Friday, August 24, 2007
Regarding Mother Teresa's dark night half-century of the soul, a reader kindly reminded me of this great quote from C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. As Screwtape wrote to Wormwood,
"Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Poland's shame
John Cornwell
Both
bishops and religious orders are failing to condemn an avowedly
anti-Semitic Redemptorist priest, whose radio station is bolstering
political support for the extreme nationalism of the 58-year-old
identical twins inhabiting the offices of Polish President and Prime
Minister
Time has a long article on a new compilation of Mother Teresa's letters to her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years. An excerpt:
The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."
That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'"
Jack Balkin is right, I think, that "several centuries of modernity, secularism, and religious skepticism" coupled with the Church's loss of direct temporal power have aided religioius thinking about universal human rights. And, with Jack, I assume that God is chuckling at the irony. But, I think Rob's response is far too timid. I think we can 1) successfully argue from history that Jewish and Christian belief pre-Enlightenment provided the foundation for modern universal human rights thinking, 2) argue from reason that for any benefits gained from the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment periods, that those projects ultimately undermine universal human rights (this has yet to be fully worked out in history), and 3) we can offer an explanatory hypothesis as to why human beings (religious and non-religioius alike) set themselves up for failure by articulating moral codes that are unachievable by most people, institutions, and societies.
I am not a historian, but I hope later today to at least offer a few more thoughts on 1) and possibly 3). My thoughts on 2) will have to wait for a another day.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Jack Balkin weighs in on our conversation regarding the relationship between human rights and belief in God. He mentions the treatment of Jews within the papal states, and suggests that we have:
assumed that belief in God is good for human rights because God himself approves of universal human rights, religious tolerance, and human equality. But that is not generally true of what people thought God wanted historically, even within the Judeo-Christian tradition. Throughout most of human history, God (and different gods) have been remarkably partial, at least if we credit the moral and political beliefs of people who professed to believe most fervently in Him throughout the ages, and who justified their practices based on their belief in Him.
For religion to ground universal human rights in the very attractive way that the previous discussion has assumed, that religion must be of a very special sort, and, I would suggest, it must be of a form that arises most commonly following the Enlightenment, when older versions of religious belief were repeatedly questioned and reshaped by religious strife, political necessity, the rise of modern secular institutions, and the growth of science; these historical phenomena -- and not simply belief in God per se -- led to increasing religious tolerance between sects and increasingly capacious and generalized conceptions of human liberty and human equality. That is to say, the sort of belief in God that most strongly undergirds the discourse of universal human rights as we understand it today is the sort of belief in God that has been chastened by and reshaped by several centuries of modernity, secularism, and religious skepticism.
Prof. Balkin is right to point out this underlying premise of our thesis, and that's why my claim has been fairly limited. I see something distinctive in the fact (if it is a fact) that we were created by a God who wants a relationship with us. But I can't speak with any confidence about the content of the human rights that would flow from that fact. Perhaps God wants to reveal his glory to humankind through displays of awesome power against those who reject his chosen prophets' teachings. Perhaps the natural order is built on a rigid human hierarchy. If I was looking for a human rights advocate, Aquinas and Augustine would be nowhere near the top of my list. Admittedly, I have the good fortune of pushing this conversation in a post-John Courtney Murray, "I'm OK You're OK" society of blurred religious lines, and in this context, a belief in a loving creator is a potentially rich and distinctive resource for supporting human rights. The fact of creation has always been a potential resource, of course, and our own failure, as believers, to recognize it as such is one reason why non-believers (and many believers) are understandably skeptical.
Thanks to Michael P. for linking to the piece from the Chronicle on Mark Lilla's Stillborn God, which was excerpted recently in the New York Times Magazine.
The Chronicle piece quotes Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian at the University of Virginia, as being concerned about Lilla's view
that there is something called "the West" and that "within this alleged 'West' there is a 'We' that conforms to the core tenets of textbook history: 'We' were once burdened by superstitions and irrationalities until somehow 'we' became enlightened."
(Here's Prof. Vaidhyanathan's post over at "Altercations", from which the above quote was taken.)
Wholly apart from the Lilla excerpt -- more on that later -- and without disagreeing with Prof. Vaidhyanathan's point that the boundaries and content of "the West" are not always obvious, I guess I'm one who still believes firmly that it is a useful -- indeed, a necessary -- idea. There is, it seems to me, a "West," and its history is inseparable from "our" history as Catholics and Americans.
According to the Chronicle, Prof. Vaidhyanathan is also
. . . not "puzzled" by the sort of "theological radicalism" that emanates from Iran or Saudi Arabia. He claims that it echoes the theologically infused politics that one can find "in any conservative Baptist church in Texas." Even more arresting, Vaidhyanathan claims that this "hard-core millenarianism...is perhaps the most powerful strain of political thought in the United States today."
Good Lord. Again: Distinctions must be drawn -- it is important that they be drawn, and those who fail to draw them err badly -- but are too often not being drawn (see, e.g., Andrew Sullivan's tired "Christianist" riff, or "American Theocracy", or "American Fascists", or . . . ): The GOP is not the Taliban; Rick Santorum is not Sayyid Qutb; our "Red v. Blue" is not the Thirty Years' War; Operation Rescue is not Al-Qaeda; regulating partial-birth-abortion is not stoning unveiled women; etc. The suggestion that the violent ideology "that emanates from Iran or Saudi Arabia" "echoes" what one can find in "any conservative Baptist church in Texas" is . . . seriously mistaken (an "echo" after all, is a fainter version of the original sound, isn't it?). And, the claim that "hard-core millenarianism" is "perhaps the most powerful strain of political thought in the United States" is . . . unhelpful and inconsistent with the facts.
Now, with respect to the Lilla piece, certainly, it's the kind of thing that I suppose we should be delighted to find in the Sunday newspaper, and discussed in the public forum. It's full of big and interesting ideas and claims. At the end of the day, though, I came away thinking that there is a way of thinking about the relationship religion and politics -- a Catholic way -- that is ignored in the essay. As I read the piece, it canvasses three ways of thinking about this relationship: (a) religious questions are and should be separate; (b) politics involves, and simply involves, the implementation of God's revealed, specific plans on earth; and (c) "liberal theology", a "third way between Christian orthodoxy and the Great Separation," which failed -- Lilla thinks -- because it offered no answer to the question, "why be a Christian?" (or a Jew, etc.).
But, the "Great Separation", as Lilla frames it, is not -- it seems to me -- the only alternative (nor, indeed, has it really been our alternative) to theocracy or the hollowed-out thing that Lilla (perhaps inaccurately) calls "liberal theology." See, e.g., John Courtney Murray, "We Hold These Truths."
I have some quibbles with Lilla's "Great Separation" narrative, too, but I'll save those for another post.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Over at Balkinization, Brian Tamanaha rejoins the conversation on the relationship between human rights and belief in God, responding to recent posts by Fr. Araujo and me. An excerpt:
Rob and Father Araujo, it should be noted, are not taking the same position. Rob (like Perry) is arguing that religious belief alone, even false belief, provides a superior grounding for human rights, whereas Father Araujo identifies the superiority of religion for morality and human rights in the “objectivity that surrounds God’s existence.” Father Araujo, moreover, extends the argument beyond human rights to claim that the morality and moral code of religious believers is superior to “the atheist’s morality and moral code.”
In response to Father Araujo, I can only say that if God indeed exists (and if it is God’s will that humans have inherent dignity), then he is correct: human rights and morality have an objective existence. But the essential question, as always, is whether God exists—which he simply assumes.
In response to Rob’s argument that even a false belief in God provides a superior rational grounding for human rights, I offer a simple (and unoriginal) question: What if belief in God is like belief in witchcraft?
Believers in witchcraft can, to be sure, have an internally coherent belief system that amounts to a religion—and let’s also say that inherent human dignity and human rights and a deity are part of their witchcraft belief system. Would Perry and Rob assert that this belief system is “rational” and provides a superior foundation for human rights? Does not the “rationality” of the belief system hinge upon the truth of witchcraft (rather than merely belief in witchcraft) and upon the existence of their claimed deity?
If the answer to the latter question is “yes,” then (for the same reasons) the rationality and coherence of religious belief systems also rest on the truth of God’s existence, which has never been proven. Consequently, religion provides no more solid a rational foundation for human rights than any other ungrounded moral belief system.
My answer to Brian's question is yes, witchcraft could provide a rational basis for human rights if 1) living consistently with the claims of witchcraft required observance of human rights; and 2) the person in question believed that the claims of witchcraft are objectively true. Let's assume that God does not exist, and that believers are deluded, while atheists see things as they truly are. In my view, it is the fact of the delusion that still allows for the rational foundation of human rights. I'm not equating "rational" with universally accessible and compelling; I'm focusing more on the rational relationship between an authentically held belief regarding our existence (not simply wishful thinking) and recognition of human rights. Atheists know they are creating human rights; believers rationally follow the implications of reality (as they perceive it) to the unavoidable conclusion that humans naturally possess rights.
And again, to be clear, none of this is to suggest that religious voices should be privileged in human rights discourse or that non-religious voices are less legitimate or welcome. It is simply to point out that religious voices bring a dimension to the conversation that is not easily replaced by a one-size-fits-all language that has been stripped of any sense that human dignity emanates from a source greater than ourselves.
This is a followup to my earlier post.
From the online Chronicle of Higher Education:
Siva Vaidhyanathan declares himself a longtime admirer of Mark Lilla's work, which is precisely why he is worried about Lilla's forthcoming book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, which was excerpted this past Sunday in The New York Times Magazine.
Vaidhyanathan's concern stems from Lilla's apparent belief that there is something called "the West" and that "within this alleged 'West' there is a 'We' that conforms to the core tenets of textbook history: 'We' were once burdened by superstitions and irrationalities until somehow 'we' became enlightened."
Vaidhyanathan, settling in to his new digs at the University of Virginia, where he is a professor of media studies and law, lays out his case on Eric Alterman's Web site, Altercation, where he is guest blogging this week. (To read more about Vaidhyanathan, check out this profile by The Chronicle's Scott Carlson.)
"Any construction of an intelligible and enlightened 'West' must elide all of those messy contradictions within it: Nazism, Francoism (Catholic royalism), Stalinism, radical Serbian nationalism, Jerry Falwell, etc. But mostly," Vaidhyanathan writes, "it must ignore the diversity of thought and practice among real people who inhabit 'the West.' And it must ignore the omnipresence of materialism, secularism, consumerism, rationalism, and even atheism as major traditions in places that could not easily be described as 'Western' such as India, Iran, and China."
Contrasting Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University, Vaidhyanathan is not "puzzled" by the sort of "theological radicalism" that emanates from Iran or Saudi Arabia. He claims that it echoes the theologically infused politics that one can find "in any conservative Baptist church in Texas." Even more arresting, Vaidhyanathan claims that this "hard-core millenarianism...is perhaps the most powerful strain of political thought in the United States today." As such, he faults Lilla for failing to examine how political theology influences not only radical Islam, but also radical Christianity and radical Judaism.
"The conflict between political theology and political liberalism is, as Lilla claims, the central conflict of our time," Vaidhyanathan writes. "I would add that it is the central conflict of all time. And it ain't just Americans and Europeans who have to deal with it. The front lines of this struggle run through Jakarta, Bombay, Karachi, Cairo, and Lagos. That's where the real story is."
(Not surprisingly, Christopher Hitchens has some of his own objections to Lilla's thesis.)
Evan Goldstein | Posted on Tuesday August 21, 2007 | Permalink
Coming on the heels of a $51 million gift last May, Marquette University Law School just announced another major gift: $30 million from Joseph J. Zilber, Milwaukee philanthropist, real estate developer and Chairman of the Board of Zilber Ltd., a real estate holding company. (HT: Empirical Legal Studies blog.) Congrats to Dean Kearney and everyone else at Marquette, Milwaukee's "Catholic, Jesuit University."
CNN (and TNT) have been plugging this upcoming series, "God's Warriors," hosted by Christiane Amanpour. I admit it: I'm not optimistic, and anticipate a series of badly misplaced equivalency arguments (i.e., "sure, there are the Islamists, but what about the home-schooling evangelicals?").
Jim Lindgren has a good post, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, about the demographics of "fundamentalists" and other things. And, he has links to lots of other commentary about the series.
Thinking about the series, and these posts, I find myself thinking also about the Dutch bishop's recent suggestion that Catholics call God "Allah" (a suggestion that Robert Miller firmly declines here) and also Mark Lilla's recent NYT Mag article, "The Politics of God." One thought I come away from all this with: Distinctions must be drawn -- it is important that they be drawn, and those who fail to draw them err badly -- but are too often not being drawn (see, e.g., Andrew Sullivan's tired "Christianist" riff, or "American Theocracy", or "American Fascists", or . . . ): The GOP is not the Taliban; Rick Santorum is not Sayyid Qutb; our "Red v. Blue" is not the Thirty Years' War; Operation Rescue is not Al-Qaeda; regulating partial-birth-abortion is not stoning unveiled women; etc.
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