religion as a biological organ . . .

Man is always concerned about his destiny—that is to say, his position and rôle in the universe, and how he is to maintain that position and fulfill that rôle. All societies of man developed some sort of organs for coping with this problem—organs for orientating their ideas and emotions and for constructing attitudes of mind and patterns of belief and behavior in relation to their conception of their destiny. All of the social organs concerned with destiny can, I think, properly he included under the head of religions. Even if some of them are exceedingly primitive and consist of little but magic rituals, while others are highly developed and claimed to be entirely rational, they are all, from Haitian voodoo to Roman Catholicism, from neolithic fertility religions to Marxist Communism, concerned with the same general function. In the same sort of way, the tube-feet of a starfish, the legs of a horse, the pseudopods of an amoeba, and the wings of a bird, though profoundly different organs from each other, are all animal organs concerned with the same general function of locomotion.

Julian Huxley
Religion Without Revelation
1957

Hertha

I that saw where ye trod
     The dim paths of the night,
Set the shadow called God
     In your sky to give light;
But the morning of manhood is risen, and the
     shadowless soul is in sight.

The tree many-rooted
     That swells to the sky,
With frondage red-fruited
     The life-tree am I;
In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves; ye
     shall live and not die.

But the Gods of your fashion
     That take and that give,
In their pity and passion
     That scourge and forgive,
They are worms that are bred in the bark that falls off;
     they shall die and not live.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne

 

on idolatrous foolishness ...

" ... the inadequacy of the explanation does not invalidate the reality of the experience. Paul, like anyone who dares to speak of God, discovered that there is no such thing as a god language with which to process a God experience. The language we use is human, culturally conditioned, and incapable of doing more than pointing to that which it can never fully embrace. To attribute ultimate reality to the constructs of our language, to make religious claims for the human explanations for the God experience is to become idolatrous, and foolish. ...[...] ... The church must recognize that its first-century biblical explanations, its fourth and fifth-century creedal explanations and its later developing system of doctrines and dogmas are human creations, not divine revelations and none of them is either finally true or eternally valid ... [...] ... The ultimate heresy of Christianity lies not in its inability to explain adequately the Christ experience. It lies in the claim uttered through the ages that human words could not only define for all time something called orthodoxy, but that the ultimate and saving truth of the God experience could actually reside in the theological explanations."

J.S. Spong
"A Christianity for Tomorrow"
The Once and Future Faith
2001

watch that first step (it's a doozy)

I
The Meaning of "God"

Knowing what one is talking about is of inestimable value in any dialogue, so the theist, before he sets out to explain why we should believe in god, must first explain what he means by the word "god". What is the theist attempting to establish the existence of? What is the nature of god? How are we to identify him (or it)? At least some of the attributes of this supposed creature must be known before anything can be considered relevant to establishing his existence. As one theist puts it, "With no description or definition to work from, we will literally fail to know what we are talking about." For example, consider the following dialogue:

Mr Jones: "A unie exists."
Mr White: "Prove it."
Mr Jones: "It has rained for three consecutive days—that is my proof."

If this exchange is less than satisfactory, much of the blame rests with Mr. White: his demand for proof is immature. Mr. Jones has not specified what an "unie" is; until and unless he does so, "unie" is nothing but a meaningless sound, and Mr. Jones is uttering nonsense. Without some description of an "unie," the alleged proof for its existence is incoherent.

When confronted with a claim that a god exists, the person who immediately demands proof commits the same error as does Mr. White. His first response should be, "What is it for which you are claiming existence?" The theist must present an intelligible description of god. Until he does so, "god" makes no more sense than "unie"; both are cognitively empty, and any attempt at proof is logically absurd. Nothing can qualify as evidence for the existence of a god unless we have some idea of what we are searching for. Even if it is demanded that the existence of god be accepted on faith, we still must know what it is that we are required to have faith in. As W.T. Blackstone puts it,

Until the content of a belief is made clear, the appeal to accept the belief is beside the point, for one would not know what one has accepted. The request for the meaning of a religious belief is logically prior to the question of accepting that belief on faith or to the question of whether that belief constitutes knowledge.

from Atheism: The Case Against God
by George H. Smith
1979

Einstein's world . . .

The Meaning of Life

What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

Of Wealth

I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can produce fine ideas and noble deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and always tempts its owners irresistibly to abuse it.

Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Ghandi armed with the money-bags of Carnagie?

Christianity and Judaism

If one purges the Judaism of the Prophets and Christianity as Jesus Christ taught it of all subsequent additions, especially those of the priests, one is left with a teaching that is capable of curing all the social ills of humanity.

It is the duty of every man of good will to strive steadfastly in his own little world to make this teaching of pure humanity a living force, so far as he can. If he makes an honest attempt in this direction without being crushed and trampled under foot by his contemporaries, he may consider himself and the community to which he belongs lucky.

Education and Educators

Dear Miss —

I have read about sixteen pages of your manuscript and it made me—smile. It is clever, well observed, honest, it stands on its own feet up to a point, and yet it is so typically feminine, by which I mean derrivative and vitiated by personal rancour. I suffered exactly the same treatment at the hands of my teachers, who disliked me for my independence and passed me over when they wanted assistants (I must admit that I was somewhat less of a model student than you). But it would not have been worth my while to write anything about my school life, still less would I have liked to be responsible for anyone's printing or actually reading it. Besides, one always cuts a poor figure if one complains about others who are struggling for their place in the sun too after their own fashion.

Therefore, pocket your temperament and keep your manuscript for your sons and daughters, in order that they might derive consolation from it and—not give a damn for what their teachers tell them or think about them.

Incidentally I am only coming to Princeton to research, not to teach. There is too much education altogether, especially in American schools. The only rational way of educating is to be an example—of what to avoid, if one can't be the other sort.

from The World As I See It.

This I Believe

In every one of the higher religions there is a strain of infinite optimism on the one hand, and on the other, of a profound pessimism. In the depths of our being, they all teach, there is an inner light, but an inner light which our egotism keeps for most of the time in a state of more or less complete eclipse. If, however, it so desires, the ego can get out of the way, so to speak, can dis-eclipse the light and become identified with its divine source, hence the traditional optimism of the traditional religions. Their pessimism springs from the observed fact that, though all are called, few are chosen for the sufficient reason that few choose to be chosen. To me this older conception of man's nature and destiny seems more realistic, more nearly in accord with the given facts than any form of modern utopianism. In the lord's prayer we are taught to ask for the blessing which consists in not being led into temptation. The reason is only too obvious. When temptations are very great or unduly prolonged, most persons succumb to them. To devise a perfect social order is probably beyond our powers, but I believe that it is perfectly possible for us to reduce the number of dangerous temptations to a level far below that which is tolerated at the present time. A society so arranged that there should be a minimum of dangerous temptations, this is the end towards which as a citizen I have to strive. In my efforts to achieve that end, I can make use of a great variety of means. Do good ends justify the use of intrinsically bad means? On the level of theory, the point can be argued indefinitely. In practice, meanwhile, I find that the means employed invariably determine the nature of the end achieved. Indeed, as Mahatma Ghandi was never tired of insisting, the means ARE the end in its preliminary stages. Men have put forth enormous efforts to make their world a better place to live in, but except in regard to gadgets, plumbing and hygiene, their success has been pathetically small. Hell, as the proverb has it, is paved with good intentions, and so long as we go on trying to realize our ideals by bad or merely inappropriate means, our good intentions will come to the same bad ends. In this consists the tragedy and irony of history. Can I as an individual do anything to make future history a little less tragic and less ironic than history past and present? I believe I can. As as citizen, I can use all my intelligence and all my good will to develop political means that shall be of the same kind and quality as the ideal aims which I am trying to achieve. And as a person, as a psycho-physical organism, I can learn how to get out of the way, so that the divine source of my life and consciousness can come out of eclipse and shine through me.

Aldous Huxley
from original 1950s series, "This I Believe"

the unitary executive in the 1930s . . .

Vive le Roi!

this is deliciously tongue-in-cheek

The abdication of Congress is certainly not as overt and abject as that of the German Reichstag or the Italian Parliamento; nevertheless, it has gone so far that the constitutional potency of the legislative arm is reduced to what the lawyers call a nuisance value. The two Houses can still make faces at Dr. Roosevelt, and when a strong body of public opinion happens to stand behind them they can even force him, in this detail or that, into a kind of accounting, but it must be manifest that if they tried to impose their will upon him in any major matter he could beat them easily. The only will left in the national government is his will. To all intents and purposes he is the state.

We have thus come to a sort of antithesis of the English system, under which Parliament is omnipotent and the King is only a falseface. It would be rather absurd to call the charge revolutionary, for it has been under way for more than a hundred years. Since Jackson's first election, in fact, Congress has always knuckled down to the President in times of national emergency. After 1863 Lincoln ruled like an Oriental despot, and after 1917, Wilson set himself up, not only as Emperor, but also as Pope. In 1864, as antiquaries familiar with Ex parte Merryman will recall, the Supreme Court undertook to bring old Abe to book, but as the same antiquaries know, it had to confess in the end that it could do nothing.

There is no likelihood that it will intervene in the present situation. For one thing, there seems to be no public demand that it do so. For another thing, judges as a class are naturally sympathetic toward arbitrary power, for their own authority rests upon it. Thus there seems to be every probability that Dr. Roosevelt will continue to operate as an absolute monarch, at least for some time to come. If the schemes of salvation concocted by his Brain Trust, i.e., by the King In Council, appear to be working, then no one save a few touchy senators will want to depose him. And if we continue wandering in the wilderness, with our shirttails out and the hot sun scorching our necks, then most Americans will probably hold that it is better to go on following one leader, however bad, than to start scrambling after a couple of hundred of them, each with a different compass.

My gifts as a constructive critic are of low visibility, but the state of affairs thus confronting the country prompts me to make a simple suggestion. It is that a convention be called under Article V of the Constitution, and that it consider the desirability of making Dr. Roosevelt King in name as well as in fact. There is no Constitutional impediment to such a change, and it would thus not amount to a revolution. The people of the United States are quite as free, under Article V, to establish a monarchy as they were to give the vote to women. Even if they held, as some argue, that the Bill of Rights is inviolable and cannot be changed by constitutional amendment, it may be answered that there is nothing in the Bill of Rights requiring that the national government shall be republican in form.

The advantages that lie in making Dr. Roosevelt King must be plain to everyone. His great difficulty today is that he is a candidate for reëlection in 1936, and must shape all his acts with that embarrassing fact in mind. Even with a docile Congress awaiting his orders he cannot carry on with a really free hand, for there remains a moniroty in that Congress which may, son or late, by the arts of the demagogue, convince the public, or a large part of it, that wahat he is doing is dangerous, and so his reëlection may be imperiled. To meet and circumvent this peril he must play the demagogue himself, which is to say, he must only too often subordinate what he believes to be wise to what he believes to be popular.

It is a cruel burden to lay upon a man facing a multitude of appaling problems, some of them probably next door to insoluble. No other man of genuine responsibility under our system of government is called upon to bear it. It lies, to be sure, upon Congressmen, but Congressmen, after all, are minor functuaries, and no one has expected them, these hundred years past, to be wise. We try to lighten it for Senators, who are a cut higher, by giving them six-year terms and so postponing their ordeal by ballot, and we remove it altogether for Federal judges by letting them sit during good behavior. But the President has to go on the auction block every four years, and the fact fills his mind and limits his freedom of action from the moment he takes the oath of office.

I am not a Roosevelt fanatic, certainly, though I voted for the right hon. gentleman last November, and even printed a few discreet pieces arguing that he might be worse. But it must be manifest that, in any situation as full of dynamite as the present one, it is a great advantage to have a leader who can devote his whole time and thought to the problems before him, without any consideration of extraneous matters. Yet that is precisely what, under our present system, a president cannot do. He is forced, at every moment of his first term, to remember that he may be thrown out at the end of it, and it is thus no wonder that his concern often wobbles him, and makes him a too-easy mark for the political blackmailers who constantly threaten him

If his term were unlimited, or limited only by his good behavior—in brief, if he were in the position of an elected King—he would get rid of all this nuisance, and be free to apply himself to his business. I believe that any man, under such circumstances, would do immensely better than he could possibly do under the present system. And I believe that Dr. Roosevelt, in particular, would be worth at least ten times what he is worth now, for he is a good enough politician to know that his current high and feverish popularity cannot last, democracy being what it is, and that the only way he can save himself in 1936 is by forgetting the Depression once or twice a day, and applying himself to very practical politics.

What this division of aim and interest amounts to is shown brilliantly by some of his appointments. He has made a plain effort to surround himself with men in whose competence and good faith he can put his trust, but he has been forced by the exigencies of his uncomfortable situation to give a number of important posts to political plugs of the most depressing sort. These plugs were too powerful to be flouted, and now that they are in office they are even more powerful than before. If they remain, they will disgrace the administration soon or late, and if they are turned out, they will imperil it in 1936. An elected King could rid himself of them at once, and they could do him no damage, now or hereafter.

The objections to monarchy are mainly sentimental, and do not bear well under inspection. I shall rehearse some of them at length in a future article, and try to show how hollow they are. Suffice it for the moment to glance at a few of them. One is the objection that a King, once in office, can't be got rid of. The answer is that Kings are got rid of very often, and usually very easily, and that the same constitutional convention which provided one for the United States might also provide for his ready impeachment and removal, and even for his lawful and Christian execution.

Another objection is that the problem of the succession is hard to solve, and that any King that we set up would probably want his son to succeed him, and would root for that son exactly as President in his first term now roots for himself, and in his second term for some favorite in his entourage. Well, why not? I believe that a Crown Price, brought up in his father's office, is likely to make at least as good a King as any other fellow. Moreover, is it so soon forgotten that Dr. Roosevelt himself came in as a sort of Crown Prince?—though I should add that he was challenged by a Legitimist party led de jure by the Young Pretender, Prince Theodore Minor, and de facto by Princess Alice. If His Excellency's name were Kelly, or Kraus or Kaminsky would he be in the White House today? To ask the question is to answer it. Despite the theory that Americans fear and abhor the hereditary principle they have elected one President's son to the Presidency, one President's grandson and one President's cousin, and in at least two other instances they have made motions in the same direction. This is five times in thirty-one times at the bat, or nearly one in six.

But the succession is really a minor matter. I see no objection to letting the sitting King nominate three candidates, and then choosing between them, by plebiscite, at his death. His nominations, at worst, would be far better than any that professional politicians could or would make, and three nominees would give the voters sufficient choice. There remains the problem of starting the ball rolling. But that problem, as I have sought to show, is already solved. We have a King in the White House at this minute, and he is quite as much of the Blood Royal as George V. All that remains is to call a constitutional convention, and, as it were, make an honest woman of him.

H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun
1 May 1933

J. Huxley on the Trinity . . .

Chapter 2
A Preliminary Interpretation

If what I have said in the preceding chapter is in principle correct (In which he professes a disbelief in either revelation or prophecy or the supernatural), then current theology requires re-interpretation. It is also evident that many differences of details would be possible in the interpretation, according both to the church or the sect chosen and to the individual temperament of the interpreter. That elasticity of framework which has made it possible for Christianity to appeal to men of all grades of culture and to societies in all stages of developments is one of the most noticeable facts about it. God the Father, for instance, must wear very different aspects to a Catholic mystic and a Hell-fire revivalist preacher.

But the broad outlines of the picture were drawn alike for all by the council of Nicæa, when it laid down the doctrine of the Trinity with its three co-equal persons. That doctrine, inspite of occasional intellectual revolts from its incomprehensibility, has appealed to the European mind for so many centuries that even the most bigoted opponent of Christianity would have to admit that the doctrine satisfies certain human needs and corresponds in some way with reality.

As I see it broadly, 'God the Father' is a personification of the forces of non-human nature; 'God the Holy Ghost' represents all ideals; and 'God the Son' personifies human nature at its highest, as actually incarnate in bodies and organised in minds, bridging the gulf between the other two, and between each of them and every day human life. And the unity of the three persons as 'One God' represents the fact that all these aspects of reality are inextricably interconnected.

The First Person of the Trinity, on this view, would be the theological name for the outer force and law which surround man whether he likes it or not. There may be mind and spirit behind these powers, but there is none in them. The powers thus symbolised are strange, often seeming definitely alien, or even hostile to man and his desires. They go their ways inevitably, without regard for human emotions or wishes. They constitute the mysterium tremendum of religion. On the other hand, they are not always hostile or alien. The spring follows the winter; nature may bring the storm and the flood, but she also blesses with abundance; the powers of nature kill and terrify, but they also bring the sun to shine, and the breeze to blow, and the birds to sing; they are powers of generation as well as of death.

In general, the forces and powers personified as the First Person are those which affect human life not only with their inevitability, but also with their quality of being entirely outside man. They may influence and subdue man, or man may influence them and control them; they and man's mind may be fused in experience; but in themselves thay are not only given, but external.

The realities symbolised in the Third Person of the Trinity, however, if my reading of theology is at all correct, are those which are equally given, but, from the point of view of humanity as a whole, internal. From the point of view of the individual man, on the other hand, they have the peculiar quality of being felt as partly internal, immanent, belonging to the self; partly external, transcendent, and far greater than the personal self. They are ideals of value, and are inevitable to an organism which like man has reached the level of conceptual thought.

Once general ideals are possible, they come to include abstract ideas and ideals. If I can make use of conceptual thought at all, I can have the general idea of truth in the same way as I can have the general ideas of circularity or hardness. But the general idea of circularity embraces not only the individual circular objects I have known, but includes them all in and refers them all to an abstract idea of perfect circularity, to which only approximations can ever in actual fact be made. So, with even more force, as regards hardness; and so with truth. Truth includes not only all the true propositions that I know and their individual if partial trueness, but also the ideal of complete and absolute truth by which every proposition must be judged as to its individual truth. And the same is the case with the moral virtues like mercy or courage or justice, with the ethical virtues of righteousness, with the æsthetic virtue of beauty. As soon as we begin to think at all, we perceive there is an ideal beyond every actual; and the more we think, the higher and the more extensive does that ideal become.

As we advance in experience, we find that our own discoveries, however intense, are but a limited and minute fraction of those that are possible; our knowledge of the actual and our conception of the ideal both enlarge enormously as a result of discovering the discoveries of others. With this the ideal becomes less merely personal, and is discovered as coextensive with humanity and thus, while losing nothing of its height, acquires new vastness of extension.

The rôle [sic] of different ideals within that sphere of reality which has been personified as the Holy Spirit has differed enormously in different ages and in different individuals and sects. It differs according to the scale of values which is adopted.

To take a few extreme cases, partly from other fields, there have been artists to whom æsthetic truth, artistic rightness of perception and expression, have been infinitely more important , more valuable to them, than intellectual truth or any moral qualities. Their contemporaries have generally rebrobated them, but posterity has been blessed in their achievements. In precisely the same way the man of science may live mainly and chiefly for the discovery of new truth, and put that at the top of his pyramid of values, neglecting beauty and the more human and domestic virtues. Or, finally, there have been many religious men and women who have found the assurance of salvation, the sense of righteousness, or the delights of religious contemplation, so far more valuable than anything else that they have 'made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake' or in other ways expressed their asceticism and their contempt for so-called earthly values, or have given themselves up so completely to the mystic life, neglecting good works and ordinary religious observance as well as secular values, that they have become objects of scandal even to the faithful.

In general, however, the ideals enshrined in the conception of the Holy Ghost include in the highest rank those of Righteousness with special reference to purity, and of Truth with special reference to the sense of illumination, though they, of course, include many others as well. But it should not be supposed that the reality behind the Third Person of the Trinity consists solely of ideals. It includes also all those 'winds of the spirit' which appear to come from some extra-personal region to fill the sails of the mind. We all know well enough that we may perceive an ideal, understand that it should be followed, and yet draw on no interior force which enables us to live by it or through it; and equally that we may be seized and possessed by spiritual forces which we do not recognise as having previously been part of our personality, uprushing we know not whence to drive us onwards in the service of some ideal. This, in some form or another, appears to be the almost universal experience of those who in obedience to their temperament and gifts have devoted themselves to pure art, pure science, pure philosophy, or pure religion: they seem when most successful in their work to be least personal. The same in its degree is true of all of us in our everyday life. General Booth once said that religion was something that came to us from outside: this is a singularly unsatisfactory definition, since it would apply equally well to a dozen other activities of the mind -- we have only to recollect what we experienced when we first fell in love, or when we performed some action in obedience to a sense of inward compulsion, but against all the feelings of our everyday personality.

The reality behind all these cases of irruptive spiritual force is constituted by those parts of the inborn capacities of mind and soul which have not been utilised in the building-up of personality. These inborn capacities of men, theirs through no merit or fault of their own, are given to them once and for all by heredity and early environment. The utmost that we, as individuals and persons, can do is to utilise fully the capacities which are thus presented for our use; we often do not even use them, but leave them to rust.

The contemplation of our own selves and human nature, the miracle of its existence as a product of natural evolution, the amazing fact that a man is a mere portion of the common and universal substance of the world, but so organised as to be able to know truth, will the control of nature, aspire to goodness, and experience unutterable beauty -- that is perhaps the fullest way in which the givenness of our capacities comes home to us. But it is not everyone who is prone to contemplation. To most people the two chief ways in which this reality (which I have assumed to be one basis for the doctrine for the doctrine of the Holy Spirit) becomes realised are in the irruption into conscious life of mental powers not at all or not fully utilised in the building up of personality, and in the swallowing up of self or personality in the consciousness of something larger and more embracing. The building up of personality consists in adjusting the wholly or partially disconnected instincts and tendencies with which we are born into a connected whole in which the parts are in organic relation with each other; to this we are forced by experience, by the outer and inner conflicts which naturally occur but must be adjusted if we are to lead a life worth living, and by the light of reason which confronts the actual with the possible and the ideal.

This organised mutual relation of mental capacities and tendencies, each adjusted in some measure to the rest, and each thus becoming not merely one in a sum of properties, but an essential part of an organic unity, is what we call the personal self. But it is by no means necessary that all our capacities should be early or indeed ever thus organised, they remain outside the self, outside the personality. On the other hand, it is always possible for some experience to bring any such disconnected portion of our mental and spiritual outfit into connection with the organised part, and for this connection to be not merely a transitory one, but to remain, and to involve the permanent addition of something new to the personal organism. Whether the connection be permanent or merely temporary, it is often experienced as the irruption of something outside the self into the self; it is also often experienced as a recognition of mental forces within the self which had previously been unrecognised -- a bewildering sense of powers which seem at the same time immanent and transcendent in regard to the self. Both these ways of experience will be realised to be perfectly natural if the principle which I have outlined of the upbuilding of personality is accepted. There must always be a fringe of faculty only in part and dimly connected with the strongly personal central core where organisation has proceeded furthest. There may also be wholly untapped regions, or, more frequently, minor systems which are definitely kept apart from the majority by the psychological forces of repression. The more apart or the more unrealised the faculty has been, the more its recognition will come as a sense of an external gift: the more it has been un subconscious connection with the rest, the more it will appear as immanent. But in most cases at least the experience will combine the two at first sight incompatible notions of invasion of the self from outside, and the discovery of powers that are permanently and inevitably immanent within the self.

The other aspect of this problem to which I referred consists in the process, in a sense opposite to that we have just been considering, in which the personality, instead of adding to itself, has the sensation of being swallowed up in something larger than personality. This, however, will occur naturally whenever the pursuit of some ideal comes to dominate strongly over the immediate interests of the self. Any ideal, by its very nature, is beyond the limitations of the individual, beyond the particulars of place or time: and yet, or course, the ideal in any actual case is grasped and acted upon by an individual personality. Here again, therefore, there comes in the double sense of internal and external, immanence and transcendence in combination. Complete absorption in a mathematical problem, complete disregard of danger in the wish to save a child from a burning house, complete neglect of all the ordinary business of life by the man or woman in love, complete oblivion of the outer world in mystical contemplation, whether religious or æsthetic -- in all such occasions self is forgotten, the ordinary interests of the personality are swallowed up and dominated by a supra-personal interest which yet is organically connected with the personality.

In all cases, in our attempt to translate the terms of Christian theology into terms of our own, we may say that what has been described as the Holy Spirit is that part of human nature which impresses by its givenness, by its transcendence of the personal self regarded as a self-centered mental organisation, and by its compulsive power of driving human nature on towards an ideal.

Finally, there remains the second person, the Logos, the Son. In order not to be misinterpreted, let me remind my readers at the outset that orthodox theology, in regard to the Second Person of the Trinity, presents us with a doctrine far from simple, the result of a long process of development. The original idea of a temporal Messiah, destined in his lifetime to lead the chosen people to success, soon gave place to that of a Messiah shortly to come again in glory and bring the end of the world and the justification of the elect. As time went slowly by and the Second Coming tarried, this idea too faded, and the messianic idea was transferred more and more to the kingdom that is within, to the problem of personal salvation. Here it made intimate contact with various of the existing mystery religions, which, long before the birth of Jesus, were built upon the idea od worshippers obtaining holiness through some form of mystical communion with the god, and upon the possibility of transfering sacredness from god to man; Christianity both borrowed and lent to these, on the whole receiving more than it gave. In the first few centuries of its existence (almost one century, actually; the earliest fragment of an NT manuscript that we have - a fragment of the Gospel of John, a work which begins with this concept of the Logos which Philo had previously described in the forties - a decade before Saul of Tarsus wrote his surviving letters - dates to circa 125 c.e. - ed.) it also made intimate contact with the Judaised Greek philosophy of which Philo is the most celebrated representative. Here it encountered the idea of the Logos and eventually incorporated it, in a way peculiarly its own, with the messianic idea, both of course being linked with the historical figure of Jesus. But even so, the doctrine of the Second Person was by no means established. As everyone who has an elementary acquaintance with Church history is aware, the full divinity of the Son -- Messiah-Logos-Jesus -- was long in dispute. For a large and important body, Christ was definitely less than divine, subordinate to God; and it was only after three centuries of theological dispute and development that the council of Nicea gave Christianity the doctrine of Christ as co-equal with God the Father, which it has retained with little or no modification to the present day.

When I speak of the Second Person of the Trinity, therefore, I am not referring to the historical Jesus, nor to the idea of Jesus which was present to the minds of the twelve apostles or the early church, but to this complex idea, as presented in the Nicene creed and subsequent theology, deriving from Jewish and pagan religious sources, from Greek philosophy, and from patristic theology, as well as from the man Jesus, the facts of his life and death, and the legends associated with him.

Ad this, I make bold to say, embodies the fundamental reality that only through human nature, through personalities with all their limitations, is the infinite of the ideal made finite and actual, is the potential which we have recognized behind the term Holy Spirit realised in the world, is the apparently discontinuity between matter and spirit bridged over. Modern science is able in one not unimportant particular to amplify the original doctrine. Through our knowledge of evolutionary biology, we can see that human nature is not, as a matter of fact, alone in this; but that human nature merely does more efficiently, more completely, consciously, and on a definitely higher plane, what other life had been doing gropingly, unconsciously, and partially for æons before man ever was. We can therefore say that the nature which finds its highest expression in human nature constitutes this bridge; since, however, it is, so far as we know, only human nature which mediates fully, or indeed at all in certain domains, between ideal and actual, between spiritual and material, it is only human nature which need be fully considered, although the evolutionary background lends a richness and solidity of foundation to all the conceptions involved.

This same conception, of human nature being in its highest aspects divine, is found in many places. It animates the myth of Prometheus who stole divine fire from heaven for man. It underlies the frequent deification, usually after death, of heroes and great men. Even in our own days there has been a definite cult of Lenin in Russia, his picture taking precisely the same place in some households which the sacred ikons do in others; and Mussolini was known as 'the Myth' by the more enthusiatic of his followers. It is at the root of Blake's allegorical mysticiam, and Wordsworth's famous Ode. It made possible the existence and power of such ideas as the divine right of kings or the infallibility and supreme power of the popes, as well as the actual deification and worship of the Roman Emperors during their lifetime.

To me it is simply the obverse of the ideas which have already been considered in relation to the Christian doctrine of the Holy Ghost. It is a matter of plain fact that all the faculties of human nature which seem most obviously immanent, yet posses in some degree the property of transcendence, in the same way in which the reverse was also found true. And this, as I have already tried to indicate, follows inevitably from the human faculty of conceptual thought, the concept always, by its mere nature, transcending every particular in general, and automatically providing an ideal goal for every direction and every striving.

Orthodox theology, naturally moving within the bounds of the theistic conception, prefers to interpret these facts by saying that God was incarnated in human nature in the person of Jesus; and, when both liberal and logical, by admitting also that God is partially incarnated in all human beings.

I prefer to say that the spiritual elements which are usually styled divine are part and parcel of human nature. Thus, the reality personified as the Second Person of the Trinity becomes to our re-interpretation the mediating faculty of human persons between the infinity of the ideal and the finite actuality of existence.

Finally, there remains the relation between the three persons of the Trinity, regarded as personifications of three aspects of reality. It has been in one sense the great triumph of Christianity to have built up this elastic and vital doctrine of the Trinity, in spite of its apparent incomprehensibility. This doctrine, for instance, made it clear that the object of worship was not merely external power which must be feared or loved as the case may be, but also internal power, immanent in or at least entering into human nature, and operating through and by means of human nature. In thus combining external and internal, it has been at a considerable advantage over completely monotheistic religions like Islam, which inevitably lay too much stress upon external power, and also over non-theistic religions like pure Buddhism, which inevitably lay too much stress upon the inner life and divorce it as far as possible from outer realities. It also, through having the three persons combined into an indivisible whole, has been at an advantage over all polytheistic religions (Santeria? - ed), in which various aspects of reality are inevitably given too great sharpness and independence of each other.

In our task of re-interpretation, we must ask what is the reality which is symbolised by the union of the three persons in one God. It is in this aspect of theology that I think the facts of science may be seen to have the greatest value. Science has gone a very long way towards providing an essential unity of all phenomena. It has at least provided a strong basis for a reasonable belief in their unity and continuity, which, in the way in which it formulates itself to me personally, I will do my best to summarise here.

I personally believe in the uniformity of nature, in other words, that Nature is seen to be orderly once we take the trouble to find out the way of her orderliness, and that there are not two realms of reality, one natural, the other supernatural and from time to time invading and altering the course of events in the natural.

I believe also in the unity of nature. Scientific discovery has tended without ceasing to reduce the number of substances with which we have to deal. There exist a milliom different species of animals and plants, each chemically different from the rest; each species contains thousands or millions of chemically different individuals; there exist almost an equally unlimited number of separate and different substances of non-living matter. Yet all these, whether alive or not, work with the same energy, are built up out of the same matter, resolvable into the same few score elements, and these very elements in their turn (so the physicists tell us) are merely so many different quantitative arrangements of two kind of units, of positive and negative electricity. If the trend of discovery continue, we shall eventually be enabled to see these positive and negative electricities as two modifications of the same basic unitary substance.

I believe in unity by continuity. Matter does not appear or disappear, nor do living things arise except from previously existing things essentially like themselves. The more complex matter that is alive must at some time have originated from matter that was not alive, but again by gradual continuity, so that only by comparing the last stage with the first could one see how considerable had been the achievement. I believe in the continuity of all matter, living or non-living; and I believe also in the continuity of mind. If, as is the case, mind and matter coexist in the higher animals and man; and if, as is now certain, the higher animals and man are descended from lower animals, and these in their turn from lifeless matter, then there seems no escape from the belief that all reality has both a material and a mental side, however rudimentary and below the level of anything like our consciousness that mental side may be.

In any case, I believe in the unity of mind and matterin the one ultimate world-substance, as two of its aspects. Such a view makes it unnecessary and ideed impossible to ask the question whether matter can have a direct effect on mind or mind on matter. I believe that whenever a thought passes in the mind, it is accompanied by a definite physical change in the brain. That particular physical change could no more happen without the passage of that particular thought than vise versa. When we say that a drug affects the mind, we mean that the drug affects the physical brain-process, and therefore the thought. When we say that the will affects the body, we mean that the body could only be affected in that particular way by a mental process called willing together with its necessary physical accompaniment. Mental and material are thus, to my belief, but two aspects of one reality, two abstractions made by us from the concrete ground of experience; they cannot really be separated, and it is false philosophy to try to think them apart.

This does not, of course, imply that the mental side of one process of reality may not be negligible, while in some other process it overshadows the material; any more than that it is impossible for one aspect of the material side--say the mechanical--to preponderate in one process, another--say the chemical--in another.

All reality then consists, as Whitehead put it, of events. The events are all the events in the history of a single substance. The events looked at from outside are matter; experienced from inside, they are mind.

These assurances of unity, uniformity, and continuity, derived from the discoveries of physico-chemical science and evolutionary biology were not available to the intellectual enquirers of earlier ages, who could thus only guess in the dark. The speculations of the Greek philosophers, for instance, as to the ultimate elements out of which the world is built and as to the evolution of life are in no way comparable to the view of science to-day. The one can rightly be described as a set of philosophic myths, while the other reposes upon tested and organised experience.

Utilising these assurances as part of our background, we can then proceed to envisage the relation between the three aspects of the unity of nature symbolised as the three persons of the Trinity somewhat as follows. The first person represents the power and externality of matter and material law, given and inexplicable. The third person represents the illumination and compulsive power of thought, feeling, will--thefaculties of mind in its highest ranges and at the level when it deals with universals; these are also inexplicable, but must be accepted as given. The second person is the link between the other two; it is life, in concrete actuality, mediating between ideal and practice, incarnating (in perfectly literal phrase) more and more of spirit in matter. This progressive incarnation may be unconscious, as appears to be the case with organic evolution, or conscious, as in the deliberate attempt in man to realise his visions.

And all non-living nature is one matter; all life is constructed of and sprung from this same matter. Further, all thought and emotion, even the highest, spring from natural mind, whose slow development can be traced in life's evolution, so that life in general and man in particular are those parts of the world substance in which the latent mental properties are revealed to their fullest extent. Thus, the three apects of reality, so separate at first glance, are in point of fact genetically related in a single unity.

On the Moral side too this unity underlying apparent diversity can also be traced. It may not solve the problem of evil, which is probably insoluble in the form in which it is usually stated, but it does contribute to the idea of a moral unity when movements and actions which at first sight seem neutral or evil are found on analysis to be inextricably part and parcel of a larger movement towards good. This is quite definitely so in regard to biological progress, and is also a commonplace of the human moralist.

***

Julian Huxley
from
Religion Without Revelation
1957

deva ju all over again . . . ?

How did the colonies win the war?

Does this sound familiar? The world's most powerful nation is caught up in a war against a small guerrilla army. This superpower must resupply its troops from thousands of miles away, a costly endeavor, and support for the war at home is tentative, dividing the nation's people and leadership. The rebels also receive financial and military support from the superpower's chief military and political antagonist. As the war drags on and casualties mount, generals are disgraced, and the rebels gain momentum, even in defeat.

The United States in Vietnam? It could be. But it is also the story of the British loss of the American colonies. There are numerous parallels between the two conflicts. For the United States, substitute England under George III, the dominant world power of the day, but caught up in a draining colonial conflict that stretches its resources. For the Vietcong, substitute the colonial army under Washington, a ragtag collection if ever there was one, who used such unheard-of tactics as disguising themselves in British uniforms and attacking from the rear. British generals, accustomed to precisely drawn battle formations, were completely taken aback, just as American commanders schooled in the tank warfare of World War II were unprepared for the jungles of Vietnam. For foreign support, substitute England's chief European adversary, France (as well as Spain and the Netherlands) for the Soviet (and the Red Chinese) supplying the Vietcong.

There can be no question that without France's armies, money, and supplies (as much as 90% of the American gunpowder used in the war came from France), the American forces could not have won. Why did the French do it? Certainly King Louis XVI and his charming wife, Marie Antoinette, had no particular sympathy for anti-monarchist, democratic rabble. Their motive, actually the strategy of a pro-American minister, the Comte de Vergennes, was simple: to bloody England's nose in any way they could and perhaps even win back some of the territory lost after the Seven Years War. Had the monarchy and aristocracy of France known that their own subjects would be greatly inspired by the American Revolution a few years later, the French royalty might have thought the matter over a bit longer. An American loss might have saved their necks. C'est la vie!

Equally important to America's victory was the consistent bungling of the British high command, which treated the war as an intolerable inconvenience. At any number of points in the fighting, particularly in the early years, before France was fully committed, aggressive generalship from various British commanders might have turned the tide.

If Washington's army had been destroyed after Long Island or Germantown . . .

If Congress had been captured and shipped off to England for trial -- and most likely the noose . . .

And what if England had "won"? Could it possibly have maintained sovereignty over a large, prosperous, diverse, and expanding America, a vast territory far richer in resources than England? It is unlikely. Independence was a historical inevitability, in one form or another. It was simply an idea whose (sic) time had come, and America was not alone, as the revolutions that followed in Europe would prove.

The British had to weigh the costs of maintaining their dominance against its returns. They would have seen, as America did in Vietnam, and as the Soviets did more recently in Afghanistan, that the cost of such wars of colonial domination are usually more than a nation is willing or able to bear.

It's a pity that America's military and political leaders never learned a lesson from our own past, a fact that speaks volumes about the arrogance of power.

The preceding paragraphs comprise the closing section of the chapter on the American Revolution in Kenneth C. Davis' Don't Know Much About History: Everything you need to learn about American history but never learned.

The need for a Vatican III

The following is a speech given by James Caroll, the author of Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, upon receiving the Melcher Book Award from the Unitarian Universalist Association for that best-selling work at a Cambridge Forum on Thursday, April 18, 2002. The book is a powerful and disturbing analysis of the history of Christian, especially Roman Catholic, anti-semitism. In it he argues that Christians took anti-Semitic forks in the road when they might well have written a less tragic history by following another road. Carroll depicts Christian attitudes towards Jews as grudging acceptance at best, a general hostility, and a long series of atrocities culminating in the shoah, Hitler's 'final solution.'

No peace.

No peace among nations without peace among religions. No peace among religions without serious religious dialogue. No serious religious dialogue without basic investigations and corrections of foundational assumptions.

A paraphrase of the great mantra of our contemporary public life - who'd have thought it - from Hans Kung, the great contemporary Swiss Roman Catholic theologian. Constantine's Sword is a history of Christian anti-semitism, culminating, of course, in the great revelation of its inexorable dynamic that was the holocaust, and at the conclusion of Constantine's Sword, in a way the most controversial portion of this book, I draw conclusions from the history that require fundamental correction of basic assumptions of my own Roman Catholic tradition, and in this evening's observance, I presume to read one argument for correction that was a conclusion of my study of Christian anti-semitism culminating in the holocaust and the reason I am reading it is because of its evident relevance to the broad present crisis in Roman Catholicism having nothing to do with anti-semitism that has gripped the public imagination so powerfully in recent months. Aware of the poignant, shameful and tragic fact that what the holocaust failed to do, [that is, to ] evoke a broad and urgent sense of the need for reform in the Catholic people, the priestly sex abuse scandal has done quite powerfully in a very short time. The broad urgent sense of the need for reform in the Catholic people and beyond the Catholic people of this institution. At the end of Constantine's Sword, I propose that many Catholics of my kind long for a third Vatican council, a fundamental institutional act of correction - self criticism - and I presume to read for you this evening, because of its present relevance, what I call Agenda Item 4 of my proposal for Vatican III, "The holiness of democracy", an agenda item prompted in this book by the history of Christian anti-semitism, but clearly called for by the urgent present crisis.

So, agenda item #4 for this dreamed third Vatican council:

The holiness of Democracy

My dear fellow citizens;
For forty years on this day you have heard from my predecessors the same thing in a number of variations, how our country is flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produce, how happy we all are, how we trust our government and what bright prospects lie ahead of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I too should lie to you.

So began the address with which the playright and dissident Václav Havel assumed the presidency of Czechoslovakia. The speech was delivered on that first day of 1990. The momentuous events of the previous months in the nations of eastern Europe symbolized by the breaching of the Berlin wall in November of 1989 had amounted to an unpredicted outbreak of democratic fervor, as Havel put it, humanistic and democratic traditions about which there had been so much idle talk did after all slumber in the unconscious of our nations and our national minorities. In that short period the social structures of totalitarianism were transformed, not only in the satellite states of the Soviet Union, but in Russia itself, not only in Europe but in South Africa, and the dramatic changes came about almost completely without blood in the streets because the masses of ordinary people in many nations discovered within themselves an irresistible civic identification, an urge to participate in the public life of society, a readiness to claim those nations as their own. Citizens of western Europe and of America, where democratic traditions were already established, could only behold the political transformation of the velvet revolution with an unbridled sense of wonder. What we saw played out again and again in those years, acts of staggering courage, Havel declining a strings-attached release from prison, Lech Wałęsa openly convening meetings of the outlawed Solidarity, Boris Yeltzin standing on that Russian tank saying, in effect, you will have to kill me to do this. What we saw played out was the drama of democracy itself, entire peoples taking responsibility for themselves and for their societies. We in the west had never seen before so clearly how the political system under which we lived and which we took for granted counted as a moral absolute. Democracy was a value of the highest order, and the impulse to embrace it, at great cost, lived unquenchably in the human heart. Beginning in 1989, the world beheld something sacred and the business of a third Vatican council must be to honor that sacredness. Vatican III must end the church tradition of opposition to, or at best ambivalence about, democracy. Vatican III, that is, must celebrate the dignity of every human life. Vatican II must uphold the importance of treating each one equally. Vatican III must affirm the holiness of democracy.

To their everlasting credit the Christian churches of Europe supported and in some instances sponsored the 1980s' flowering of democratic spirit. The churches were especially helpful in keeping violence at bay. Lutheran pastors in east Germany played crucial roles in challenging the German democratic republic and the Catholic church especially in Poland was a source of spiritual and at times political inspiration and sustenance to the dissidents and pope John Paul II himself was an avatar of anti-communist resistance. His biographers uniformly credit him sometimes with Ronald Reagan as the man who did the most to bring down the totalitarian system that he had opposed since his youth in Krakow. Opposition to Stalinism is not the same thing, however, as support for the principle of constitutional democracy, and the Roman Catholic church has yet to shed its suspicion of, and even its hostility to governments that invest the people with ultimacy, or rather, governments in which the people do the investing. This has been especially true in the Vatican suppression of liberation theology, which is a religious affirmation of the politican ideal of "rights for all". Thus, in opposing Soviet totalitarianism, the Catholic church nevertheless maintained its internal commitment to methods that undergird totalitarianism, which was why, even as the system crumbled, the church was doing its part to support Latin American oligarchies. The same John Paul II who sponsored the most politically engaged Catholic church of modern times in Poland, even to the extent of funneling large sums of money from the Vatican to Solidarity condemned, silenced, and disciplined priests and nuns in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Haiti, and Mexico because of their so-called political activity. The pope who wants to make Pius XII a saint is reticent about Oscar Romero, the bishop of El Salvador who was slain at the altar. The pope who rallied against the ruthless dictators of communism was the first and only head of state in the world to recognize the legitimacy of the military junta that overthrew the democratically elected president of Haiti and former priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide. I say "so-called" political activity because the priests and nuns of the liberation insisted that their actions had more to do with their reading of the gospel than any political tract. Observers of the difference between the Catholic hierarchy in, say, Poland where the church lent support to Solidarity, and in Nicaragua, where the church was a [pititive] channel of money from the CIA during Reagan's Contra war, were left with the feeling that it was not totalitarianism as such that the church opposed, only totalitarianism that was unfriendly to the church. It was one thing for pope Innocent III to declare the Magna Carta null and void in 1215 bacause it violated the divinely instituted order of hierarchy, and it was quite another for the Vatican to equate pluralism with marxism as it did in 1999. It is impossible to reconcile a rejection of pluralism with an authentic commitment to democracy, and a Catholic devotion to the eradication of pluralism remains dangerous. Internal church policies have relevance here, because the use of anathemas, bannings, and excommunications to enforce a rigidly controlled intellectual discipline inside the church reveals an institution that has yet to come to terms with basic ideas like freedom of conscience and the dialectical nature of rational inquiry. As we saw in our consideration of Spinoza, the very idea of constitutional democracy begins with the insight that government exists to protect the interior freedom of citizens to be different from one another an to cling if they choose to opposite notions of truth. The political implementation of this insight requires a separation of church and state, since the state's purpose is to shield the citizen's conscience from impositions by any religious entity, and we saw that Spinoza's arrival at this position came as a direct consequence of his family's experience with the inquisition. The Roman Catholic church has repudiated the inquisition but it continues to hold ideas that produced it. The Vatican's panic-driven sequence of condemnations in the 19th century, condemnations of socialism, communism, rationalism, pantheism, subjectivism, modernism, even of Americanism, added up to a resolute denunciation of everything that we mean by democracy. From the standpoint of the hill overlooking the Tiber all of this was simply an effort to defend the key idea that the worlds of science, culture, politics, and learning, all worlds that could easily be associated with jews, were apparently conspiring to attack. Spinoza himself had seemed to attack it, the idea that there is one objective and absolute truth, and that its custodian is the Catholic church. Again, we think of the papal apology of March 2000. That was the beginning of a process, not the completion of one, because while John Paul II confessed the sin of "the use of violence that some have resorted to in the service of the truth" (thinking of the inquisition), the apology did not confront the implications of the still-maintained idea of the truth. Universalist claims for Jesus as the embodiment of the one objective and absolute truth launched from the battlement-like pulpits of the basilicas have landed with explosions in the streets for centuries. Nothing demonstrates the link joining philosophical assumptions, esoteric theology, and political conflict better than the course of the church's own christology, its thoelogy of Jesus. The violence of heresy hunts in the 4th and 5th centuries is tied to that story, the theology of Jesus, and so at its other end is the violence of Europe's imperial colonizers who even into the 20th century felt free to decimate native populations, poor devils, because they were heathens. Hanging from the line joining those two posts, in addition to the inquisition, are the religious wars waged in the name of Jesus not only against heathens and against jews but against other christians who believed, but wrongly. Underlying all of this is a question that the Roman Catholic church has yet to confront and that the third Vatican Council must confront, a question the answer to which shapes attitudes toward democracy, a question the answer to which has profound relevance to the churche's past and future relations with jews. It is a question to which jews themselves must respond in regarding new corrections of their own attitudes of monotheism, election, and chosenness equivalent to the Catholic correction required by the church's self-understanding in Carl Reiner's phrase "as itself as the absolute religion". It is the question that was put most famously by Pontius Pilate in the Pilate-exonerating Gospel of St. John. This was an instance before Pilate told the Jews that Jesus was innocent, preparing the ground for the Jewish condemnation and the permanent Jewish bloodguilt: "Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice," Jesus told Pilate, to which the Roman replied, "What is truth?" Latin philosophy had long answered that question by appealing to an objective and external order. We have seen that various traditions claiming Plato and Aristotle as patrons gave shape to the Christian theologies. The dualism of Christian platonism posited a divide between nature and grace, with grace the realm of truth, approachable only through faith. The more rationalistic tradition of Thomas Aquinas affirmed the compatability of nature and grace. The knowability of God through reason. But in asserting the absolute character of truth, Thomas Aquinas took note of the problem that occurs when a contingent nature-bound creature attempts to perceive the truth. Truth, he said, is perceived in the mode of the perceiver; human perception can take in absolute truth, but not absolutely. Thus Thomas makes a modest claim for human knowing, with room for ambiguity, which means with room for diverse claims made in the name of truth. Alas, this aspect of Thomas Aquinas' subtlety would be lost to the Catholic church in the rigidities to the response to the reformation.

Religious pluralism, which is the ground of democracy, begins with the acknowledgement of the universal impossibility of direct knowledge of God. The immediate consequence of this universal ignorance is that we should regard each other respectfully and lovingly, but our clear statement of christian openness to the other is its own revelation. In the Epistle of John God is defined as, most simply, love, but it is also true that that epistle is attributed to the author of the fourth gospel. The fourth gospel was written apparently about the turn of the first century. It was addressed to Christian communities that were riven with the dusputes that had come after the destruction of the temple, and with the first serious conflict between what was becoming known as "the Church" and the synagogue. This plea, that we think of God as love, whatever else it referred to, concerned the tragedy that was then beginning to unfold and it concerned the tragedy that was embodied above all in the Gospel of John, for it was that gospel which more than any other demonized the Jews and the tragedy is underscored further by the fact that in that same letter of John, as if understanding what was already at stake in this conflict berween the followers of Jesus who identified themselves as Jews and those who had begun to identify themselves as something else. John begged hi readers to not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and who murdered his brother. Why did he murder his brother? Because of his own deeds which were evil and his brothers' were righteous. This tragedy, in other words, of murder must forever warn us of cheap talk of love. It is all too soon and all too easily that the followers of Jesus were able and ready to identify themselves as the sons of Able and to identify Cain with Jews. That sin, embedded in the gospel itself, is proof of why the Christian church in general and the Catholic church in particular needs democracy, for the assumption of democratic politics, in addition to the assumption that all citizens can contribute to the truth-seeking conversation, is that all citizens also are constitutionally incapable of truth-seeking and steadfast loving. God may be love, but the polis is not, and neither is the church.

So we come full circle and we recall that the language of love is often used by those who are in power while the language of justice is used by those who suffer the abuse of power. The language of love is not enough because the language of love does not protect us from our failures to love. Only the language of justice does that. Democracy assumes that a clear-headed assesment of the flaws of members extends to everyone, but even leaders of democracies, especially in the United States perhaps, salt their speeches with Christian chauvinism, with an excluding religiosity, assuming that a democratic polity could be called univical (no voices, that is) for religious minorities or those of no religion. And that, finally, is why a democracy assumes that everyone must be protected from the unchecked, uncritized, unregulated power of everybody else, including the well-meaning leader. The universal experience of imperfection, cynitude and self-centeredness is the pessimistic ground of democratic hope. We saw that in Spinoza's story, which was after all the story of a man constructing the democratic ideal out of the cruelties that were inflicted in the name of God. The church's own experience, in particular its gravest sin in relation to love, proves how desperately in need of democratic reform the Catholic church is. Vatican III must therefore turn the church away from monarchy and toward democracy, as the Roman Catholic people have, in fact, already done. Vatican III must restore the broken authority of the church by locating authority in the place where it belongs, which is with the people, through whom in this faith the holy spirit breathes. Vatican III must affirm that democracy itself is the lates gift from God, who operates in history, and the only way for the church to affirm democracy is by embracing it. The old disputes between popes and kings over who appoints bishops was resolved in favor of the pope, but bishops now should be chosen by the people they serve. The clerical caste, a vestige of the medieval court, should be eliminated. Vatican III must establish equal rights for women in every sphere, a system of checks and balances, due process, legislative norms designed to assure equality for all instead of superiority for some, freedom of expression, and above all, freedom of conscience. All of this must be established within the church, not because the time of liberalism has arrived, but because this long and sorry story of church hatred of Jews only lays bare the structures of oppression that must be dismantled once and for all, and not only the sad and sorry story of the hatred of Jews.

Thank you.

two short poems

Goodtime Jesus

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dream-
ing so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it?
A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled
back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beau-
tiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little
ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

------------------------

A Knock On The Door

They ask me if I've ever thought about the end of
the world, and I say, "Come in, come in, let me
give you some lunch, for God's sake." After a few
bites it's the afterlife they want to talk about.
"Ouch," I say, "did you see that grape leaf
skeletonizer?" Then they're talking about
redemption and the chosen few sitting right by
His side. "Doing what?" I ask. "Just sitting?" I
am surrounded by burned up zombies. "Let's
have some lemon chiffon pie I bought yesterday
at the 3 Dog Bakery." But they want to talk about
my soul. I'm getting drowsy and see butterflies
everywhere. "Would you gentlemen like to take a
nap, I know I would." They stand and back away
from me, out the door, walking toward my
neighbors, a black cloud over their heads and
they see nothing without end.

James Tate

For Warmth

I hold my face in my two hands.
No, I am not crying.
I hold my face in my two hands
to keep the loneliness warm:
two hands protecting,
two hands nourishing,
two hands preventing
my soul from leaving me
in anger!

Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh

Nice People

I intent to write an article in praise of nice people. But the reader may wish to know first who are the people that I consider nice. To get at their essential quality may perhaps be a little difficult, so I will begin by enumerating certain types who come under the heading. Maiden aunts are invariably nice, especially, of course, when they are rich; ministers of religion are nice, except those rare cases in which they elope to South Africa with a member of the choir after pretending to commit suicide. Young girls, I regret to say, are seldom nice nowadays. When I was young most of them were quite nice — that is to say, they shared their mother's opinions, not only about topics, but what is more remarkable, about individuals, even young men; they said, "Yes, Mamma," and, "No, Mamma" at the appropriate moments; they loved their father because it was their duty to do so, and their mother because she preserved them from the slightest hint of wrongdoing. When they became engaged to be married they fell in love with decorous moderation; being married, they recognized it as a duty to love their husbands but gave other women to understand that it was a duty they performed with great difficulty. They behaved nicely to their parents-in-law, while making it clear that any less dutiful person would not have done so; they did not speak spitefully about other women but pursed up their lips in such a way as to let it be seen what they might have said but for their angelic charitableness. This type is what is called a pure and noble woman. The type, alas, now hardly exists except among the old.

Mercifully the survivors still have great power: they control education, where they endeavor, not without success, to preserve a Victorian standard of hypocrisy; they control legislation on what are called "moral issues", and have thereby created and endowed the great profession of bootlegging; they ensure that the young men who write for the newspapers shall express the opinions of the nice old ladies rather than their own, thereby enlarging the scope of the young men's style and the variety of their psychological imagination. They keep alive innumerable pleasures which otherwise would be quickly ended by a surfeit; for example, the pleasure of hearing bad language on a stage, or of seeing there a slightly larger amount of bare skin than is customary. Above all, they keep alive the pleasures of the hunt. In a homogeneous country population, such as that of the English shire, people are condemned to hunt foxes; this is expensive and sometimes even dangerous. Moreover, the fox cannot explain very clearly how much he dislikes being hunted. In all these respects the hunting of human beings is better sport, but, if it were not for the nice people, it would be difficult to hunt human beings with a good conscience. Those whom the nice people condemn are fair game; at their call of "Tallyho" the hunt assembles, and the victim is pursued to prison or death. It is especially good sport when the victim is a woman, since it gratifies the jealousy of the women and the sadism of the men. I know at this moment a foreign woman living in England, in happy though extra-legal union with a man whom she loves and who loves her; unfortunately, her political opinions are not so conservative as could be wished, though they are merely opinions, about which she does nothing. The nice people, however, have used this excuse to set Scotland Yard upon their scent, and she is to be sent back to her native country to starve. In England, as in America, the foreigner is a morally degrading influence, and we all owe a debt of gratitude to the police for the care which they take to see that only exceptionally virtuous foreigners are allowed to reside among us.

It must not be supposed that all nice people are women, though, of course, it is much commoner for a woman to be nice than for a man. Apart from ministers of religion, there are many other nice men. For example: those who have made large fortunes and have now retired from business to spend their fortunes on charity; magistrates are also almost invariably nice men. It cannot, however, be said that all supporters of law and order are nice men. When I was young, I remember hearing it advanced by a nice woman, as an argument against capital punishment, that the hangman could hardly be a nice man. I have never known any hangmen personally, so I have not been able to test this argument empirically. I knew a lady, however, who met the hangman in the train without knowing who he was, and when she offered him a rug, the weather being cold, he said, "Ah, Madam, you wouldn't do that if you knew who I am," which seems to show that he was a nice man after all. This, however, must have been exceptional. The hangman in Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, who is emphatically not a nice man, is probably more typical.

I do not think, however, that we ought to agree with the nice woman I quoted a moment ago in condemning capital punishment merely because the hangman is not likely to be nice. To be a nice person, it is necessary to be protected from crude contact with reality, and those who do the protecting cannot be expected to share the niceness that they preserve. Imagine, for example, a wreck on a liner which is transporting a number of colored laborers; the first-class female passengers, all of whom are presumably nice women, will be saved first; but in order that this may happen, there must be men who keep the colored laborers from swamping the boat, and it is unlikely that these men will be able to succeed by nice methods. The women who have been saved, as soon as they are safe, will begin to feel sorry for the poor laborers who were drowned, but their tender hearts are rendered possible only by the rough men who defended them.

In general, nice people leave the policing of the world to hirelings because they feel the work to be not such as a person who is nice would wish to undertake. There is, however, one department which they do not delegate -- namely, the department of backbiting and scandal. People can be placed in a hierarchy of niceness by the power of their tongues. If A talks against B, and B talks against A, it will generally be agreed by the society in which they live that one of them is exercising a public duty, while the other is actuated by spite; the one who is exercising the public duty is the one who is the nicer of the two. Thus, for example, a headmistress in a school is nicer than an assistant mistress, but a lady who is on the school board is nicer than either. Well-directed tittle-tattle may easily cause its victim to lose his or her livelihood, and even when this extreme result is not achieved, it may turn a person into a pariah. It is, therefore, a great force for good, and we ought to be thankful that it is the nice people who wield it.

The chief characteristics of nice people is the laudable practice of improvement upon reality. God made the world, but nice people feel that they could have done the job better. There are many things in the Divine handiwork which, while it would be blasphemous to wish them otherwise, it would be by no means nice to mention. Divines have held that if our first parents had not eaten the apple the human race would have been replenished by some innocent mode of vegetation, as Gibbon calls it. The Divine plan in this respect is certainly mysterious. It is all very well to regard it, as the aforesaid divines do, in the light of a punishment of sin, but the trouble with this view is that while it may be a punishment for the nice people, the others, alas, find it quite pleasant. It would seem, therefore, as if the punishment had been made to fall in the wrong quarter. One of the main purposes of the nice people is to redress no doubt this unintended injustice. They endeavor to secure that the biologically ordained mode of vegetation shall be practiced either furtively or frigidly, and that those who practice it furtively shall, when found out, be in the power of the nice people, owing to the damage that may be done to them by scandal. They endeavor to ensure also that as little as possible shall be known on the subject in a decent way; they try to get the censor to forbid books and plays which represent the matter otherwise than as an occasion for sniggering nastiness; in this they are successful wherever and in so far as they control the laws and the police. It is not known why the Lord made the human body as he did, since one must suppose that omnipotence could have made it such as would not have shocked the nice people. Perhaps, however, there was a good reason. There has been in England, ever since the rise of the textile industry in Lancashire, a close alliance between missionaries and the cotton trade, for missionaries teach the savages to cover up the human body and thereby increase the demand for cotton goods. If there had been nothing shameful about the human body, the textile trade would have lost this source of profit. This instance shows that we need never be afraid lest the spread of virtue should diminish our profits.

Whoever invented the phrase "the naked truth" had perceived an important connection. Nakedness is shocking to all right-minded people, and so is truth. It matters little with what department you are connected; you will soon find that truth is such as nice people will not admit into their consciousness. Whenever it has been my ill fortune to be present in court during the hearing of a case about which I had some first-hand knowledge, I have been struck by the fact that no crude truth is allowed to penetrate within those august portals. The truth that gets into a law court is not the naked truth but the truth in court dress, with all its less decent portions concealed. I do not say that this applies to the trial of straightforward crimes, such as murder or theft, but it applies to all those into which an element of prejudice enters, such as political trials, or trials for obscenity. I believe that in this respect England is worse than America, for England has brought to perfection the almost invisible and half-conscious control of everything unpleasant by means of feelings of decency. If you wish to mention in a law court any unassimilable fact, you will find that it is contrary to the laws of evidence to do so, and that not only the judge and the opposing counsel but also cousel on your side will prevent the said fact from coming out.

The same sort of reality pervades politics, owing to the feelings of nice people. If you attempt to persuade any nice person that a politician of his own party is an ordinary mortal no better than the mass of mankind, he will indignantly repudiate the suggestion. Consequently it is necessary to politicians to appear immaculate. At most times the politicians of all parties tacitly combine to prevent anything damaging to the profession from getting known, for difference of party usually does less to divide politicians than identity of profession does to unite them. In this way the nice people are able to preserve their fancy picture of the nation's great men, and school children can be made to believe that eminence is to be achieved only by the highest virtue. There are, it is true, exceptional times when politics become really bitter, and at all times there are politicians who are not considered sufficiently respectable to belong to the informal trade-union. Parnell, for example, was first unsuccessfully accused of co-operation with murderers and then successfully convicted of an offense against morality, such as, of course, none of his accusers would have dreamed of committing. In our own day Communists in Europe and extreme Radicals and labor agitators in America are outside the pale; no large body of nice people admires them, and if the offend against the conventional code they can expect no mercy. In this way the immovable moral convictions of nice people become linked with the defense of property, and thus once more prove their inestimable worth.

Nice people very properly suspect pleasure wherever they see it. They know that he who increaseth wisdom increaseth sorrow, and they infer that he that increaseth sorrow increaseth wisdom. They therefore feel that in spreading sorrow they are spreading wisdom; since wisdom is more precious than rubies, they are justified in feeling that they are conferring a great benefit in so doing. They will, for example, make a public playground for children in order to persuade themselves that they are philanthropic and then impose so many regulations upon its use that no child can be as happy there as in the streets. They will do their best to prevent playgrounds, theaters, etc., from being open on a Sunday, because that is the day when they might be enjoyed. Young women in their employment are prevented so far as possible from talking with young men. The nicest people I have known carried this attitude into the bosom of the family and made their children play only instructive games. This degree of niceness, however, I regret to say, is becoming less common than it was. In the old days children were taught that

One stroke of His almighty rod
Can send young sinners quick to Hell,

and it was understood that this was likely to happen if children became boisterous or indulged in any activity such as was not calculated to fit them for the ministry. The education based upon this point of view is set forth in The Fairchild Family, an invaluable work on how to produce nice people. I know few parents, however, in the present day who live up to this standard. It has become sadly common to wish children to enjoy themselves, and it is to be feared that those who have been educated on these lax principles will not display adequate horror of pleasure when they grow up.

The day of nice people, I fear, is nearly over; two things are killing it. The first is the belief that there is no harm in being happy, provided no one else is the worse for it; the second is the dislike of humbug, a dislike which is quite as much æsthetic as moral. Both these results were encouraged by the War, when the nice people in all countries were securely in control, and in the name of the highest morality induced the young people to slaughter one another. When it was all over the survivors began to wonder whether lies and misery inspired by hatred constituted the highest virtue. I am afraid it may be some time before they can again be induced to accept this fundamental doctrine of every lofty ethic.

The essence of nice people is that they hate life as manifested in tendencies to co-operation, and in the boisterousness of children, and above all in sex, with the thought of which they are obsessed. In a word, nice people are those who have nasty minds.

Bertrand Russell
1931

Rhetoric

I assume that we are talking about saving a few good men from suicide and a few others from becoming cops or firemen. I have in mind those who commit suicide out of disgust, because they find that others own too large a share of them.

To them one should say: at least let the minority within you have the right to speak. Be poets. They will answer: but it is especially there, it is always there that I feel others within me, when I try to express myself, I am unable to do so. Words are ready-made and express themselves: they do not express me. Once again, I find myself suffocating.

At that moment, teaching the art of resisting words becomes useful, the art of saying only what one wants to say, the art of doing them violence, of forcing them to submit. In short, it is a matter of public safety to found a rhetoric, or rather, to teach everyone to found his own rhetoric.

This saves those few, those rare individuals who must be saved: those who are aware, and who are troubled and disgusted by the others within them.

Those individuals who make the mind progress, and who are, strictly speaking, capable of changing the reality of things.

Francis Ponge
trans. Serge Gavronsky

From theRandom House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry

two by fire . . .

I am dying
because you have not
died for me
and the world
still loves you

I write this because I know
that your kisses are born blind
on the songs that touch you

I don't want a purpose
in your life
I want to be the last among
your thoughts
The way you listen to New York City
when you fall asleep

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

There are no traitors among women
even the mother does not tell the son
they do not wish us well

She cannot be tamed by conversation
Absence is the only weapon
against the arsenal of her body

She reserves a special contempt
for the slaves of beauty
She lets them watch her die

Forgive me, partisans,
I only sing this for the ones
who do not care who wins the war

Leonard Cohen
The Energy of Slaves

Goethe's recipe . . .

Nine requisites for contented living:
Health enough to make work a pleasure.
Wealth enough to support your needs.
Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them.
Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them.
Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished.
Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor.
Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others.
Faith enough to make real the things of God.
Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

deja vu?

There are, indeed, many among us who find justification of the present war in the plea that its motive is to give independence to the people of Cuba, long burdened by the oppresive and corrupt rule of Spain, and especially to relieve the multitudes deprived of their homes and of means of subsistence by the cruel policy of the general who exercised for a time a practical dictatorship over the island. The plea so far as it is genuine deserves the respect due to every humane sentiment. But independence secured for Cuba by forcible overthrow of the Spanish rule means either practical anarchy or the substitution of the United States for that of Spain. Either alternative might well give us pause. And as for the relief of suffering, surely, it is a strange procedure to begin by inflicting worse suffering still. It is fighting the devil with his own arms. That the ends justify the means is a dangerous doctrine, and no wise man will adivse doing evil for the sake of an uncertain good. But the plea that the better government of Cuba and the relief of the reconcentrados could only be secured by war is the plea of either ignorance or of hypocrisy.

But the war is declared; and on all hands we hear the cry that he is no patriot who fails to shout for it, and to urge the youth of the country to enlist, and to rejoice that they are called to the service of their native land. The sober cousels that were appropriate before the war was entered upon must give way to blind enthusiasm, and the voice of condemnation must be silenced by the thunders of the guns and the hurrahs of the crowd. Stop! A declaration of war does not change the moral law. (blogger's emphasis) 'The Ten Commandments will not budge' at a joint resolve of Congress. Was James Russell Lowe aught but a good patriot when during the Mexican war he sent the stinging shafts of his matchless satire at the heart of the monstruous iniquity, or when, years afterward, he declared that he thought at the time and that he still thought that the Mexican war was a national crime? Did John Bright ever render greater service to his country than when, during the Crimean war, he denounced the administration which had plunged England into it, and employed magnificent power of earnest and incisive speech in the endeavor to repress the evil spirit which it evoked in the heart of the nation? No! The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent and spite of obloquy, misrepresentation and abuse, to insist on being heard, and with sober counsel to maintain the everlasting validity of the principles of the moral law.

So confused are men by false teaching in regard to national honor and the duty of the citizen that it is easy to fall into the error of holding a declaration of war, however brought about, as a sacred decision of the national will, and to fancy that call to arms from the Administration has the force of a call from the lips of the country, from the America to whom all her sons are ready to pay the full measure of devotion. This is indeed a natural and for many a youth, not a discreditable error. But if the nominal, though authorized, representatives of the country have brought us into a war that might and should have been avoided, and which consequently is an unrighteous war, then, so long as the safety of the state is not at risk (blogger's note . . . . spurious claims to self defense against imagined stockpiled munitions, anyone?), the duty of a good citizen is plain. He is to help to provide the Administration responsible for the conduct of the war with every means that may serve to bring it to the speediest end. He is to do this alike so that the immediate evils of the war be as brief and as few as possible, and also that its miserable train of after evils may be diminished and the vicious passions excited by it be the sooner allayed. Men, money, must be abundantly supplied. But, must he himself enlist or quicken the ardent youth to enter service in such a cause? The need is not yet. The country is in no peril. There is always in a vast population like ours an immense, a sufficient supply of material of a fighting order, often of a heroic courage, ready and eager for the excitement of battle, filled with the old notion that patriotism is best expressed in readiness to fight for our country, be she right or wrong. Better the paying of bounties to such men to fill the ranks than they should be filled by those whose higher duty is to fit themselves to the service of their country in the patriotic labors of peace. We mourn the deaths of our noble youth fallen in the cause of their country when she stands for the right; but we may mourn with a deeper sadness for those who have fallen in a cause which their generous hearts mistook for one worthy of the last sacrifice.

Charles Elliot Norton
1898

In the above essay, substitute the word "Iraq" for the word "Cuba" and the name "Saddam Hussein" for the word "Spain" and it becomes eeriely clear how little we've learned the lessons of history. Over a hundred years have passed since this was written and we are still behaving like amoral scoundrels . . . of course with the added irony that the administration involved has taken the position of insisting that it is they who have the moral higer ground. (don't you just love sophistry?). Shame on them. Not even Jesus was sacred to them in their desire to go after Iraq; they waved his name like a filthy flag to rally people to their wicked cause (and during the last campaign to secure four more years of their villainous greed), used it like a bugle call. Shame on them for pushing this war on us and shame on us for taking it like docile idiots. For transforming a great republic into a rogue state with imperial delusions.

It seems to me a really bad idea to go into the empire business without having one's heart into it. That seems to me the main difference with this empire; it's one that we don't even want to admit having or even to want to have. It's like a bizarre grotesque.