we must bring our commitment to justice and the common good to bear. In concluding let me suggest that there is a very big practical syllogism that faces all of us in American higher education: the syllogism of globalization, one that raises the problem of justice and the common good to the nth degree. We live in a world where globalization is going on relentlessly at many levels and in many ways and we Americans are at the center of it. One way of thinking about our present situation, in which the United States is the cultural model, the economic dynamo, and the only military super-

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power, is that globalization is really a new kind of empire, foreshadowed only by the Rome of two millennia ago and Britain in the nineteenth century. Talk of empire became widespread in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. President Bush’s report entitled ‘‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,’’ issued in September of 2002, seemed to reinforce this idea when he declared that we would maintain military predominance everywhere in the world and would permit no nation to become militarily competitive with us. That assertion of absolute military dominance, combined with Bush’s stunning promise to ‘‘rid the world of evil,’’ did indeed seem to imply a kind of world empire unheard of before. The history of all previous empires unfolds in three stages: expansion, overextension, and collapse.What usually takes decades or centuries to unfold seems to have overtaken our country in a matter of months. A year ago we were told that American military power was so great that we could intervene anywhere and fight several wars at once. The collapse of the Iraqi army following our ‘‘shock and awe’’ tactics seemed briefly to confirm that assertion. But though shock and awe destroyed the Iraqi army, it did not destroy Iraqi resistance and now, several months later, we find ourselves seriously overextended and badly in need of help from others in the form of troops and money. It is too soon to speak of collapse, but arrogance has declined dramatically in tandem with growing world disapproval and falling poll numbers at home. The word ‘‘empire’’ doesn’t trip from the tongue quite as easily as it did even a few months ago. But that America is not as omnipotent as its leaders only recently proclaimed, does not mean that we are not still the greatest power in the world, economically and culturally, as well as militarily. Americans, like the Romans and the British before us, cannot just think about problems within our own society. Since we dominate the world, not absolutely but still enormously, we are responsible for the world we dominate. That, I think, is the greatest challenge for American education today. American dominance is not new. We have been the strongest power in the world since World War II. But for most of that period we were challenged by another great superpower and another kind of social system: the Soviet Union and world communism. A bipolar world has a particularly good fit with the American psyche. Moral splitting into good and evil is a general human temptation, but nowhere more than in the tradition of dissenting Protestantism that is so central to American culture. In the early days of the Cold War Reinhold Niebuhr warned us of the temptation to see ourselves as the children of light and the other guys as the children of darkness. In those days we called ourselves and our friends

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‘‘the free world’’ and the other side the ‘‘evil empire.’’ It was a great simplification, especially since the definition of the free world depended more on who was anticommunist than on whether their institutions were free or not. Nonetheless, there was a rough reality in that particular kind of splitting. A recent New Yorker cartoon showed a husband speaking to his wife saying, ‘‘Who would have ever thought the Cold War would be the good old days?’’ The fall of the evil empire, however, did not bring sweetness and light; in many ways the world became more chaotic not less in the years since 1989. The fact that the door on which we had been leaning for forty-five years finally and unexpectedly flew open led more to confusion than to a sense of triumph. The world was still a dangerous place, but how were we to understand it? Who are the bad guys now? Through most of the nineties we floundered about trying to find an answer. 9/11 changed all that. It was now clear who the bad guys are: they are the terrorists, and we, as usual are the good guys who will ‘‘win the war on terrorism.’’ But who are the terrorists? Since many of them are Muslims, it is tempting to equate terrorism with Islam. Even though our government has gone out of its way to distinguish the ‘‘good’’ Muslims from the terrorists, many things we have done and said, including several times when our president used the unfortunate word ‘‘crusade,’’ have led many in the Muslim world to believe we really are at war with Islam. It doesn’t help at all that we have a very inadequate idea of what Islam is. In our eagerness not to appear anti-Muslim, we have tended to think that Muslims can be divided into religious zealots who are terrorists and the good Muslims who are just like us, just waiting for the opportunity to embrace capitalism and democracy, American style. But the truth is that Islam is a very large and diverse religion and most of its followers don’t fall on either side of our dichotomy. They aren’t terrorists, but they don’t want to become Americans either, nor are they happy to see a Christian nation occupying a central area of the Muslim world. My point is that the simple dichotomy of the free world versus communism, inadequate though it was, had a certain validity. Our present exercise in moral splitting, however, is wholly inadequate and is leading us into major mistakes and blunders. Our challenge as educators is how to help create a knowledgeable citizenry with a realistic understanding of the economic, political, and, above all, cultural complexity of the world in which we live. The future of the world is much more in the hands of the United States (and to some extent Europe and East Asia) than in the hands of alQaeda, or indeed the poorer nations of the earth. The kind of government

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we elect can lead the world into a new comity or blunder into one disaster after another. As we know, Americans tend to vote their pocketbook, and leave ‘‘foreign policy’’ as an afterthought. But we are now so much part of the world that there is little distinction between foreign and domestic policy. If we have to spend eighty-seven billion dollars on Iraq now, and how much more in a few months, then our own economy is going to be severely affected. Our ignorance of the history, culture and religion of the Middle East is inexcusable, even in terms of our narrow self-interest. And how much do we know about Africa, or even East Asia for that matter?—places where serious challenges to us and to the world are already developing. It’s not just cognitive knowledge that we need, though we are woefully short on that. It is also moral insight, and here too, Americans are sharply limited. Our central tradition makes us think of justice only in terms of individual rights and, outside the Catholic community, we have little understanding of the common good at all. Human rights as a set of norms are accepted all over the world, but in most of the world, and in Catholic social teachings, human rights include many social rights: the right to a decent standard of living, a good job, health care, and so on. Only the United States has failed to ratify the United Nations protocol on social and economic rights, because our ontological individualism prevents us from even seeing them as fundamental rights. In our foreign policy we have of late acted like a lone cowboy, not building a general consensus, but declaring those who disagree with us to be ‘‘irrelevant.’’ It is already clear that the United States cannot run the world alone on the basis simply of our overwhelming military power. But how do we even think about justice and the common good in ways that will strengthen international institutions and really make the world a safer and happier place? In short, how, in this deeply provincial nation, do we educate citizens responsible for the whole world? But if an effective liberal arts education cannot at least try to face the question of justice and the common good in a globalized world, what good will it be?

Part IV S O C I O LO G Y A N D T H E O LO G Y

Most scholars, even practicing members of their religious communions, would not bring interpretations of their faith into a collection of scholarly articles, unless, indeed, they were theologians. At the very least, most of us would simply say, ‘‘Theology is not my field.’’ The chapters collected in this section are very much the work of a sociologist, but also of a Christian, an ecumenical one with broad sympathies with other faiths. If the chapters in part III involved an effort to challenge the fact–value split, the chapters in part IV involve an effort to challenge the faith–knowledge split. As boundary crossings go, that is an even more difficult one than the boundary between fact and value. It is taken for granted by most in the university, not only by secularists but by believers as well, that the secular realm is neutral, open to all, whereas the religious realm is, what? Sectarian? Perhaps what is really implied is private, not open to public inspection. After all, secular discussions are based on reason, religious ones on revelation. It is that distinction that needs challenging. Some paragraphs from Bellah’s response to a talk by Jürgen Habermas, ‘‘Religion in the Public Sphere,’’ indicate how: In discussions of religion in the public sphere it is often said that religious positions, insofar as they are based on revelation, belong outside the public sphere, whereas secular views that are open to rational argument belong inside the public sphere. I would like to raise a serious question about this kind of contrast between reason and revelation. I would argue that if we see revelation, as I think we must, as a kind of transforming encounter, then strong secular views are often also derived from a kind of revelation. In one of the talks he gave in Kyoto Professor Habermas referred to philosophical ‘‘classics,’’ works that remain contemporary regardless of when they were written, with one of his wonderful metaphors. He said, ‘‘The thoughts of a classic thinker are like the molten core beneath a volcano,’’ whereas their lives are merely like the hardened lava on the outside of the volcano. In the first place I would argue that those who have encountered the ‘‘molten core’’ of the thoughts of a classic philosopher have often been transformed in a way similar to those

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who have received a religious revelation. But I must also challenge Habermas’s argument in the same talk that the lives of philosophers are much less important than their thoughts. That may often be true, but he unaccountably ignores the great exception. Although for centuries when scholars mentioned the philosopher, they meant Aristotle, and Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato, it is not Plato or Aristotle who has been the very embodiment of philosophy through most of Western history, but Socrates, who never wrote a word, but whose life, and above all, whose death have provided the great encounter that is at the very heart of the philosophical tradition. The several Platonic dialogues that recount the trial and death of Socrates have been the New Testament of philosophy so to speak. It was the willingness of Socrates to die for his beliefs and for the city of Athens, of which he was proud to be a citizen, that helped to shape the very ideal of a life of inquiry. And Plato was telling his Greek audience, ‘‘Don’t look at Achilles, the beautiful, athletic, murderous narcissist, as the ideal of the good life, but at this old, ugly stonemason who devoted his life to trying to get his fellow citizens to face the truth about their lives, and was willing to die for his mission. He is the one who can show us how to live.’’ But if philosophy has the moral equivalent of revelation, religious revelation, I would argue, has always cried out for reason. Habermas himself has a remarkable commentary on the first of the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses, ‘‘You shall have no gods but me’’: ‘‘From a philosophical point of view, the first commandment expresses that ‘leap forward’ on the cognitive level which granted man freedom of reflection, the strength to detach himself from vacillating immediacy, to emancipate himself from his generational shackles and the whims of mythical powers.’’ 1 What could be more quintessentially revelation than the Ten Commandments, yet Habermas finds the very germ of reason in the first of the ten. Further, Habermas has also found the germ of Western individuality in the form of the encounter between God and Moses: ‘‘You shall have no other gods . . . .’’ The King James Version says, ‘‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’’ using the archaic English second person singular, the German du. Yes, through Moses, the commandments are addressed to the children of Israel, and ultimately to all human beings, yet they are addressed to each Israelite or each human being individually. Not, of course, that the individual is isolated, but rather taken up and included in a defining relationship with the Lord of the universe. The utterly so-

1 Quoted in Sandro Magister, ‘‘The Church Is under Siege, but Habermas, the Atheist, Is Coming to Its Defense,’’ at http://www.chiesa.org.

Part IV. Sociology and Theology 453 cial and the utterly individual come together indissolubly, in the words of the great commandments. So, I would ask, where is the dogma that defies argument? The transforming encounter, whether secular or religious, has a validity all its own, one that is not rationally deduced, but simply is. A reader of an Ayn Rand novel who suddenly sees that the only thing in life worth doing is pursuing his or her own self-interest, is as immune to reason as the thunderstruck children of Israel at the moment of the reception of the Ten Commandments. But no sooner has the transforming encounter occurred than the argument begins. Even the grammar of the first commandment has led to a great deal of argument, so that its exact meaning is still in controversy. Nor can we with complete certainty interpret what it meant at the time the text was written down. And how it should be applied, then, now, or ever, is a source of never-ending controversy. The hermeneutic enterprise as described by Hans-Georg Gadamer, with its three moments of understanding, interpretation, and application, requires rational argument at every stage. Since the religious life is no more lacking in rational argument than any other sphere of human life, whenever religious views are expressed that bear on issues in the public sphere, it is legitimate to argue with them not only in terms of their implications for the common life, but also as to the adequacy of their expression of religious truth.2

The chapters in this section deal with several aspects of religious belief. Chapter 23, ‘‘On Being Catholic and American,’’ already suggests a kind of boundary crossing within the religious realm, for how, without crossing a boundary that would once have seemed uncrossable, can one raised in the high Protestant tradition of Presbyterianism speak sympathetically to a Catholic audience about Catholic identity? The key here is not a matter of denominational loyalty, but a concern with the Christian tradition as a whole, of which the Catholic and Protestant churches today are parts. Chapter 15 in part II, ‘‘Flaws in the Protestant Code,’’ indicates a growing sympathy with what Andrew Greeley describes as ‘‘the Catholic imagination.’’ 3 Even so, both the essays and the sermons in part IV give evidence of 2 From Robert N. Bellah, ‘‘Response’’ to ‘‘Religion in the Public Sphere,’’ by Jürgen Habermas, both talk and response given at the Kyoto Laureate Symposium, University of San Diego, March 4, 2005. Habermas and Bellah are old friends and found more to agree with than to disagree about in this exchange, though, needless to say, their views are not identical. 3 Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

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what Paul Tillich called ‘‘the Protestant principle,’’ as well as of Catholic substance. Chapter 24, ‘‘Religious Pluralism and Religious Truth’’ starts from the fact that in any search for truth the knower is always involved with the known from the very beginning. It is not that we cannot know ‘‘what is really there,’’ but that the situation of the knower is always part of any apprehension of reality. This insight is then applied to Christian claims to religious truth relative to the claims of other religions, using the work of the theologian-sociologist H. Richard Niebuhr in an effort to deal with the problem. The argument is once again an effort to cross boundaries without leaving anything behind, not always possible to be sure. Chapter 25, ‘‘Texts, Sacred and Profane,’’ suggests that the problem of religious canons can be generalized to cultural canons that are not explicitly religious, and that the idea of a canon is indispensable, though its contents are open to revision. Even the apparently closed canons of biblical religion have in fact varied in emphasis and interpretation over the centuries and are still contested today. Canons are and have always been loci of contestation, but abandoning canons means in fact to commit cultural suicide. Since canons claim to be authoritative, the very idea of a canon raises the issue of authority that is often so troubling to the secular mind. Chapter 20 in part III, ‘‘Freedom, Coercion, and Authority,’’ argues that authority is based on reference to a normative order, a conception of the good, and that both individual freedom and social coherence depend on those willing to take responsibility for that normative order. Neither a religion nor a secular ethic can survive without those willing to take authority in this sense. Such authority must always be open to challenge, and must be willing to ‘‘redeem’’ its cognitive and ethical ‘‘claims’’ with arguments, as Habermas would put it. Authority closed to challenge is no healthier in religious life than in secular life, but authority open to argument is equally indispensable in both. The three sermons that close this book are offered as examples of how one can speak from within a religious tradition without abandoning the critical distance of a scholar, in this case a sociologist. If one believes that religion is an indelibly private matter, then it might be helpful to have the reflections of a psychologist, but the sociologist would not have much to say. But if one believes that religion is intrinsically and inescapably social, then theological reflection will always be, however implicitly, sociological. These sermons are examples of theological reflections that are explicitly sociological.While they are addressed to Christian congregations, and

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involve the explication of biblical texts, they treat matters of such general human concern that they may well have something to say to believers in other religions or in no religion at all. If they succeed as Christian reflections open to public argument then they will have justified their inclusion in this book.

23 On Being Catholic and American

How is it that a Protestant, of Scotch-Irish descent, who is undoubtedly related, if you go back far enough, to those dreadful people who go around marching in Northern Ireland every summer, should be standing before you speaking on the subject ‘‘On Being Catholic and American’’? That very fact may be an indication of where we are in this matter. If there had been no Vatican II there would probably not have been a Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, at least not one that included both Catholic and Protestant schools, and I would not have spent over thirty years working closely with Catholic professors and students as an adjunct professor at the gtu. There is also the fact that three of my four coauthors of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society were raised Catholic and not only that but each in his own way had a serious experience of the religious life, most notably Richard Madsen who was a Maryknoll father for years and is still a close advisor to the Maryknoll order. So I have been pretty well socialized into what Andrew Greeley calls ‘‘the Catholic imagination’’ over the years.1 And finally, there is the fact that, though I was raised a Presbyterian, my own intellectual and spiritual development has led me to the Episcopal Church, which, while not Catholic, is not exactly Protestant either. Hans Kung in his book Christianity: Essence, History and Future, after discussing the Anglican Church as a kind of middle way between Catholicism and the Reformation says that perhaps ‘‘the whole of the Catholic church could have looked like this’’ if there had been a compromise between Luther and Rome in the sixteenth century: that is, an international communion (he points out that among Protestants only the Anglicans have a real world-wide communion), but considerably decentralized and allowing for a great deal of diversity at the national level, within the context of a [First published in Mary K. McCullough, ed., Fire and Ice: Imagination and Intellect in the Catholic Tradition (Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press, 2003), 29–47. Used by permission. It was first given as a talk at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, on May 16, 2000.] 1 Andrew M. Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

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if it is thinkable at all, but for me it has a certain charm. While there is no golden age that we can look back to with nostalgia, and it is also true that throughout the history of the church there have been potential or actual conflicts, heresies, and schisms, it is the case that up until the sixteenth century Catholicism was largely synonymous with Western culture, whereas since that time the Church, though remaining a significant cultural force, has had to deal with challenges, alternatives and rivals. It might be well to sketch briefly the several waves of modernity in which these alternatives have been expressed. There was first of all the Protestant Reformation itself, which I, following Weber, see as the single most important moment leading to modernity. The great project of modernity was the leap into freedom. The first step was the claim to spiritual freedom: that individuals can relate directly to God without any mediation. The Reformers saw many Catholic beliefs and practices as forms of magical mediation, and thus attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation, the veneration of saints, and other traditional practices that they deemed magical. In their fear of idolatry they, in effect, pushed God out of the world into radical transcendence. With the doctrine of predestination Calvin (or if not Calvin, as some scholars now believe, then some of his followers) described a God who had preordained everything that can occur before the beginning of time. It was natural for some philosophers and scientists to move from that idea to a deterministic physical universe without a personal God at all: ‘‘I have no need of that hypothesis,’’ as one of them said. So Calvin’s powerful doctrine of divine transcendence paradoxically opened the door to atheistic naturalism. To the extent that the Reformation led to a renewed emphasis on the enfranchisement of the laity, the priesthood of all believers, it was a fulfillment of Christian teachings. And the idea of the priesthood of all believers did help subjects to become citizens when changes in church polity stimulated changes in national polity. But the suspicion of any form of mediation led to a weakening of the very idea of the church itself. The Enlightenment leapt further into freedom, imagining that we could live by disembodied reason alone. But the next turn in the process of emancipation was the disembedding of the economy from traditional constraints, and the consequent depletion of all those institutions that formerly 2 Hans Kung, Christianity: Essence, History and Future (New York: Continuum 1995), 596.

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protected the lifeworld. In the capitalist world the individual was left more alone than ever and vulnerable to the great ideological movements that swept the world in the twentieth century, movements that falsely promised security in an increasingly insecure world. At least in the United States a dynamic, open, and affluent society was able, for a long time, to slow the corrosive effects of modernization. But we have now entered a third wave of modernity, characterized by postmodernity at the level of high culture and the collapse of existing solidarities throughout the social system, the emergence of loose connections and porous institutions that Robert Wuthnow, Robert Putnam, and others have described. Our rather fragile affluence at the moment papers over the deep tears in our social fabric, but any serious challenge would reveal how incoherent our society has become. It is in this context that I want to consider what the Catholic tradition in America has to say to its own adherents and to the larger society. Here I would affirm Charles Taylor’s position in his address ‘‘A Catholic Modernity?’’ Namely, that neither a Catholic modernism that jettisons major aspects of the tradition in order to appear contemporary nor a Catholic integralism that imagines a total rejection of the modern world are viable alternatives. Only by appreciating the genuine achievements of modernity, Taylor argues, will we be in a position to criticize adequately its weaknesses and its failings. Only in a genuine dialogue with modernity can Catholics and other believers hope to alter its course. As Taylor writes: The view I’d like to defend, if I can put it in a nutshell, is that in modern, secularist culture there are mingled together both authentic developments of the gospel, of an incarnational mode of life, and also a closing off to God that negates the gospel. The notion is that modern culture, in breaking with the structures and beliefs of Christendom, also carries certain facets of Christian life further than they ever were taken or could have been taken within Christendom. In relation to the earlier forms of Christian culture, we have to face the humbling realization that the breakout was a necessary condition of the development.3

As examples of the achievements of modernity Taylor cites universal human rights and the appreciation of ordinary life. But, Taylor warns, a radically secularist view which denies that rights and life come from anything 3 Charles Taylor, ‘‘A Catholic Modernity?’’ in James L. Heft, ed., A Catholic Modernity? Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture, with Responses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 16.

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beyond rights and life endangers the very achievements of modernity and cries out for a deeper understanding of the human condition in relation to God. There is much more to be said about modernity and its pitfalls, and much more about the problems of contemporary American society; I have addressed these problems elsewhere. Here I want to focus on intellectual life and its embodiment in American universities. It is common for people in my position to discuss the positivism, scientism, naturalism, and reductionism that have become so central in our intellectual life and in the academy. Much as I see those as critically important issues, I think we need to go back further, especially in the American case, to the heritage of the Reformation which lies behind, and not very far behind, the Enlightenment and its subsequent developments, and which has deeply influenced the American university. I want to make the argument, with the help of David Tracy, that the Christian theological tradition has included both analogy and dialectic, and that they are mutually corrective. Oversimplifying Tracy’s complex argument, the analogical imagination sees similarities in the relationship between God, self, society, and world, but is tempered by the dialectical imagination with its emphasis on dissimilarities.4 Tracy’s irenic account argues for the primacy of emphasis on the analogical side in Catholic theology and the dialectical side in Protestant theology, but for the fruitful complementarity of both approaches in both theological traditions. I want to be a little less irenic and argue that the dialectical imagination of Protestantism has often become dangerously one-sided. I have already suggested as much in my remarks about the Protestant attacks on practices of mediation: if the differences between God and the world are emphasized so much that the gulf becomes unbridgeable, then the possibility of a Godless world begins to make sense. Much as Tracy is right in emphasizing the dangers of an analogical imagination untempered by a dialectical moment, I think we can see that in our history it is the Protestant overemphasis on negative dialectics that has had the gravest consequences. One way of putting it would be to say that Protestants have emphasized the element of critical judgment, the great negations of the prophetic tradition, at the expense of the affirmation of Being, the capacity to accept the world as God’s creation. The critical dialectical moment, which is certainly there at the heart of the tradition, has become unhinged from the other core elements 4 David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1981), especially chap. 10, sec. 1.

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of the tradition, and the result, for good and for ill, is the drastic progress of modernity. One result of Protestant one-sidedness was a weakening of the classical doctrine of the Trinity. The three persons of the Trinity began to be treated separately. What was incipient in H. Richard Niebuhr’s 1960 book Radical Monotheism and Western Culture,5 became explicit in James Gustafson’s Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective,6 which opted for a ‘‘low Christology’’ almost indistinguishable from Unitarianism. The tremendous Protestant emphasis on transcendence has the danger of asserting a transcendence without incarnation, Jesus without Christ. If that is a danger that has been inherent in liberal Protestantism for a long time, there is a parallel danger in Evangelicalism: an exclusive emphasis on Jesus that approaches what Paul Tillich called Jesusolatry. Accepting Jesus as one’s personal lord and savior is the whole of it and creeds are seen as unnecessary encumbrances. Pentecostalism is subject to the temptation of a unitarianism of the spirit. Another one-sided temptation of Protestantism is the emphasis on the Word, often a Word of judgment, at the expense of the Sacrament. Tillich expressed this danger as follows: ‘‘The classical combination ‘word and sacrament’ means, in the first place, ‘the word as well as the sacrament.’ Next it signifies, ‘the sacrament through the word.’ And it has often been used, especially in Protestantism, as ‘word without sacrament.’ ’’ 7 The sacramental life is the key to the analogical imagination, the visible signs of things unseen. To weaken it is to upset an essential balance in the Christian life. Word without Sacrament again runs the danger of transcendence without incarnation. All the one-sided temptations of Protestantism come to a head in its doctrine of the church, where the suspicion of any mediation between the individual and God tends to empty out the tangible reality of the church as the Body of Christ. For a while the full implications of this move were attenuated by the development of new intermediate forms of loyalty. It has often been pointed out that the Protestant Reformation paved the way for modern nationalism by breaking the hold of the international church and replacing it with state churches instead. But the American case was ex5 H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (1960; New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1970). 6 James M. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, 1984), 2 vols. 7 Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 98.

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treme in fusing the glory of God with the glory of the nation in a sense of millennial hopes fulfilled: America as redeemer nation for all the world. This understanding of the nation, in Chesterton’s words, ‘‘the nation with the soul of a church,’’ lingers today but almost as a shadow of what it once was. The greater danger in Protestant ecclesiology, one that has been evident from within Protestantism for a long time, is that the church is simply dissolved into its constituent individuals. I recently came across a warning from an American Unitarian leader in the middle of the nineteenth century, Henry W. Bellows, to his fellow Unitarians, which I found almost paradigmatic of the problem with Protestant ecclesiology. Unitarianism historically is an offshoot of Congregationalism and carries tendencies within Congregationalism and Protestantism generally to a kind of logical conclusion. Bellows named that conclusion individualism. As he put it, writing in 1859, ‘‘the sufficiency of the Scriptures turns out to be the self-sufficiency of man, and the right of private judgment an absolute independence of Bible or Church.’’ No creed but the Scriptures practically abolishes all Scriptures but those of the human heart; nothing between a man’s conscience and his God, vacates the Church; and with the church, the Holy Ghost, whose function is usurped by private reason; the Church lapses into what are called Religious Institutions; these into Congregationalism, and Congregationalism into Individualism—and the logical end is the abandonment of the church as an independent institution . . . and the extinction of worship as a separate interest.8

That Bellows’s comments were prescient is indicated by a 1995–1996 survey which found that one-third of Americans believe that ‘‘people have God within them, so churches aren’t really necessary.’’ I suspect even some American Catholics believe that. To use David Tracy’s shorthand terms, these are the consequences when the dialectical imagination overwhelms the analogical imagination. I think it is obvious that they pave the way for the next step in the history of modernity. A fractured Trinity, the loss of a sense of the sacred within the world as evidenced by the sacraments, a purely verbal and private piety: these open the door to a world without God altogether, a world in which ethical ideals may still be expressed, but those ideals are no longer anchored in any 8 Henry W. Bellows, The Suspense of Faith (New York, 1859), as quoted in Conrad Wright, Walking Together: Polity and Participation in Unitarian Universalist Churches (Boston, Mass.: Skinner House, 1989), 156.

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larger understanding of the whole; they are ideals that from now on depend only on the transient proclivities of the individual heart. At that point we are hovering over the abyss of Nietzschean nihilism, though Americans, for the most part, have been too busy to look down and see it. I want now to bring this story home to the American university, using as my major source George Marsden’s The Soul of the American University, whose subtitle says it all: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief, and to offer some suggestions about how we as Christians and you as Catholics can cope with our present reality.9 Marsden makes the point that all the great American universities of the twentieth century, public as well as private, the schools that set the standards for other universities and in good measure gave the Ph.D.’s to those who would teach in all universities, came out of Protestantism, more particularly liberal Protestantism, and are unintelligible without understanding that religious context and its devolution. He gives a number of examples because each of the great universities has its own story even though the outcome is depressingly similar. Harvard, founded in the seventeenth century as a school for the training of Congregational ministers, became in the late nineteenth century, under the leadership of a high-church Unitarian—a designation only intelligible in New England—namely Charles Eliot (whose personal religion has been called ‘‘Unitarianism raised to the nth degree’’),10 a national university which combined a commitment to science and professionalism with a new religion of humanity and high culture. Eliot’s ‘‘Religion of the Future’’ held that ‘‘knowledge of God . . . comes through the knowledge of the best of the race,’’ and it was available for wider consumption in the Harvard Classics, ‘‘Dr. Eliot’s five-foot book shelf.’’ 11 Harvard to this day is not shy about speaking for the cultural elite, although the link between high culture and the incoherent free elective system in the context of continually differentiating specializations that Eliot also fostered has grown ever more frail. Marsden takes the University of Chicago, a much younger school than Harvard, but emerging as a great national university at about the same time, as a quintessential example of a low-church institution, with its strong Baptist identity, at least at the beginning. Marsden notes that since the United 9 George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 10 Marsden, The Soul, 186. 11 Marsden, The Soul, 193.

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States is the only modern nation whose culture was shaped predominantly by low-church Protestantism, it is not surprising that institutions of higher learning would reflect this cultural style: So with respect to American universities, their pragmatism, their traditionlessness, their competitiveness, their dependence on the market, their resort to advertising, their emphasis on freedom as free enterprise for professors and individual choice for students, their anti-Catholicism, their scientific spirit, their congeniality to business interests, and their tendency to equate Christianity with democracy and service to the nation, all reflect substantial ties to their lowchurch past.12

What linked populist Chicago with elitist Harvard was the evacuation of any substance that might betray their origin in an organic relationship to a church. The Protestant tendency to allow the nation to take the place of the church (Marsden turns Chesterton around by speaking of ‘‘A Church with the soul of a Nation’’), or dissolving the church into its individual members, was expressed in each school (and in many others) in its own way. Yet while these tendencies were taken for granted in America as simply the inevitable process of secularization in the modern world, Marsden is surely right to point out that not only were these universities Protestant in origin, in spite of their increasing claim to be nonsectarian, but they were part of a Protestant establishment: ‘‘The Protestant establishment was an establishment. By weakening the distinction between church and nation it had claimed the whole nation as its church. Although its doctrines were thus blended with and often subordinated to the liberal ideals of the republic, they were still doctrines. Moreover, they were doctrines with a distinctly Protestant heritage.’’ 13 What is peculiar about the Protestant establishment, and what kept it obscure to itself as well as to others, is that it was not an established church, for it was just the church which had disappeared. This did not make it any less Protestant, and the Protestant heritage remains significant to this day, even though most professors currently teaching at these institutions would be distinctly uncomfortable if that were pointed out to them. Marsden is aware that the soul of the university resides not just anywhere in the academic body but in one particular part of it: the faculty. Thus he uses representative faculty members as the most effective way to show how the life of the mind was changing. His examples from Harvard 12 Marsden, The Soul, 239. 13 Marsden, The Soul, 404.

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and Chicago as they became national universities at the turn of the twentieth century are William James and John Dewey respectively. James and Dewey represented not only their respective institutions, though they did that, but the emergence of serious American academic culture for the first time. James was an example of Harvard’s upper-class, high-church Unitarianism (more Emersonian than Swedenborgian), just as Dewey was an example of Chicago’s middle-class, low-church orientation, though in his case Methodist rather than Baptist. One might even link the contrast between James’s radical humanistic individualism and Dewey’s instrumentalism and scientism to the same institutional difference. Yet in spite of the considerable differences between them, they were part of the general intellectual movement that became known as pragmatism, and for our purposes most significantly, though continuing to take religion seriously, they left not only the churches of their ancestors but Christianity itself behind. Both found new sources of religious meaning without the embarrassment of traditional religion: for James in individual religious experience, for Dewey in the religion of democracy. Both men grew up in the period before the split between liberal Protestantism and fundamentalism (Marsden points out the, to me, astounding fact that Dwight L. Moody, of revivalist fame, was quite popular with both faculty and students on the Yale campus in the 1890s—that’s like imagining Jerry Falwell being popular at Yale today), so that they could not ignore ‘‘the religious question.’’ Yet the answers they gave left their successors free to wonder why they need concern themselves with the question at all. But if James and Dewey represent perhaps the single most critical step in the process with which Marsden’s book is concerned, namely the shift from Protestant establishment to established nonbelief, that cannot be the whole story. James and Dewey were extraordinary thinkers, among the most perennially interesting that America has ever produced. Perhaps their creative energy is related to their emancipation from traditional religion, just as modern Jewish creativity is often associated with the generation first experiencing emancipation. Be that as it may, when we criticize some of their ideas as unfounded, and destructive in their consequences, as I believe we must, we must also recognize how much we have to learn from them. For example, Hans Joas, a most interesting German Catholic social theorist who teaches part of the year in Chicago, gives each of them a chapter in his impressive book The Genesis of Values.14 Keeping in mind Charles Taylor’s admonition that we neither uncritically affirm nor uncriti14 Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values (New York: Polity Press, 2000).

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cally deny modernity, we must acknowledge how much we have to learn from James and Dewey even as we continue to argue with them. One final reflection about the story Marsden tells that did not come out of his text but occurred to me as I read it is the contrast between the American case, and to some extent Protestant cases generally, and what happened in Catholic countries. In one sense it would seem that things went much worse for Catholic Christianity in the transition to modernity than it did for Protestantism. In Catholic countries a militant anticlericalism and secularism led to the expulsion of Christianity from much of higher education and the explicit establishment of nonbelief in a way we have never experienced in this country. But in another sense the transition to modernity was much more insidious in Protestant countries. Rather than resisting the process of secularization, liberal Protestantism assisted it, to the extent that most people whether within or without the universities never even knew what was happening. (Those whom Marsden calls ‘‘the outsiders’’ knew, but they seldom had access to the broader public.) In other words, it is late in the day when believers have been pushed to or even beyond the margins of academia that a book like Marsden’s can appear. I know the history of Catholic higher education is quite different, but Catholics too have been influenced by the very subtlety of the transition to secularism, so that it is only when that transition is far advanced that concerns with Catholic identity come to the forefront, or maybe such concerns have returned after a post–Vatican II period when it was assumed that all was well when Catholic universities became ‘‘normal’’ American universities. One of the burdens of my talk is that I want to argue that Catholics who are Americans have imbibed more Protestantism than they might be aware of, because American culture and American academic culture in particular, are Protestant to the bone. Marsden wants Protestants to be aware of their own complex history, but I think it is also incumbent on Catholics to take this dimension of our history seriously in order to decide how much of the Protestant ambiance in which we all live to appropriate and how much to resist. But of course the issue is not one simply of appropriation versus resistance: following Taylor’s argument in ‘‘A Catholic Modernity?’’ we can see that it is a continuing engagement with modernity, including for Americans the deeply Protestant form of our modernity, that is necessary. It is my belief that this is potentially a Catholic moment in American cultural history and that Protestants and Catholics alike badly need an infusion of the analogical imagination to help us overcome the cultural confusion into which we have fallen. Whether, in actuality, an increasingly defensive and

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doctrinally rigid Catholicism can take advantage of that moment remains to be seen. As to how to realize that possibility, let me use exemplars, just as Marsden did. But whereas he used the examples of James and Dewey to help us understand how we got into our present predicament, I want to use the examples of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre to help us understand how we might get out of it, remembering that it is the faculty that is the soul of the university and without the right kind of faculty we are not apt to create the kind of university we want. Here I can only suggest that MacIntyre and Taylor are, each in his own way, figures worthy of comparison with James and Dewy, in scope, seriousness of thought and wealth of implications that their work opens up. And I could show that the contemporary two, like the older two, have combined a life of scholarship with one of active political engagement (both have had significant encounters with Marxism, for example), and that both are impressive in their relationship to and influence on their students and colleagues. Both have mastered the technical discourse which has dominated late-twentieth-century philosophy, namely analytic philosophy, but neither has been confined by it, nor by the field of philosophy in its current self-understanding: both have strong interests in the social sciences, history, and, unusually for scholars today, in theology. They are thus admirable role models for the kind of faculty members who could make a university with a Catholic identity become a reality today. Let us consider what it is in their thought that is so helpful today, that provides resources for current reflection even for those of us who cannot more than tangentially recreate them as role models. To suggest why their work is so important let me take another look at the contrast between dialectical and analogical thinking. David Tracy cites Paul Tillich as suggesting that the Protestant principle, with its critical and prophetic impulse, which Tracy equates with the dialectical imagination, must always be complemented with Catholic substance. In other words, there must be something affirmed for there to be criticism of it. The tendency of modernity is to raise the idea of criticism to an absolute level, which makes some sense in a culture that is largely closed and dogmatic, but makes no sense in a culture that is already saturated with criticism from top to bottom. It is, above all, substance that MacIntyre and Taylor give us, though both are fully capable of wielding the critical scalpel. Each has adopted quite a different tactic in his work, although both use the narrative of developing modernity as a frame for their arguments. Taylor has examined the emergence of modernity in the course of his magisterial Sources of the Self in

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order to discover what can be retrieved.15 This project followed a major book on Hegel as the thinker who made the most comprehensive early modern effort to recover substance in the face of criticism. Sources of the Self finds other figures such as Herder and Humbolt, who can help us withstand the flood of negations, and he points in the end to the direction that his lecture ‘‘A Catholic Modernity?’’ begins to develop.16 Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue,17 surely one of the most seminal books of the last fifty years, engages in a much more drastic deconstruction of modernity than Taylor’s more irenic project has entailed, but all in the service of an effort to recover an Aristotelian or Thomist substance to help us withstand the winds of nihilism, as his notion that our cultural choice boils down to Aristotle or Nietzsche indicates. In his subsequent books he has spelled out the sources from which, he argues, we may most usefully draw, and his most recent book, Dependent Rational Animals, provides almost a primer of what a genuinely Aristotelian ethics would look like today.18 Finding people like Taylor and MacIntyre to appoint in Catholic universities today will never be easy. And Marsden reminds us that even in universities with specific religious or indeed Catholic affiliation, there is no guarantee that scholars with the kind of explicit religious commitment that Taylor and MacIntyre express would be hired by departments whose selfconception is determined by disciplinary standards. Marsden suggests appointments funded from without the department, appointments we would call at Berkeley ‘‘targets of opportunity,’’ though persons with explicit religious convictions would regrettably not be such targets in my institution, as one way of bringing such people into a campus. I am reminded that Nathan Pusey did have such an end in view when he brought Paul Tillich to Harvard in the 1950s as a University Professor, which meant he had the right to teach in any faculty. I audited his very well attended undergraduate course on the theology of culture, which Morton White and some other professors vainly attacked as indoctrination and not worthy of inclusion in the undergraduate curriculum. Even when McGeorge Bundy brought 15 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). 16 See footnote 3. 17 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). 18 Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago: Open Court, 1999).

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Erik Erikson and David Riesman primarily to teach undergraduates and without consulting the relevant departments, there was grumbling. So appointments from on high can be unsettling, though, in the examples I have given from Harvard, they turned out well in the eyes of most of the faculty and greatly to the benefit of the students. However it is brought about, I believe that only the presence of a number of scholars who exemplify the commitment to Catholic identity in dialogue with the modern world will make the project of an American Catholic university viable today. No amount of gimmicks can substitute for the presence of role models. I want to talk a bit about curriculum, though tentatively, being aware of how many land mines there are in such a discussion. The contemporary university has become incoherent, in part because of the conflicting paradigms of what I would call positivism, postmodernism, and tradition, that MacIntyre described in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry,19 in part because of the internal incoherence of the dominant positivist paradigm itself, where differentiation has proceeded apace with little accompanying effort at integration, and in part because of increasing external pressures on higher education. For postmodernists incoherence is not a problem since the only truth they recognize is incoherence; and for many faculty members it is not a problem because they have narrowed their world to their disciplinary subspecialty and their colleagues in it with whom they can converse. The brunt of the incoherence falls on students, though some of them attempt to combat it by developing tribal loyalties to their majors. The internal incoherence of the university is greatly exacerbated by the growing tendency to think of the university as the ‘‘education industry’’ whose major function is to prepare students for the job market. My coauthor Ann Swidler describes the institutional depletion that results: Many come to think of their education in purely instrumental terms, just like their work lives—an accumulation of credits toward a degree that will help them in the labor market. The idea that the college years allow time for the development of deeper understanding of history, cultures, and societies outside one’s own, a deepened appreciation of one’s own history and traditions, and reflection on the purpose and meaning of one’s life in society—for appropriation of the enormous cultural endowment that is our birthright, won through generations of those who came before—this conception of education is all but lost.20

19 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). 20 Ann Swidler, ‘‘Saving the Self: Endowment versus Depletion in American In-

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Since students see no point in learning anything that isn’t directly related to job possibilities, a course is only a means to the end of a degree that will lead to a good job. It is this that helps us understand an aspect of today’s undergraduate education: for most students learning is not cumulative. What is learned in one course is likely to be quickly forgotten because, as one student put it, you have to ‘‘make room for the new stuff you need to know to do well in the next course.’’ Such external instrumentalization meets little resistance from the selfunderstanding of many of today’s faculty members. Mark Taylor speaking at Berkeley recently said that when you ask undergraduates today what is the purpose of higher education, they reply, to learn critical thinking, and of course they got that idea from their teachers. Indeed college professors in institutions of liberal learning have long believed that one of their primary functions is to provide students with the critical tools that will allow them to rid their minds of the prejudices and superstitions they brought with them to college. But the prejudices and superstitions that students bring to the university today are seldom the product of the coherent but misguided worldview that the professors have in mind; instead it is the disjecta membra of postmodern culture. Thus when the practical nihilism of the students meets the practical nihilism of the faculty there is no ensuing Enlightenment but only a vacuum. What the students need above all is substance, is metanarratives, that will give them some sense of who they are and what kind of world they live in. Only that would counter the incoherence that surrounds them and give them a context in which the skills of critical thinking would make sense. Let me consider some efforts to provide such substance, in the first instance specifically Catholic substance. When I first heard about Catholic studies programs at Catholic universities, I was shocked—shouldn’t the Catholic identity permeate the whole curriculum? I have grown less shocked. In view of the inevitably secular nature of most of the curriculum at any contemporary university, a Catholic studies program, with links to many other parts of the university, is probably a very good idea. In such a program students could move back and forth between classic texts and modern writers such as Taylor and MacIntyre. Theology would be central, but the scope would, I hope, be comprehensive, and the analogical imagination would be cultivated without slighting the necessary correctives supstitutions,’’ in Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, eds., Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 51.

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plied by the dialectical imagination. Just to the extent that Thomism has lost the compulsory status that it enjoyed in the early twentieth century, a free reappropriation of it could be refreshing, and the recognition that much that has taken its place is unconvincing, sobering. For students in such a program, learning would indeed be cumulative. I have come across a related idea that I find most intriguing: a classical studies program, in your case this would be the revival of a traditional Jesuit education in a new form. The idea comes from Jerzy Axer, a professor at the University of Warsaw, who sees it not as a return to conservatism but as a contribution to education for democratic citizenship. Just to the degree that the ideas of classics, canons, and Western civilization have been trashed, we are liberated to see classical studies in an entirely new light. As Axer describes it: The purpose [of a concentration on classical studies including ancient languages] is the ‘‘suspension’’ of the pressure of historical experiences and the reduction of the pressure of mass culture stereotypes. The forgotten language of tradition takes us back to the common roots of Mediterranean civilization, and thereby counteracts the habits stemming from our bad and only too recent experiences. . . . Having thus cleared the arena and by way of initiating the Socratic educational dialogue, one could attempt jointly to reconstruct the world by resorting to universal signs. This sovereign recreation anew of our civilization could awaken in the students naïve astonishment and delight—feelings which should be our fundamental goal and which are so difficult to arouse today. . . . We have left the smoldering ruins of Troy behind us, and our task resembles the mission of Aeneas, who was to revive it in another form and time. The meaning of such a mission can be formulated in the language of the classical tradition, and words which seem to be just commonplaces when heard and spoken in the squabbles and hubbub of daily life, regain their sense and authority thanks to the recollections of their original contexts. If we wish to prepare society for becoming truly civic, and make citizens ready for participation in community instead of being outside observers, we must restore the conceptual apparatus, which endows meaning to the notion of Res Publica.21

The idea of a classical studies program (which would have to be very different from a professionalized classics program) as a kind of anthropological journey that would illuminate our situation by its radical difference and lead to its possible renewal, is most intriguing and one can see how it could 21 Jerzy Axer, quoted in Stanley N. Katz, ‘‘Can Liberal Education Cope?’’ http:// www.wws.princeton.edu/~snkatz/papers/aglsp.html.

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overlap and interact with Catholic studies, for its very premise would be the revitalization of an analogical imagination. I wish that I could see a way to break the stranglehold of disciplinary departments on our academic life, but I don’t see any that wouldn’t jeopardize the academic standing of any university that tried it and so undermine its capacity to continue. Nor do I think the attempts at general education or core curriculum have done much to change the incoherence of disciplinary division, though they are perhaps better than nothing. I am intrigued, however, by a suggestion coming from the self-understanding of the early-nineteenth-century German university where the faculty of philosophy was expected to function in a dialectical relation with the more specialized faculties: ‘‘Each particular inquiry, each discipline, develops itself by interrogating its own foundations with the aid of the faculty of philosophy. Thus, inquiry passes from mere empirical practice to theoretical self-knowledge by means of self-criticism.’’ 22 While I doubt that departments of philosophy today would see themselves as either qualified or interested in such an endeavor, I think, especially in a Catholic university of moderate size, the faculty itself might decide to embark on such a task of disciplinary self-interrogation, in which each would examine its historical origins and the present understandings of its purposes, as well as its boundary relations with other disciplines and its possible blind spots. I suspect a close look at the actual practices going on in the various fields, including the natural sciences, might yield more analogies than we might expect.23 A process of mutual self-interrogation might bring some greater understanding of the relationship of the parts to the whole. I cannot guarantee that it might not just reveal the true extent of the underlying chaos, but I think it is worth a try. Finally I can only allude to what may be the most important thing of all: the conception of the Catholic university as a worshipping community. I believe the Eucharist is the heart of our common life and the celebration of mass ought to be at the center of a Catholic university. It is there that the analogical imagination takes over our consciousness and makes all things real. Such liturgical practice must, of course, be voluntary; we are beyond the stage of coercion. Here I think we, and I include priests and laity, faculty and students, must engage in a complex effort of persuasion as to why a Catholic presence in the university and in our lives makes sense. The last 22 William Readings, cited in Katz, ‘‘Can Liberal Education Cope?’’ 23 See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).

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chapter of Hans Joas’s The Genesis of Values that I mentioned earlier is on reconciling the right and the good. The right necessarily always involves constraint; laws must be enforced. But we are drawn to the good by love. Joas quotes Goethe as saying, ‘‘One knows nothing save what one loves, and the deeper and more complete that knowledge, the stronger and livelier must be one’s love.’’ That applies first of all to the love and knowledge of God, which we express above all in prayer and worship, but it applies to the whole of our educational life. The love of God and of all the forms of good that overflow from God must be at the heart of any university that would call itself Christian or Catholic.

24 Religious Pluralism and Religious Truth

My theme, religious pluralism and religious truth, is one that preoccupied H. Richard Niebuhr at several points in his work but nowhere more than in The Meaning of Revelation. In the preface to that work Niebuhr recognizes both Ernst Troeltsch and Karl Barth as his teachers and notes that they are frequently thought to be ‘‘in diametrical opposition to each other.’’ Nevertheless he proposes to ‘‘combine their main interests,’’ though he is modest as to whether he has succeeded.1 With respect to my theme, which I can specify here as the question of the uniqueness of the revelation of God in Christ, Troeltsch and Barth would indeed seem to be irreconcilable. Toward the end of his life Troeltsch came to recognize that the great world religions had equal claims to validity, though he did not quite leave it at that, as we will see later. For Barth there is an absolute distinction between the revelation of God in Christ and the religions, which are purely human expressions and as such more or less idolatrous.2 It would indeed seem rather difficult to combine those insights. Niebuhr begins by going quite far with Troeltsch in asserting the historical relativity of Christianity but ends up rather close to Barth in emphasizing God’s unique revelatory initiative in the Hebrew prophets and above all in Jesus Christ. It is true that in Radical Monotheism and Western Culture he leaves open the question of whether radical monotheism is to be found in what he calls ‘‘the monisms of the East,’’ and he even offers a [First published in its entirety in Reflections (Yale Divinity School) 90, no. 2 (1995): 9–17. Used by permission. A shortened version appeared as ‘‘At Home and Not at Home: Religious Pluralism and Religious Truth,’’ Christian Century 112, no. 13 (1995): 423–428. It was originally delivered as a talk celebrating the hundredth anniversary of H. Richard Niebuhr’s birth at a Niebuhr Celebration at the Yale Divinity School on February 7, 1995.] 1 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (1941; New York: Macmillan, 1960), xi. 2 See Ernst Troeltsch, Christian Thought: Its History and Application (1924; New York: Meridian, 1957), especially chap. 1, ‘‘The Place of Christianity among the World Religions’’; and Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928; New York: Harper and Row, 1957), esp. 19–20, 41–43, and 66–71.

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as far as I can see he never explicitly integrated these positions with his usually ‘‘confessional’’ theology. If I am right that Niebuhr has not wholly succeeded in combining Troeltsch and Barth, far be it from me to claim to achieve such an integration. Yet I believe that Niebuhr’s notion that we cannot do without the insights of either Troeltsch or Barth was correct. All I can hope to do here is to inquire whether in the years since The Meaning of Revelation was published we have gained resources that might further the Niebuhrian project. The choice of ‘‘pluralism’’ in my title was deliberately provocative. The word ‘‘pluralism,’’ like the word ‘‘multiculturalism,’’ is one of the buzzwords with which we are constantly assailed today. The word has to do with the identity politics so evident in our country, though perhaps more on university campuses than elsewhere. It relates to an increasingly interdependent world in which plural cultures and civilizations interact and sometimes conflict. It resonates with postmodernist positions that hold that knowledge is relative to the power position of those who claim it as knowledge, there being no ‘‘objective’’ access to truth, and thus only plural and irreconcilable claims. While my use of ‘‘pluralism’’ is surely related to some of these current usages, I want to develop my own sense of the term and then return only toward the end of this discussion to consider the relationship of what I have said to some of the current fashionable usages. How would we recognize religious truth if we saw it? Or, to put it in Christian terms, how do we know that God reveals himself in Jesus Christ? I think we find those questions daunting because of the culturally hegemonic presumption about what knowing is. True knowledge, we unconsciously assume, is knowledge attained by the methods of natural science, objective almost in the sense that it is knowledge without a subject, science sciencing itself. In this hegemonic view that we hold even when we consciously reject it, we believe that true knowledge is context-free, untouched by human hands, validated by its own methodological canons. It is against this dominant view that postmodernism has revolted, dismissing the notion that knowledge is ever context-free, and claiming that knowledge is always a disguised claim to power, as fragile as the power to uphold it. We do not need to be trapped in this dichotomy, though often in today’s 3 H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (1960; New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 38–39.

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university it seems that we are. There is another way of dealing with the problem of knowledge and truth with a long tradition behind it, descending in modern times from Hegel through the American pragmatists, and including in good part Troeltsch and Niebuhr.Without getting bogged down in too much philosophical argument, I want to call on some recent work that reinforces this alternative view, and that can help us escape from a debate that often seems to pit scientific absolutism against nihilism as the only alternatives. To begin with, we need not think of a knowing subject over against an objective world. All knowing subjects have emerged from and are part of a world. Thus we could speak not of knowing subjects knowing a world, but of a world knowing itself through knowing subjects. Even the simplest single-celled organisms know, in the sense that when touched they retreat. Lacking brain or nervous system they yet have, in the simplest terms, intention. They know something and that knowledge is useful to them, though what they know is, from our point of view, not much. We can generalize from this example to argue that all knowledge is speciesspecific, depending on the primary representational system of the species, that particular system of sense receptors, capacities to process sense impressions, and capacities to respond to the interpreted stimuli. Our human primary representational system has specialized for hearing (though there are ranges of pitch which we cannot hear that other species can hear) and especially for a subtle capacity for vision. Derek Bickerton, after commenting on our complex visual system, says, ‘‘Compare this with our sense of smell. While we can distinguish an infinite variety of objects by sight, there is only a handful of smells that we can distinguish, and we distinguish them quite crudely.We tend not to be aware of these limitations.We assume that most objects have no smell, an illusion that would not last long if dogs could talk.’’ 4 In short, our knowing in the first instance is limited by the context of our primary representational system, which is species-specific. We know the world in the way our primary representational system makes possible.We do not know the world the way other species know it. Our primary representational system selects some features of the world leaving out others. It adds its own interpretation to what it senses. So, are we back with Kant and an unknowable thing-in-itself? That would be one way of putting it, but I don’t think it is the most helpful. Rather we can say that we 4 Derek Bickerton, Language and Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 81. The notion of ‘‘primary representational systems’’ comes from Bickerton.

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are one part of the world knowing selectively other parts of the world. Our knowledge is reliable enough, given all the possibilities of fallibility, but it is partial, it is context-dependent. It depends on the biological primary representational system of our own species. Unlike other species, we have developed a secondary representational system, namely language. Following Bickerton we can see language as repeating on a higher level some of the functions of the primary representational system.5 Language selects some of our primary representations and represents them with words, that is, symbols. It can then organize these symbols syntactically to produce a variety of hypothetical worlds, that is stories, or propositions. Language enormously enhances our capacity to know the world, but it does so by selecting from the richness of sensory representations and then providing syntactic relations between the words that do not in any one-to-one way ‘‘correspond’’ even to our sensations, much less to whatever our sensations are sensations of. Am I taking a line of ever-deepening scepticism? Not at all. The fact that our knowledge is context-dependent (and dependent not only on language but on this particular language, and not only on this particular language, but this particular language at this time and place) does not make it unreliable. Like the single-celled organisms, we know what we need to know in order to carry out our intentions. Like them, we are often fallible, but that is no reason to despair of the reliability of our knowledge, which, after all, is infinitely greater than that of single-celled organisms, even though limited in ways we can hardly imagine. I have been telling you a story, a story about how the human capacity for knowing has been developing for hundreds of millions of years, although our capacity to use language may be only a hundred thousand years old. I have become interested in these matters because of my return to an old concern with the problem of religious evolution. I have no time to spell out even what little I have as yet learned, so let me leap to the next step of my argument, adding another layer of context to the layers I have already mentioned. We live in culture-bearing communities and what we know is conditioned by the historical experience of those communities and of the individuals who live in them. Let me say at once that such culture-bearing communities have never been closed worlds, cut off from all others. Even in the Upper Paleolithic, communities were in constant touch with one 5 Bickerton, Language and Species, chap. 4, ‘‘The Origins of Representational Systems.’’

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another, often borrowing artifacts, ideas, and, undoubtedly, stories. Early Christian communities were profoundly Jewish, a matter to which I will return, but it is not mistaken to find ‘‘Greek’’ elements in the New Testament. How could it be otherwise when the text itself is Greek? In short all historic cultures have been ‘‘pluralistic,’’ and the assertion that we are now ‘‘more pluralistic than ever before in history’’ is based on an inadequate knowledge of history. But however diverse the elements in any human culture, particular communities do undergo shared historical experience and define themselves in relation to constantly reinterpreted memory. When, after the kingdom of David and Solomon began to break up and its component parts to suffer traumatic defeats at the hand of great Middle Eastern empires, prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah saw in what was happening the work of God, the same God who they remembered had brought the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt some centuries before. Are we to see Isaiah and Jeremiah as knowing subjects speculating about an objective reality over against them and worrying about whether something called God existed or not? I don’t think we can see even Plato and Aristotle in that way, for they too were speaking out of particular traumatic historical situations and trying to make sense of them, however different their approach was from that of Isaiah and Jeremiah. But before I pursue the historical issue, which I must if I am to get to the question of religious truth, let me back up a minute and relate historical cultural-linguistic contexts to biological contexts. Not at any point in the history of life do we find a passive knower over against an objective reality. As the capacity for knowing developed, as representational systems became more complex, the very nature of the organism changed, and with it the world in which the organism lived. For human beings, language brought a fateful change in who we are and what we can do, and, alas, in what we can do to the world, though ultimately in what the world can do to us.6 Examples of children who have grown up without the opportunity 6 Bickerton discusses whether the lack, so far, of any evidence of ‘‘intelligent life’’ in other parts of the cosmos can be taken to mean that there is none: ‘‘But if there are no other beings like us, a sinister reason may suggest itself for their absence. Perhaps language is, after all, terminally dysfunctional. Perhaps any species that achieved language would seek to take control of its planet, just as we have done. However, a biosphere irreparably damaged, whether accidentally through reckless use of it, or deliberately through conflicts fought with hyperdestructive weapons, might, in a relatively short time, bring any such species to extinction.’’ Language and Species, 253.

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to learn language at the appropriate time indicate what limited humans we would be without language. Just as biological capacities define the different identities of species, so cultural-linguistic capacities define the difference between communities: they link us to the world, they give us our identity in relation to the world as we apprehend it. Here I am not suggesting some kind of free-floating postmodern cultural perspectivism, some play of signifiers without anything signified. Rather, I hope, I am trying to get at what George Lindbeck was developing in his cultural-linguistic theory of religion.7 Far from something arbitrary, if we follow Charles Peirce and not some of those who have used his term ‘‘semiotics’’ for quite other ends, we can see culture, and the symbolism which is its essence, as the living membrane that connects communities and individuals with the rest of the world, and that makes them the communities and individuals that they are. So when we hear through the mouth of Jeremiah that God declares ‘‘I will be their God and they shall be my people’’ (31:33; also Ezekiel 11:20) we can grasp that the very identity of the people in that historical situation has been defined by their interaction with this narratively understood God. To attempt to understand the meaning of God here torn out of its historical and cultural-linguistic context would surely be not to understand it at all. And yet, and yet. Jeremiah goes on to claim that God is not just the God of Israel but the God of all the nations. Out of his highly specific context Jeremiah makes a universal claim, and what are we to make of that? Robert Neville has said that theology is always genetically particular but normatively universal.8 And this, I would argue, is as true of tribal myth as of the most sophisticated religious metaphysics. How are we to square that circle? Not right away, if at all. I want to get closer to the central Christian claim before I attempt to make progress with Niebuhr in the effort to combine Troeltsch and Barth. How are we to understand the claim that God revealed himself in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ? First of all, just understand, not evaluate. I am convinced that this claim is not very well understood even in our own society and must be very hard to understand in non-Western societies. To suggest the problem let me recount an incident that occurred to me while I was a postdoctoral fellow at the In7 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Post Liberal Age (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster, 1984). 8 Robert Cummings Neville, Behind the Masks of God: An Essay toward Comparative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 165.

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stitute for Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal in the 1950s. My wife and I had spent a summer of fieldwork a couple of years earlier in a Mormon community in Ramah, New Mexico. Being new to Canada, and rather homesick, we invited in two Mormon missionaries from Utah when they called on us in Montreal and spoke with their familiar Western twang. After exchanging small talk, which is what we really wanted, the missionaries were eager to get down to the business of converting us. They pulled out an elaborate display of illustrated cardboards, depicting incidents from the Bible. The story developed sequentially along the lines of, if you believe this then you must believe this. I was willing to consent up to a certain point and then I had to discourage the discourse from continuing. I already knew a great deal about Mormonism and was not about to be converted. But aside from disappointing our new friends, the thing that most impressed me on that occasion was that their entire pitch was based on the assumption that (a) we were familiar enough with the Bible to follow their argument and (b) that if they could demonstrate that the Bible said something they wanted to prove we would be constrained to agree. Ignorance of the Bible or lack of confidence in its authority would have left them completely at sea. Or rather it would have forced them back to the beginning, to prove, as they would put it, that ‘‘the Bible is true,’’ long before they would ever get to Joseph Smith. It may seem a long leap, but I believe the first Christians were in the same situation. There is only one point in the New Testament, as far as I know, when the Gospel is preached to those entirely lacking in knowledge of the scriptures (most of the gentiles to whom Paul preached were from among the sympathizers of the synagogue, so that Paul could presume what Lindbeck calls ‘‘biblical literacy’’), and that is Paul’s famous address on the Areopagus. Paul’s entering wedge is to tell the philosophically educated Athenians that he has discovered ‘‘an altar with the inscription, ‘to an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown this I proclaim to you’’ (Acts 17:23). But then he goes on: ‘‘The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth . . .’’ and proceeds to give a brief precis of Genesis. He ends with the notion that God will ‘‘have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead’’ (Acts 17:24–33). In short, in order to preach Jesus Christ and him crucified to the biblically illiterate Athenians, Paul must convince them of the fundamentally Jewish notion of a creator God who is Lord of all and who will bring the world to an end in a last judgment. Only in that context does the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ make sense.

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Even though Paul abrogated the Jewish ritual law for the gentiles, he still, in a critically important sense, had to convert them to Judaism before he could convert them to Christianity. That is as much the case today as ever and is evidenced by the fact that the Hebrew scriptures are canonical for Christians. To put it in Niebuhrian terms, to try to convert people to Christianity without Paul’s background of Hebrew radical monotheism, would be to convert them to a sort of henotheism, a belief in Jesus as a kind of ‘‘guardian spirit.’’ 9 It would confirm the suspicion of the Athenian philosophers about Paul: ‘‘He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities’’ (Acts 17:18). Indeed today much missionary work carried on by Americans or Western Europeans in the non-Western world, emphasizing individual salvation rather than a transformed way of life, may be only the proclamation of a foreign divinity. As the missionary-theologian Leslie Newbigin puts it: ‘‘A religion of individual salvation had been taught, along with a wholesale rejection and condemnation of traditional culture. The result has been . . . a superficial Christianity with no deep roots and then—later—a reaction to an uncritical and sentimental attachment to everything in the discarded culture.’’ 10 Only much later when the new Christians have the Bible in their own language will they or their children or grandchildren be able to discern what of the missionary culture and what of the traditional culture is really consonant with a genuine living out of the Gospel in their own circumstances. Theirs will presumably no longer be a ‘‘superficial’’ Christianity. Thus it would seem that a nonsuperficial Christianity must be based on something more than an individual decision for Christ, must be based on induction into the Christian cultural-linguistic system. Without such induction the individual decision may not be for the biblical Christ but for a henotheistic guardian spirit. And that is not only true for so-called new Christians, but for many of us in our own allegedly Christian society who do not understand what Paul would have required us as Christians to understand. In short, understanding the meaning of Christ as lord and savior is deeply contextual, dependent on historical memory and cultural-linguistic literacy. Because it is so, it requires membership in a confessing, worshipping community, the church. It is for this reason that Stanley Hauerwas has recently reasserted the old claim that ‘‘there is no salvation outside the 9 Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism, 30. 10 Leslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989), 189.

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say so, the notion of a private Christian is a contradiction in terms. And yet if we insist, as I believe we must, so relentlessly on the historical, linguistic, cultural, and social particularity of the Christian faith, how can we proclaim its universality? How can we say with Peter, ‘‘There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved’’ (Acts 4:12)? Or with Paul, ‘‘Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’’ (Philippians 2:9–11). Particularly, how can we say those words when we live side by side with good people of other faiths or, in their own eyes at least, of no faith at all? Christians have taken several positions on this question. The polar ones are the inclusivist or pluralist position, namely that there is salvation in other names and Christians should simply drop the language of Peter and Paul; and the exclusivist position that the words must be asserted straightforwardly: there is no salvation in any other name. For many, however, these stark alternatives seem equally unattractive, or even arrogant, as though we know what only God can know: who is saved and who is not. The effort to maintain the biblical assertion without consigning most of humanity to perdition has developed a number of arguments, two of which George Sumner calls implicit faith and prospective salvation.12 He illustrates the idea of implicit faith with Karl Rahner’s notion of the anonymous Christian. The idea of prospective salvation is the notion of an eschatological moment at the end of times when everyone will be given the opportunity of a saving encounter with Christ. I have no time to go into either of these arguments, both of which are of considerable interest in themselves, but both of which easily bog down in baroque complexities. Let me say that I believe the whole issue arises from a category mistake. It is to take language which is deeply contex11 Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? How the Church Is to Behave if Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1991), chap. 1, ‘‘The Politics of Salvation: Why There is No Salvation Outside the Church.’’ 12 George R. Sumner, ‘‘Light and Twilight: The Church and the Nations in the Drama of Salvation,’’ in Ephraim Radner and George R. Sumner, Reclaiming Faith: Essays on Orthodoxy in the Episcopal Church and the Baltimore Declaration (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993), 156ff.

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tual, that is confessional, and in the case of Paul probably also liturgical, and turn it into objective assertions of a quasi-scientific form that give us information about the eternal fate of non-Christians. Here I am trying to redeem Troeltsch’s notion of a truth for us. He wrote, ‘‘A truth which, in the first instance, is a truth for us does not cease, because of this, to be very Truth and Life.’’ 13 By a truth for us I do not mean only a truth for Christians: Peter was speaking to non-Christians. It is a truth for non-Christians if they can hear it, and we have already seen how difficult that may be. As to the fate of non-Christians, as well as of those who lived before Christ, the only Christian thing to say is that that is in the hands of God, or, to put it more colloquially, God can deal with that. The words of Peter and of Paul are, like so many words in the Bible, dangerous words, easily turned into triumphalism, which Niebuhr would call the henotheistic worship of the Christian community rather than the one God. But if we take them confessionally, in the double Niebuhrian sense of confession—saying what we believe and repenting of our sin and lack of faith in the same breath—then we can find in them, with Troeltsch, very Truth and Life. A too easy, although quite compelling, way of making the point is that ‘‘salvation’’ is a notion whose meaning is understandable only within the Christian cultural-linguistic system, so of course no one else has it; whatever Buddhists or Confucians, say, are after, it is not salvation.14 A stronger way of putting it is that the idea that there is salvation in no other name but Jesus has the horizon of universality from the point of view of the context in which it is used. It is not the truth of single-celled organisms, or of dogs, or of Buddhists or Confucianists, but there is no truth, even scientific truth, that transcends the community that produces it. Yes, this means that all truth is relative, but it does not mean that all truth is relativistic, that anything goes. All truth is potentially fallible and can in principle be contested, but contested by people living within a community of intelligibility for whom both the truth and challenges to it have meaning. There is no truth that truths itself, although modern rationalism since the time of Descartes assumes there is. But we do not live in one community—human beings never have. Some of us have managed to live, at least imaginatively, in other religious communities. I suspect, in some cases I know, that those Christians who espouse a pluralist or inclusivist position, who reject the notion of salvation 13 Troeltsch, Christian Thought, 63. Emphasis in the original. 14 On this point see Sumner, ‘‘Light and Twilight,’’ 160.

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in no other name, have personally experienced the truth and the light that is discerned in Buddhist or Hindu or Confucian or Islamic communities. They also live in the academic world of religious studies and comparative religion, which is also a community of sorts and also claims to know at least something of the truth. One of the virtues of participating in several communities is that one can see problems with the language of one community from the point of view of another. When it comes to claims about the uniqueness of the revelation of God in Christ it is certainly well for Christians to learn what that language has meant to other communities, especially though not exclusively the Jewish community, and to be careful about how they use it and what they mean by it. But, I believe, it is getting our wires crossed to think we can jettison defining beliefs, and more than beliefs, loyalties and commitments, because they are problematic in another context. Reform and reappropriation are always on the agenda, but to believe that there is some neutral ground from which we can rearrange the defining symbols and commitments of a living community is simply a mistake, a common mistake of modern liberalism. Thus I do not see how Christians can fail to confess, with all the qualifications I have stated, but sincerely and wholeheartedly, that there is salvation in no other name but Jesus. Let me turn, then, to one of the wisest statements about our present situation of religious pluralism that I know. Herbert Fingarette has written: It is the special fate of modern man that he has a ‘‘choice’’ of spiritual visions. The paradox is that although each requires complete commitment for complete validity, we can today generate a context in which we see that no one of them is the sole vision. Thus we must learn to be naive but undogmatic. That is, we must take the vision as it comes and trust ourselves to it, naively, as reality. Yet we must retain an openness to experience such that the dark shadows deep within one vision are the mute, stubborn messengers waiting to lead us to a new light and a new vision. . . . We must not ignore the fact that in this last analysis, commitment to a specific orientation outweighs catholicity of imagery. One may be a sensitive and seasoned traveler, at ease in many places, but one must have a home. Still, we can be intimate with those we visit, and while we may be only travelers and guests in some domains, there are our hosts who are truly at home. Home is always home for someone; but there is no Absolute Home in general.15

15 Herbert Fingarette, The Self in Transformation: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and the Life of the Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 236–237.

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For Christians the church is home. For H. R. Niebuhr the church was finally home, though somewhat grudgingly because he was so acutely aware of its faithlessness and its disloyalty. I would argue for a stronger doctrine of the church than I find in Niebuhr, perhaps a more catholic one, one that emphasizes the church as the body of Christ, the church as, as Karl Rahner put it, the one sacrament from which all the particular sacraments are derived.16 Here I am attracted by communion theology as David Yeago has recently expounded it. He speaks of the Trinitarian structure of the communion of the church: This Trinitarian complex of remembrance of Christ, appeal to the Spirit, and thanksgiving to the Father is not simply one aspect of the church’s life; rather, it is the very act of the church’s life, the act in which the church’s koinonia is realized. The church is that community whose common life is a lively remembrance of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Spirit, to the glory of God the Father. And it is in this way that the communion of the church in history becomes a living sign of the eschatological reconciliation of the world with God. Concretely, of course, this means that the church is the community that celebrates the eucharist. The eucharist is by ecumenical consensus the corporate act in which ‘‘the community of God’s people is manifested,’’ and it is of crucial importance that the identity-defining rite of the Christian community is precisely a rite of remembrance, an act in which the many are united in a common turning in the Spirit to one in particular, to the Palestinian Jew Jesus, through whose life and in whose person the salvation of the God of Israel is confessed to have been conclusively bestowed on humankind.17

I have on occasion had students come to me and ask what church to go to, adding, but I’m afraid I don’t believe in God. I never tell them what church to go to, but I do say not to worry about believing in God. I tell 16 ‘‘Now the Church is the continuance, the contemporary presence, of that real, eschatologically triumphant and irrevocably established presence in the world, in Christ, of God’s salvific will. The Church is the abiding presence of that primal sacramental work of definitive grace, which Christ is in the world, effecting what is uttered by uttering it in sign. By the very fact of being in that way the enduring presence of Christ in the world, the church is truly the fundamental sacrament, the well-spring of the sacraments in the strict sense.’’ Karl Rahner, The Church and the Sacraments (London: Burns and Oates, 1963), 18. 17 David S. Yeago, ‘‘Memory and Communion: Ecumenical Theology and the Search for a Generous Orthodoxy,’’ in Radner and Sumner, eds., Reclaiming Faith, 256–257. Emphasis in the original.

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them that if they become part of the life of the church then they will begin to see how the word is used and what it means. Believing in God, I say, is not something one decides in the privacy of one’s room, but something one comes to in a living community, for Christians, the church.18 Maybe, to be realistic, it depends on the church. In Radical Monotheism, Niebuhr spoke of God as Being itself or the principle of Being, terms, by the way, which only make sense within the tradition and community of Western philosophy—Being in Niebuhr’s or Tillich’s or Plato’s sense is missing in East Asian thought; even the word is lacking in Chinese and Japanese. Still I think Niebuhr’s philosophical language about God was more a commentary on the Bible’s (and thus the church’s) language than a foundation or a substitute for it. Niebuhr was nervous about any mediation of God, even through Christ, certainly through the Bible or the church. Yet what would an unmediated access be? We have no unmediated access to truth. The primary and secondary representational systems and the cultural-linguistic communities in which we live are only the three most obvious of the many mediations that connect us to our world. So truth cannot derive from some unmediated encounter; it depends on the quality of the mediations. It is perhaps to get at this mediating aspect of truth that Vaclav Havel speaks of ‘‘living in truth’’ as something different from knowing the truth.19 And it is to this dimension too that Paul at the Areopagus is referring when he speaks of the God not just that we know but in whom ‘‘we live and move and have our being’’ (Acts 17:28). The value of communion theology for me is that it emphasizes the church not only as a community that links us to our fellows, but as a com18 Rowan Williams, in words that seem to echo George Lindbeck, says that ‘‘doctrine is a set of instructions for performance: ‘Tell me about God. / Watch. / What does the doctrine of the Trinity mean? / Watch. / Why should I confess that Jesus is Lord? / Watch.’ ’’ Rowan Williams, ‘‘Teaching the Truth,’’ in Jeffrey John, ed., Living Tradition: Affirming Catholicism in the Anglican Church (Boston, Mass.: Cowley, 1992), 36. 19 See Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). William Butler Yeats went one step beyond Havel when he wrote, six days before his death: ‘‘I know for certain that my time will not be long. . . . I am happy and I think full of an energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say ‘Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.’ I must embody it in the completion of my life.’’ Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 285. Yeats’s words shed an interesting light on an incarnational theology.

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munity that links us to the Trinitarian God in common membership. In the eucharist we become members of his Body; the Spirit enters not only the bread and the wine but the members of the congregation; and the glory of God the Father becomes present in the act of worship. In the creed we say that we believe not only in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit but in ‘‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church,’’ not a fourth member of the godhead but the place where the triune God becomes actual in our lives. The life of the church gives a particularly vivid example of the fact that a cultural-linguistic community is a living membrane that unites us to reality. Niebuhr knew well that clause of the creed and his commentary on it in the last unfinished chapter of Faith on Earth is one of the most remarkable things he ever wrote:20 The line between church and world runs through every soul, not between souls. Neither is the distinction between visible and invisible church as idealism makes it, that is between the actual and the ideal church, a tenable one. For the church in which we believe, on which we count as the supporting, interpreting community of faith, is actual, interpersonal reality, not a form, but an action, trust and loyalty experienced over and over again. . . . [But the church] is forever involved in the great inversion whereby man turns back upon himself and his works, back upon his faith, away from the God of faith. When it seeks to correct this tendency in one direction, as when it reacts against idolatrism of subjective reliance on religious feeling, it swings into the opposite direction and substitutes right doctrine about God for God himself. History and contemporary visible church life make it quite clear to us that when we say ‘‘I believe in the Holy Catholic Church’’ we cannot mean this church. And yet, without it the community of faith does not exist, anymore than the personal self which lives by faith exists without mind and without body.21

In this extraordinarily powerful but extraordinarily ambivalent statement Niebuhr is, as is often the case with him, holding together two almost incompatible things, neither of which we can abandon without peril. I would emphasize, if anything even more strongly than Niebuhr, the empirical church, the communion of the saints that has come down in unbroken continuity from apostolic times, so that we see the resurrection through the eyes of the disciples, because they and all the intervening gen20 H. Richard Niebuhr, Faith on Earth (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), chap. 7, ‘‘The Community of Faith.’’ 21 Niebuhr, Faith on Earth, 117–118.

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erations are still present to us. The preface for the eucharistic prayer for the Epiphany season in the Book of Common Prayer says that in the mystery of the Word made flesh God has caused a new light to shine in our hearts ‘‘to give the knowledge of your glory in the face of your Son Jesus Christ.’’ But if we find the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ we find the light of Christ in the faces of the saints down through history to the present. Who can become a Christian without seeing that reflected light? And if the light is not shining in our churches is that not one of the reasons why people turn away from them? If we lose the doctrine of the communion of the saints then we have nothing but separate individuals, and the witnesses to the acts of Christ are simply people long ago and far away with beliefs and purposes not our own, so what are they to us or we to them? And yet, central as the community of the church is for us, it is not our only community. Robin Lovin, commenting on a sentence of Niebuhr’s that I have quoted above, ‘‘the line between church and world runs through every soul, not between souls,’’ says: The relativity of Niebuhr’s theocentric relativism derives not from the variety of religious and cultural contexts in which different people live, but from the awareness that each person lives in several of these contexts at once. We are not fully integrated centers of reflection astonished by the discovery that there are others who see the world differently from ourselves. We understand the pluralism of our social context in part because it reflects the variety of ways in which we understand our own experiences.22

The problem of being the church is acute for us not only because we must live side by side with those of other religious communities, but because the church is only one of the communities in which we live. Pluralism is within us as well as without us. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith has said, in the university we live in a community with a religious devotion to truth that ultimately descends more from Plato than from the Bible. If the church is still our defining community, as I think for Christians it must be, then it is so in part because it breaks the metaphor of home. The church is a sign of the kingdom of God, and in that sense participates in it, but it points beyond itself to the eschatological kingdom in all its fullness. Its telos is not in itself but beyond itself, in the ‘‘city out of sight.’’ It is our home and 22 Robin Lovin, ‘‘Response to Linell Cady,’’ in Ronald F. Thieman, ed., The Legacy of H. Richard Niebuhr (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1991), 135.

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yet not our home; it directs us toward what Niebuhr called the universal community.23 Though there are plural religions and plural communities, and no absolute or unmediated truth, and only God is at home absolutely, still the truth for us in the church, so far as in humility and repentance we can grasp it, does not cease to be very Truth and Life.

23 Yet even here we Christians cannot say ours is the uniquely superior religious community on that account. I think for Buddhists too the sangha is a home and not a home, a community that points beyond itself to the universal community.

25 Texts, Sacred and Profane

Harold Bloom has famously said that once we were a text-obsessed culture, then we became a text-centered culture, and now we have become a textless culture.We must wonder what Bloom means by calling us textless. It is true that at one point it was predicted that in the electronic age printed texts would cease to exist. But instead we are inundated with printed texts in a variety of forms (fax, email, Web pages) beyond anything imaginable in the preelectronic age. Yet amidst this blizzard of printing it may be that there are few if any of the kind of texts Bloom was thinking about. Bloom probably did not have in mind only specifically religious texts, what we could broadly call scripture, but he was thinking of texts that have a kind of authority, that are in an extended sense of the term sacred, that are indeed canonical. The question is whether in the blizzard of disposable print any text has more than the most fleeting authority, or could speak to us from beyond its transient occasion, that is, whether any of it could remotely be called canonical. Or are all or almost all of the texts that surround us irredeemably and inanely profane? Literacy has never been more important in an economy increasingly based on knowledge rather than physical labor, yet we know that a significant proportion, perhaps as much as 50 percent, of the population even of our enlightened nation is functionally illiterate; that is, they can read the words but they cannot understand even a simple set of instructions. Those of you who have recently taught undergraduates may have discovered that functional illiteracy turns up even among our college students. But if we are talking about literacy with respect to the kind of texts Bloom was referring to, the proportion of people who are functionally illiterate may be much higher. It was some years ago that George Lindbeck lamented that even the fundamentalist students who showed up at Yale Divinity School were biblically illiterate. What these considerations indicate is that texts, sacred or profane, do not live except in the context of practice: they must [First published in the Proceedings of the American Theological Library Association (2000), 195–205. Used by permission. The paper was delivered at the association’s annual conference in Berkeley, California, on June 24, 2000.]

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be read, and reading is a social practice embedded in a whole range of other social practices. Clearly, profane texts have no meaning in themselves: they exist as instruments, utilities, and once used they may be discarded, for they are devoid of any intrinsic or lasting value. That is why there are few qualitative distinctions between them—if they serve their purpose, one is as good as another. Nor is there any great distinction between texts that are meant to inform and texts that are meant to entertain, for the difference between them is increasingly blurred, as in infomercials and infotainment, or, for example, USA Today or some television newscasts. We are inclined to think that sacred texts, canonical texts, have in themselves an intrinsic meaning and are by nature qualitatively different from other texts, but this is a mistake. It leads to the culturally conservative view of texts as objects embalmed in glass cases to be reverently referred to as authoritative, maybe to be touched, as some people touch their Bibles, but not necessarily to be read. In fact sacred texts must be read or listened to in the context of a community for which they are sacred: it is in the practices of a living community that they become sacred. The once-sacred texts of an ancient civilization unearthed by archeologists are no longer sacred; they are merely the objects of scholarly curiosity. It is true that they are potentially sacred, and can become sacred again if they are inserted into the practice of a living community. But texts outside the practice of a community are not sacred. Thus the textlessness of which Bloom complains is not only the symptom of a cultural depletion, though it is that, but of a social depletion as well. If we don’t know what is canonical any more it is because the communities for which the texts were canonical have become incoherent. Thus it may be more useful to judge postmodernism not as theoretically right or wrong, but as the legitimate expression of an incoherent society. Let me illustrate with a literary example. The new director of the California Shakespeare Theater, appointed in December of 2000, announced that he rejects the idea that Shakespeare plays should be done because, in his words, ‘‘they’re timeless and speak to the human condition. I’m not even sure what ‘the human condition’ is.’’ Jonathan Moscone, the director, went on to say that he didn’t ‘‘buy into any antiquated, museum-oriented, highfalutin language ideas about Shakespeare.’’ 1 The intention to free Shakespeare from ‘‘museum orien1 Steven Winn, theater critic, San Francisco Chronicle, December 6, 1999, E1 and E4.

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tation’’ is admirable, but it hardly ensures that Mr. Moscone’s intention is to invoke a new audience that will take Shakespeare seriously. Rather, I’m afraid, Mr. Moscone, by eschewing any understanding of the plays as speaking to the human condition, means only that he hopes to make them entertaining, that is, not qualitatively different from the many other forms of entertainment available today. Shakespeare seems to be able to survive in a competitive entertainment market even among people who think he doesn’t ‘‘speak to the human condition,’’ perhaps because, as Bloom in his recent book on Shakespeare has argued, Shakespeare has created our human condition.2 But for how many people is Shakespeare formative today? How many know not just a line or two, but characters, scenes, whole plays, which provide a reference point for living? There once was what might be called a religion of high culture. If one goes to performances of classical music one can see that this religion is still alive, but like the congregations of many churches, it is rapidly aging, with few young replacements. Some so-called classical music stations play wall-to-wall baroque music, as a kind of easy listening. But how many are really attending to, say, Mozart? Karl Barth wrote that in the great throne room in heaven Bach was to be heard, but that when God retired to the intimacy of his living quarters with a few angels they listened to Mozart. We know that Barth began every working day by listening to a phonograph recording of Mozart. There are those, such as my wife, who think that Jesus has already come again and his name is Wolfgang Amadeus. My point is not only to lament the passing of a devotion to high culture, although it saddens me that my own children don’t listen to classical music or read poetry, but to show that such devotion is only possible when there is a community to carry it, a community of serious, attentive readers and listeners. Philip Roth, who is about my age, was quoted in a recent New Yorker as saying ‘‘every year, seventy readers die and only two are replaced. . . . The literary era has come to an end.’’ He even spoke of ‘‘the death of reading.’’ 3 Since everyone reads all the time—that may be part of the problem—Roth means a certain kind of reading, just as Bloom meant a certain kind of text, reading as a practice, carried by a community of practice. Let me try another approach. We have all heard about the information 2 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998). 3 The Philip Roth quotations are from David Remnick, ‘‘Into the Clear: Philip Roth Puts Turbulence in Its Place,’’ New Yorker, May 8, 2000, pp. 86–87.

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superhighway. We live in the midst of an information explosion. I have heard it said that the world’s knowledge doubles every two years, and I am not prepared to doubt it, though I don’t know how that is quantified. You in the library business are in the forefront of this information explosion. But of this I am sure: the world’s meaning is not doubling every two years. Meaning and information are in a kind of zero-sum relation, so that the more information the less meaning. In terms of my title, meaning is sacred; information profane. Let me try to suggest why meaning is so unfashionable today. Meaning doesn’t tell us something new, it seems just to be saying the same old thing, though in a deeper understanding it makes sense of the new. Meaning is iterative, not cumulative. If someone in an intimate relation says to the other, ‘‘Do you love me?’’ and the other replies, ‘‘Why do you ask, I told you that yesterday?’’ we can say that he doesn’t get it. The request was not for information but for the reiteration of meaning. Or another way of making the point would be if someone said, ‘‘Why do we have to say the Lord’s Prayer this Sunday?—we already said it last Sunday,’’ again we would say the person is making a category mistake. The Lord’s Prayer is not news that we can forget once we’ve heard it; it is an expression of who we are in relation to who God is, and its reiteration is not redundant but a renewed affirmation of meaning, an invocation of a total context. I am reminded of a story a friend told on herself. She was a graduate student at Harvard and went to a seminar offered by the great Plato scholar Eric Voegelin. Voegelin announced that the text for the term would be Plato’s Republic. After class my friend went up to Voegelin and said, ‘‘But Professor Voegelin, I have already read the Republic.’’ Voegelin replied, ‘‘Well, read it again.’’ Canonical texts, sacred texts, can never be reread too often. And canonical texts may turn up in strange places, such as my own field of sociology, where certain texts by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim are as close to sacred as we get. I remember my own teacher, Talcott Parsons, telling me he had read Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life at least thirty-five times. I haven’t kept count, but I have read it quite a few times myself. Knowledge of these texts is a marker of membership in a community. One way of putting my argument would be to say that the reading of canonical texts is a kind of ritual that occurs in a community for which the text is canonical. The untutored ear in an information culture would hear me as saying the reading of canonical texts is only a ritual, therefore pointless. That is because the very word ‘‘ritual’’ has become pejorative. Ritual, however, is indispensable, for it is the place where meaning occurs. Saying

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‘‘I love you’’ to an intimate other is indeed a ritual, but it contributes more than we imagine to maintaining the meaning of the intimate relationship, just as the ritual of reciting the Lord’s Prayer reiterates the meaning of our worship of God. These ritual moments don’t tell us anything about specifics, but they remind us of the whole in which all specifics make sense. In an information culture, where only what is new and what is useful is interesting, ritual is incomprehensible. But if I am right, then ritual is the basis of culture, and of our humanity, and no one can avoid it. The annoyance of the pc user when faced with a Mac program or vice versa is an example of how even in the world of the computer we need familiar rituals to feel at home. Ritual persists in the interstices of our lives—otherwise how could we live?—but ritual practices as central cultural concerns are pushed to the margins. I began this discussion of meaning by saying that meaning has become unfashionable today, but that isn’t quite right. There is a hunger for meaning that is evident throughout our society, but many are looking for it in the wrong place. Since they don’t understand ritual, they think they can find meaning in the right kind of information, some new spirituality, some new self-help technique. By confusing meaning and technique they imagine there is a quick fix for the meaning problem, and that the individual can find it all alone. So how can we understand theological libraries in the world in which we live? Tocqueville tells us that even in the crude huts of the American frontier there were to be found books, usually just two books, a Bible and a Shakespeare. Maybe that’s all they needed. Maybe they were in some sense better educated than we are. Does that mean that theological libraries should have only one book: the Holy Bible? Well, maybe a few, for we would need at least several translations and a concordance. But then, although the canon of the Bible is closed, each strand of the tradition has other works that are in a looser sense canonical. Indeed they don’t even all agree about what is in the canon of the Bible. There are the church fathers, the doctors of the church, the great theologians, the reformers and founders. So our theological libraries are growing. And since theological libraries are usually associated with seminaries, which in turn serve particular denominations, or even particular religious orders, they will be shaped in part by what the communities they serve take as canonical. But here our earlier assertion that meaning and information are in a zero-sum relation begins to break down, or is shown to be only one aspect of the truth, for in another sense meaning and information are complementary. Even the most basic terms that give us meaning, like the word ‘‘love’’ or the

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words of the Lord’s Prayer, require to be understood anew in every age, to be interpreted again, to be applied to present reality.4 And to understand, interpret, and apply we will need a lot of information. In a sermon interpreting words that are totally familiar we may hear things we never heard before, things that, if said rightly, deepen our understanding of the meaning, rather than distract from it. Or they may not. When Robert Maynard Hutchins became president of the University of Chicago, he regularly attended Rockefeller Chapel for Sunday services. But when one Sunday the dean of the Chapel began his sermon with ‘‘Yesterday I was on the golf course and as I teed off I was reminded that we must follow through in life,’’ Hutchins was so upset that he never returned.5 We can understand why. The story I am telling about Christianity and the several churches that compose it could be told of any of the great religious traditions. At their core is the spoken word of Moses, the Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Muhammad, words that continue to be spoken in the ritual life of the communities that carry these traditions. Sooner or later the words get written down, though often there are lengthy oral traditions behind the written texts. And then, inevitably, there are the commentaries, the interpretations, the applications, that are necessary for the life of the communities to deal with ever changing historical circumstances. Over time information, much of it helpful, much of it distracting, accumulates. In any living tradition much information will be forgotten, even parts of the canon will be overlooked or ignored, and there will be a recurrent process of rediscovery and renewed application which will add to the bulk of what is transmitted. Inevitably there will arise those who say the tradition has become distorted; let us return to the original texts; and they too will be added to what is transmitted. But even though libraries will become large, they will serve a living community for which the reading and understanding of canonical and quasi-canonical texts are essential for the reaffirmation of the meaning of the community’s continued existence. Where ritual leaves off and study as we would understand it begins is unclear in all the great traditions. The yeshiva, the Quranic school or madrasa, the Confucian school, are all places where texts are recited, sometimes chanted, and where the written text itself is revered. The lectio divina of the monastic traditions in Chris4 The most helpful discussion of understanding, interpretation, and application is in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1989). 5 George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 377.

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tianity has a similar quality. The texts are to be ‘‘chewed’’ as it was said, read slowly and reflected on until they are internalized, become constituent parts of the self. Yet in all the traditions differences of interpretation arose and sharp disagreements were manifested. It was part of the life of the community to try to get it right, and often not only spiritual but political, certainly ethical, consequences hung in the balance. In all this process meaning and information were constantly passing back and forth into each other. I am not claiming that this process was idyllic. Terrible things could be transmitted over long periods of time, including not infrequently seriously distorted views about other traditions. I am simply trying to show how ritual, text, reading, and interpretation were part of the life of an ongoing community, and how libraries were an inevitable component of the practices of such a community, that is, they were helping in the production of meaning. In the last several centuries, however, something has happened that has few precursors in premodern cultures. Profane readings of other people’s sacred texts are known from ancient times. Classical philosophers such as Celsus criticized the beliefs of Christians, and Christian theologians such as Augustine criticized the beliefs of classical philosophers, often with none too subtle an effort to understand the opponent. But no one claimed neutrality. In most of human history there was religion but no science of religion or religious studies. There was not even disinterested scholarship concerning religion, for scholarship was very interested: to defend, to criticize, to proclaim. The ideal of autonomous scholarship concerning religious texts began to emerge only gradually, becoming fully explicit, perhaps, only in the nineteenth century. This ideal of scholarship too had its institutional location, the modern university. Though the ideal of disinterested scholarship has never been realized in practice, since significant scholarship is always motivated by some kind of passion, acknowledged or not, its existence as an ideal, even an unrealized one, has been enormously significant. To some extent a purely cognitive concern, simply to find out what is the case, without concern for the lived consequences for a religious community, has been realized. It is called the Ph.D. dissertation. No, seriously, I am referring to the vast accumulation of scholarship which probably takes up more cubic feet of theological library shelf space than anything else and which grows at ever increasing rapidity and now digitally as well as on the printed page. Valuable though much of this is, it is part of what I have already referred to as the information explosion. I would suggest that it is the intersection of this scholarly information explosion with the life of religious communities

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that presents the greatest challenge to theological libraries today, a challenge that will undoubtedly be met quite variously by libraries affiliated with the various traditions and the strands of subtraditions. In some ways you are better off than secular libraries. I have followed the terminological battle at Berkeley over what we used to call the Library School. Under administrative pressure the name of the school was changed to the School for Library and Information Sciences; but more recently, and under faculty protest, it was changed to the School for Information Management and Systems. Thus the complete triumph of information over meaning. All this because the liber, Latin for ‘‘book,’’ from which the word library comes, and which has carried a great deal of information but in its deepest sense has always had a powerful overtone of meaning, is in disgrace. Books are being superseded by electronic storage and retrieval, or so the theory goes. Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and Borders.com all seem to be doing a thriving business. But, we are told, all that will soon be over.We will just call up a book on our computer screens, skim it, print out what we want of it, and then delete it. All very well if what we want is information.What about meaning? Well, canons, and the practices of reading that make them canons, and the communities that carry the practices are also on the way out, and there will always, well, at least for a while, be secondhand book stores for those who must have classics to contemplate. It is worth remembering that the tradition of the modern university, even long after its connection to religious institutions had weakened or disappeared, continued a concern for meaning as well as information. The religion of high culture to which I alluded earlier in this talk was institutionally based very much in the humanities departments of universities. At the moment, however, as universities become ever more closely tied to the market economy in the computer age, the older understanding of the humanities is in serious jeopardy. If the balance between meaning and information seems to be tipping in secular university libraries irretrievably to the information side, let us hope that will not happen in theological libraries. Like everyone else, you will have to cope with the information explosion. Knowledge about all the subjects involved in theological education is growing exponentially, just as in other fields. And I am sure you are already taking advantage of the wide array of electronic devices that make retrieval of such information rapid and easy. But I hope that respect for the book as such will not decline. I greatly prefer the Graduate Theological Union library to any library on the Berkeley campus. It is friendly and accessible and encourages the visitor to actually sit and read. Of course I use the computer to find books, but I am also happy that the old card

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files are still publicly available with the wealth of information they contain. And I cannot imagine ever wanting totally to give up browsing in the stacks, where one comes across books shelved near what one was looking for that one never knew existed and certainly would not know how to look up in any index. It may be my age, but for me the sense of the weight, even the smell, of an old book can never be replaced by a computer printout, although I am very happy to get brand-new papers from colleagues by email attachment. Such a reader-friendly library could be replicated, and I’m sure is being replicated, perhaps not in the vast libraries of research universities, but in the libraries of good liberal arts colleges. What I wonder about is something more. Can a theological library play a part in the practices of reading in a seminary that is organically related to a religious community? Can the fact that sacred or quasi-sacred texts are at the core of a theological library be related to serious practices of reading in which the reader enters into the life-transforming possibilities of genuine encounter with such texts? George Marsden wrote about the soul of the American university. Can we ask about the soul of the American theological school? I believe there is a struggle for that soul between its organic relation to a church and its organic relation to a university. Even seminaries not attached to universities live under the shadow of those that are. Is the purpose of the seminary, and thus of its library, the understanding, interpretation, and application of a living tradition to the problems of a religious community formed by that tradition, or is it the accumulation of information to which the secular university is increasingly devoted? I’m not saying there is a necessary contradiction here; under the right circumstances meaning and information are mutually enriching. But I am saying that there may be a matter of priority, and that what has priority in the secular university might not be the same as in a theological school. But behind this way of putting it lies a larger and more ominous problem. To what extent are the religious communities in America, the churches, still sufficiently strong as communities to interpret and apply their traditions to the world in which we live, or to what extent has the world in which we live so invaded and eviscerated those communities that they have difficulty understanding their vocation? I say this because the triumph of information over meaning is not simply a cultural reality, but is in turn rooted in the social reality of what has been happening to American society for quite some time. The question is whether America is a collection of individuals who, if they are religious at all, are embarked on their own private spiritual journeys and intent on furnishing their souls with whatever at-

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tractive religious antiques they may gather from whatever tradition may be at hand, or does it still contain communities that think of themselves as the Body of Christ, living in the communion of the saints and practicing a form of life that shows a foretaste of the kingdom of God? If the former then a universal bazaar of religious information available to individuals to choose from is all we need. If the latter, then it is a matter of beliefs and practices embedded in a continuing solidary community that it is increasingly difficult to maintain in the kind of society America is becoming. And if the latter choice is the one we want to make, it involves not only rethinking religious community but also perhaps reforming the environing society as well. Some have argued of late that it is the business of Christians to reform themselves without worrying about the larger society, but in a nation where church and society are far more deeply interrelated than the doctrine of separation has ever made sense of this may not be so easy. I have recently had the sobering experience of reading Robert Putnam’s new book Bowling Alone.6 It gives an incisive analysis, based on an extraordinarily extensive collection of data, of what we have come to in our society today. The picture is not entirely news; in one sense it is a massive empirical confirmation of the argument of Habits of the Heart, although it is more than that. In the book Putnam describes the sharp decline of what he calls ‘‘social capital’’ in just about every sphere of American life for the last thirty years or more, all the more remarkable since the first sixty or seventy years of the twentieth century saw a significant increase in social capital. By social capital Putnam means social connectedness of almost every sort and finds all of them—from voting, to political activism, to membership in a wide variety of civic organizations (he takes his title from the stunning decline of bowling leagues), to informal socializing, including even having dinner with one’s own family, to churchgoing, membership, and giving—weaker today than they have been for decades. But more is changing than a decline in belonging of all sorts. Social capital also consists in norms and expectations—that we stop at boulevard stops, for example, or that we expect that most people can be trusted, and all those measures are dramatically down as well. Anyone serious about understanding our society today will have to read Bowling Alone carefully to find out how we have changed in each different sphere. In a nutshell I can summarize it by saying we live in a very different society from the one I grew up in. Loyalty to others is not high on the agenda of most younger 6 Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

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Americans, who can, not entirely inaccurately, be caricatured as sitting alone at their computers calculating how to maximize their self-interest. Rather than give the bad news across the board, let me turn to the most relevant field for our topic, the field of religion. For a long time many people, including me, thought that religion was relatively immune to these trends, that both church membership and church attendance were remarkably stable except for the unusual bump up in the 1950s, but, as it turns out, both membership and attendance have been in decline over the same period as other forms of engagement, that is, since 1960. Though a wide variety of groups, just for example the pta and the League of Women Voters, but also the Jaycees, the Kiwanis, and the Shriners, have been in precipitate decline in this period, the decline in the churches has been more gradual and has taken a bit longer to become evident. In fact, church giving has declined more sharply than church membership or church attendance, but all have steadily fallen for forty years. While it is the quantitative data that are most reliable, there are some things we can say about the quality of participation as well. We can discern in the life of religious communities something that is going on in the society in general: participation is less about loyalty and a strong conviction of membership and more about what one will get out of participating. Even evangelical churches that used to be able to count on their members now have to offer incentives, to ‘‘sell’’ their programs as adding value to the participants. Attachment to all groups, including churches, but even families, is increasingly evaluated in terms of, what will I get out of it? what’s in it for me? Before making the connection between all this and my theme of texts, sacred and profane, which I think is a close one, I want to look at Putnam’s effort to explain what has happened to us in the last thirty or forty years. Putnam’s primary explanation is generational change. On almost every variable in which he is interested each generation starts lower than the one before and stays lower. On the other hand those who started high have stayed high. My generation (note: not Putnam’s generation—he is not just an old man being nostalgic), those born between 1925 and 1930, which Putnam calls the most civic generation in American history, started out voting and we still vote, started out going to church and we still go to church, started out reading newspapers and we still read newspapers, and so on down the line, but each succeeding generation has started lower and remains lower. Another important variable in Putnam’s analysis, one that overlaps with generation, is television watching. The number of hours per person spent watching television has gone up through the whole period

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when almost every form of participation has been declining, and again, the increase by generation is clear. But the correlation is not just general, it is quite specific: that is within every generation, those who watch more television participate less in politics, civic life, informal socializing, and religion. Looking more closely, not all television watching has these negative effects. Watching educational television, or network news (network news now has a largely geriatric audience), is not negatively correlated with participation, but, like newspaper reading, is positively correlated. The kind of television that is negatively correlated with participation, and it is by far the most common type, is television as entertainment, television for its own sake, simple channel hopping to find something to watch. Thus I think what we can say is that attentive watching, or reading in the case of newspapers, does not undermine social connectedness. But it is just the decline of attentiveness across the board that is problematic. What I am suggesting is that the kind of people Americans are becoming, and increasingly so with each succeeding generation, finds it ever more difficult to sustain commitments to religious communities, to understand ritual, and to organize their lives around sacred texts, to even understand why some texts are sacred at all. (Let me remind you that we are talking about statistical trends here—among every generation, including the youngest, there are many civically minded, socially responsible, and religiously active people; there are just fewer of them.) Dense, multistranded commitments to many kinds of communities are being replaced, as Putnam puts it, with ‘‘single-stranded, surf-by interactions’’ so that ‘‘more of our social connectedness is one shot, special purpose, and self oriented.’’ 7 I have not mentioned it so far, but this shift obviously is closely related to the dramatic change in the economic orientation of our society from an inadequate welfare state in the early postwar period to an increasingly marketized, privatized society at the end of the century. Someone recently asked a group of college students what makes their generation different, and their response was ‘‘We’re more entrepreneurial than our parents.’’ That says it all. If everything is commodified, if even religion is just one more consumer preference, then why do we need churches? Why not just buy our religious goodies on the Web? But the very fact that Web sites devoted to religion are rapidly proliferating is suggestive that generations less and less in touch with meaning as opposed to information are nonetheless hungry for meaning even when they don’t know what it is. As loyalty weakens and the routines and ritu7 Putnam, Bowling Alone, 183–184.

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als that make it real disappear, the idea of loyalty still exerts an attraction. In a society with an ever fainter grasp on the reality of community, the word ‘‘community’’ is still, except among some academics, widely popular. The trouble is that younger Americans, late boomers and Generation Xers, can’t imagine infringing their autonomy. Freedom is still the highest good. So they want somehow to combine choice and commitment in ways that may be performatively impossible. As one observer puts it: ‘‘In late twentieth-century America there is no alternative to voluntary community based on perceptions of individual interest; we will have to get along as best we can without antique norms and practices of sacrifice and mutual obligation.’’ 8 But according to David Brooks in his book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There,9 which describes the bohemian bourgeoisie which is setting the tone of our younger cultural elite, many in this group are nonetheless still trying to find a way to, as he puts it, ‘‘smoosh together choice and commitment’’ in highly problematic ways. He quotes a rabbi whom he interviewed in Montana as saying what we need is ‘‘flexidoxy.’’ That these efforts are proving to a degree ineffectual is indicated by some of Putnam’s more alarming findings: that what we might call subjective health as measured by reported headaches, insomnia, and indigestion, is actually getting worse with each younger generation, and subjective feelings of happiness are declining as well, counterintuitive findings where we might normally expect that the younger the generation the healthier and happier it would feel. Obviously this loosening hold on meaning and its social correlates cannot be the whole story, although the trends I have described affect Protestants and Catholics, Evangelicals and non-Evangelicals, Christians and non-Christians. Communities for which rituals, texts, reading, and interpretation remain central to their collective life will continue to exist, even if their numbers decline, but what will they look like? I have recently read a book describing contemporary American Jewry that argues that what the writer calls the orthodox model is winning out.10 Secular Jews are simply gone—the social and cultural context that has sustained them in their identity so far is rapidly evaporating, and if they are religious at all it is apt to take the form of the do-it-yourself spirituality that appeals so widely 8 Nessim Watson, as quoted by William Galston, ‘‘Does the Internet Strengthen Community,’’ Philosophy and Public Policy 19, no. 4 (Fall 1999), 8. 9 David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 10 Samuel G. Freedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 338ff.

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to younger Americans. Only a tightly structured religious community emphasizing Hebrew, daily Torah reading, religious practices including keeping kosher, will survive. The author is not saying that all Jewish groups will become ideologically like the ultraorthodox of today. Far from it: some of these groups will continue to ordain women, bless gay unions, and support a variety of progressive causes which would be anathema to the ultraorthodox. But they will look more orthodox because their practice will be more orthodox. One possible consequence of such a change must be noted. We know that while religious membership and attendance in general is positively correlated with all other kinds of political and civic engagement, this is not true for Christian Evangelicals, and probably not for Orthodox Jews or conservative Catholics as well, though I don’t have more than anecdotal evidence for that. Their ‘‘social capital’’ may be strong, but it is kept within the group and does not link them to others. Will all surviving religious communities look like this? Circling the wagons and withdrawing from the larger world? What would be the implications of that development for seminaries and theological libraries? There is another possible scenario. Perhaps the balance between individual and society is cyclical in America. After all, the first two-thirds of the twentieth century saw an increase in social solidarity; only the last third saw a drastic decline. Maybe the profound incoherence produced by the shift to radically market-oriented individualism will of itself motivate a countertendency, a recovery of social connection, within which at least some religious communities would not need to withdraw, but could play a significant role in the public arena, understanding their texts and practices in a way that strengthens their connection to their own group but to other groups as well. For that to happen would require an effort to missionize the disconnected without either giving in to their proclivity to incoherence, or reacting to it with tight systems of external control. I have no formula for how successfully to undertake such a mission, except that we have to start from where people are and show them why their lives are not working as they would hope, before we can offer more meaningful alternatives. But renewal of genuine practices of reading in a community for which ritual, text, and interpretation have again become central would have to be part of the process. Such an initiative too would have significant implications for seminaries and theological libraries. Embracing our diversity is surely the right thing to do in our present world, but recognizing that the great waves of modern history affect all of us, in the very midst of our diversity, in remarkably similar ways, is also a challenge we cannot avoid.

26 Epiphany ‘‘B L E S S E D A R E T H E P O O R I N S P I R I T’’

This morning, because I have been asked to come here to the College of Preachers to speak to the professors of homiletics, that is, the teachers of preachers in our Episcopal seminaries, I want to reflect on the place of preaching in the life of the church. For a homily on preaching, the lessons for today overflow with riches. But I want to start by pointing out another connection, the close relationship between preaching and this season of the liturgical year. Epiphany is a good season for thinking about preaching, for in Epiphany we are thinking about the manifestation of our Lord, the disclosure, in a series of events, of who he is, but also of the words that make him known, such as in the Gospel reading three weeks ago the voice from heaven at his baptism saying, ‘‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,’’ or two weeks ago John the Baptist saying, ‘‘Behold, the Lamb of God,’’ or last week Jesus himself saying, ‘‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’’ Those are disclosing words, creative words, words that create a world, and in preaching we must utter such words and hope that they will disclose something real. To participate in the Epiphany today, to make Christ manifest, to disclose the truth for our lives of what was incarnate in him, we must show what he was and what he means for us now. But the special form of manifestation that I want to consider this morning is Christ as preacher, the living word preaching the living word. On this fourth Sunday after Epiphany this year our lectionary begins the Sermon on the Mount with those singular verses we call the Beatitudes, an extraordinary disclosure of Jesus himself, but also an extraordinary disclosure of the art of teaching and preaching. As a matter of fact all of our readings this morning have the quality of preaching that manifests or discloses the Christ. And what great preachers [Preached at Washington Cathedral, February 1, 1987, the fourth Sunday after Epiphany. The text of this sermon was published in Cathedral Age 62, no. 2 (1987): 28–30. Used by permission.]

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we have: Micah who sums up and epitomizes the teachings of the Hebrew prophets; Paul who saw himself as essentially a preacher and whose letters are often extended sermons; and above all Jesus, and here at the beginning of his greatest sermon. It is easy to see how Jesus is manifesting himself in his words as well as his actions, though how that works in the Beatitudes will take a little reflection. But Christians also discern a pointing to, a disclosure of, Christ, even in the Hebrew scriptures. Nowhere is this clearer than in the famous verse at the end of our reading this morning from Micah: ‘‘For what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.’’ Those are indeed the things that Christ requires of us, but without his grace where would we find the strength to do them? But significant as all of today’s readings are, the Beatitudes, today’s gospel, are so condensed and so powerful that I must devote most of my attention just to beginning the process of opening them up. If we take the Beatitudes seriously and truly grapple with what is being said, then we will soon be shocked to discover that this great proclamation of the Good News will come to most Americans as very bad news indeed, for it goes against our central beliefs. We may remember that at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew writes, ‘‘And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching.’’ If we are able to open ourselves, even a little, to the original power of the Beatitudes, and not be mesmerized by the familiarity, or the archaic unfamiliarity, of the words, I can guarantee you that we will be astonished too. ‘‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’’ Immediately we are hit with the difficult, seemingly self-contradictory phrase ‘‘poor in spirit.’’ Does it mean ‘‘spiritually humble,’’ so that rich people who don’t think too well of themselves can be ‘‘poor in spirit’’? No, say the commentaries, if Matthew had meant ‘‘humble’’ he had perfectly good Greek ways of saying so. Certainly the word ‘‘poor’’ refers to the actually, materially, poor. Luke in a parallel passage says simply, ‘‘Blessed are the poor.’’ Rather, ‘‘poor in spirit’’ seems to mean those who are really poor but are untroubled about it, uncomplaining about it. We might even go so far as to say that they accept permanent defenselessness and insecurity. And what does this archaic word ‘‘blessed’’ mean? Well, one of its plain meanings is happy. The Jerusalem Bible translates it, ‘‘Happy are the poor in spirit.’’ And so Jesus is starting right out in the first sentence of the greatest sermon ever preached telling us that the really poor who are untroubled by their poverty are happy and further that ‘‘the kingdom of heaven is

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theirs.’’ That is, present tense, they are now already participating in the messianic fulfillment that it was Jesus’ special mission to bring about on earth. Now almost nobody in America is going to want to hear that. The conservatives will wonder why these poor folks are so happy. Don’t they have any ambition? Don’t they know this country is a land of unlimited opportunity, where the children of the poorest immigrants can become governors, senators, and ceos of our largest corporations? And besides, if there is going to be any kingdom of heaven on earth certainly it should belong to those who have worked hard and deserve it and not to poor people who are so apparently lazy that they are satisfied with their poverty. Nor will the liberals like it any better. Why should the poor be happy? Don’t they know that it is the rich who are oppressing them and keeping them down? And how can they be enjoying the kingdom of heaven now when we haven’t yet reformed the social system so as to eliminate poverty? The liberal may even feel that a passage like this proves the Marxists are right, that Christ was just trying to keep the poor happy while the rich could go on being rich, when what he should have done is exhort us to do something about poverty. Of course elsewhere he did exhort us to do something about the poor, to feed them, clothe them, take them in. But not here. Here he is trying to shock us, to open us up to something we don’t want to see, to disclose to us a reality different from the one we take for granted. Or let’s take the second Beatitude: ‘‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.’’ Those who mourn are those who suffer loss, perhaps those who have lost everything. To put it in present American parlance we might think of those who mourn as ‘‘losers.’’ Jesus is saying that losers are happy and will be comforted, when we all know that ending up a loser is the worst thing that can happen to you and you certainly won’t be happy. Or what about the meek in the third Beatitude? ‘‘Meek’’ is another somewhat archaic term that Richmond Lattimore translates as ‘‘gentle.’’ Certainly it means unaggressive. The unaggressive are not only happy but they are going to inherit the earth? Whoever heard of such a thing? Everyone knows that it is only the go-getters, the really aggressive, who ever get anything on this earth, and certainly if we want global power it is only armed might that will get it. Jesus, as we would put it in California, seems to be completely ‘‘off the wall.’’ I have been able only to begin to unfold the depths of meaning in the first three Beatitudes and show how powerfully, how shockingly, they will speak to us if we will only hear them. I cannot even do that for the next five,

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which consider those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. I hope you will go home and reread these verses of chapter 5 of Matthew, think about them, and see what they say to you. Let me skip, then, to the last Beatitude, the ninth, where there is a dramatic shift that puts the whole passage in a new light. But first let me point out that the first eight Beatitudes are an example of what I said at the beginning of this sermon about words creating a world. For the first eight Beatitudes create a world just as surely as the word of God in Genesis 1 creates the heavens and the earth and all that is in them. The first eight Beatitudes create the world of the heavenly kingdom. Note the symmetry of the first and eighth Beatitude: both conclude with ‘‘for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’’ The first eight, with remarkably compressed power, follow a fixed third-person declarative form: ‘‘Blessed are the . . . , for they shall . . . .’’ But suddenly in the ninth Beatitude Jesus shifts to direct address: ‘‘Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad [the King James Version says, ‘be exceeding glad’], for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.’’ Jesus has saved the greatest shock for the last. We are to be happy when men revile us and persecute us. We are to rejoice and be glad when they utter all kinds of evil against us. For his sake. When we are doers of the word and not hearers only. And by the very form of the language he has moved from creating the world of the heavenly kingdom to addressing us directly and pulling us, as it were, into that world. The participation in the messianic kingdom in and through Jesus Christ, who is the kingdom incarnate on this earth, brings a joy and a gladness that overwhelm all the sufferings of the world. What Jesus is teaching is an affront to more or less all of the cultures in human history, but to none more so than our own. We have probably more than any culture in history emphasized competition, survival, and success. Perhaps only in America could someone say and be respected for saying, ‘‘Winning isn’t everything, winning is the only thing.’’ But Jesus is saying it doesn’t have to be that way. Life does not have to be lived as a harrowing struggle for survival with the honors going to the foremost. Those who haven’t ‘‘made it’’ don’t deserve to be despised and neglected, and those who have ‘‘made it’’ don’t need to be so desperately anxious about constantly achieving more. Instead Jesus holds up to us the poor, the outcast, the rejected, the persecuted as the place where the kingdom of God is, where he is (the Last Judgment passage in Matthew 25, where Jesus tells

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us that as we did it to the least of these we did it to him). Bishop Lawrence, Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts in 1901, said that ‘‘godliness is in league with riches’’ (I wonder where he found that in the Bible). But Roger Williams in the seventeenth century was closer to Jesus when he said ‘‘the godly are persecuted and the more godly the more persecuted.’’ In that regard we can think of Martin Luther King Jr., whom we were remembering so recently, or of Archbishop Tutu and his coworkers in South Africa today. So if we listen well, we will probably, like the crowds gathered on the mountain, be ‘‘astonished at his teaching.’’ We may even, with God’s grace, be able to see through these words a glimpse of our incarnate Lord. But will it make any difference? Will it transform our lives? Will it be as the seed that is sown in rocky soil in the parable of the sower, that flourishes for a moment but withers as soon as the sound of the words has died away? If all we have is words, important as language is, that is probably what will happen. But we have more than words. George Lindbeck has indicated that the churches such as ours with a strong liturgical tradition have a special advantage in that the biblical teaching is carried in the practice, the enactment, the embodiment, of the liturgy. The compressed message of the Beatitudes is enacted each time we jointly celebrate the Eucharist: ‘‘On the night he was handed over to suffering and death, our Lord Jesus Christ took bread; and when he had given thanks to you, he broke it, and gave it to his disciples.’’ In the Eucharist we have a powerful and central enactment of the kingdom of heaven, the reign of God. It should be a focal action, a focal practice, that radiates out into the whole of our lives. But again, does it really happen or does the power of the Eucharist remain imprisoned in the walls of the church for the brief time that we come together to celebrate it? In chapter 9 of Habits of the Heart we describe an Episcopal parish, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, where, partially and uncertainly to be sure, the power of the Eucharist, of the kingdom of heaven, does break out into the whole lives of its members. They are actively concerned with the hungry and the homeless. As members of the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant they may well be persecuted. But we cannot as Episcopalians take any special pride in that example. Like other denominations our congregations show a wide range of spiritual vitality. Yet it is strengthening for us to remember that there are Anglican churches and other churches not only in America but all over the world, where the word is not only preached, but where, in the light of the word and the sacrament, Christian communities

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are actually living a life of discipleship, enacting the parables of Jesus, showing forth the reign of God, losing their lives as they find them in him. If we truly listen to the Beatitudes, we will hear them as a call for us to recover the integrity of our own faith and its lived expression. But if we only go through the motions of our religion, while closing ourselves off from its real meaning, if we do not discover that the kingdom of heaven is our only true home, the place that defines our most essential identity, we will be lost in the wilderness of decayed traditions and vulnerable to the domination of modernity’s suicidal infatuation with power, the exact opposite of the Gospel message. Our greatest contribution to the world is, with God’s grace, to try to be who, as Christians, we are. That will never be easy and will probably bring upon us rejection and even persecution, but it will also make us exceeding glad.

27 Pentecost ‘‘B E G I N N I N G I N T H E E N D O F T I M E S’’

It is a privilege to preach on Pentecost. It is in fact a sociologist of religion’s dream come true: to preach on the birthday of the Church! There is a great deal going on in the wonderful texts we have for this morning, and even more in the many texts related to them. I can only offer a few of the points that I think are most important. I want to start with a text that is to me one of the most profound in the New Testament. It is in Jesus’s farewell discourse, which he preaches to the disciples at the last supper, John 16:7 and following: ‘‘Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you, but if I go, I will send him to you. . . . I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.’’ So Jesus seems to be saying, ‘‘I must leave you in order to send the Holy Spirit to you.’’ But Jesus in John’s Gospel has told us many times that he is in the Father and the Father is in him, and therefore we can presume that he is in the Spirit and the Spirit in him. None of the members of the Trinity are separated from one another. And yet which member of the Trinity is emphasized tells us something important. In our Gospel reading for today Jesus breathed on the disciples and said, ‘‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’’ In the reading from Acts the followers of Jesus are ‘‘filled with’’ the Holy Spirit. It is as if we had to lose Jesus in order for Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, to enter into us, so that we become members of the body of Christ, as Paul so wonderfully puts it. There is much preparation for this in John’s Gospel. Already in chapter 3 he tells the uncomprehending Nicodemus that he must be born again, born of the Spirit, if he is to enter the kingdom of God. In chapter 15:14ff., in the farewell discourse, not long before he announces the coming of the Counselor, Jesus says, ‘‘You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from [Preached at All Souls Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California, on May 31, 1998.]

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my Father I have made known to you.’’ He has told us that he is the Way, the Truth and the Life, that he is the vine of which we are the branches. It is as though he has been pulling us toward him, pulling us to be part of him, and then, ‘‘I must leave you, but I will send the Holy Spirit to you.’’ One can imagine the scattered, confused, disheartened followers trying to make sense of Jesus’s words in the light of the terrible event of the Crucifixion. And then one can imagine them with growing confidence, but still a lot of confusion, trying to make sense of the appearances of the risen Christ and the cryptic words they hear him utter. It is at Pentecost, the third great feast of the church, that things come dramatically together. As Acts tells us, ‘‘When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.’’ We will come to the ‘‘other tongues’’ in a minute, but first I want to note that ‘‘they were all together in one place.’’ The Spirit did not come to them when they were alone. It is not a case of ‘‘alone in the garden with Jesus.’’ The Spirit came to them together; the Spirit came and made them the Church.We are all Pentecostals. Every time the Spirit comes and sanctifies the bread and the wine, every time the Spirit comes and sanctifies us as we partake of the bread and the wine, it is Pentecost: we are in the Spirit and the Spirit is in us. Jesus went away, but in the Spirit we are born again, we have become members of his body. So that is the powerful and wonderful beginning of Pentecost, but it is only the beginning. They ‘‘began to speak in other tongues.’’ What is going on here? Some commentators think Luke didn’t get it about speaking in tongues. According to our earliest source, namely Paul’s letters, speaking in tongues, glossolalia, was not speaking in other tongues, that is other languages, but utterances unintelligible in themselves that had to be interpreted in ordinary language. But before we think Luke just made a mistake, let us consider that he is referring not to a miracle of speaking, but to a miracle of hearing, as it is sometimes put. What the followers of Jesus were saying was intelligible to all peoples. Here we have a reversal of the story of Babel. At Babel languages became unintelligible to each other; at Pentecost they became intelligible again. The church represents the overcoming of differences, the erasing of boundaries. Paul is getting at the same thing when he says ‘‘By one Spirit we are baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free.’’ In Galations he adds, ‘‘male or female,’’ and we

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might add ‘‘black or white, Eastern or Western.’’ Our diversity and pluralism are penultimate goods and we are right to celebrate them. But in the Spirit we become one body; that is our ultimate good. But let’s get back to the speaking. Right after our passage for this morning in Acts 2 we get a sermon by Peter, the beginning of the preaching mission of the church. And Peter starts, as is so often the case in the New Testament, with a reference to the Old Testament. He starts from the second chapter of Joel: And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.

And then he preaches the Gospel of Jesus Christ and him crucified, and him raised from the dead. But that isn’t all, even in chapter 2, for toward the end of the chapter we are told that ‘‘all who believed were together and had all things in common.’’ Pentecost culminates, so to speak, in a common life. Here Paul’s great imagery of one Spirit but varieties of gifts, varieties of works, varieties of service, is so apt. ‘‘To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good,’’ says Paul. Because the Spirit of God is in the church, we already experience in its common life a foretaste of the kingdom of God. To put it the other way around, outside the church there is no salvation. As Stanley Hauerwas reminds us, the true meaning of that statement is addressed not to nonChristians, but to Christians, to the ones who think they’re very spiritual, but not religious, meaning they don’t have to go to church; to Christians who think that as long as they have a personal relation with Jesus they don’t need the church. But if Jesus is the vine of which we are the branches there is not going to be any salvation if we cut ourselves off from the vine. If, as Paul says, the church is grafted onto the vine of Israel, with all the concrete peoplehood that that implies, we are fulfilled as Christians only when we are living branches of that vine, when we are filled with the Holy Spirit in the church. Pentecost is saying to us, it is through the church that we know Christ. It is in the common celebration of the Eucharist that Christ comes to us and we to him. God is present on this earth through the church. The church is

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not divine, to be sure, but through it we participate in divinity. That is why in the Nicene creed after we say we believe in the Father, in the Son, and in the Holy Spirit, we also say we believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. We believe that Jesus Christ is God incarnate; there is only one final incarnation. But through the coming of the Holy Spirit we participate in the incarnation, we are included in it: that’s what being members of the body of Christ means. With our innate American anti-institutionalism we tend to distance ourselves from the ‘‘institutional’’ church; we refer to ‘‘it’’ or ‘‘them.’’ But the Holy Spirit fills us; we are the church. That’s what Vatican II was saying about the people of God. The church is not something over against us, any more than God is over against us. God in Christ is with us; the Holy Spirit fills us; we are the church. But what about that ‘‘all things in common’’? That, we think, didn’t seem to work out so well.We should not forget that people have taken it seriously all down through the history of the church. I am thinking of the monastic orders, for example, but there have been many other attempts, some more successful, some less. But rather than focus on the literal meaning of ‘‘all things in common’’ let’s ask why Pentecost, the birth of the church, would lead to such a conclusion. The answer, I think, is that if the church is a foretaste of the kingdom of God, it should look like the kingdom of God. If in the communion we receive the Eucharist, then we are called to go out into the world and become eucharist. It is up to us joyfully to share the sufferings of Christ, to share in the work of the redemption of the world. ‘‘You are my friends if you keep my commands.’’ In the case of Jesus that isn’t a lot of do’s and don’ts. It’s basically one commandment: that you love one another. Love one another? What kind of society would that be where we love one another? And Jesus didn’t mean just our relatives and our next-door neighbors. He meant everybody: the poor, the sick, the old, not just here but in Indonesia, Rwanda, Bosnia, without barriers of gender, race, language. So it’s just one commandment, but it’s too big for any of us alone. Only with the help of our brothers and sisters in Christ and by the grace of God can we do anything to respond to it at all. But the Church of Jesus Christ is called on to show forth what the kingdom of God is like. That’s why they had ‘‘all things in common.’’ Only a few of us are called on to live literally in that way, though it strengthens all of us as Christians to know that there are some who do, but we are all called on to do our part, to work for the transformation of the world, to make it more like the kingdom of God, even though in the end what happens is in the hands of God. So in this great feast of Pentecost all things come together. We are all

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Pentecostals; we are all born again; we are all Friends in the sense that Quakers are Friends; and we are all Catholic: we believe in the tangible reality of the visible church. I am in you and you are in me, said Jesus. Nowhere more than at Pentecost do we experience that oneness, that being filled with the Holy Spirit: tongues as of fire; a sound from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind.

28 All Souls Day ‘‘T H E L I V I N G A N D T H E D E A D I N C O M M U N I O N’’

I am honored to be asked to preach on our parish’s name day. When I was asked to preach at Pentecost a couple of years ago, it was a piece of cake: a sociologist getting to preach on the birthday of the Church. When I was asked to preach on All Souls Sunday this year, I was more than a little uneasy. I wasn’t sure what All Souls was about or what I would have to say. I was not reassured when I consulted a friend of Irish descent who was raised a Roman Catholic. He said, ‘‘That’s an awfully gloomy day to preach on,’’ and he reminded me of a passage in Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock, which describes life in late-seventeenth-century Quebec: The devotions of [All Souls] day had begun an hour after midnight. Old Bishop Laval had not thought that anyone should forget the solemn duties of the time. He was at his post at one o’clock in the morning to ring the Cathedral bell, and from then on until early mass he rang it every hour. It called out through the intense silence of streets where there were no vehicles to rumble, but only damp vapours from the river to make sound more intense and startling, to give it overtones and singular reverberations.

‘‘Priez pour les Morts, Vous qui reposez, Priez pour les tré-pas-sés!’’ [Pray for the dead, you who rest, pray for the dead.] it seemed to say, as if the exacting old priest himself were calling. One had scarcely time to murmur a prayer and turn over in one’s warm bed, before the bell rang out again . . . To the older people of Kebec, All Souls’ was a day of sad remembrance. Their minds went back to churches and cemeteries far away. . . . Fears for the sick and old, sorrow for those who died last year—five years ago—many years ago,— [Preached at All Souls Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California, on November 5, 2000.]

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memories of families once together and now scattered; these things hung over the rock of Kebec on this day of the dead like the dark fogs from the river.1

I was not reassured to learn that the Reformation had abolished All Souls Day and that it wasn’t even in the Book of Common Prayer. In the Lesser Feasts and Fasts for November 2, it is called ‘‘All Faithful Departed,’’ not ‘‘All Souls.’’ The reason for abolishing All Souls was that the distinction between All Saints and All Souls was a medieval idea and theologically unsound, because it is a redoubling of what should essentially be only one feast. Furthermore, when I look at lists of parishes, I see lots of All Saints parishes but very few All Souls. I wanted to know how our parish got its name, but I was told the archives are silent on that matter. A long-time member of the parish, however, suggested that the choice of the name ‘‘All Souls’’ perhaps lies in the low-church, evangelical origin of our parish as a ‘‘mission church’’ of St. Mark’s, the older Berkeley parish. The first rector, or probably vicar, was reaching out to ‘‘all souls’’ to bring them to Christ, thus the motto ‘‘All souls are mine saith the Lord,’’ and wasn’t thinking of the liturgical calendar or All Souls Day at all. Thus we can see the choice of our patron name as an expression of our humble missionary origins. But none of this helped me get at the substance for today’s sermon. So I decided I needed to take a comparative and historical look at what might be the context for All Souls Day. As it turns out, festivals of the dead are not unique to Christianity: they can be found all over the world. Frequently they involve the idea that the dead return on a special day in the year and they are to be received with gracious hospitality. In Japan there is the O-Bon festival in July.Village houses are cleaned and decorated in anticipation of the return of the ancestors. If one has relatives still in the rural villages, one may return ‘‘home’’ at that time of year to share in welcoming the ancestors back. The Mexican Days of the Dead involve a complex mixture of Christian and pagan ideas. The dead are believed to return and their return is a mixture of joy, satire, and grief. Dead children are supposed to return on the night of November 1, and adults on the night of November 2. But orthodox Christian belief has never sanctioned the idea that the dead return. Nonetheless communication with the dead is very much involved in the feast of All Souls. I decided to look more closely at the practice in England just before the Reformation, the immediate ancestral practice of our own Anglican communion, with the help of the extraordinary book of Eamon Duffy: The 1 Willa Cather, Later Novels (New York: Library of America, 1990), 524–525.

All Souls Day 517 Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580.2 It

began to be clearer what the distinction between saints and souls was all about. The saints are in Paradise. They can help us but they don’t need our help. The souls, however, though saved by the grace of Jesus Christ, are in Purgatory, undergoing purifying punishments for the sins they have committed in this world. Our prayers and good works can actually help them in their progress through Purgatory so that they can at last join the saints in Paradise. Thus the injunction Priez pour les morts, pray for the dead, has quite practical consequences: our actions can benefit the faithful dead. It is this sad emphasis on the dead in Purgatory that gave All Souls Day its dismal quality in Counter-Reformation French and Irish Catholicism. But when we look at pre-Reformation times, the picture is not so dismal after all. According to Duffy: The influence of the cult of the dead was ubiquitous. Yet it would be a mistake to deduce from its ubiquity that late medieval English religion was morbid or doom-laden. . . . If it is true that much of the religious activity of the period had death and the other world in mind, it is also true that the thought of mortality was endlessly harnessed by preachers and dramatists, not to call people away from social involvement but to promote virtue and sociability in this world. The cult of the dead can be seen as . . . a means of prolonging the presence of the dead within the community of the living, and therefore as the most eloquent of testimonies of the permanent value of life in the world of time and change.3

What Duffy is saying is that the cult of the dead caused people to concentrate on their lives in this world because it was in this world that living a good and virtuous life could not only lessen one’s own time in purgatory but hasten along those who had gone before. Summing up Duffy says: The cult of the dead, so central in the pieties of every late medieval Catholic, was also in an important and often overlooked sense a cult of the living, a way of articulating convictions about the extent and ordering of human community, and hence of what it was to be human. In this perspective, the Reformation attack on the cult of the dead was more than a polemic against a ‘‘false’’ metaphysical belief: it was an attempt to redefine the boundaries of human community, and,

2 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992). 3 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 302–303.

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in an act of exorcism, to limit the claims of the past, and the people of the past, on the people of the present.4

I cannot here get into, much as I might like to, the question of the great achievements and the great distortions of the Reformation, except to say that the Reformation was the first, and in my opinion the most profound, of the great waves of modernity that have so changed all of our lives in the last several centuries. As such, the Reformation already contained in germ the drastic claims of modernity that there is no past (a claim completed by the postmoderns who tell us that there is no future either) and there is no community beyond the isolated individual. In this great transition our Church and our Book of Common Prayer managed to maintain a middle way, an example of what, as Hans Küng put it, might have happened had Luther and the Vatican been able to compromise their differences. But what I am trying to imagine now is the late medieval English Catholic sense of the sacred, which Duffy characterizes as ‘‘a shared preoccupation with the communal, and a sense of the intimate interweaving of this world and the next,’’ and a concern with ‘‘the visible and tangible embodiment of absolute value, of the sacred within the human community.’’ 5 Of course the central expression of the embodiment of absolute value within the human community is the Eucharist, which in its fullness the Anglican communion never lost, though it has taken a while to bring it back into its proper place in our worship lives. Let us consider then the explanation of the observance of ‘‘All Faithful Departed,’’ as it is called, in Lesser Feasts and Fasts. There it is pointed out that in the New Testament the word ‘‘saints’’ is used to describe the entire Christian community, but that it later came to be used only for ‘‘persons of heroic sanctity.’’ Therefore: Beginning in the tenth century, it became customary to set aside another day— as a sort of extension of All Saints—on which the church remembered that vast body of the faithful who, though no less members of the company of the redeemed, are unknown to the wider fellowship of the church. It was also a day of particular remembrance of family members and friends. Though the observance of the day was abolished at the Reformation because of abuses connected with Masses for the dead, a renewed understanding of its meaning has led to a widespread acceptance of the commemoration among

4 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 8. 5 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 7.

All Souls Day 519 Anglicans, and to its inclusion as an optional observance in the calendar of the Episcopal Church.

Note that the words ‘‘All Souls’’ never appear at all in Lesser Feasts and Fasts, thus suggesting how hard it is, even in our communion, to restore a sense that the dead are still part of our living community, that they are not gone, and that we cannot live without them. It would be nice to think that the feast of All Saints takes care of that, but the justified triumphalism of All Saints would not seem to remember adequately ‘‘that vast body of the faithful who, though no less members of the company of the redeemed, are unknown to the wider fellowship of the church.’’ Although undoubtedly it is ‘‘a day for the particular remembrance of family members and friends,’’ a feeling shared by all of us, at least all of us old enough to have lost someone close to us, it is about ‘‘that vast body [of the] unknown’’ that I want to speak in this sermon. The lesson from Ecclesiasticus for last week spoke of them when it said: ‘‘Some of them have left behind a name, so that others declare their praise. But of others there is no memory; they have perished as though they had never existed; they have become as though they had never been born, they and their children after them’’ (Ecclesiasticus 44:8–9). It is they that I want to remember and toward whom I want to express our gratitude this morning. I want to emphasize how much we owe to the whole creation that came before us. The atoms and molecules that make up our body go back to the earliest moments of the universe. The amino acids in our bodies go back billions of years to the amino acids that were the precursors of life in the early stages of our planet’s existence. Our living tissue goes back to those first single-celled living creatures that emerged, we know not yet how, two or three billion years ago. Our dna is related to everything living: we share more dna than we might like to think even with the molds, and an enormous amount with the vertebrates and almost all, 98 percent or more, with the chimpanzees. We might not like to recognize them as living descendants of our common ancestors, but they are, and we can even teach these distant cousins of ours to communicate with us by a rudimentary use of symbols. And how much do we owe to the whole human species, which began sometime in the last million or half million years ago to communicate with protolanguage, with what some evolutionary musicologists have even called ‘‘musilanguage,’’ the common source from which music and language would later differentiate? I like to think that in the language of the Mass, in our Book of Common Prayer, we have continued that ancient

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musilanguage, and not fallen into the formless prose and baneful music of some of our Free Church friends. But in our culture and our society we owe an enormous debt to all those tribal peoples who, long before civilization emerged, came to inhabit almost every part of our globe. ‘‘Globalization,’’ which we like to think is our contemporary achievement (or disaster, depending on your point of view) was under way in a more basic sense tens of thousands of years ago when the first humans came to Australia and the New World, and was nearly completed some fifteen hundred years ago when the Polynesians reached the last isolated islands of the Pacific. I cannot in this sermon even mention the achievements of the great civilizations of the fourth, third, and second millennia b.c., but our biblical religion and classical Greek and Roman civilization borrowed heavily from them. What we owe to the Bible needs no comment in this context, but what we owe to the Greeks and Romans is evident from our daily speech: ‘‘politics,’’ ‘‘policy,’’ even ‘‘police,’’ all derive from the Greek word polis; and ‘‘citizen,’’ ‘‘civic,’’ and ‘‘civil’’ all derive from the Latin word civitas. In our world of thought and our world of the arts, though we seldom think of it this way, our debt to the dead is overwhelming. Plato and Aristotle are living presences in our lives and conversation with them has never been more intense. Where would we be without the music of Bach and Mozart, the painting and sculpture of Michelangelo? You may say those are the secular saints of our cultural heritage and not members of that vast body of the unknown, but where would we be unless members of that vast body had faithfully transmitted and commented on those ancient texts and kept alive through their performance or their connoisseurship the music and art that we treasure? I think today I need hardly mention what we owe to our parents and teachers, mentors and friends, without whom we would not be who we are, because we are so well aware of it on this day of remembrance. But I am reminded of a car dealer we interviewed for Habits of the Heart, who prided himself on being what he called ‘‘a self-made man,’’ failing to mention that he had inherited his dealership from his father.We are all tempted by the modern notion that we gave birth to ourselves, that we owe nothing to anyone but ourselves. This is indeed the day to correct those falsehoods. But while this is indeed a day for happy remembrance of all we have received from the dead and the extent to which the dead are still alive within us and around us, enriching our lives at every moment, it is also a day to remember another side: that among that vast body of the unknown there was enormous suffering and enormous injustice, that, in Saint Paul’s words, ‘‘All creation is groaning.’’ If we can’t any longer believe literally in Purga-

All Souls Day 521

tory, we might understand it, as we do Dante’s great poem the Purgatorio, as an extended metaphor for the human condition. And although we can’t erase the nightmare that is history, there is still something we can do for the suffering dead, even as medieval Christians believed there was something they could do. If we can’t reciprocate by helping with prayer to get them out of Purgatory, we can see ourselves as continuing their often failed endeavors, as redeeming their anonymity not just by remembering them, important though that is, but by doing their work, carrying it forward as our strength allows. Here I think the difference between saints and souls begins to disappear. What saint, however heroic, completed all that he or she set out to do? It is what we owe to the dead that we try to bring about the justice and the human flourishing that they failed or only partly succeeded in achieving. It is our way of helping along all the souls in Purgatory. In this task we must learn not to be afraid of death, even our own, for death is part of life, and, living or dead, we are part of one living community. Saint Francis in his wonderful Cantico delle Creature, spoke of our kinship with all beings, with brother sun and sister moon, but also with sora nostra morte corporale, our sister, bodily death. Death is our sister; we need not fear. Finally I want to remind you that it is in the Eucharist that it all comes together: with all the company of heaven, the communion of the saints, and of all souls, all enfolded in one time, time out of time, all equally present— past, future, and to come. Nunc stans, the eternal now. That is what happens in that moment when the sacred is embodied in human community, when God in Christ becomes real in us as we participate in him. It is in and through the Eucharist that we can understand the real meaning of time and death, of those who have gone before, those who are with us now, and those who are to come. It is in and through the Eucharist that we can understand the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel: Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life; he does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. Truly, truly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah

1952

Apache Kinship Systems. Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Prize Essay for 1950. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

1957

Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. Japanese translation, Nihon Kindaika to Skukyo Rinri (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1962).

1958

‘‘The Place of Religion in Human Action.’’ Review of Religion 22, nos. 3–4: 137–154. ‘‘Religious Aspects of Modernization in Turkey and Japan.’’ American Journal of Sociology 64, no. 1: 1–5. Review of Charles R. Kaut, The Western Apache Clan System: Its Origin and Development. American Anthropologist 60, no. 3: 586–587. Review of J. Milton Yinger, Religion, Society and the Individual. American Anthropologist 60, no. 2: 382–383.

1959

‘‘Durkheim and History.’’ American Sociological Review 24, no. 4: 447–461. Review of Max Weber, The Religion of India. American Sociological Review 24: 731–733. Review of Norman Jacobs, The Origin of Modern Capitalism and Eastern Asia. American Sociological Review 24, no. 5: 921–922.

1961

‘‘Nihon Kindaika no Ayumi’’ [The Path of Japan’s Modernization]. Daihorin (Tokyo), no. 28: 26–35. ‘‘Religious Tradition and Historical Change.’’ Transactions of the Institute of Japanese Culture and Classics (Kokugakuin University, Tokyo), no. 8: 303– 311. Also in Japanese translation.

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Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah

1962

‘‘The Religious Situation in the Far East.’’ Harvard Divinity Bulletin 26, no. 4: 27–38.

1963

‘‘It Doesn’t Go Far Enough.’’ Review of J. A. T. Robinson, Honest to God. Christianity and Crisis 23, no. 19 (November 11): 200–201. ‘‘Some Reflections on the Protestant Ethic Analogy in Asia.’’ Journal of Social Issues 19, no. 1: 52–60. ‘‘Values and Social Change in Modern Japan.’’ In Asian Cultural Studies (International Christian University, Tokyo), 13–56. Also in Japanese translation.

1964

‘‘Religious Evolution.’’ American Sociological Review 29, no. 3: 358–374. ‘‘Research Chronicle: Tokugawa Religion.’’ In Philip E. Hammond, ed., Sociologists at Work, 142–160. New York: Basic Books.

1965

‘‘Father and Son in Christianity and Confucianism.’’ Psychoanalytic Review 52, no. 2: 236–258. ‘‘Ienaga Saburō and the Search for Meaning in Modern Japan.’’ In Marius Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese Attitudes toward Modernization, 369–423. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ‘‘Japan’s Cultural Identity: Some Reflections on the Work of Watsuji Tetsuro.’’ Journal of Asian Studies 24, no. 4: 573–594. Religion and Progress in Modern Asia. Edited with introduction and epilogue, ix–xxv, 168–229. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

1966

‘‘Japanese Religion and World Civilization.’’ Yomiuri Shimbun (Tokyo) (January). ‘‘Religious Systems.’’ In Evon Z. Vogt and Ethel Albert, eds., The People of Rimrock, 227–264. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Review of David E. Apter, The Politics of Modernization. American Sociological Review 31, no. 2: 268–269. ‘‘Words for Paul Tillich.’’ Harvard Divinity Bulletin 30 (January): 15–16.

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah 525 1967

‘‘Civil Religion in America.’’ Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter): 1–21. Reprinted with commentary and rejoinder in Donald R. Cutler, ed., The Religious Situation, 1968 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 388–393. Comment on A. K. Saran’s Review of Religion and Progress in Modern Asia. Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion 6, no. 1: 117. ‘‘The Problems of Violence in Developing Countries.’’ In Harold W. Fildey, ed., Ethical Issues in American Life, Southern Regional Education Board Seminars for Journalists, Report no. 6, 27–43. Nashville: Vanderbilt University. Review of Werner Stark, The Sociology of Religion, vols. 1 and 2. Sociological Analysis 28, no. 4: 229–230.

1968

‘‘Meaning and Modernization.’’ Religious Studies 4, no. 1: 37–45. Religion in America. Edited with William G. McLoughlin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; paperback, Boston: Beacon Press. ‘‘Religion, Sociology of.’’ In David L. Sills, ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 13:406–413. New York: Macmillan. Review of Donald R. Cutler, ed., The Religious Situation, 1968, part 2. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 7, no. 2: 290–291. Review of Herbert W. Richardson, Toward an American Theology. In Harvard Divinity School Bulletin, new ser. 1, no. 3: 18–19. Review of Werner Stark, The Sociology of Religion, vol. 3. Sociological Analysis 29, no. 3: 160–161. ‘‘Shinto and Modernization.’’ In Continuity and Change: Proceedings of the Second International Conference for Shinto Studies, 158–162. Tokyo: Institute for Japanese Culture and Classics, Kokugakuin University. Also in Japanese translation. ‘‘The Sociology of Religion.’’ In Talcott Parsons, ed., American Sociology: Perspectives, Problems, Methods, 214–228. New York: Basic Books.

1969

‘‘The Dynamics of Worship.’’ In Myron B. Bloy, Jr., ed., Multi-Media Worship, 53–69. New York: Seabury Press. ‘‘Japan, Asia, Religion.’’ Sociological Inquiry 39, no. 1: 93–95. Preface to David Little, Religion, Order, and Law: A Study in Pre-Revolutionary England, iii–v. New York: Harper. ‘‘Transcendence in Contemporary Piety.’’ In Herbert W. Richardson and

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Donald R. Cutler, eds., Transcendence, 85–97. Boston: Beacon Press. An earlier version appeared in Donald R. Cutler, ed., The Religious Situation: 1969 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

1970

Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World. New York: Harper and Row. ‘‘Christian Realism.’’ Guest editorial in Theology Today 26, no. 4: 367–370. ‘‘Christianity and Symbolic Realism’’ and ‘‘Response to Comments on ‘Christianity and Symbolic Realism.’ ’’ Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion 9, no. 2: 89–96, 112–115. ‘‘Confessions of a Former Establishment Fundamentalist.’’ Bulletin of the Council for the Study of Religion 1, no. 3: 3–6. ‘‘Islamic Tradition and the Problems of Modernization.’’ International Yearbook of the Sociology of Religion 6: 65–82. Review of Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body. History of Religions 9, no. 4: 352–357.

1971

‘‘Brown in Perspective: A Commentary on Love’s Body.’’ Soundings 14, no. 4 (Winter): 450–459. ‘‘Continuity and Change in Japanese Society.’’ In Bernard Barber and Alex Inkeles, eds., Stability and Social Change, 377–404. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown. ‘‘Evil and the American Ethos.’’ In Nevitt Sanford and Craig Comstock, eds., Sanctions for Evil, 177–191. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. ‘‘The Historical Background of Unbelief’’ and ‘‘Between Religion and Social Science.’’ In Rocco Caporale and Antonio Grumelli, eds., The Culture of Unbelief, 39–42, 271–293. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1972

‘‘Intellectual and Society in Japan.’’ Daedalus 101, no. 2 (Spring): 89–115. ‘‘No Direction Home: Religious Aspects of the American Crisis.’’ In Myron B. Bloy Jr., ed., Search for the Sacred: The New Spiritual Quest, 65–81. New York: Seabury Press. ‘‘Religion in the University: Changing Consciousness, Changing Structures.’’ In Claude Welch, ed., Religion in the Undergraduate Curriculum, 13–18. Washington: Association of American Colleges.

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah 527 1973

‘‘American Civil Religion in the 1970’s.’’ Anglican Theological Review, suppl. ser., no. 1: 8–20. Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society. Edited and with an introduction, ix–lv. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ‘‘Liturgy and Experience.’’ In James D. Shaughnessy, ed., The Roots of Ritual, 217–234. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans. 1974

‘‘American Civil Religion in the 1970’s’’ (augmented version). In Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones, eds., American Civil Religion, 255–272. New York: Harper and Row. ‘‘The Contemporary Meaning of Kamakura Buddhism.’’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42, no. 1: 3–17. Foreword to Eli Sagan, Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form, ix–xi. New York: Harper. ‘‘Le cinque religioni dell’Italia moderna.’’ In Fabio Luca Cavazza and Stephen R. Graubard, eds., Il caso italiano, 439–468. Milan: Garzanti Editore. ‘‘The New Religious Consciousness and the Secular University.’’ Daedalus 103, no. 4: 110–115. ‘‘New Religious Consciousness.’’ New Republic 171, no. 21 (November 23): 33–41. Preface to Dean R. Hoge, Commitment on Campus: Changes in Religion and Values over Five Decades, ix–x. Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster. ‘‘Reflections on Reality in America.’’ Radical Religion 1, nos. 3–4: 38–49. ‘‘Religion and Polity in America.’’ Andover Newton Quarterly 15, no. 2: 107–123. ‘‘Roots of the American Taboo [on socialism].’’ Nation 219, no. 22 (December 28): 677–685. 1975

The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. New York: Seabury Press. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ‘‘Civil Religion and the Bicentennial.’’ In Ralph Weltge and John Westerhoff, eds., Bicentennial Broadside, 6. New York: National Council of Churches. ‘‘Emergence of the American 70’s: An Interview with Robert Bellah.’’ Right On (Berkeley, California) 7, no. 4 (November): 5, 12, 15. ‘‘The New Religious Consciousness and the Secular University’’ (uncut version), in David Noel Freedman and A. Theodore Kachel, eds., Religion and the Academic Scene, 1–24. Waterloo, Ont.: Council on the Study of Religion.

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‘‘Reflections on Reality in America, Part 2: A Dialogue between Karl E. Klare and Robert N. Bellah.’’ Radical Religion 2, no. 1: 66–67. ‘‘Rejoinder to Lockwood: ‘Bellah and His Critics.’ ’’ Anglican Theological Review 57, no. 4: 406–423.

1976

‘‘Abraham Lincoln as Theologian of America.’’ In Bicentennial Convocations at Sage Chapel, 3–8. Ithaca, N.Y.: Office of University Publications, Cornell University. ‘‘Civil Religion: The Sacred and the Political in American Life’’ (A Conversation with Sam Keen). Psychology Today 9, no. 8 (January): 58–65. ‘‘Civil Religion and the American Future.’’ Religious Education 71, no. 3 (May– June): 235–243. ‘‘To Kill and Survive or to Die and Become: The Active Life and the Contemplative Life as Ways of Being Adult.’’ Daedalus 105, no. 2 (Spring): 57–77. The New Religious Consciousness. Edited with Charles Y. Glock. With two chapters, ‘‘The New Consciousness and the Berkeley New Left’’ and ‘‘New Religious Consciousness and the Crisis of Modernity,’’ 77–92, 333–352. Berkeley: University of California Press. ‘‘Response to the Panel on Civil Religion’’ and ‘‘Comment on ‘Bellah and the New Orthodoxy.’ ’’ Sociological Analysis 37, no. 2: 153–159, 167–168. ‘‘The Revolution and the Civil Religion.’’ In Jerald C. Brauer, ed., Religion and the American Revolution, 55–73. Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress Press.

1977

Foreword to Paul Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, ix–xiii. Berkeley: University of California Press. ‘‘Read Any Good Books Lately.’’ Comment on Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. California Monthly 88, no. 2: 13. Review of Maruyama Masao, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan. In Journal of Japanese Studies 1, no. 3: 177–183.

1978

‘‘American Society and the Mormon Community.’’ In Truman G. Madsen, ed., Reflections on Mormonism: Judaeo-Christian Parallels, 1–12. Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. ‘‘Baigan and Sorai: Continuities and Discontinuities in Eighteenth-Century Japa-

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah 529 nese Thought.’’ In Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner, eds., Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period: Methods and Metaphors, 137–152. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ‘‘Commentary and Proposed Agenda: The Normative Framework for Pluralism in America.’’ Soundings 61, no. 3: 355–371. ‘‘Faith Communities Challenge—and Are Challenged by—the Changing World Order.’’ In Joseph Gremillion and William Ryan, eds., World Faiths and the New World Order, 148–168. Washington: Interreligious Peace Colloquium. Foreword to David DeLeon, The American as Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous Radicalism, xi–xiii. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. Foreword to Nobuya Bamba and John F. Howes, eds., Pacifism in Japan, ix–xi. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. ‘‘Grounds for a Value Consensus in America.’’ In The Search for a Value Consensus, 19–31. Working Papers. New York: Rockefeller Foundation. ‘‘Religion and Legitimation in the American Republic.’’ Society 15, no. 4: 16–23. ‘‘The Religious and Moral Prerequisites for Democracy in America.’’ Uniquest 9: 4–6. ‘‘Religious Studies as ‘New Religion.’ ’’ In Jacob Needleman and George Baker, eds., Understanding the New Religions, 106–112. New York: Seabury Press. ‘‘The Role of Preaching in a Corrupt Republic.’’ Christianity and Crisis 38, no. 20 (December 25): 317–322.

1979

‘‘Human Conditions for a Good Society.’’ In ‘‘Ideals in Transition: Tomorrow’s America’’ section of St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 100th anniversary edition, March 25, 8–11. ‘‘An Interview with Robert Bellah, ‘We’re in the Lull Between Two Storms.’ ’’ By Lockwood Hoehl. The Witness 62, no. 5 (May): 7–9, 13. Review of Harry V. Jaffa, How To Think about the American Revolution: A Bicentennial Celebration. American Spectator 12, no. 6: 34–36. ‘‘The World Is the World through Its Theorists: In Memory of Talcott Parsons.’’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 18, no. 4: 454–456. Reprinted in American Sociologist 15, no. 2 (May 1980): 60–62.

1980

‘‘American Association of Law Schools Law and Religion Panel: Law as Our Civil Religion.’’ Mercer Law Review 31, no. 2: 482–485. ‘‘American Values, Citizenship and the Political Economy: Prospect for the ’80s.’’ With William M. Sullivan. In Critical Choices for the ’80s, 29–47. Na-

530

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tional Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity, 12th Report. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. ‘‘Other Cultures . . . Journeys We Must Take.’’ Humanities (National Endowment for the Humanities) 1, no. 3: 1–2. Response to Peter Brown, ‘‘The Philosopher and Society in Late Antiquity.’’ Colloquy 34: 18–19. Berkeley: Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern Culture, Graduate Theological Union and University of California, Berkeley. Varieties of Civil Religion. With Philip E. Hammond. New York: Harper and Row.

1981

‘‘Biblical Religion and Social Sciences in the Modern World.’’ National Institute for Campus Ministers Journal 6, no. 3 (Summer): 8–22; ‘‘Responses,’’ 48–49, 65–66, 85–87, 112–113. ‘‘Civil Religion and the Use of Power.’’ In Power in Church and Society, 8–13. Proceedings of the 1981 Christian Life Commission Seminar, Dallas, Texas (March).‘‘Cultural Vision and the Human Future.’’ Teachers College Record 82, no. 3: 497–506. ‘‘Democratic Culture or Authoritarian Capitalism?’’ With William M. Sullivan. Society 18, no. 6: 41–50. ‘‘The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry.’’ Teachers College Record 83, no. 1: 1–18.

1982

‘‘Books: Critics’ Christmas Choices.’’ Commonweal 109, no. 21 (December 3): 661. ‘‘Concluding Remarks.’’ In The Japanese Challenge and the American Response: A Symposium, 111–116. Research Papers and Policy Studies 6. Berkeley: Institute of East-Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. ‘‘Cultural Pluralism and Religious Particularism.’’ In Henry B. Clark II, ed., Freedom of Religion in America, 33–52. Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books. ‘‘Discerning Old and New Imperatives in Theological Education.’’ Theological Education 19, no. 3: 7–29. Foreword to Steven M. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties, ix–xi. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foreword to William M. Sullivan, Reconstructing Public Philosophy, ix–x. Berkeley: University of California Press. ‘‘Power and Religion in America Today.’’ Commonweal 109, no. 21 (December 3): 650–655.

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah 531 ‘‘Response to Louis Dumont’s ‘A Modified View of Our Origins: The Christian Beginnings of Modern Individualism.’ ’’ Religion 12 (April): 83–84. 1983

‘‘Cultural Identity and Asian Modernization.’’ In Cultural Identity and Modernization in Asian Countries: Proceedings of Kokugakuin University Centennial Symposium, 16–27. Institute for Japanese Culture and Classics, Kokugakuin University, Tokyo. Introduction to Mary Douglas and Steven M. Tipton, eds., Religion and America: Spiritual Life in a Secular Age, ix–xiii. Boston: Beacon Press. Preface to the Japanese translation of The Broken Covenant, by Yaburareta Keiyaku, 5–12. Tokyo: Miraisha. ‘‘Religion in Japan: National and International Dimensions.’’ In Hiroshi Mannari and Harumi Befu, eds., The Challenge of Japan’s Internationalization: Organization and Culture, 201–211. New York: Kodansha International. Social Science as Moral Inquiry. Edited with Norma Haan, Paul Rabinow, and William Sullivan. With two chapters, ‘‘Introduction’’ and ‘‘The Ethical Aims of Moral Inquiry,’’ 1–18, 362–381. New York: Columbia University Press. ‘‘Social Science as Practical Reason.’’ In Daniel Callahan and Bruce Jennings, eds., Ethics, the Social Sciences, and Policy Analysis, 37–64. New York: Plenum Press. This essay was published in slightly abbreviated form in Hastings Center Report 12, no. 5 (1981): 32–39. 1984

‘‘Economics and the Theology of Work.’’ New Oxford Review 51, no. 9: 13–15. ‘‘A Moral and Religious People.’’ San Jose Studies 10, no. 3 (Fall): 12–17. ‘‘Religion and Secularization in Modern Societies.’’ In Religion in the Modern World, 7–22. Papers in Comparative Studies 3. Columbus: Center for Comparative Studies in the Humanities, Ohio State University. ‘‘Religion and the University: The Crisis of Unbelief.’’ William Belden Noble Lectures, 1982. Religion and Intellectual Life 1, no. 1: 7–73. With introduction, responses, and afterword. ‘‘Toward Clarity in the Midst of Conflict.’’ Christianity and Crisis 44, no. 17 (October 29): 391–393. 1985

Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. With Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. Berkeley: University of California Press; 2nd ed., 1996.

532

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah

‘‘The Humanities and Social Vision.’’ In Daniel Callahan, Arthur L. Caplan, and Bruce Jennings, eds., Applying the Humanities, 107–123. New York: Plenum Press. ‘‘Interview with Robert Bellah: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.’’ Berkeley Journal of Sociology 30: 117–141. Introduction to paperback edition of Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan, xi–xxi. New York: Free Press. ‘‘The Meaning of Dogen Today.’’ In William R. LaFleur, ed., Dogen Studies, 150–158. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ‘‘Populism and Individualism.’’ Social Policy 16, no. 2: 30–33. Review of Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution. New Oxford Review 52, no. 8, (October): 24–26. ‘‘Walkaway . . . Don’t Look Back: Rampant Individualism.’’ Concern 27, no. 1 (January): 17–19.

1986

‘‘Are Americans Still Citizens?’’ Tocqueville Review 7: 89–96. ‘‘The Meaning of Reputation in American Society.’’ California Law Review 74, no. 3: 743–751. ‘‘Paradox of World Renunciation and the Path to Individuation.’’ Ten Directions 7, no. 1 (Spring–Summer): 9–14. ‘‘Populism and Individualism.’’ In Harry C. Boyte and Frank Riessman, eds., The New Populism, 100–107. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press. ‘‘Processi di legittimazione nella politica e nella religione.’’ In R. Cipriani, ed., Legittimazione e società, 113–125. Rome: Armando Editore. ‘‘Public Philosophy and Public Theology in America Today.’’ In Leroy S. Rouner, ed., Civil Religion and Political Theology, 79–97. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. ‘‘Religious Influences on United States Foreign Policy.’’ In Michael Hamilton, ed., American Character and Foreign Policy, 50–59. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans. A Response to William Bennett, ‘‘Citizenship and Character Revisited.’’ New Perspectives Quarterly 8, no. 2: 29–30. ‘‘Social Science as Public Philosophy.’’ Center Magazine 19, no. 6 (November– December): 8–23. ‘‘Transforming American Culture.’’ Center Magazine 19, no. 5 (September– October): 2–15.

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah 533 1987

‘‘Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit.’’ Cathedral Age 62, no. 2: 28–30. ‘‘Can You Recite Your Creed?’’ Plumbline 15, no. 3: 4–9. ‘‘The Church as the Context for the Family.’’ New Oxford Review 54, no. 10 (December): 6–13. Contribution to ‘‘Symposium on Roman Catholicism and ‘American Exceptionalism.’ ’’ New Oxford Review 54, no. 2: 5. ‘‘Forsaking All Others.’’ California Monthly 98, no. 3 (December): 11–12. ‘‘The High Price of American Individualism.’’ Commonwealth 81, no. 37: 402– 404. Individualism and Commitment in American Life: Readings on the Themes of Habits of the Heart. Edited with Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. ‘‘Introduction: America’s Cultural Conversation,’’ 3–10. New York: Harper and Row. ‘‘Legitimation Processes in Politics and Religion.’’ Current Sociology 35, no. 2: 89–99. ‘‘The Quest for Common Commitments in a Pluralistic Society.’’ Philosophy and Theology 2, no. 1: 21–34. Preface to Paul Giurlanda, F.S.C., Faith and Knowledge: A Critical Inquiry, ix–x. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. ‘‘The Professions and the Common Good: Vocation/Profession/Career.’’ With William M. Sullivan. Religion and Intellectual Life 4, no. 3: 7–20. ‘‘Pure Land Buddhism and Modernization in Japan and the United States.’’ Pacific World (Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies, Berkeley), new ser., 3: 68–74. ‘‘Religion and the Technological Revolution in Japan and the United States.’’ University Lecture in Religion. Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, February. ‘‘Resurrecting the Common Good: The Economics Pastoral, a Year Later.’’ Commonweal 114, no. 22 (December 18): 736–741. Review of Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind. In New Oxford Review 54, no. 6: 22–24. Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America. Edited with Frederick E. Greenspahn. ‘‘Conclusion: Competing Visions of the Role of Religion in American Society,’’ 219–232. New York: Crossroad.

1988

‘‘The Common Good.’’ With William M. Sullivan. Tikkun 3, no. 4 (July–August): 29–32, 91–92.

534

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah

Foreword to Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630–1875, ix–xi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ‘‘Gustafson as Critic of Culture.’’ In Harlan R. Beckley and Charles M. Swezey, eds., James M. Gustafson’s Theocentric Ethics: Interpretations and Assessments, 143–158. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press. ‘‘The Idea of Practices in Habits.’’ In Charles H. Reynolds and Ralph V. Norman, eds., Community in America: The Challenge of Habits of the Heart, 269–288, 301. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reprinted from Soundings 69, nos. 1–2 (1986), 181–187. Introduction to William S. Pregnall, The Episcopal Seminary System During the Decline of the American Empire, v–viii. Cincinnati, Ohio: Forward Movement Publications. ‘‘Invisible Hand or Iron Laws: Economics and the Nature of the Good Society’’ and ‘‘Concluding Remarks: An Ethicist’s Perspective.’’ In David A. Krueger, ed., Proceedings of the Second National Consultation on Corporate Ethics, 5–12, 124–128. Chicago: Center for Ethics and Corporate Policy. ‘‘The Kingdom of God in America: Language of Faith, Language of Nation, Language of Empire.’’ In Religion and the Public Good: A Bicentennial Forum, 41–61. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press. ‘‘Language and the Defense of the Native American Life-World.’’ Church and Society 79, no. 1 (September–October): 14–26. ‘‘The Quest for the Self.’’ Philosophy and Theology 2, no. 4: 374–386. ‘‘The Recovery of Biblical Language in American Life.’’ Radix 18, no. 4: 4–7, 29–31. ‘‘Technology, Society, and Christian Values: A Response to the CBS Documentary Film, High Tech: Dream or Nightmare?’’ In Guy Fitch Lytle, ed., Theological Education for the Future, 7–13. Cincinnati, Ohio: Forward Movement Publications.

1989

Preface to Robert McAfee Brown and Sydney Thomson Brown, A Cry for Justice: The Churches and Synagogues Speak, 1–4. New York: Paulist Press. ‘‘Robert Bellah Talks about Real Happiness.’’ An interview. The Door 105 (May– June): 16–17, 36–37. Afterword to Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., ed., Beyond Individualism: Toward a Retrieval of Moral Discourse in America, 219–225. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. ‘‘Christian Faithfulness in a Pluralist World.’’ In Frederic B. Burnham, ed., Post-

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah 535 modern Theology: Christian Faith in a Pluralist World, 74–91. New York: Harper and Row. Comment on James A. Mathisen, ‘‘Twenty Years after Bellah: Whatever Happened to American Civil Religion?’’ Sociological Analysis 50, no. 2 (Summer): 147. ‘‘Habits of the Hearth.’’ An interview. Christianity Today 33, no. 2 (February 3): 20–24. ‘‘The Humanities and the Survival of Community.’’ Humanities Network 11, no. 3 (Summer): 1, 4, 9. The complete text of the 1989 Public Humanities Lecture published in pamphlet form by the California Council for the Humanities. Review of Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics. In New York Times Book Review, November 12, 22. ‘‘Robert Bellah, Sociologist.’’ An interview. In Bill Moyers, A World of Ideas, 279–290. New York: Doubleday.

1990

‘‘The Church in Tension with a Lockean Culture.’’ New Oxford Review 57, no. 10 (December): 10–16. ‘‘Finding the Church: Post-Traditional Discipleship.’’ Christian Century 107, no. 33 (November 14): 1060–1064. Reprinted in James M. Wall and David Heim, eds., How My Mind Has Changed, 113–122 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991). ‘‘The Invasion of the Money World.’’ In David Blankenhorn, Steven Bayne, and Jean Bethke Elshtain, eds., Rebuilding the Nest: A New Commitment to the American Family, 227–236. New York: Family Service America. ‘‘Morale, religion et societé dans l’oeuvre Durkheimienne.’’ Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 69 (January–March): 9–25. ‘‘The Role of the Church in a Changing Society.’’ Currents in Theology and Mission 17, no. 3 (June): 181–191.

1991

‘‘Citizenship, Diversity and the Search for the Common Good.’’ In Robert E. Calvert, ed., ‘‘The Constitution of the People’’: Reflections on Citizens and Civil Society, 47–63. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. ‘‘Cultural Barriers to the Understanding of the Church and Its Public Role.’’ Missiology: An International Review 19, no. 4 (October): 462–473. ‘‘Cultural Problems in Preaching to Americans.’’ In Roger Alling Jr., ed., Sermons That Work, 65–79. Cincinnati, Ohio: Forward Movement Publications.

536

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah

‘‘Development and Creation: Ethics for International Behavior.’’ In Bernhard Moltmann, ed., Beyond the Cold War: Evolving a Concept of Responsible International Development, Arnoldshainer Texte—Band 69, 28–43. Frankfurt, Germany: Haag and Herchen. The Good Society. With Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. New York: Vintage paperback, 1992. ‘‘How I Teach the Introductory Course.’’ In Mark Juergensmeyer, ed., Teaching the Introductory Course in Religious Studies: A Sourcebook, 193–203. Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press. ‘‘The Importance of Catholic Social Teaching for Envisioning the Good Society.’’ New Oxford Review 58, no. 9 (November): 8–16. ‘‘Nihon no Shukyo Dento to Kindai Fukurokoji’’ [The Japanese Religious Tradition and the Blind Alley of Modernity]. Shiso, no. 803 (May): 103–113. ‘‘Personal and Social Health: A Necessary Connection?’’ Radix 20, no. 3, 16–19, 29–30. ‘‘The Politics of Care: The Episcopal Church in a Changing Society.’’ Anglican and Episcopal History 60, no. 4 (December): 433–442. Preface to Susumu Shimazono and Keishi Nakamura, trans., Kokoro no Shukan (Japanese translation of Habits of the Heart), v–vii. Tokyo: Misuzu Shobo. ‘‘Progress and Poverty.’’ Journal for Preachers 14, no. 2, 16–21. ‘‘The Quest for the Self: Individualism, Morality, Politics.’’ In Ken Masugi, ed., Interpreting Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, 329–347. Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. ‘‘A Symposium: What Is To Be Done?’’ New Republic 204, no. 20 (May 20), 28. ‘‘The Triumph of Capitalism—Or the Rise of Market Totalitarianism.’’ New Oxford Review 58, no. 2 (March): 8–15.

1992

‘‘Autonomy and Responsibility: The Social Basis of Ethical Individualism.’’ In James Ogilvy, ed., Revisioning Philosophy, 153–163. Albany: State University of New York Press. ‘‘Elite Failure.’’ Christian Century 109, no. 22 (July 15–22): 672–673. ‘‘Bring Along your Compass.’’ Family Therapy Networker 16, no. 6 (November– December): 53–55. ‘‘Introduction to the Second Edition.’’ The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, vi–xiii. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. ‘‘Review Essay: What We Can Learn from Flacks and Wolfe.’’ Theory and Society 21: 409–414.

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah 537 Review of Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of a PostChristian Nation. In New Oxford Review 59, no. 8 (October): 16–18. Review of John Kenneth Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment. In New York Times Book Review, April 5, 13. ‘‘Small Face-to-Face Christian Communities in a Mean-Spirited and Polarized Society.’’ New Oxford Review 59, no. 5 (June): 17–22.

1993

Foreword to Matthew Glass, Citizens against the MX: Public Languages in the Nuclear Age, vii–x. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ‘‘Beforecare.’’ With Chris Adams. Nation 256, no. 11 (March 22), 378. ‘‘Beyond Autonomy toward Community.’’ Modern Liturgy 20, no. 2 (March): 12–16. ‘‘Individualism and the Arts.’’ With Chris Adams. Christian Century 110, no. 21, 703–704. ‘‘Outrageous Thoughts on War and Peace.’’ New Oxford Review 55, no. 2 (March): 15–20. ‘‘Togo Sekai ni okeru Bunka Tagenshugi’’ [Cultural Pluralism in an Integrated World]. Shiso, no. 824 (February): 4–16. ‘‘What Government Can’t Do, Charity Can.’’ Interview, by Jerry Shepherd. Renaissance Society Magazine 2, no. 1 (Summer): 29–32.

1994

‘‘Education for the Good Society.’’ Lutheran Colleges and Universities: Mission, Task and Focus. Papers and Proceedings 1994, 6–17. Washington: Lutheran Educational Conference of North America. Foreword to Richard L. Smith, Aids, Gays, and the American Catholic Church, xi–xiv. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press. ‘‘Remarks by Prof. Robert N. Bellah’’ and ‘‘Panel Discussion.’’ In William E. Zagotta, ed., New Possibilities for a Secure and Just World, 13–29. Livermore, Calif.: Center for Security and Technology Studies, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. ‘‘Strong Institutions, Good City.’’ With Christopher Freeman Adams. Christian Century 111, no. 19 (June 15–22): 604–607. ‘‘Understanding Caring in Contemporary America.’’ In Susan S. Phillips and Patricia Benner, eds., The Crisis of Care: Affirming and Restoring Caring Practices in the Helping Professions, 21–35. Washington: Georgetown University Press.

538

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1995

‘‘At Home and Not at Home: Religious Pluralism and Religious Truth.’’ Christian Century 112, no. 13 (April 19): 423–428. ‘‘Beyond Expertise, the Good Society.’’ Spectrum 24, no. 4 (April): 17–23. ‘‘Community, Real and Imagined.’’ Christian Century 112, no. 4 (February 1–8): 150–153. ‘‘How to Understand the Church in an Individualistic Society’’ and ‘‘An Afterword: Coming to Our Senses.’’ In Rodney L. Petersen, ed., Christianity and Civil Society, 1–14, 161–165. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis. ‘‘Reaffirming Marriage Culture.’’ Options Politiques 16, no. 10 (December): 16–19. ‘‘Religious Pluralism and Religious Truth’’ (uncut version). Reflections (Yale Divinity School) 90, no. 2: 9–17. ‘‘Reply to Daniel Chirot ‘Modernism without Liberalism: The Ideological Roots of Tyranny.’ ’’ Contention 5, no. 1 (Fall): 177–178.

1996

‘‘Community Properly Understood: A Defense of ‘Democratic Communitarianism.’’ Responsive Community 6, no. 1, 49–54. ‘‘Families in the Context of Community.’’ In Patricia Voydanoff, ed., Families and Communities in Partnership, 3–18. Lanham, N.Y.: University Press of America. ‘‘Gakusha Maruyama Masao to Yujin Maruyama Masao’’ [Maruyama Masao as Scholar and Friend]. Misuzu, no. 427 (October 1996): 11–13. ‘‘The House Divided.’’ With Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. Introduction to the 2nd edition of Habits of the Heart, vii–xxxix. Berkeley: University of California Press. ‘‘Individualism and the Crisis of Civic Membership.’’ Christian Century 113, no. 16 (May 8): 510–515. ‘‘The Neocapitalist Employment Crisis.’’ Christian Century 113, no. 23 (July 31– August 7): 754–756. ‘‘ ‘Reforming’ the Welfare Act.’’ Pacific Church News 134, no. 4 (October– November): 20–21. Review of Eiko Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan. Contemporary Sociology 25, no. 1 (January): 110–112. Review of William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Commonweal 123, no. 17 (October 11): 19–20.

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah 539 ‘‘What Is God Calling the Church to Do Today?’’ Pacific Church News 134, no. 1 (April–May): 20.

1997

‘‘Class Wars and Culture Wars in the University Today: Why We Can’t Defend Ourselves.’’ Academe 83, no. 4 (July–August): 22–26. ‘‘Creating Transforming Communities.’’ Global Learning (New Delhi) 1, no. 3: 16–23. Foreword to F. Byron Nahser, Learning to Read the Signs: Reclaiming Pragmatism in Business, xi–xiv. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997. ‘‘The Necessity of Opportunity and Community in a Good Society.’’ International Sociology 12, no. 4 (December): 387–393. ‘‘Professions under Siege: Can Ethical Autonomy Survive?’’ Logos 1, no. 3 (Fall): 31–50. Shinran o meguru mo hitotsu bunkaron [One More Cultural Discussion Concerning Shinran]. With Alfred Bloom and Futaba Kenko. Kyoto: Nagata Bunshodo. ‘‘Work as Calling.’’ Wider Circle 2, no. 3: 4–6.

1998

‘‘Courageous or Indifferent Individualism.’’ Ethical Perspectives (Journal of the European Ethics Network, Leuven, Belgium) 5, no. 2 (June): 92–101. ‘‘Is There a Common American Culture?’’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66, no. 3 (Fall): 613–625. ‘‘Reforming Our Institutions of Meaning.’’ An interview. In Benjamin Webb, ed., Fugitive Faith, 3–14. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis. ‘‘Unintended Consequences.’’ Spirituality and Health 1, no. 1 (Fall): 42–43.

1999

Review of Peter I. Berger, ed., The Limits of Social Cohesion: Conflict and Mediation in Pluralist Societies, Contemporary Sociology 28, no. 2 (March): 209–210. ‘‘Comunitarismo ou liberalismo? Brasil e Estados Unidos em debate.’’ In Jessé Souza, ed., O malandro e o protestante: A tese weberiana e a singularidade cultural brasiliera, 295–315. Brasília: Editora unb. ‘‘The Ethics of Polarization in the United States and the World.’’ In David Batstone and Eduardo Mendieta, eds., The Good Citizen, 13–28. New York: Routledge.

540

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah

‘‘Freedom, Coercion, Authority.’’ Academe 85, no. 1 (January–February): 16–21. ‘‘Is There a Common American Culture? Diversity, Identity and Morality in American Public Life.’’ In William H. Swatos Jr. and James K. Wellman Jr., The Power of Religious Publics: Staking Claims in American Society, 53–67, 207–208. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. ‘‘Max Weber and World-Denying Love: A Look at the Historical Sociology of Religion.’’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, no. 2 (Summer): 277–304. ‘‘Religion and the Shape of National Culture.’’ America 181, no. 3 (July 31– August 7, 1999): 9–14. Review of Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. In Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 38, no. 4 (December): 569–570. ‘‘The Scholar’s Vocation.’’ Collegium (Baylor University, College of Arts and Sciences): 18–21.

2000

‘‘Flaws in the Protestant Code: Some Religious Sources of America’s Troubles.’’ Ethical Perspectives 7, no. 4: 288–299. ‘‘Texts, Sacred and Profane.’’ Proceedings of the American Theological Library Association, 195–205. Annual conference, Berkeley, California, June 21–24. ‘‘The True Scholar.’’ Academe 86, no. 1 (January–February): 18–23.

2001

‘‘Care of Souls in Today’s America.’’ Radix 28, no. 1: 4–7, 24–26. ‘‘Cultural Resources for a Progressive Alternative.’’ With William M. Sullivan. In Henry Tam, ed., Progressive Politics in the Global Age, 21–35. Cambridge: Polity Press. ‘‘Habit and History.’’ Ethical Perspectives 8, no. 3: 156–167. ‘‘Religion: Evolution and Development.’’ In N. J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, eds., 13062–13066. International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier. ‘‘Sekimon Shingaku in the Context of Culture and Society in the Tokugawa Period.’’ In Ishida Baigan and Sekimon Shingaku, 57–73. Monograph Series No. 1 (March). Kyoto: Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, Kyoto Gakuen University. ‘‘Shingaku to Nijuichi Seiki no Nihon’’ [Shingaku and 21st-Century Japan], ‘‘Shingaku no Mirai’’ [The Future of Shingaku (a symposium)], and ‘‘Koyama Shikei-shi no ‘Shingaku e no Michi’ o yonde’’ [On Reading Mr. Koyama Shi-

Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah 541 kei’s ‘‘The Way to Shingaku’’]. In Shingaku ga Hiraku Nijuichi Seiki no Nihon [Shingaku Opening 21st-Century Japan], 35–71, 72–123, 129–162, 217–223. Compiled by Sanzensha. Tokyo: php Editors Grou. ‘‘Stories as Arrows: The Religious Response to Modernity.’’ In Arvind Sharma, ed., Religion in a Secular City: Essays in Honor of Harvey Cox, 91–115. Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity International.

2002

‘‘Epilogue—Meaning and Modernity: America and the World.’’ In Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, eds., Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self, 255–276. Berkeley: University of California Press. ‘‘The New American Empire.’’ Commonweal 129, no. 18 (October 25): 12–14. ‘‘The Protestant Structure of American Culture: Multiculture or Monoculture?’’ Hedgehog Review 4, no. 1 (Spring): 7–28. Review of Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Christian Century 119, no. 11 (May 22–29): 20–26. ‘‘Rousseau on Society and the Individual.’’ In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses, edited by Susan Dunn, 266–287. Rethinking the Western Tradition Series. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. ‘‘Seventy-Five Years.’’ South Atlantic Quarterly, special issue, Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11 102, no. 2 (Spring): 253–265.

2003

Foreword to Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By, ix–xii. University of Illinois Press. Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation. Berkeley: University of California Press. ‘‘On Being Catholic and American.’’ In Mary K. McCullough, ed., Fire and Ice: Imagination and Intellect in the Catholic Tradition, 29–47. Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press. ‘‘Righteous Empire: Imperialism, American-Style.’’ Christian Century 120, no. 5 (March 8): 20–25. ‘‘The Ritual Roots of Society and Culture.’’ In Michele Dillon, ed., Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, 31–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

542

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2004

‘‘American Politics and the Dissenting Protestant Tradition.’’ In E. J. Dionne Jr. et al., eds., One Electorate under God? A Dialogue on Religion and American Politics, 63–66. Washington: Brookings Institution Press. ‘‘Education for Justice and the Common Good.’’ Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education 25 (Spring): 28–37. Foreword to Russell Jeung, Faithful Generations: Race and New Asian American Churches, vii–viii. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. ‘‘The Future of Religion: Andrew Cooper Interviews Robert Bellah.’’ Tricycle 53, no. 1 (Fall): 52–55, 114–115. ‘‘Human Conditions for a Good Society’’ and ‘‘A Night at Camp David.’’ In Daniel Horowitz, Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s: The ‘‘Crisis of Confidence’’ Speech of July 15, 1979; A Brief History with Documents, 73–77, 152–157. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

2005

‘‘Durkheim and Ritual.’’ In Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, 183–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘‘God and King.’’ In L. Gregory Jones et al., eds., God, Truth, and Witness: Engaging Stanley Hauerwas, 112–130. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press. ‘‘God, Nation, and Self in America: Some Tensions between Parsons and Bellah.’’ In Renée C. Fox et al., eds., After Parsons: A Theory of Social Action for the Twenty-First Century, 137–147. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Introduction to Mark Nepo, ed., Deepening the American Dream: Reflections on the Inner Life and Spirit of Democracy, vii–xiii. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. ‘‘McCarthyism at Harvard.’’ Letter to the editor. New York Review of Books 52, no. 2 (February 10): 42–43. ‘‘Marriage in the Matrix of Habit and History’’ and ‘‘Epilogue: It Takes a Society to Raise a Family.’’ In Steven M. Tipton and John Witte Jr., eds., Family Transformed: Religion, Values, and Society in American Life, 21–33 and 286–298. Washington: Georgetown University Press. ‘‘What Is Axial about the Axial Age?’’ Archives Européennes de Sociologie 46, no. 1: 69–89.

2006

‘‘Robert Bellah on Religion, Morality, and the Politics of Resentment.’’ Interview, by Roger Bowen. Academe 92, no. 1: 33–37.

Index

Achilles, 86–92, 97, 452 Action Party, 63 Active life, 20, 81–106 passim Activism: as civil religion, 55; Croce and, 53, 68–78; Maritain and, 106; militant, 269; political, 499; romantic, 446 Adams, John, 105; and civil religion, 232, 233 n.5, 259 Aesthetic: romanticism as aesthetic movement, 337; in Weber, 129, 137–44. See also Art African Americans, 272, 279, 305– 8; American culture and, 322–23; identity politics, 328–29; Jefferson and, 309; Royce and, 313 Aggiornamento, 76–77. See also Catholicism; Vatican II Alexander, Jeffrey, 391, 394 n.20 Alienation, 26, 58, 142, 170, 210; Rousseau on, 192; in Weber, 26, 142 All Saints Day, 516–19 Amadae, S. M., 429–31. See also Rational choice theory American Eminence Index, 374 American Empire, 287, 300, 350–56, 371. See also Roman Empire American Indian: colonialism and, 288, 325; communalism and, 306; Jefferson’s views on, 309; as source of religious counterculture, 272 American Revolution, 256, 264, 338 Amour de soi, 187 Amour propre, 187–88, 191 Anderson, Benedict, 174–75 Anglican church, 308; as middle way, 458, 508, 516–19 Anglo-American tradition, 194, 267,

323, 396, 400, 411, 428; romanticism in, 323. See also Individualism Anthropology: historical, 19; social, 1–2 Anti-clericalism, 61, 66, 73, 239–40, 338–39, 466 Anti-intellectualism, 278 Apache, 115–18 Apocalypse, 3; Mussolini and, 70 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 319, 321, 328–29 Archaic societies, 4, 20, 27, 33–41, 50, 85, 89, 90–91, 135 n.34, 137, 359–375 Arendt, Hannah, 86–87, 101 Arete, 97 n.36. See also Character; Virtue Aristotle, 452, 468, 478, 520; on active life, 89; on contemplative life, 86; Ethics, 10; education and, 442; on habits, 204–5, 213, 217; political philosophy of, 10, 86, 89, 251; Politics, 383; on practical life, 92, 99, 101; social inquiry and, 381–90; on virtues, 422–23 Arrow, Kenneth, 430–31 Art, 12; history, 405; in Renaissance, 43 n.38; ritual and, 164; as salvation, 49, 140, 149 Asad, Talal, 162–63 Asceticism: environmentalism and, 337; Buddhist, 41; Taoist, 25; as world rejection, 126–30 Asia, East, 2–3, 86, 91; empire and, 134 n.33; religions of, 27, 91, 226, 272–83; ritual in, 172 Asian American, 321–23 Assman, Jan, 135 n.34, 360–61

544

Index

Athens, 86–87, 196, 452 Atheism, 102; vs. acosmism of Spinoza, 123; of Hobbes, 267; of Paine, 199, 242; naturalism and, 344, 458 Augustine, Saint, 26, 84, 92–96, 106, 113, 182, 247–48, 385, 496 Australia, 520; religions of, 30–33, 150 Authoritarianism, 261, 343, 411; in America, 280–84; in Italy, 60 n.22, 77 Autonomy, 166, 206, 215, 218; in academia, 402–4, 409; in modernity, 107–9; Protestantism and, 367, 369 Axer, Jerzy, 471 Axial Age, 10–11; religions of, 4, 125– 26, 134–39, 179; religiopolitical forms in, 362, 367, 370 Babylon, 362, 365 Bacon, Francis, 101–4 Baptists: in colonial America, 323–38, 369; polity of, 346 Bargy, Henry, 239 Baron, Hans, 98 Barth, Karl, 45, 474–75, 479, 492 Basso, Keith, 115–16 Baudelaire, Charles, 123 Beatitudes, 504–9 Becker, Gary, 430–32 Beecher, Lyman, 289 Being, 231–233, 486 Belief: new religious movements and, 278–83; religion as, 151–52, 159; ritual contrasted with, 6, 8 Bellows, Henry W., 462 Benson, Rodney, 319 Berndt, Ronald, 31–32 Bernstein, Basil, 165–67, 177–79, 205–8 Beveridge, Albert J., 293 Bhagavad Gita, 138 Bible, 106, 441, 480–88; authority

of, 289, 317, 462; God and, 254; Jefferson and, 105 Biblical religion, 4, 116, 120, 454; civil religion and, 231, 245, 249; natural religion and, 254; as tradition in America, 266–83, 520 Bickerton, Derek, 476–78 Bildung, 420. See also Education, higher Biology, 382 Bloch, Ruth, 289–90 Block, James, 369 n.22 Bloom, Allan, 88; on Rousseau, 196–97 Bloom, Harold, 344, 490–92 Body of Christ, 178; church as, 486; holy spirit and, 510, 513. See also Eucharist Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 46 Borgmann, Albert, 121 n.16 Bourdieu, Pierre, 402, 408 Bowman, Carl, 374 Boyle, Nicholas, 353–54 Brooks, David, 215, 502 Brown, Steven, 158–61, 167 n.47, 208 Brownson, Orestes, 263 Brueggemann, Walter, 362 Bruner, Jerome, 7–10 Bryan, William Jennings, 266, 268 Buddha, 25–26, 130–32, 143, 147, 391, 495 Buddhism, 125; counterculture and, 272, 276; human nature in, 38; modernity and, 46; Pure Land and, 41; ritual in, 178; as world rejecting, 91, 96, 103, 136, 138 n.42 Bultmann, Rudolf, 46 Bush, George W., 176 n.64, 212–13, 370, 372–73; national security strategy of, 350, 353–54, 371, 447 Calvin, John, 181, 198, 249, 368; doctrines of, 344, 458 Calvinism, 368, 391

Index 545 Canaan, 135, 288 Canon, 454, 490–97; liberal arts, 442 Capitalism, 20, 126–27, 144–45, 281, 284 n.9, 392, 428 Caritas, 84, 129, 138 n.42 Case, Shirley Jackson, 294 Cather, Willa, 515–16 Catholicism, 8; in America, 457–73; conservatism of, 284 n.9; in Italy, 53–69; new religious movements and, 272 ‘‘Catholic Modernity, A’’ (C. Taylor), 358 n.3, 459, 466–67 Cavour, Camillo Benso di, 61–65 Celsus, 496 Character, 88, 204, 251, 383, 415, 421–25, 438, 440 Charisma, 41, 138, 393 Chesterton, G. K., 329, 336, 462, 464 Chomsky, Noam, 335 Christian church: early, 92–95, 133, 367; disestablishment of, 64, 199, 225 n.1, 228, 250, 338, 369; Protestant denominations, 262, 271 Christian Democrats, 75–77, 148 Christianity: in America, 286; civil religion and, 225–34, 247–48; empire and, 94; in evolution of religion, 4, 20, 25, 41, 46–47, 91; in Italy, 60, 70, 79; Machiavellian critique of, 97; organic social ethic of, 138; as protosocialist movement, 135–36; world denial in, 133. See also Civil religion; Kingdom of God Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 85, 98, 441 Citizenship: common good and, 303–318; education for, 415, 471; in polis, 174; social inquiry and, 399–400 Civil religion, 246; American, 3, 4, 14, 15, 221, 223, 225–45, 249–58, 357; Italian, 54–55, 58, 60, 62, 76; in Rousseau, 198–200

Civil society, 109–10; covenant society and, 296; early American, 253; in Rousseau, 184, 189, 198 Civil War, American, 234–37, 256, 266, 297 Classical studies, 471 Clericalism. See Anti-clericalism Clinton, William Jefferson, 330, 413 Coffin Text 1130, 360 Cold War, 412–13, 429, 447–48 Coleman, James, 430 Collins, Randall: Conflict Sociology, 395–400; on interaction ritual, 8–9, 171, 179; The Sociology of Philosophies, 153–57 Colombani, Jean-Marie, 355 Common good, 303–18, 378, 435– 449; in Rousseau, 187, 193–95, 252, 258, 262, 290 Communism, 447–48; Italian, 51, 60, 73, 77, 78 Community: beloved, 287, 297, 313; Royce’s philosophy of, 294–95, 312–17; Weber on religious, 128 Comte, Auguste, 23, 109, 386 Conflict Sociology (Collins), 395–400 Confucius, 89–91, 103, 120, 136–7, 495 Confucianism, 41, 95–96, 102–3, 125, 148 Congregationalism, 289, 462 Constantine, 223, 367; America and, 374–75 Constitution (U.S.), 250, 253–56, 261, 285, 289, 303. See also First Amendment Contemplative life, 81–106 passim Conze, Edward, 131–32 Counterculture, American, 264, 271–77 Counter-Reformation, 60, 368 Covenant: in Calvinist theology, 368; Reformation and, 367–68; at Sinai, 289–90, 360, 364; society, 290

546

Index

Cox, Harvey, 107 Creed, 213, 461, 487, 513 Croce, Benedetto, 51–54, 60 n.20, 62–70 Croly, Raymond, 263 Cult, 31–35 Cultural codes, 335, 338 Cultural sociology, 6 Cynics, 133, 135 Dangerfield, Anthony, 426–28, 433 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 69–71 Darnton, Robert, 342 Darwinism, social, 267, 269, 293, 428 David (biblical), 287, 478 Deacon, Terrence, 154–162 Dean, William, 331, 345 De Bary, W. Theodore, 102–3 Decisionism, 389 Declaration of Independence, 105–6, 231, 234–35, 241, 253–57 Democracy: civil religion as support for, 241; vs. communism, 243; covenant as basis for, 290, 360; environmentalism and, 335–37; spread of, 293–97, 371–72 Denominations, Protestant, 262, 271 Descartes, René, 102, 121, 185, 483 Despotism, 251–55; America and, 261, 264 de Waal, Frans, 432 Dewey, John, 293, 314, 465–67 Diamond, Jared, 340 n.12 Differentiation of spheres, 12–13, 108, 110, 124, 469. See also Modernization; Rationalization Dinka, 28–31, 152 Discipline, 48, 62; ascetic, 92–93; Calvinist, 368; ritual as, 163 Disestablishment. See First Amendment Dissanayake, Ellen, 158–59, 167, 207–8 Diversity, 222, 303–18, 319, 503, 512

Divine king, 35, 39, 135 n.34, 359, 362, 367 Division of labor, 20, 156, 168 Dolci, Danilo, 78–79 Donald, Merlin, 7–8 Dostoevski, Fyodor, 146 Douglas, Donald, 429 Douglas, Mary, 21, 162; on ancient Israel, 176–79; on ritual, 165–70; on speech codes, 166–70, 176, 205–19 Douglas, Stephen, 260, 304–5 Duffy, Eamon, 516–518 Dulles, John Foster, 243 Dumont, Louis, 133, 137, 177–78 Durkheim, Emile, 2–4, 8, 19, 20, 432, 493; on civil religion, 221, 225 n.1; ethical aims of social inquiry, 381, 386–88, 392, 394, 400; on primitive religion, 30, 33; Religion of Humanity, 14; on ritual, 21, 82, 150–80 passim; Rousseau and, 194, 199, 200, 202 Economy, 110–21, 148, 188, 331, 340; sphere of, 144–46; universities and, 413–20 Education, higher, 42, 342, 378, 402–49 passim, 466–70 Egypt, 36, 116, 135, 359–65 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 227, 243 Eisenstadt, S. N., 23, 40, 125–26, 134 n.33, 137 n.41 Elect: America as, 266; religious, 42–44 Eliade, Mircea, 24, 31 n.21 Eliot, Charles, 463 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 312–14 Empire, American, 287, 300, 350–56, 371. See also Roman Empire Engell, James, 426–28, 433 Enlightenment, 108–13, 118–20, 143, 290, 324, 358, 369, 406–7, 443, 458

Index 547 Environmentalism, 334–39 Episcopalianism, 173, 212–13, 310, 458, 504, 508, 519 E pluribus unum, 303, 307. See also Diversity Erikson, Erik, 469; on active and contemplative life, 82–85, 104–5; life cycle theory of, 20, 81; ritualization in, 167, 207 Eros, 89, 100 Essenes, 133 Ethics: narrative as source of, 10–11; as formation, 438–44; professional, 416; religion and, 52, 64; social science and, 396. See also Weber, Max Ethics (Aristotle), 10 Eucharist, 41, 176, 346–48, 472, 485–88, 508, 512–13, 518, 521 Evangelicalism, 311 n.11, 336, 345, 373–75, 461, 503 Evolution: religious, 7, 19, 23–50; social, 19, 25, 108, 183, 185, 190, 191 Exodus: American civil religion and, 234, 245, 286–88, 296; as political model, 116, 362–64 Expert culture, 12, 13, 16 Family: erosion of, 341, 343; positional control in, 165–66; traditions, 441 Fascism: Italian, 20, 51, 53, 58, 62, 69–74; Japanese, 51 Federalism, 258, 310 Fingarette, Herbert, 120, 484 Finnegan, William, 328 n.24 Fiorenza, Francis Schussler, 324 n.24 First Amendment, 250, 285, 300, 310, 326–27, 338 ‘‘Flexidoxy,’’ 215, 219 Francis, Saint, 130–32, 143, 147, 391, 521 Frankfurt School, 282 n.7 Franklin, Benjamin, 230, 232–34, 247 n.1, 261

Freedman, Samuel, 216, 219, 502 Freedom, 29, 35–36, 49; authority and, 410–20; individual, 215, 220, 330; religious, 111, 228, 250–53, 310, 324, 326, 333, 338; in state of nature vs. civil society, 182, 185, 188, 192–202 Freeman, Walter, 158–62 French Revolution: Catholic Church and, 61–62; civil religion and, 240; roots of modern nationalism in, 174 Freud, Sigmund, 2–3, 11, 385 Fundamentalism, 219, 269, 282 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 453, 495 Game theory, 430–31 Gandhi, Mohandas, 147; life-cycle theory and, 82–84 Geertz, Clifford, 161 n.30, 176 n.64, 335, 346; criticism by, 152; definition of religion by, 24, 27 General will, 189–95, 200–202 Generation X, 215 Genesis (Bible): Paul’s interpretation of, 480; positional control in, 218 Gettysburg Address, 235–37, 257 Gingrich, Newt, 402 Glaeser, Andreas, 320 Glazer, Nathan, 318 Globalization, 352–53, 446–47, 520 Goffman, Erving, 8–9, 153, 157, 171 Good, 384 Good life, 87, 383, 390, 452 Good society, 252, 381, 384, 387, 390, 393, 411 Gorski, Philip, 368 Graff, Gerald, 405–7 Gramsci, Antonio, 51–54, 59–65, 70–71, 75 Great Awakening, 255 Greece, ancient, 9, 25, 110, 125 n.7 Greeley, Andrew, 346–48, 453, 457 Gregory the Great, 99 n.43 Gustafson, James, 461

548

Index

Habermas, Jürgen, 20, 200; human rights and, 143; materialist account of salvation religions, 134 n.33; on modernity, 107–22; on religion in the public sphere, 451–54; Theory of Communicative Action, 11–14 Habit, 21; history of, 203–20; religion and, 6 Hammond, Phillip E., 327 Hanson, Chad, 136 Hatch, Nathan, 255–56 Hauerwas, Stanley, 223, 357–75 passim, 481, 512 Havel, Vaclav, 330, 339, 348–49, 486; on globalization, 352; politics of the impossible in, 119 Hawai’i, divine kings in, 359, 363 Hegel, G. W. F., 202, 468, 476; civil theology and, 249; on creeds, 213; globalization interpreted through, 353, 355; historicism of, 3, 7, 23, 63; on marriage, 218; Spinoza and, 123 Heilbroner, Robert, 281, 407–8 Heilsgeschichte, 3 Hell, 26, 37 High culture: centers of, 25; religion of, 463, 492, 497 Hinduism, 125; life-cycle theory in, 83–84; oral transmission of, 136 n.39; organic social ethic of, 138; ritual in, 177–78; unity of all being, 278 History, 7, 17, 23; developmental, 125 n.5; discipline of, 36, 419; God active in, 231–32, 238 n.12; of habit, 203–20; intellectual compared to life, 104; of religion, 6, 8, 25, 179; sacred, 3; salvation, 183 Hitler, Adolf, 72, 174, 328 Hobbes, Thomas, 100–101, 184, 188–91, 252, 267–68, 273, 304, 322; social scientific inquiry and, 381–85, 396; on state violence, 390;

and ‘‘war of all against all,’’ 148, 164 Hochschild, Arlie, 34 Homer, 36, 86–89 Hubert, Henri, 35 Humanism, civic, 98, 100 Humanities, 378, 407, 426–29, 443– 45, 497 Human nature, 112, 384, 385, 398 Human rights, 143, 324, 446, 449, 459 Huntington, Samuel, 121–22 Hussein, Saddam, 354, 372 Identity: Catholic, 466–70; vs. culture, 328; diffusion of, 38; radical, 177; ritual and, 164; role differentiation and, 82–85; symbol, 38 n.34; unified, 42 Ienaga Saburō, 46 Imperialism: liberal, 372; of righteousness, 292–93 India: ethic of world rejection, 130– 38; ritual in, 177–79 Indian, American. See American Indian Individualism: bureaucratic, 314; Durkheim and ethical, 387–88; national, 350–51; in Protestantism, 344–46, 462; religious, 312, 329–30; vs. philosophy of community, 295; utilitarian, 222, 266–73, 277–84, 322–23, 327 Industrialization, 110 Information: meaning and, 211–17, 443, 492–501; modern economy and, 413–17; ritual as prior to, 164, 180 Inglehart, Ronald, 336 Institutions: culture and, 320–22, 377; legitimacy of American, 262–63, 265–66, 315; porous, 214–15, 219, 341, 343, 347. See also Education, higher Ipuwer, admonitions of, 360

Index 549 Iraq, 356, 372, 446–49 Ireland, John (archbishop), 293 Irony of American History, The (Reinhold Niebuhr), 299–301 Islam, 38–39, 448 Israel, 4, 25, 36, 40, 85, 91, 116, 135, 137, 174, 176, 179, 213, 238 n.12, 362–69; America as new, 232–33, 240–41, 257, 266, 286, 288–89, 300; God of, 478–79, 485 Italy: activism in, 68–69; Catholicism, 59–62; Christian Democrats, 76–77; Communist Party, 77–78; Croce’s analysis of, 52–54, 62, 66; fascism, 69–74; Gramsci’s analysis of, 53–54, 59–60, 62–63, 65– 66; liberalism, 62–66; socialism, 66–68, 80 Jacobinism, 60–63 Jacobsen, Thorkild, 359 Jaffa, Harry V., 263–64 James, William, 10, 465–67 Janowitz, Morris, 399–400 Japan: Bellah and, 1, 20; fascism, 51, 54–55; divine emperor in, 359; thinkers, 26, 46, 103 Japanese American community, 305–6 Jaspers, Karl, 4, 125 Jeffers, Robinson, 243–44 Jefferson, Thomas, 291, 326, 338; active and contemplative life of, 82–85, 104–6; on American Indians, 309–10; civil religion and, 232–34, 241; higher law as authority, 231, 254; individualism of, 311–12, 329; religious freedom and, 250, 369; on slavery, 308 Jellinek, Georg, 324, 326, 338 Jemolo, Arturo Carlo, 57–78 Jen, 90, 133 Jesuits: contemplativus in actione, 100, 104; education for justice and, 378, 434–42

Jesus, 97, 182–83, 227, 236, 388, 495; Beatitudes of, 504–9; ethic of universal brotherly love, 129 n.17; human dignity and, 317; Jefferson’s understanding of, 105, 311; kingdom of God and, 286–87, 294–97; last supper of, 120, 510–14, 521; movements, 117, 274–82; personal relationship with, 344–46; politics of, 366–69, 375; as religious truth, 461, 474–488 Joas, Hans, 465, 473 Jodō Shinshū, 41, 46 John XXIII (pope), 76 Johnson, Lyndon B., 233, 240–42 Johnson, Richard, 326 Jordan, Barbara, 255 Judaism, 25, 38, 111, 271, 367, 481 Justice: Catholic social teachings on, 301–2, 317; Jesuit education and, 378, 434–42; in Rousseau, 183, 186, 189, 198–99; social, 3, 109 n.2, 148, 271 Kant, Immanuel, 202; ethics of, 11 n.23, 45, 143, 204; on reason, 422–23, 476 Kautsky, Karl, 135–36 Kennedy, John F.: death of, 175, 237, 375; inaugural address as civil religion, 226–34, 240–43 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 147, 257, 269, 271, 301, 508 Kingdom of God, 214; in America, 285–302; church as sign of, 488, 512–13; Jesus and, 507 Kingdom of God in America, The (H. Richard Niebuhr), 296–99 Kinship, 125–39; ritual as basis of, 157 n.13 Klaaren, Eugene, 101–2 Krishna Consciousness Society, 274–76 Kuhn, Thomas, 381, 398, 436 Kung, Hans, 457–58, 518

550

Index

Langdon, Samuel, 289 Language: of faith, nation, and empire in America, 285–302; religious, 109 n.2, 146, 285, 296, 300–301; as secondary representational system, 477–86 Lawrence, William A. (bishop), 508 League of Nations, 351, 354 Lectio divina, 495 Levi, Carlo, 56 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 30–31 Liberalism: church and, 358, 370; classical, 194, 410; constitutionalism and, 252; Durkheim and, 387; impossibility of pure, 255; in Italy, 52–53, 62–66, 76. See also Individualism: utilitarian Lifeworld, 107–22, 331 Lincoln, Abraham: active and contemplative life of, 104–6; as civil theologian, 234–35, 254, 257, 266, 297; Lincoln-Douglas debates, 260, 304–5; political thought of, 263 Lindbeck, George, 331, 479–80, 490, 508 Lippmann, Walter, 314–16 Lipset, Seymour M., 239, 323, 326 Little, David, 370 n.23 Lobkowicz, Nicholas, 85 n.8, 92 n.30, 101 n.47 Locke, John, 101, 104; political philosophy of, 184, 188, 194–95, 252, 267, 304, 323 Logos, 9, 92 n.30 Love: in active and contemplative life, 86, 94, 99 n.43; Catholic social teachings on, 301–2, 317–18; ethic of brotherly, 390–91; of truth in Augustine, 94; of self (amour de soi) vs. self-love (amour propre), 187–91; university and, 473; Weber and world-denying, 123–49. See also Caritas; Eros Lovin, Robin, 290, 488 Lowell, Robert, 235–36

Lowen, Rebecca, 412 Luckmann, Thomas, 262 Luther, Martin, 60, 84 n.4, 99. See also Reformation, Protestant Lynn, Robert, 258 Maccabeans, 367 Machiavelli, Niccolò: as civic humanist, 98–101; good society and, 251, 261, 381–84; in Italian politics, 60; on Moses, 364 n.13; virtu and, 97; works of, 60, 97, 364 n.13, 383–84 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 11 n.23; on ‘‘bureaucratic individualism,’’ 314; on Catholic substance in the university, 467–70; human nature in, 217; Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 406–7, 422–26, 435, 469 Madison, James, 232, 253, 291, 326, 329 Madsen, Richard, 457 Magic, 125–28, 139; Reformation rejection of, 344, 458 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 69, 70 Maritain, Jacques, 106 Market economy, 108, 113, 117–21, 145, 331, 340; higher education in, 413–15, 497 Marriage: changes in institution of, 275, 320, 327; good life and, 393, 432; as noncontractual contract, 218–19 Marsden, George, 463–68 Marshall, George C. (general), 372 Marx, Karl, 2–4, 67, 249, 386 Marxism, 23, 54, 69, 79, 272, 279 Maslow, Abraham, 164 n.41 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 286, 323, 325 Mauss, Marcel, 30, 35, 163, 177 May, Henry, 295 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 63–66 McCann, Richard V., 46 n.41 McGuffey reader, 258 McLoughlin, William, 338

Index 551 McNamara, Robert, 431 McNeill, William, 173–74 Mead, Sydney, 234, 256 Meher Baba, 274 Mencius, 89–91, 103 Mesopotamia, 135, 359, 365 Metanarratives, 470 Metaphysics, 38 n.34, 45, 96, 178, 384 Mexican-American War of 1845, 244, 292 Micah (prophet), 344, 505 Middle East, ancient, 34, 365 Milberg, William, 407–8 Millennialism, 283, 291, 292–95, 373, 462 Miller, Perry, 256, 285 Minghetti, Marco, 57 Modernization, 108, 112, 269, 281, 459 Monasticism, 95–96, 99, 138, 367 Monism, 36, 45 Monotheism, 474–75, 481 Monroe, James, 232 n.3 Monroe Doctrine, 251 Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat), 251, 263 Moody, Dwight L., 465 Mores, 196–99, 251, 258–59, 263, 440 Morgenstern, Oskar, 431 Mormons, 306 Moscone, Jonathan, 491–92 Moses, 97, 116–17, 135, 198, 233 n.5, 286–89, 362–64, 368, 373, 452, 495 ‘‘Motherese,’’ 167, 207–8 Muhammad (prophet), 38, 188 Muir, John, 336 Multiculturalism, 319–29, 334 Murray, John Courtney, 315–16 Musilanguage, 160–61, 167, 208, 519 Mussolini, Benito, 51, 68–75 Mysticism, 273; nature and, 337; in Weber, 123 n.2, 126–30, 273, 337. 339 Myth, 9, 11, 31–37, 120, 216–17, 279

Nadal, Jerome, 100 Napoleon I, 174, 291 National cultures, 333, 335 Nationalism, 174, 200, 203, 219, 248, 284 n.9, 307, 350, 368, 461 Nation-state, 110, 112, 355, 368 Naturalism, 46, 103, 344, 458, 460 Natural liberty, 189, 201 Navaho, 30 n.19, 32 n.25 Nelson, Cary, 403–4 Neo-Confucianism, 96, 102–3 Neolithic period, 188, 190 Nettl, Bruno, 158 Neville, Robert, 479 Newbigin, Leslie, 481 New School, 203 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 286, 290, 454; The Kingdom of God in America, 296–99; on religious pluralism and truth, 474–89 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 238, 316–17, 447; The Irony of American History, 299–301 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 406, 468 9/11, 354, 373 Nirvana, 38 n.34 Nixon, Richard, 273 Nonviolence, 132–33, 300 Northern Ireland, 112, 306 Origen, 92–93 Origins of Music, The (Wallin et al.), 157–60 Orthodoxy, 42, 47–49, 282; critical, 219; in Italian religion, 73–78 Orwell, George, 119 Pagan, 55–56, 325–26, 516 Paideia, 441 Paine, Thomas, 48, 199, 234, 242 Pande, G. C., 131–32 Papacy, 55, 59, 61, 73 Parmenides, 89, 131 n.25 Parsons, Talcott, 1–4; general theory of action, 5–6; ‘‘societal community’’ in, 255

552

Index

Paruta, Paolo, 98 Patriotism, 200, 230, 259, 294, 307 Paul (the apostle), 295, 366, 480–83, 486, 505, 510–18 Peace of Westphalia, 110 Peirce, Charles, 479 Pentecost, 510–14 Pentecostalism, 8, 361 Performance, 155; doctrine and, 486 n.18; ritual as, 161–65, 173 Performative speech, 162–63 Pericles, 86–90 Personality, 97 n.36, 104; in action system, 5, 49; effects of ritual on, 159, 162–63 Peter (the apostle), 93, 482–83, 512 Pharaoh, 288–89, 359, 362, 364 Philo, 92 Philosophy: Christian, 92, 94; classical, 100, 190, 410; contemporary examples of, 263; political, 92, 94 Phronesis, 423–24 Physics, 381–82 Pity, 184–85, 191 Pius IX (pope), 61 Plato, 9, 25, 137, 382–83; on contemplative life, 86–92, 97–100 Plotinus, 92 n.30 Pocock, J. G. A., 97 n.36 Polanyi, Karl, 118 Polis, 86–87, 110, 174, 383 Political association, 389 Political science, 385 Political theory, 20, 228, 249 Politics, 410, 501; active and contemplative life and, 87; Aristotle on, 383; Christianity and, 358–75; Havel on, 119; Machiavelli on, 98, 101; religion and, in America, 239, 248, 250; religion and, in Italy, 53, 59–75 passim; Rousseau on, 191, 199; as sphere, 10–11, 414; Weber on, 16, 130, 146, 389–90 Politics (Aristotle), 383

‘‘Politics as a Vocation’’ (Max Weber), 16, 130, 389–90 Polytheism, 124, 390 Poor, 67, 118, 129 n.17, 138, 148, 188– 96, 262; nations, 281; in spirit, 504–7; treatment of, 302, 361, 367, 513 Popular Party, 71 Positivism, 66, 102, 407–8; incoherence of, 469; as university model, 405, 424–25 Postmodernity, 121, 405–9, 424–25, 433, 459, 469–70, 475, 479, 491 Practices, community, 8, 9, 151, 212– 16, 304, 491–503 Pragmatism, 106, 331, 464–65 Premodernity, vii, 6–8, 21, 44, 58, 158, 173, 307, 406 Priesthood of all believers, 367, 458 Profane, 81–82, 104; texts, 454, 490– 91, 496, 501; time, 151 Professionalism, civic, 439 Promised Land: America as, 233, 245, 288–89; Moses in, 364 Property, private, 3, 186, 188, 383 Protestantism, 4, 41, 43, 130, 145, 182, 333–349, 358, 369 n.22, 373, 447, 460–66 Protestant principle, 347, 467 Protolanguage, 157, 160 Providence, 101, 230–35, 289, 292, 385 Public interest, vs. common good, 304 Public philosophy, 293, 314–16. See also Common good Public sphere, religion in, 109, 338– 39, 345, 451–53 Public theology, vs. civil religion, 256–57 Purgatory, 42 n.37, 517, 521 Puritanism, 127, 145; politics of, 286–88 Putnam, Emily James, 203–6, 210, 219 Putnam, Robert, 343, 459, 499–502

Index 553 Quakers, 324 Radcliffe-Browne, A. R., 163 Rahner, Karl, 482, 485 Rappaport, Roy, 21, 161–65, 170, 172, 177, 180 Rational choice theory (rational actor theory), 408, 428–33 Rationalism, 11, 140 Rationalization: Habermas on, 108, 118–19; of means, 268, 270, 280; in religious evolution, 47 Readings, William, 472 Reagan, Ronald, 287, 315–16 Reason: Aristotelian, 444–46; cognitive, 12; practical, 377, 382, 384, 388; pure vs. practical, 422–23 Reciprocity, ethic of, 117, 128–29, 134, 139 Reich, Robert, 168, 209, 403 Reformation, Protestant, 11, 40–43, 54, 60–62, 126, 176, 179, 324, 368, 458, 461 Religion: academic study of, 23, 109, 445, 451–55, 484, 496; culturallinguistic theory of, 479; definitions of, 6–8, 24, 53, 151, 233; private life and, 109, 111, 147, 251; women and, 82 Renaissance: Italy and, 54, 65; religion and, 43 n.38 Renouncers of the world, 133, 137–38, 178–79 Repentance, 297–301 Republicanism, civic, 194, 330, 332 Rhetoric, 384–88 Rhodes, Edward, 370–72 Richman, Bruce, 161 Ricoeur, Paul, 120 n.13, 216–17 Rights: human, 143, 324, 446, 449, 459; individual, 192, 194–95; ‘‘of man,’’ 226–29 Riker, William, 431 Risorgimento, 53, 54, 60 n.22, 63–66, 76

Ritual: anti-ritual, 11, 165, 178; Durkheim on, 150–80 passim; theories of, 162–63 Robertson, Leslie, 438–39 Robinson, J. A.T. (bishop), 47 n.43 Roman Empire, 59, 94, 275, 351, 367 Romanticism, 323, 333, 337 Roth, Philip, 492 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 181–82, 200; on common good, 193–95, 252, 258, 262, 290; Second Discourse, 183–91; The Social Contract, 181, 183, 192–98, 201–2 Royce, Josiah, 294–95, 312–17 Sacramentalism, 41; Catholic, 139, 272, 347, 458, 461, 485; Protestant anti-sacramentalism, 11, 337 Sahlins, Marshall, 128 Salutati (Florentine), 98 Salvatorelli, Luigi, 60 n.22, 63–64 Salvemini, Gaetano, 79 San Francisco Zen Center, 274, 276 Santayana, George, 263 Saussaye, Chantepie de la, 23 Savonarola, 97–98, 249 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 45 Schluchter, Wolfgang, 123 n.2, 125 n.5, 131 n.25 ‘‘Science as a Vocation’’ (Max Weber), 16, 146, 388–89, 443–44 Scientism, 281 Second Discourse (Rousseau), 183–91 Sect, 324 Secularization, 48, 98–99, 170, 466 Self-interest: human action and, 194, 252, 267–68, 290, 305, 354, 396, 432; Tocqueville’s critique of, 259, 265, 385. See also Rational choice theory Sermon on the Mount, 132, 286, 504–5 Service learning, 445 Shakespeare, performances of, 491–92 Sheilaism, 345

554

Index

Shils, Edward, 399–401, 417–19 Shinran Shōnin, 41–42 Shinto, 55; ‘‘American,’’ 238 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 103 Slavery (U.S.): anti-slavery movement, 297; civil religion and, 241–42, 257, 266; Jefferson and, 308–9; Lincoln and, 105, 234–35, 238, 304–5 Smith, Brian K., 176–78 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 3, 6, 488 Social capital, 331, 343, 499, 503 Social contract, 155, 162, 290, 432; Sparta and, 196–98 Social Contract, The (Rousseau), 181, 183, 189, 192 Social Darwinism, 267, 269, 293, 428 Social inquiry, 381–401 Socialism, 20, 145, 273; Italian, 53– 58, 66–73, 77–80 Social justice, 3, 109, 148, 271 Social theory, 19–22 Societies: complex, 36, 125, 174, 307; democratic, 44, 49, 78; tribal, 4, 111–14, 307 Sociology of Philosophies, The (Collins), 153–57 Socrates, 85–92, 97 n.36, 136, 205, 388, 452 Solidarity: academic, 404–5; Catholic understandings of, 301, 312, 318, 348; ethic of, 148, 330, 344, 503; music and, 158; narrative and, 112; national, 239, 255; religious communities and, 218–19, 329; ritual and, 8, 33, 157–74 passim, 199; Rousseau and, 200 Sorel, Georges, 69–70, 78 Sparta: Christianity and, 247–48; social contract and, 196–98 Special interests, 195 Spencer, Herbert, 23, 66–67 Spinoza, Baruch de, 123 n.1, 131 n.25, 135 n.34 Squadristi, 71, 73

Stanner, W. E. H., 30–33 Starobinski, Jean, 183, 186, 188 State of nature: in Hobbes, 384; in Rousseau, 182–96 Stern, Jessica, 370 n.23 Stockinger, James, 195 Stoics, 133, 136 Street, Nicholas, 288 Strong, Josiah, 292–93 Sturnick, Judith, 403–4 Sullivan, William, 434–44 Sumner, George, 482 Superstructure: Counter-Reformation as, 60; religious, 253, 255, 263 Swidler, Ann, 436–37, 469 Symbolic codes, 165, 205 Symbolic Species, The (Deacon), 154–62 Symbol system, 24–44 passim Tambiah, Stanley, 136 n.39 Taoism, 25, 41, 95–96, 125, 133, 272 Taylor, Charles: ‘‘A Catholic Modernity,’’ 358 n.3, 459, 466–67; on Rousseau, 182, 467–68 Taylor, Mark, 470 Television, 137 n.40, 175; civic participation and, 500–501; as means of socialization, 321–22; politics and use of, 227, 260 Ten Commandments, 452–53 Terrorism, war on, 356, 370 n.23, 375, 448 Thanksgiving Day, 232, 237 Thatcher, Margaret, 347 Theoria, 86, 89, 92 n.30 Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas), 11–14 Thoreau, Henry David, 244 3HO, 274–79 Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (MacIntyre), 406–7, 422– 26, 435, 469 Tillich, Paul, 46, 279, 347–48, 461, 467, 486

Index 555 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 195–202, 234, 239, 247, 251, 258–59, 308, 323, 385–86 Tolstoy, Leo, 123 n.2, 146, 391, 444 Totalitarianism: in Italy, 51, 72; Rousseau and, 93–94 Totem, 159 Tracy, David, 346, 460–62, 467 Trinity, doctrine of, 461–62, 486 n.18, 510 Troeltsch, Ernst, 474–76, 483 Truman, Harry, 243 Turner, Victor, 82, 162 n.33 Unitarianism, 462–65; Jefferson and, 311, 338 United Nations, 244; America and, 354, 374 United States: foreign policy, 449; national security strategy document, 350, 353–54, 371, 447 Upanishads, 136, 138, 178 Vatican II, 466, 513; American culture and, 271–72, 282; impact on ritual, 165; Italy and, 77 movement away from, 284 Vedic-Hindu tradition, 176–78. See also Hinduism Vietnam War, 221, 271, 357, 412 Virgin Mary, feast of, 56 Virtu, 92, 384 Vocation, 415 Voegelin, Erich, 24–25, 493 Vogel, David, 334–37 Voluntary associations, 6, 340, 343, 369 Von Neumann, John, 431 Walzer, Michael, 136 n.35, 362–64 War of 1812, 291 Warner, Lloyd, 237

Washington, George, 230–37, 254, 259 ‘‘Weapons of mass destruction,’’ 350, 371 Weathermen, 274 Weber, Marianne, 146–47 Weber, Max, 391–93; aesthetic in, 129, 137–44; alienation and, 26, 142; decisionism of, 133, 389; mysticism and, 123 n.2, 126–130, 273, 337, 339; on politics, 16, 130, 146, 389–90; on Puritan ethic of vocation, 145; on religious ethic of brotherliness, 128, 141–48; on salvation religions, 125–44, 390; ‘‘Science as a Vocation,’’ 16, 146, 388–89, 443–44; world rejection and, 25–50, 91, 126, 130 Weld, Theodore, 298 Welfare state, 148, 262, 501 Wesleyan Methodism, 118 Will to power, 406 Williams, Roger, 287–88, 323–26, 329–30, 508 Williams, Rowan, 486 n.18 Wilson, Bryan, 275 Wilson, E. O., 423–24, 445 Wilson, Woodrow, 293, 372 Winthrop, John, 285–87, 323–25 Working class: in Italy, 68, 70, 73; speech codes of, 165–68, 205–8 World War I, 70, 139, 293 World War II, 75, 330, 408, 411–13 Worldwide Web, 501 Worster, Daniel, 335–38 Wuthnow, Robert, 214, 340–45, 459 Yeago, David, 485 Yoder, John Howard, 366–68 Zen Buddhism, 272–279 Zoroastrianism, 125, 135–36, 137, 367

robert bellah is the Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He was educated at Harvard University, receiving the B.A. in 1950 and the Ph.D. in 1955. He began teaching at Harvard in 1957 and left there as a professor of sociology in 1967 when he moved to Berkeley to become Ford Professor of Sociology. His publications include Tokugawa Religion, Beyond Belief, The Broken Covenant, The New Religious Consciousness, Varieties of Civil Religion, and most recently, Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation (2003). In 1985 he published Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, in collaboration with Richard Madsen,William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, and in 1991, with the same collaborators, The Good Society. In 2000 Bellah was awarded the National Humanities Medal. steven tipton teaches sociology and religion at Emory University and its Candler School of Theology, where he is a professor and director of the Graduate Division of Religion. Educated at Stanford (B.A., 1968) and Harvard (Ph.D., 1979), he is the author of Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change and Public Pulpits; coauthor of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society; and coeditor of Religion and America, Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Meaning and Modernity, and Family Transformed.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bellah, Robert Neelly The Robert Bellah reader / edited by Robert N. Bellah and Steven M. Tipton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8223-3855-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8223-3855-6 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-8223-3871-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8223-3871-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Religion and sociology. 2. United States—Religion. 3. Religion and sociology—United States. I. Tipton, Steven M. II. Title. bl60.b38 2006 306.6—dc22 2006011059