Christianity, Tolerance and Pluralism: A Theological Engagement with Isaiah Berlin's Social Theory (Routledge Studies in Religion)

Christianity, Tolerance and Pluralism

This book provides a sustained, critical and theological engagement with arguably the most crucial aspect of contemporary society – its diversity. A variety of questions are addressed: • • • • •

Is diversity a curse or a blessing? Can Christians, and people of other faiths, be true to their convictions and also practice pluralism? Is tolerance a virtue? Are there situations in which conflicts over values and beliefs can strengthen rather than weaken communities? Is conflict inevitably a threat to the common good?

The author finds in the social theory of Isaiah Berlin a number of fruitful ways to reframe the debate over these questions, and to contribute to a more positive conversation regarding our fundamental differences. The book focuses particularly on Berlin’s critiques of monism and idealistic utopianism, arguing that pluralism does not represent a failure in the nature of human society, but a superabundance of possibilities in a created world grounded in the character of God. Bringing Berlin’s thought into conversation with other social theorists, philosophers and Christian theologians, the book provides leaders and members of faith communities with a viable model to move beyond tolerance as mere forbearance, to a grace which consists of respect and radical acceptance of others. Michael Jinkins is Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Pastoral Theology, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books, including The Church Faces Death (1999), Invitation to Theology (2001) and The Character of Leadership (1998). Research for Christianity, Tolerance and Pluralism was funded by the Lilly Endowment through the Association of Theological Schools Faculty Grants program.

Routledge Studies in Religion

1 Judaism and Collective Life Self and community in the religious kibbutz Aryei Fishman 2 Foucault, Christianity and Interfaith Dialogue Henrique Pinto 3 Religious Conversion and Identity The semiotic analysis of texts Massimo Leone 4 Language, Desire, and Theology A genealogy of the will to speak Noëlle Vahanian 5 Metaphysics and Transcendence Arthur Gibson 6 Sufism and Deconstruction A comparative study of Derrida and Ibn ’Arabi Ian Almond 7 Christianity, Tolerance and Pluralism A theological engagement with Isaiah Berlin’s social theory Michael Jinkins 8 Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy Arthur Bradley

Christianity, Tolerance and Pluralism A theological engagement with Isaiah Berlin’s social theory

Michael Jinkins

First published 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2004 Michael Jinkins All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Jinkins, Michael, 1953– Christianity, tolerance, and pluralism: a theological engagement with Isaiah Berlin’s social theory/Michael Jinkins. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Berlin, Isaiah, Sir. 2. Christianity and other religions. 3. Religious pluralism–Christianity. 4. Religious tolerance–Christianity. I. Title BR127.J55 2004 261.2–dc22 2003025772 ISBN 0-203-39121-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67214-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–32908–6 (Print Edition)

For the faculty of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary Whenever you would delight your heart, think of the gifts and talents of your colleagues – the energy of one, the modesty of another, the generosity of a third, and so forth. Nothing lifts one’s spirits quite so wonderfully as to see the virtues reflected in the lives of one’s friends, and to see them together marshaled as a strong company. Keep these images always before you. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VI, 48

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction 1

2

3

4

x xiii 1

Isaiah Berlin: a critical description of his thought from a theological perspective

15

Can Christians be pluralists? Value pluralism and the gift of diversity

73

The application of Isaiah Berlin’s understanding of social conflict to communities of faith

122

Is toleration a Christian virtue? Beyond the disrespect of Enlightenment forbearance

166

Epilogue in an ecclesiological key Notes Index

201 205 245

Preface

This book represents a sustained, critical engagement with several lines of discourse in contemporary theology in conversation with political, social and cultural theory. As such, it comprises a form of theological work described by Rowan Williams as ‘communicative’ theology, i.e. an approach to theological reflection which ‘seeks also to persuade or commend, to witness to the gospel’s capacity for being at home in more than one cultural environment, and to display enough confidence to believe that this gospel can be rediscovered at the end of a long and exotic detour through strange idioms and structures of thought’.1 I am convinced that such a ‘communicative theology’, at or across the boundaries of the classical disciplines of constructive and historical theology, can prove especially fruitful in our contemporary context. This approach to theology requires us to reposition ourselves in relation to many of the questions we ordinarily raise and the ways we raise them (the primary focus of this book includes social conflict, diversity and tolerance), compelling us as Christian theologians to make our inquiries in relatively unfamiliar intellectual territory, sometimes using languages which are not our ‘first languages’ as theologians. My modest hope is that doing theological (specifically ecclesiological) reflection on Isaiah Berlin’s thought, and allowing his thought to press us as theologians and people of the church into relatively unfamiliar theoretical territory, will expand our theological understanding. While the warning of novelist David Lodge’s fictional character Morris Zapp, that travel narrows a person, is sometimes more true than I would like to admit, it is also often the case that crossing boundaries into new intellectual territories can stimulate new thoughts, and can encourage or provoke us to see things we simply had taught ourselves not to see back home. Both social and intellectual dislocation can, in other words, be beneficient teachers. To shift metaphors slightly, the kind of ‘communicative theology’ which Williams describes can help us to focus on issues of considerable import and difficulty through untried conceptual lenses. By engaging in this exercise in communicative theology, our focus may improve. Thus it is crucial to recognize from the outset of this book that, while it deals with a number of philosophical

Preface xi themes and ideas common to social and political theory, this is a study written primarily for Christian theologians and persons concerned about the identity, the character, the vocation and the future of the church. There is another, perhaps even more important, though simply pragmatic, clarification that should be made from the outset with reference to the methodology of this study. Although the entire project explores the theological viability of several aspects of the thought of Isaiah Berlin, the first chapter particularly represents a descriptive-critical engagement with Berlin’s social theory, while the other three chapters each attempt to make specific constructive theological contributions in light of Berlin’s thought, bringing his work into play with a variety of theologians, philosophers and cultural scholars. Moving from Chapter 1, then, in which I present a theological review of several themes that emerge in Berlin’s extensive corpus, I address specific aspects of a theological engagement with pluralism, with social conflict (specifically axiological conflict) and with tolerance, all grounded in the discussion of Berlin in Chapter 1. In each of these chapters I seek to enlarge the original discussion, even at the risk of some digression (Williams’ ‘exotic detours’ interest me especially here), in pursuit of the goal of providing an explicitly theological response to various aspects of the ‘problem’ of social, cultural and religious diversity. Those who have read Berlin’s essays in intellectual history will sense in Chapters 2–4 a stylistic as well as a philosophical resonance with Berlin’s own discursive approach, inviting readers to enter more deeply into overlapping and interweaving dialogues among thinkers familiar and forgotten. In Chapter 1, as I tease out Berlin’s thought on pluralism, social conflict and tolerance, from an explicitly theological perspective, my intention is to stay close to the primary sources. I believe the effort will be rewarded as we turn, in subsequent chapters, to look at specific aspects of the contemporary theological scene. This opening chapter represents the first systematic theological analysis of Berlin’s oeuvre examining ecclesiological implications of his engagement with Machiavelli, Vico, Hamann, Herder, and the Romantic movement. As such, it provides a more thorough exploration of his literary corpus than one sometimes finds. Berlin’s ideas with reference to pluralism developed over a period of several decades. His thought was subtle, and he contradicts his own views, and changes his mind, from time to time. A theological appropriation of Berlin’s social theory will be best served if we understand his thoughts as well as possible. Chapter 2 begins by placing Berlin’s distinctive analysis of monism, relativism, and what I have distinguished as two types of pluralism, in the context of Christian faith and commmunity, before complexifying and problematizing these concerns further with an extended digression related to the historical-theological development of Christian absolutism, vis-à-vis Carl Braaten, Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Barth and John Hick, among others. The chapter closes on a constructive note, clarifying the options Christians have with reference to pluralism and the life of faith.

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Chapter 3 explores the issue of social conflict in Christian communities, again, beginning with a brief recital of Berlin’s understanding of monism and pluralism in contrast to that of Nicholas Rescher, before exploring theologically the logical incoherence of utopias. The chapter returns explicitly to Berlin’s thought on axiological conflict and incommensurable values in light of John Gray’s critical analysis (and reappropriation) of Berlin, and ends by bringing Berlin into conversation with Lewis Coser, who, like Berlin, perceives positive as well as negative roles which conflict plays in society and social history. Chapter 4 advances an alternative to the Enlightenment doctrine of toleration as ‘forbearance’, a doctrine which is impotent to counter the contempt for difference that is not unknown in even the most ‘enlightened’ societies. In the contemporary context, Berlin’s thought offers a cogent alternative to conventional monistic versions of tolerance. He invites us to hear the differences of others not simply as erroneous views that we condescend to tolerate (assuming them to be erroneous in light of a monistic assumption that there can be only one right answer to every real question), but as aspects of entire social and cultural systems of valuing which, though we do not necessarily share them, represent potentially valid, though different ways of being human in societies that pursue different ends. While we may choose other ways than our own, and while we may live toward ends different from those of others, we need not necessarily exclude or disrespect the other. Berlin’s analysis of pluralism and incommensurable values provides a framework within which we can move from mere tolerance to respect for others in their difference, and in conversation with which we can re-conceive radical acceptance of others in terms of Christian grace. Finally, in light of our theological examination of Berlin’s social theory and our conversation with a number of other thinkers, this study argues for a new way of understanding the tasks of Christian apologetics, evangelism, and interfaith dialogue. There is no final ‘grand design’ advocated by this study. In the end, we find ourselves, with Berlin, attempting to negotiate life day-by-day under the values and faith claims of our particular communities, always in the provisional mode, yet always with one eye on the horizon of human existence.

Acknowledgements

This study would not have been possible without the assistance of a number of people and institutions. I wish particularly to thank the Association of Theological Schools and the Lilly Endowment for their support of my research on Isaiah Berlin at Oxford University during my sabbatical there in 1999, and on a return visit in 2001. I am very grateful to Henry Hardy, Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, Sir Isaiah’s editor for many years and now a trustee of his literary estate, who has been an invaluable resource throughout this project, providing crucial information and insights, and offering sound critical and editorial advice. Roger Hausheer, of the University of Bradford, met with me in Oxford, and subsequently read various sections of this study, also offering helpful suggestions, for which I am indeed grateful. I want to thank Vincent Strudwick and the staff at Kellogg College, Oxford, for their gracious hospitality and assistance. I am grateful to Jane Shaw, Dean of Divinity at New College, Oxford, and Paul Fiddes, Principal of Regent Park College, Oxford, and his faculty, for their hospitality and rich conversation. I am also grateful to the staffs of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the British Library in London, for their assistance in my research. Jeremy Begbie, Vice-principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge; Mike Booker, also of Ridley Hall; and Lance Stone of Westminster College, Cambridge, offered opportunities for further reflection on some of the essential themes in this study, as did Alan Torrance, Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews, and Iain Torrance, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Divinity at the University of Aberdeen. I am grateful to all of these colleagues for their willingness to listen, to reflect on, and to critique the ideas for which I argue in this study. As always, I am more grateful than I can say to my colleagues on the faculty of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, to whom this book is dedicated. The conversations we share as we work together provide the essential grounding from which this study grew, and it is not an exaggeration to say that this work would not have occurred but for them. I particularly want to thank C. Ellis Nelson, Scott Black Johnston, David Jensen, Bill Greenway, Cynthia Rigby, Stan Hall, Stephen Reid and Timothy Lincoln for

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their encouragement, critical reflection and suggestions on this book. I want to thank my secretaries at various times of composition, Alison Riemersma and Hilda Harnden, for their tireless work, and my research assistants Sabelyn Pussman, Martin Loberg and Anne Cameron for their diligence in helping correct and prepare the text for publication, and David Gambrell and David Pussman for their technical assistance. My gratitude also goes to President Ted Wardlaw, the administration and board of trustees of Austin Seminary, for their support of this project, not least for the generous sabbatical leave program of our school, which allows us to engage in research and writing without the interruptions that make up the daily round of ordinary academic life. Finally, I want to thank my wife Deborah and our children Jeremy and Jessica, for giving me the space and time necessary to write a book that expresses the values we share. The publishers would like to thank the following for their permission to reproduce their material: Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, translated by Edwyn Hoskyns (Oxford University Press, 1977). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Isaiah Berlin, Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty, edited by Henry Hardy (Oxford University Press, 2002). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism. Copyright © 1999 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Electronic rights, The Roots of Romanticism © 1999 by the Trustees of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust and Henry Hardy. Material by Isaiah Berlin reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust: Against the Current © Isaiah Berlin 1979; The Crooked Timber of Humanity © Isaiah Berlin 1990; Liberty © The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2002; The First and the Last © The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 1998; The Proper Study of Mankind © Isaiah Berlin 1997. Carl E. Braaten, ‘The Problem with the Absoluteness of Christianity’, Interpretation, 40 (October 1986), 341–353. Reprinted by permission of Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology. John Gray, Isaiah Berlin. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. © John Gray (1995). Michael Walzer, On Toleration (Yale University Press, 1997). Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press. The frontispiece, Reconstructed Icon, David Gambrell, 1997. Digital collage. Reproduced by permission of the artist.

Introduction

[S]ometimes God answers even the prayers of Her postmodern children. James Hynes1

Pluralism and Christian communities Often we assume that agreement, harmony, or even unanimity among the members of a community is a necessary prerequisite for their life together to flourish. Diversity with regard to defining our most crucial beliefs and values, aspirations and goals, therefore is frequently seen as a potential, if not actual, enemy of a shared social existence. A powerful assumption seems to be at work, especially within some religious groups, to the effect that conflict over ideas, values and beliefs (i.e. axiological conflict) is something to be feared, that it must be avoided at all costs, and if it cannot be avoided, it must be carefully managed and quickly resolved. Among some religious communities, the possibility of such open conflict produces such anxiety that the group, or the group’s leaders acting on behalf of the group, will strive to silence – by force if necessary – any voices raised in contradiction to or in defiance of the official voice of the community. The alternative is apparently unthinkable, and is summarily dismissed: the heretical belief that some forms of conflict regarding the most crucial issues of heart, mind, soul and life, though at times painful, are ordinary and beneficial to a society or a community, and that some forms of conflict evidence a cultural and historical richness and profundity without which a human group can hardly be described as a community at all. At a time when many religious and social conflicts appear intractable, and the fear of ideological and tribal Balkanization looms ever larger among religious communities and secular states, Isaiah Berlin’s work in social theory, political philosophy and the history of ideas provides an approach to thinking about pluralism that re-conceptualizes social conflict. Berlin understands that the irreducible diversity and the sheer variety of forms of human life represented in most complex social contexts, and the competition and incommensurability among the conflicting values and beliefs, and the ultimate ends arising from these particular social contexts in

2

Introduction

their concrete historical development, are facts to be celebrated rather than regretted. One might, indeed, argue that our diversity is the very quality that makes it both necessary and possible for us to live in community with one another and to discern in our life together, in the mutuality predicated by our differences, the meanings and purposes for which we long as humans. The key to dealing constructively with axiological conflict lies in understanding the character of diversity among persons in their concrete, historical contexts, not in avoiding or denying our inevitable differences and conflicts, or surrendering to a violent suppression of conflict in the name of peace. While Berlin considered himself ‘tone deaf to God’,2 nevertheless, his insights into pluralism, cultural and historical diversity, and the potentially creative role that certain kinds of conflict can play in society, may prove particularly instructive for communities of faith as we wrestle with controversial social, political and religious issues within and among our religious communities, and between our communities of faith and the larger social contexts in which we find ourselves. Berlin’s thought is especially suggestive as we try to talk with those with whom we vigorously disagree without falling into the enervating alternatives of relativism (merely brushing aside the perspectives of others as subjective and individualistic differences of ‘taste’, or assuming that we cannot enter imaginatively or sympathetically into any real understanding of their views, and, by extension, of their humanity), and absolutism (solipsistically demanding that all others divest themselves of difference as a precondition for being in relationship with us). Berlin’s social theory further assists us as we attempt interfaith dialogue while resisting theological reductionism (establishing grounds for agreement by making only minimal faith claims) and theological chauvinism (refusing a priori to entertain the possibility that the faith claims of other religious communities have any validity at all). Finally, Berlin’s insights allow us to reframe the question of toleration in a way that avoids the rationalistic assumptions and the superficial, and essentially disrespectful, forbearance characteristic of certain streams of the Enlightenment and its modernist children. Although Berlin, at first blush, may appear to be an unlikely theological conversation partner, Christian theologians have much to learn from him, particularly as we attempt to make use of the overused and frequently misunderstood word ‘community’. Christianity, Tolerance and Pluralism picks up on a line of inquiry at the point at which my previous volume in ecclesiology, The Church Faces Death (Oxford University Press, 1999), left off. In the present study I use the persistence of conflict in church history and the contemporary experience of the church as an occasion to reflect theologically on the meaning of Christian community, whereas in the previous study I explored ways in which the apparent demise of mainline Protestantism in North America and Western Europe presents the church with an opportunity to reflect theologically on its identity, responsibility, and unique vocation in the world. The Church

Introduction 3 Faces Death introduced the idea that the church’s history argues against its own tendency to demand uniformity in belief and forms of common life. This is a crucial issue for contemporary theology, though I only briefly touched on it in the previous study, for instance in the epilogue where I asserted: The countervailing particularity of communities of faith, the conflicted state of our value systems within and among these communities, and their diverse narratives of meaning and structures of symbols represent the richness and fullness of churchly life and faith. Rather than yearning for a social group in which everyone thinks and says the same thing, we would do much better to embrace the pluralistic reality of our diverse communities that give birth to varieties of human life and experience, viewpoints and visions, that make it possible for us to value very differently very different things.3 In the immediate context of this remark, I went on to cite Isaiah Berlin, who identifies the monistic desire for uniformity in the values and ends of human life and the yearning for a conflict-free utopian society as two features contributing to the twentieth century’s penchant for totalitarian regimes. Since writing The Church Faces Death I have continued my research into Berlin’s understanding of pluralism and social conflict. I am now even more convinced that his thought – characterized by a thoroughgoing respect for the cultural pluralism organically rooted in the historical development of particular societies, in contrast to what I shall call atomistic or subjectivist relativism – holds extraordinary promise for those of us who wish to affirm the diversity of faith communities and the objectivity of their values, beliefs and ends, while, at the same time, we seek to understand and establish critical dialogue within and among these communities of faith. My conviction regarding the potential value of Berlin’s thought has only been strengthened in the past two years as I have explored the Christian doctrine of the triune creator as the theological ground for mutuality and difference in church and society.4 I would argue that respect for cultural pluralism and the attendant diversity of and conflict among the beliefs, values and ends emerging from such pluralism represent an appropriate extension of the Christian doctrines of creation and incarnation. As shall become apparent in this study, some of Berlin’s principal conversation partners, notably Giambattista Vico, Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder, were distinctively Christian thinkers, and their faith was neither tangential nor ancillary to their appreciation for pluralism. Their pluralism was, in fact, a natural development of their theological reflection. Further, Christian faith is neither necessarily nor ineluctably united to the monistic philosophia perennis which Berlin critiques, as we shall see in Chapter 1. Christianity in ‘divers ways and sundry places’ certainly has made use of various Platonic, Neoplatonic, Stoic and

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Aristotelian metaphysical systems in its long history (all of which are monistic), and the basic faith claims of the Christian message raise questions well beyond the scope of the empirical world, not least because these claims often call into question various aspects of our experience of this world (e.g. God’s creation and creative sustenance of that which exists, divine revelation, and the Christian doctrine of the resurrection from the dead in Jesus Christ). But Christian faith itself does not necessarily espouse any particular metaphysical scheme, and many Christian thinkers (representing a diversity of theological perspectives from those influenced in various ways by Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to essentially materialist and liberationist theologians, as well as Christian thinkers influenced by the later Wittgenstein or by postmodernists like Jacques Derrida and Mark C. Taylor) distrust and may even resolutely reject metaphysics and its implied ‘systems’ altogether. Berlin sometimes paints with a broad brush, and he generally characterizes Christianity (and Judaism) as representative of monism. While his characterization is generally accurate, the exceptions are theologically significant. Finally, I have come to believe that the contemporary context of postmodernity provides confessing Christians with an extraordinarily favorable moment to make the faith claims and to participate in the practices that have historically shaped our Christian communities, and to understand that real and enduring diversity is not an enemy of Christian faith and practice. This is especially important as we attempt to make theological sense of the various conflicts that characterize the experience of contemporary Christian communities, not least of which are the conflicts over the meaning of postmodernity itself, and the question of whether or not (or to what extent) postmodernity threatens Christian faith. As we witness the extensive questioning of the fundamental assumptions of modernism – and the monism which undergirds not only modernism but so much of the intellectual history of the past two millennia – we are particularly well placed to speak meaningfully about the positive role of axiological conflict in and among our diverse communities of faith. Berlin’s thought, again, is highly suggestive to the task of theological reflection, especially relative to ecclesiology. Our contemporary context, so frequently the object of postmodern criticism, calls into question the habit of appealing to privileged claims to universal and singular truth based on social hegemony and its covert ideologies, and the stifling control of universal reason with its appeals to the authority of science, technique and method. While we are undoubtedly beneficiaries of rationalism and empiricism, the Enlightenment and the natural sciences, and few indeed would want to return to an age dominated by obscurantism, superstition, prescientific ignorance and irrationalism, we can also recognize the fact that the legacies of the patriarchs of reason include the suppression of human difference and the faith claims of religious communities with regard to that which we believe is historically unique. Though Berlin certainly would not have

Introduction 5 anticipated the use of his thought by theologians and religious communities (and would undoubtedly have greeted such an application of his work with bemused skepticism), nevertheless his understanding of historically and culturally diverse human societies in which a plurality of values and ends are recognized as irreducible and frequently irreconcilable, may provide communities of faith with a crucial key to exploring the conflictual plurality they face in a positive and constructive manner.

Why Isaiah Berlin? Isaiah Berlin’s work is widely known among scholars in the areas of philosophy, ethics and political theory. His thought is, however, less familiar to theologians, though even here some will have read essays such as ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’ (1951) and, perhaps, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958).5 For much of his academic career, Berlin was known primarily as a brilliant conversationalist and the author of a few stimulating essays. When a knighthood was conferred on him in 1957, then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan specified that the reason Berlin was honored was for ‘talking’. Indeed, in Berlin’s 1968 essay on Alexander Herzen, one may discern an autobiographical resonance with the Russian intellectual Berlin so admired. Berlin writes of Herzen: [H]e was a brilliant and irrepressible talker: he talked equally well in Russian and in French to his intimate friends and in the Moscow salons – always in an overwhelming flow of ideas and images; the waste, from the point of view of posterity … is probably immense.6 [W]hat survives today of all that activity, even in his native country, is not a system or a doctrine but a handful of essays, some remarkable letters, and the extraordinary amalgam of memory, observation, moral passion, psychological analysis and political description, wedded to a major literary talent, which has immortalised his name.7 Berlin’s gifts, like those of Herzen, were wonderfully suited to the salon, the lively social occasion, the cocktail party, or the college high table, the moment, sparkling, but ephemeral, the letter or diplomatic dispatch, the topical essay. His friend and colleague, Maurice Bowra, once famously remarked of Berlin that ‘like Our Lord and Socrates, he does not publish much’.8 As it has turned out, however, Bowra was mistaken. Berlin wrote extensively and published broadly, sometimes in small or obscure journals; and, in large measure due to the industrious editorial work of Henry Hardy, his vast and vastly dispersed literary corpus (his bibliography numbers over 200 entries between 1928 and his death in 1997) is now largely collected into several excellent volumes.9

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Introduction

While Berlin concerned himself with a variety of subjects, from epistemology to music, from biography to intellectual history, he understood his most important contributions to have been made in ‘four fields of enquiry: liberalism; pluralism; nineteenth-century Russian thought; and the origins and development of the Romantic movement’.10 Roger Hausheer observes that ‘at the heart of all Berlin’s writings’ is a somewhat broader ‘cluster of perennial philosophical problems’, including: The nature of the self, will, freedom, human identity, personality and dignity; the manner and degree in which these can be abused, offended against, insulted, and their proper boundaries … transgressed; the consequences, both probable and actual, of failing to understand them for what they are, and above all of torturing them into conformity with conceptual systems and models which deny too much of their essential nature; the distinction between ‘inner’ human nature as opposed to ‘external’ physical nature, and between the basic categories and methods proper to their investigation.11 Hausheer observes, further, that whatever topic Berlin addresses among this cluster of problems, the single great theme to which he returns again and again is his rejection of monism, ‘the doctrine that all reality, and all the branches of our knowledge of it, form a rational, harmonious whole, and that there is ultimate unity or harmony between human ends’.12 The entire range of ideas with which Berlin concerns himself, as John Gray observes, is ‘animated by a single idea of enormous subversive force’.13 In contrast to the tendency toward monism which Berlin detects throughout the intellectual history of Western European culture, at least since Plato and continuing to the present day, and which Berlin sees as exercising such a deadening effect on human social history, Berlin argues for a thoroughgoing ‘value-pluralism’, the idea that ‘ultimate human values are objective but irreducibly diverse, that they are conflicting and often uncombinable, and that sometimes when they come into conflict with one another they are incommensurable; that is, they are not comparable by any rational measure’.14 Upon his death in November 1997, it was this theme which The New York Times emphasized in eulogizing Berlin: A staunch advocate of pluralism in a century in which totalitarians and utopians claimed title to the one, single truth, Sir Isaiah considered the very notion that there could be one final answer to organizing human society a dangerous illusion that would lead to nothing but bloodshed, coercion and the deprivation of liberty.15 Berlin discerned, as few thinkers of his or any century have, that the monistic Weltanschauung, pervasive throughout the Western intellectual traditions, appearing variously in religious, philosophical, scientific,

Introduction 7 aesthetic and political forms, produces similar results wherever it appears, militating, often violently, against our awareness of the fundamental diversity of reality and the plethora of possible answers to the question: ‘How should human beings live together?’. Berlin’s childhood, in which he witnessed the crushed idealism, the stark violence and unsheathed brutality of the Social-Democratic and Bolshevik revolutions in Russia, and his youth and young adulthood, during which he knew the privilege of admittance to excellent British schools and the ruling establishment of the United Kingdom while carrying with him something of the status of the outsider (he was the first Jew to be elected to a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford), left indelible, but largely beneficent, marks upon him.16 He remained a lifelong champion of human freedom and an implacable adversary to any idealistic or utopian scheme that promises a perfect tomorrow at the price of the lives and liberty of others today. His scholarship possesses tolerance, elegance, wit and academic rigor, an ability to explore critically and sympathetically the genius of near-forgotten figures of intellectual history, and an extraordinary fairness and generosity to his critics even in the heat of argument. While Berlin’s focus was on the vast landscape of the history of ideas, his insights possess a keen critical edge that serves theology well as we attempt, first, to see the remarkable plurality among and within our communities of faith and the expressions of Christian faith and practice in these communities, both in the history of the Christian church and in our contemporary experience, and then to make sense of this diversity in a faithful manner. Before examining Berlin’s thought, however, we shall take a short detour to reflect briefly on diversity and conflict in the history of the church.

‘By schisms rent asunder’: social conflict in a historically diverse church There has never been a conflict-free church. Nor has there ever been a time in the history of the church not characterized by some degree, and often by quite a large degree, of diversity. Frequently of a profound and rich character, either with regard to the church’s membership, its beliefs, its moral codes, or its values, the ends which were seen as most worthwhile to seek and that which was held most sacred, this pluralism is evident throughout the church’s history. Whatever we may wish to do with this fact, it is quite simply that – an empirical fact. Pluralism is not a modern or a postmodern phenomenon, though modernity and postmodernity have perhaps expanded our repertoire of attitudes and responses to it. Only the most historically unaware could believe that social conflict over ideas, behaviors, values and beliefs is in any shape a new thing. The church has from its beginning exhibited and experienced conflict and diversity. Surely, one might argue, there is at least as much to celebrate in this fact, as there is to lament. But, however true it may be that (metaphorically speaking) kata, that is, ‘according to’ (as

8

Introduction

in ‘the Gospel according to Mark’, ‘ … according to Matthew’, ‘ … according to Luke’, ‘ … according to John’) was the first word the infant church learned to speak, we have never really decided if the word is a blessing or a curse.17 The Acts of the Apostles, arguably the most crucial portion of the New Testament from an ecclesiological perspective, tells us much about the church’s struggle with its identity and its mission, both of which were in conflict. The book also reveals much about what early Christians wanted to believe about the church’s founding. Acts tells the story of the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ, of the heroes and anti-heroes of the nascent movement, of the extraordinary diversity of the first Christian communities, and the early conflicts which these communities experienced. In its pages we learn about conflicts within and among the Jewish communities from which the Christian movement (in groups consisting of both Jews and Gentiles) emerged, and often in contrast to and even in opposition to which these early Christians defined themselves. We discover conflicts within various Christian communities over the place and ownership of property, over respect and mutuality arising from the degrees of recognition and preference given to certain community members because of their national origins, their religious backgrounds and their wealth. Perhaps most decisively, we find conflicts regarding the ritual conditions of initiation into the Christian communities, the status given these rites of initiation by other Christian communities, and the differences between creedal and behavioral requirements for adherence to its faith frequently emerging at the point of initiation. While it is true that the story of Pentecost related in the Book of Acts (chapter 2) may be understood theologically as a categorical reversal of the ancient legend of the confusion of tongues at Babel, it must also be remembered that the Holy Spirit apparently did not minimize the real differences among the people who heard the gospel in their own tongues. Indeed, the story may rather underscore and bless human diversity as it seeks to glorify the God we believe speaks to us in the midst of, and through, and not merely despite, our differences. As the story of the spread of the gospel is recounted through the pages of Acts, the Pentecost event takes on an even larger role. Pentecost sets the tone for the entire book. But the tone set by the event is neither univocal nor unambiguous. Irony whispers through the pages of the Book of Acts as disciples fall out with one another, as followers who are untruthful suddenly drop dead, as magistrates ponder the wisdom of God, and a magician tries to manipulate the power of the gospel for his own self-serving purposes. Through it all God works the crowd like an invisible politician. In these pages the history of the church for 2,000 years is prefigured. When we take the whole New Testament into account (let us leave to one side, at least for now, a consideration of the entire Christian Bible including the Hebrew scriptures), and we reflect on the four Gospels, the letters from many pens, and the writings such as Acts and the Apocalypse, we are struck

Introduction 9 by the extraordinary plurality of faith, of faith practices and perspectives represented, and the startling range of social conflicts experienced by the earliest Christian communities as they attempted to make sense of, and to live out of, and to order their lives together according to the way of Jesus whom they believed to be the Christ of God. We shall return to make a positive appraisal of the pluralistic legacy of this conflict, but to begin our study let us note the simple fact of the history of diversity and conflict in the church. Let us note particularly the pervasiveness and the tenacity of conflict that characterizes the church’s history, and the fundamental and irreducible plurality of persons, the diversity of their backgrounds, their faith-understandings and religious practices, their purposes, aspirations, values and ideals. The church, as a community of communities of those who believe in Jesus Christ, was conceived and born in conflict. The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth sparked many disagreements and conflicts among his hearers, beginning with his first sermon, both modest in scope and revolutionary in content, when he identified himself unmistakably with the prophecy of Isaiah, and the congregants in his hometown synagogue responded by attempting (or at least by designing) to throw him off a conveniently located cliff. Jesus’ actions, his various acts of healing, whether on the sabbath or not, provoked consternation as often as celebration. His apocalyptic utterances, wild and impassioned, warning of the immanent approach of God’s kingdom, still frighten more of his followers than they comfort. Not even the most elaborate exegetical gymnastics can outmaneuver, nor the most adept scholarly Bible-tamer tame, the Galilean. In the end, his death stands indelibly reminding us that Christian faith emerged from a crucible of conflict, terrible and awesome, goading early communities to make sense of the crucified Christ. As these communities were confronted by the living presence of the man they had seen crucified, they were forced also to make sense of his continuing presence (spirit/Spirit) among them, and in so doing came to faith that conflicts fundamentally and finally with the most apparent realities of existence, because (as they themselves realized) if Christ be not raised from the dead then we are without hope, but if Christ is indeed risen from the dead the entire question of reality – with all the most obvious assumptions we possess about the way the world operates – must be reexamined. This was only the beginning of conflicts to come. From the earliest centuries of the Common Era, Christian faith has been practiced in and by specific groups of persons whose understandings, and therefore whose essential beliefs, rituals and values, have demonstrated remarkable continuity with and striking dissimilarity from the understandings, beliefs, rituals and values of others (including other Christians) around them. The range of questions that emerges from the various Christian communities, springing from this fertile ground of experience within and beyond the communities themselves, in concert with and in opposition to their neighbors, reflects an uneasiness at the heart of the Christian faith inseparable

10

Introduction

from its profound love and adoration for, and its no less profound uneasiness with, Jesus Christ whom it worships, and from the social implications of the message preached from the time of the apostles. Perhaps nowhere is the perceptiveness of a postmodern concept of culture, or the limitations of the modern understanding of culture that it succeeds, more apparent, at least from an historical-theological perspective, than in observing the relationship of the primitive church to culture, and the questions that emerged from this relationship. Kathryn Tanner has contrasted these alternative modern and postmodern ideas of culture, writing: It seems less and less plausible to presume that cultures are selfcontained and clearly bounded units, internally consistent and unified wholes of beliefs and values simply transmitted to every member of their respective groups as principles of social order. What we might call a postmodern stress on interactive process and negotiation, indeterminacy, fragmentation, conflict, and porosity replaces these aspects of the modern, post-1920s understanding of culture, or, more properly as we will see, forms a new basis for their reinterpretation.18 A postmodern understanding of culture – and an understanding of the complex relationship of cultures and Christian communities, I would add – pay attention ‘to the messy details of culture in action, the conflict-ridden, confused twists and turns of real-life situations, downplayed in an understanding of cultures as unified wholes’.19 When we pay attention to the development of early Christian communities in the midst of non-Christian ways of life, we discern a proliferation of questions, sometimes raised in contradiction with one another and often reflecting the flux of beliefs, attitudes, concerns and aspirations historically grounded in the church’s struggle over its identity and mission.20 As is evident in the documentary records relative to the early church, among the questions that characterized its infancy were these: What does it mean that Jesus preached the immanent coming of a kingdom that did not come (at least not as he apparently thought it would)? What does it mean that Jesus’ earliest disciples preached the impending return of Jesus (whose return seems endlessly deferred)? Can followers of Jesus reconceptualize their faith in non-apocalyptic terms and remain true to Jesus? Can one be a follower of Jesus Christ without first converting to Judaism? Can one be a follower of Jesus Christ and remain a practicing Jew? What, for Christians, are the roles of the sacred rituals and institutions handed down in Hebrew scripture? What, for instance, is the relationship between the Christian rite of initiation (baptism) and the Jewish rite of initiation (circumcision)? What will be the religious, the national, and tribal, cultural and racial boundaries for this Christian faith that is both new and old at the same time? What is the relationship between a follower of Christ and civil

Introduction 11 authorities? The earliest Christian communities struggled over these and many other questions, all of which have their origin in conflicts of communal identity and integrity. Indeed, the early Christian communities, emerging from the profound mixture of Jewish and Gentile cultural influences, both multiplied and divided over such questions.21 The Jerusalem church, with its deep roots in Judaism, its elevation of the moral response of the religious life, the self-identity of its members as ‘the poor’, was never simply another version of the Pauline churches of the diaspora. Martin Luther was correct in seeing in the letter of James virtually a different gospel from that in the Pauline writings of the New Testament, though his belief that plurality is proof of falsehood made him simply dispose of James’ ‘right strawy epistle’ rather than attempt to take account of the implications of that text as another way of being authentically Christian. If we track the spread of Christian faith by its earliest missionaries throughout the then known world, we find ourselves face-to-face with the appropriation and reappropriation of this faith in a manner and with an integrity perhaps never again equaled in the pages of the history of Christian missions. The Johannine community(ies) with their brotherly love and exclusionary claims, the Pauline communities with their genius for adaptability within a broad range of theological assertions and ecclesial arrangements, the Petrine church, the Jacobian church; within a relatively brief span of years, there appeared churches from Cappadocia to Rome, from North Africa to Gaul. Through all of these regions, peoples, and tongues the faith was heard, accepted and converted by its converts. The Christian faith was a popular religion from the very beginning, grounded in the moment, inseparable from specific contexts of history, geography and culture. The conflicts engendered by the faith helped the members of these primitive communities understand more clearly their identity and better define their complex relationships with Roman culture, with local pagan societies, with other dominant religions and with one another – a fact often manifested in the various offices that sprang up in various communities, and by the rubs and blisters created by these offices in a Church catholic. During times of oppression, conflict with outside forces (sometimes violent conflict) had certain effects on the communities. Persecution and martyrdom defined the boundaries of the Christian communities as perhaps nothing else could have done, helping the church formulate viable answers to the question ‘Who is a Christian?’ and giving rise to distinctive aspects of Christian culture, such as the veneration of relics, and the identification of Christian adherence with the fate of Christ himself through the ‘second baptism’ of martyrdom. Alternately, during seasons of prosperity, conflicts arose concerning the fruits of prosperity for these communities of faith, and the consequences for those who had renounced the faith under pressure and returned in seasons of ease. Baptism prefigured a death that gained entry into a kind of life, and marked a boundary so absolute that

12

Introduction

many were hesitant to receive its benefits until they were actually preparing to leave mortal life altogether, while the Eucharist became a shared meal, the inclusiveness of which was grounded in profound and visible social exclusion. Conflict, and the church’s fundamental unease over the appropriation and reappropriation of its perennial diversity, and the church’s commitment to the universal claims of the Christian message, especially as these claims were given performative utterance in the liturgical life of the church, remained throughout the earliest centuries distinctive touchstones of the church’s life. What became clear relatively early in the history of the church was that one might be generally speaking a sinner, but it was impossible to be universally a saint. There was no such thing as a saint in abstraction. Saints lived and died and bore witness always in relationship to specific places, specific circumstances, and specific historical moments. Saints represented what it meant to be Christian in this or that culture, at this or that time and place. Saints belonged to a people, like an inheritance or a homestead, and often the saintliness of a saint was utterly unrecognizable to people from other cultures or historical eras – or even from the next village just over the hill. Again, we find the reality of diversity and the church’s discomfort with its diversity throughout these first centuries of the church’s existence. The church is striking for the sheer diversity of its practices and beliefs, and for its equally varied responses to this diversity; in some contexts making peace with its pluralism, in others declaring war upon it in the name of the word of God. Heresies and orthodoxies were born, and died, and were born again as various communities of faith tried to preserve the sanctity of the sacred mysterium and to resist the reduction of the gospel of Jesus Christ to a single, all-encompassing formula. But conflicts over doctrine were as much about the objective self-understanding of the adherents as they were objective understandings about the content of doctrinal positions. The shifting boundaries of the late-third- and fourth-century controversies over the doctrines of the trinity and the divine-human nature of Jesus Christ, the labyrinths of technical terms that one year in one place meant the opposite of what they meant the next year in another place, show how language stretched, melted, hardened and broke in trying to express the identity of those involved in these controversies as well as, and sometimes even more than, the theological propositions they attempted to clarify. Christian communities throughout the patristic period (and perhaps well into the medieval, as well) seemed convinced that local contextuality was as vital as catholicity and, indeed, in some sense, that catholicity must be understood as an affirmation of the local, the particular, the historical context, the specific idiosyncratic and eccentric nature of Christian believing and belonging. These communities, struggling to comprehend matters of faith that still concern us today, knew that if their particular faith in Jesus Christ was compromised for the sake of universal agreement, that agreement

Introduction 13 would threaten to empty the church’s preaching of its meaning. Thus the controversies were frequently decided in favor of the more radical claim, the more revolutionary position, the more open and ambiguous way of saying things, protecting not the status quo but the freedom of God in Christ. Arius, the arch-conservative and defender of divine immutability and impassability, was defeated by Athanasius, whose radical theology established in the church a kind of respect for mystery which called into question the contemporary meaning of mystery itself, affirmed that Jesus Christ was God in the flesh, and that when we speak of the act of God we speak not of some vaporous possibility, but of an act so specific and concrete and historical that it is named with a human name, Jesus, and not for an abstraction, humanity. There is no doubt that the church historically has attempted to reduce the significance of its own diverse reality, that it has institutionally and politically attempted to distract those who look at it from the perspective of the plurality of answers that can and have and must be given to the questions: What does it mean to be Christian? What does it mean to live together Christian lives? What does it mean to be a Christian community? But the church’s historical existence argues against any homogeneous, uniformitarian or monistic arguments that the church can muster, especially when it has been most anxious, and most reactive. Whether the church likes it or not, it reflects the same compelling and often bewildering plurality that God has woven into creation as a whole. No amount of ecclesiastical declarations – whether issued by popes, general councils, magisterial reformers or ecstatic prophets – can alter this reality. One could, if one wished, teach most of the major doctrines of Christianity by tracing the conflicts of the church over its identity. This claim should not be limited to the earliest centuries of the church’s history alone. Virtually every important creed and confession of the church for twenty centuries has emerged from the crucible of conflict in which the church has attempted to come to terms with its own tenacious diversity. One could, indeed, make the case that the ordinary state of the church is conflict, and that its moments of quiet and rest are untypical. And yet Christian theology has had a very difficult time accounting for this fact. Throughout the history of the church – as is so apparent during those times when the church is locked in intractable disagreements within and without – we seem to have had no way to account for the possibility that goodness, truth and beauty are plural, that God’s ways are not only higher than our ways, but deeper, wider, and more wonderfully tangled in the undergrowth of God’s passion for the other. Whether we lay the blame at the door of Plato, Aristotle or some other, we have had a difficult time believing that it is not only inevitable that we should experience real and irreducible diversity, and sometimes intractable conflicts, with regard to matters of faith and values, but that the conflicts themselves can contribute enormously to the corporate life of the church and to the richness and

14

Introduction

vitality of Christian faith because they reflect something of extraordinary value which God has woven into the fabric of created existence itself. It seems entirely possible that the principal reason we are both fearful of conflict and frequently unable to extricate ourselves from the worst consequences of our conflicts – the bitterness and hatred, party-mindedness and intolerance that typically accompany our disagreements – is that we have not recognized the fundamental plurality of values and ends that authentically reflect Christian faith, and that we have not come to terms with the fact that these values and ends are sometimes in competition with one another, that they may be incommensurable, that they cannot be reduced to uniformity, and that they spring from the very nature of God’s creation. The church’s dilemma, at this point, corresponds to a dilemma that underlies the broader intellectual and social history of Western culture, the monistic dilemma that Isaiah Berlin profiles and critiques. The following chapters will seek to introduce us to a way of taking account of the diversity of God’s creation in a pluralistic framework. Though, in some respects, this survey will simply attempt to describe as faithfully as possible what Berlin thought, the theological (indeed, the ecclesiological) questions we have begun to ask will never be entirely out of sight or mind.

1

Isaiah Berlin A critical description of his thought from a theological perspective

All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament. Isaiah Berlin1

Berlin’s intellectual path Sir Isaiah Berlin, in the essay that in a sense serves as his final statement on a life’s work, wrote: I came to the conclusion that there is a plurality of ideals, as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments. I am not a relativist. … But I do believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek, and that these values differ.2 It is appropriate that Berlin, the historian of ideas, should say that he came to this conclusion. For Berlin, all of the ideas that matter most emerge from human predicaments grounded in specific historical and cultural contexts. His own understandings developed over the course of many years, evolving and changing in response to the world around him, the world of his experience, both private and public, his encounters with philosophical figures and political leaders, past and present, and with a vast world of ideas, always, for Berlin, grounded in the historical, the empirical, the real, the concrete. In stark contrast to some contemporary philosophers, for instance Martin Heidegger, for whom history was of little or no concern,3 Berlin firmly believed that if one wants to understand a philosopher’s thought one must understand the trajectory of his intellectual development, the way he came to think as he did, and the social context that gave rise to the questions that concerned him most. While some aspects of Berlin’s thought lie well beyond the scope of this specifically theological study, I shall allow Berlin’s own accounts of his intellectual development, especially his creative engagement with several key figures in the history of Western thought, to lead us through those aspects of his social theory which I believe are most pertinent in the life of Christian communities of faith. This opening chapter is intended primarily to serve

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readers from a theological background as both a brief survey of Berlin’s thought in these areas, and as an initial critical engagement with his work.

The philosophia perennis Berlin was a rare thinker capable of collecting and reflecting on remarkable quantities and divergent streams of thought, able to see through a mass of data the seminal features, the critical connections and larger patterns in the thought of others, and of using this rich synthesis of ideas as a palette from which to paint his grand, sweeping essays in intellectual history.4 In perhaps his best known essay, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, Berlin uses the familiar passage from Archilochus, ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’, to explore Tolstoy’s philosophy of history, sorting Tolstoy and others into the categories of hedgehogs and foxes.5 Berlin, for instance, understood Tolstoy himself as a natural-born fox who desperately tried against all odds to act like a hedgehog. While recognizing the limitations of any formal system of categories, especially those as elegantly simple as his own binary classification of hedgehogs and foxes, Berlin possessed the crucial talent of the essayist of sorting mountains of seemingly disparate data into clearly identifiable classes and bringing these classes into comparative relationship with one another, and of discovering startling new perspectives on information long taken for granted. Probably Berlin’s most provocative attempt at categorizing takes into account the entire philosophical history of Western civilization, from Socrates to the present day, placing this vast body of ideas into two columns: monism and pluralism. And, in doing this, he makes it possible to see this intellectual history anew. In the essay Henry Hardy describes as Berlin’s ‘intellectual credo’, ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, Berlin describes his youthful encounter (‘much too young’, he writes) with Tolstoy, and the indelible mark it left on his thought.6 Reading Tolstoy, he says, he became aware that the great Russian novelist, among others, believed that there are solutions to all the central problems of human existence, and that one can discover these solutions ‘with sufficient selfless effort’.7 When, as a student at Oxford, Berlin began to read philosophy formally, he noticed the persistence of certain ideas he had already observed in Tolstoy. Thinkers from Socrates to Plato, from the Stoics to the Christians, Jews and Muslims, all seemed to believe that the central problems of human existence, the problems of moral behavior and values, the problems relative to the purpose and meaning of human life, all have solutions; and, while these various thinkers differed as to where these solutions can be found, they all believed that the solutions exist and are, at least in principle, knowable.8 Berlin’s undergraduate studies led him through the rationalists of the seventeenth century and the empiricists of the eighteenth century, including those inspired by Sir Isaac Newton, with their interest in applying the burgeoning field of physical science to the concerns of human behavior,

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ethics and politics. In each case Berlin saw the same essential views expressed throughout what he called the philosophia perennis. He writes: At some point I realised that what all these views had in common was a Platonic ideal: in the first place that, as in the sciences, all genuine questions must have one true answer and one only, all the rest being necessarily errors; in the second place, that there must be a dependable path towards the discovery of these truths; in the third place, that the true answers, when found, must necessarily be compatible with one another and form a single whole, for one truth cannot be incompatible with another – that we knew a priori. This kind of omniscience was the solution of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle. In the case of morals, we could then conceive what the perfect life must be, founded as it would be on a correct understanding of the rules that governed the universe.9 Certainly, Berlin explains, many people who held these views would admit that humanity might never possess the perfect truth about how we should live together and what we should value and what we ought to do. Humanity, according to some, was simply too wicked and sinful to attain this knowledge; others believed humanity was too weak, too willful, or too foolish, to gain it. The truth itself might simply be too high and expansive for humanity to achieve. But the truth – the perfect and eternal truth, the solution to all humanity’s problems, the answer to humanity’s big questions about how to live – that truth does exist and is, at least in principle, subject to discovery and understanding. Obviously there existed and still exists a variety of perspectives on where one might discover the ultimate truth about human behavior, values, meaning and purpose. This entails the question of authority. The religious believe that the true solutions to humanity’s problems are revealed by God to prophets and saints, and are taught in ancient texts – the Bible, the Torah, the Koran – or are made known in ecstatic and mystical meditation. Some have thought that truth is intuitive; others believe it must be found in laboratories by following strict scientific methods of investigation and experiment; while others still are certain that the only truth available lies at the end of mathematical calculations. But virtually all who subscribe to the prevailing philosophical mood of Western intellectual history have believed, at least in principle, that the solutions, if they are real solutions to the real problems of human behavior and values, must be knowable. Perhaps the solutions, now apparently lost, were once known in a golden age long ago. Perhaps Adam and Eve in paradise knew the truth, now obscured to their successors by their fall. Or maybe humanity will only achieve perfect knowledge in some future age of bliss and omniscience in an eschatological kingdom, possibly beyond death. And, if human beings do not know, and can never know, the perfect truth, the definitive solution to what Berlin calls the ‘cosmic jigsaw puzzle’, then surely the angels in heaven, or God, must know.

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Even some of the most radical thinkers of the nineteenth century, such as Hegel and Marx, though they rejected the notion of timeless truth, could not let go of historical essentialism, the relentless movement, dialectical though it may be, toward the true and final purpose of the historical process when true history would at last begin.10 Berlin grasped in his sweeping generalization this extraordinary insight, that for over two millennia the conception of truth fundamental to virtually every major Western philosophy was relentlessly monistic. The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observations and experiment conducted by qualified experts, or the convictions of simple folk uncorrupted by civilisation – this view, in one form or another, is central to western thought.11 According to Berlin, this monistic view reigned supreme despite the differences among the various philosophical and religious views. Whether we are dealing with Plato, Aristotle or Epictetus, with Augustine, Anselm or Aquinas, with Descartes, Spinoza or Locke, we are dealing with varieties on these same monistic themes.12 Because this insight is so crucial for understanding Berlin’s critical assault on monism, we shall examine in closer detail the three central tenets of the philosophia perennis: First: To all real questions there is one and only one real answer, all other answers are deviations from the truth and are therefore false. To all true problems there is one, and only one true solution, all other solutions are false. This is axiomatic. It applies to questions of conduct, feeling, and practice, to questions of theory and observation, to questions of value and morality as well as scientific fact. If a value is truly a value, then it must be a value in ancient Greece no less than in contemporary North America. That which is not universally valued is ipso facto not truly a value. Even more so the ends, the purposes and the goals of humanity. The ends of life for Aquinas’ medieval companions, if they are true ends, must be the same as for an Aboriginal tribesman in seventeenth-century Australia. Beneath the shifting sands of historical appearance, the philosophia perennis maintains, there are immutable, universal, transhistorical ends, goods and values, the truthfulness, the authenticity, of which rests in their absolute singularity and singular absoluteness. Second: All real answers to all real questions, and all true solutions to all true problems, are in principle knowable. Correspondingly, there must be a true method for the discovery of these real answers and true solutions. Whether or not any particular person knows these answers or can ever discover a

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particular solution to life’s riddles, the answers and solutions must in principle be knowable. There must be a reliable method for finding them out. And, it must be remembered, the true ends, goods and values of human life are found, are discovered, by humanity; human beings and human cultures, according to the philosophia perennis, do not create or make them. For monistic thinkers, secular and religious, from Plato to the present, the central task of human life, therefore, is to seek salvation through knowledge, because knowledge is itself virtue. Berlin explains: Knowledge, for the central tradition of western thought, means not just descriptive knowledge of what there is in the universe, but as part and parcel of it, not distinct from it, knowledge of values, or how to live, what to do, which forms of life are the best and worthiest, and why. To distinguish reality from appearance, to distinguish that which will truly fulfil a man from that which merely appears to do so, that is knowledge and that alone will save him.13 Knowledge of the truth is salvation: this was no less a tenet for John Calvin, the Protestant theologian, for whom the knowledge of God the Creator is the proper end of human life, than it was for Socrates, whose unexamined life is not worth living; and, it was no less true for Condorcet or Helvétius, the great optimists of the Age of Enlightenment, than it was for Voltaire and Rousseau.14 For each of these thinkers, universal truths exist, true for all people, everywhere, at all times; these truths are expressed in universal laws, rules or principles, the knowledge of which bestows the good life (singular), the defiance of which leads to the multitude of vices, miseries and woes that afflict humanity.15 Berlin writes, in another context, of the various conservatives, liberals, radicals and socialists of the mid-nineteenth century who disagreed ‘about facts’, ‘about ends and means’, but who had something far more profound in common, ‘the belief that their age was ridden with social and political problems which could be solved only by the conscious application of truths upon which all men endowed with adequate mental powers could agree’.16 Their approaches to understanding and shaping society bore the various imprints characteristic of their age, but fundamentally theirs were simply nineteenth-century versions of the old, deep conviction of the philosophia perennis of Western civilization, that knowledge saves. Third: All real answers and all true solutions must ultimately be mutually compatible; they must cohere to form a harmonious and integrated whole, which can be expressed through a system of true propositions. One truth cannot, according to the philosophia perennis, be incompatible with another truth. No answer, if it is a true answer, can possibly conflict with another answer, if it is also true. ‘At best’, Berlin writes, ‘these truths will logically entail one another in a single, systematic, interconnected whole; at the very

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least, they will be consistent with one another’.17 What can be said of truth can be said with no less force of goodness and beauty. If there is no coherent whole there is, by definition, no cosmos. During the Age of Enlightenment, the extraordinary advances made in the natural sciences bolstered this assumption, which, again, is as ancient as Socrates and Plato. Berlin writes: As a result of the revolutionary discoveries of Galileo and Newton and the work of other mathematicians and physicists and biologists of genius, the external world was seen as a single cosmos, such that, to take the best-known example, by the application of relatively few laws the movement and position of every particle of matter could be precisely determined. For the first time it became possible to organise a chaotic mass of observable data into a single, coherent, perfectly ordered system. Why should not the same methods be applied to human matters, to morals, to politics, to the organisation of society, with equal success? … Why cannot one create a science or sciences of man and here also provide solutions as clear and certain as those obtained in the sciences of the external world? […] The programme seemed clear: one must scientifically find out what man consists of, and what he needs for his growth and for his satisfaction. When one had discovered what he is and what he requires, one will then ask where this last can be found; and then, by means of the appropriate inventions and discoveries, supply men’s wants, and in this way achieve, if not total perfection, at any rate a far happier and more rational state of affairs than at present prevails.18 Three crucial social implications flow from this principle of the philosophia perennis, each of which Berlin relates particularly to those thinkers and leaders who yearn to create a perfect civil society, a utopia, whether secular or religious. Berlin wrote frequently and compellingly of the dangers of utopianism which, despite its fascination and strange, perennial attraction to many, is fraught with practical peril. Thus he devotes considerable space to counter the practical social implications of monism. (1) Utopians, according to Berlin, tend to reason as follows: if one were capable of discovering all the right answers to all the real questions of human behavior, and were to put them all together, ‘[t]he result will form a kind of scheme of the sum of knowledge needed to lead to a – or rather the – perfect life’.19 Utopians, therefore, imagine a solution, indeed (and here we greet that chilling phrase again) a ‘final solution’, a universal, all-encompassing prescription for the perfect society which, if followed exactly, they believe offers the solutions to all real problems and the answers to all real

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questions. If such a ‘final solution’ could be discovered, many utopians further reason, it would be fundamentally necessary to pursue it as relentlessly as possible. Indeed, to know how to create a perfect society and to refuse to do so would be cruel, criminal, inhumane, even if the long-term goal of creating this perfect society requires its leadership to do certain things, to commit certain acts (such as suspending political liberties and civil rights, violating personal privacy, promoting censorship, repressing political opposition, etc.) which, in the short-term, would be viewed as cruel, criminal or inhumane: thus the justification for the penal archipelagoes of Soviet communism, and the inspiration for the simple historical observation that almost every utopian scheme begins in idealism and ends in tyranny. One could reason – in fact, many utopians have reasoned – that if the ‘final solution’ is indeed all it is advertised to be, if it is the perfect society, heaven on earth, if it really does offer humanity the fulfillment of human destiny or of divine will, if it heals all our infirmities and cures all our diseases, and if it really does usher in the age of perfect peace, harmony and justice – then social engineers, politicians and religious leaders would be justified, in the name of this ‘final solution’, to pay virtually any price, to make virtually any sacrifice, to achieve this great end. It would be unjust to do less. Wouldn’t it? So some utopians have argued. Such was the reasoning of some of the most horrific despots of the twentieth century and their disciples. Even if the phrase ‘final solution’ did not today possess the terrible meaning it does as a euphemism for Hitler’s program of mass murder and genocide, as Berlin observes, it conveys a soul-stultifying sense of repression. To make a perfect social omelette, to achieve (and enforce) a perfect society or state or church, many have certainly reasoned, surely justifies the breaking of untold eggs.20 Berlin, however, like Alexander Herzen, shrinks back in horror at the sight of the sociological, the political and the religious Molochs of the past two centuries, the idols constructed from ‘great magnificent abstractions’, on the altars of which human victims (and their human rights and freedom) have been sacrificed in the name of the nation, the state, the party, the future, even, tragically, the kingdom of God.21 The fear of utopian tyranny and repression in the name of idealistic abstractions fuels Berlin’s doubts about monism and the value of positive liberty. Berlin often quoted Kant, ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’.22 Most attempts to create heaven on earth lead to hellish suffering, through oppression and persecution. As Berlin said, ‘To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity’.23 (2) Another social implication of the philosophia perennis, and one not lost on utopians in every age, concerns the static nature of the ideal society. Berlin argues that the primary characteristic of ‘Utopias is the fact that they are static. Nothing in them alters, for they have reached perfection: there is

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no need for novelty or change; no one can wish to alter a condition in which all natural human wishes are fulfilled’.24 The same holds true as much for earthly societies set up on idealistic principles as for the various Edens of the imagination, the Golden Ages of yore, as well as the eschatological heavenly paradises of various Western religions; it holds true for Amish settlements, who have frozen in time certain aspects of European cultures past, and for the most orthodox Marxists, who struggle against all odds to make their history conform to their social idealism. ‘What is common to all these worlds’, Berlin writes, ‘is that they display a static perfection in which human nature is finally fully realised, and all is still and immutable and eternal’.25 Like the ancient theologians of Christianity who believed that God cannot change because mutability is necessarily corruption and God is not subject to corruption, the utopians attribute to their society the quality of immutability, unchangeableness; and, because change is evidence of corruption, the primary objective for the leadership of these societies is to resist all attempts at change. There is only one direction of motion, they reason: down. It is this aspect of utopias, perhaps more than any other, which George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and in his own way Arthur Miller, attack so vigorously in their political horror stories.26 Berlin observes that those who have worked hardest to produce unchanging societies in the twentieth century (i.e. the various totalitarian regimes of the communists and fascists), attempted to prevent change by doing ‘something which any nineteenth-century thinker with respect for the sciences would have regarded with genuine horror – the training of individuals incapable of being troubled by questions which, when raised and discussed, endanger the stability of the system’.27 We shall explore later how utopias frequently attempt to prevent change – and, therefore, the corruption of the perfect society – by discouraging curiosity, reducing all questions of meaning to questions of technique, and by enforcing isolation.28 At present, let us simply note Berlin’s belief that monism cannot logically conceive of a perfect society that admits any degree of change. (3) The third social implication of Berlin’s account of monism is closely related to the second. The perfect society is a conflict-free society. The monistic tradition, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, maintained that the singularity and universality of truth and goodness are reflected in a united state, the unity of which (and, therefore, the truth and goodness of which) is expressed in its lack of conflict. If a society has achieved perfection (according to the same logic that led some to believe in social immutability), its citizens cannot experience conflict within themselves or with one another. Difference is the sign of falsehood. In his analysis of Aristotle’s account of virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre locates the origin of this aspect of social monism in Greek thought. His observations are especially relevant to Berlin’s analysis, though MacIntyre

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does not comprehend the character of plurality in the modern period as perceptively as does Berlin.29 MacIntyre writes: ‘Both Plato and Aristotle treat conflict as an evil and Aristotle treats it as an eliminable evil. … For Aristotle, as for Plato, the good life for [humanity] is itself single and unitary, compounded of a hierarchy of goods’.30 Driven as they were by their metaphysical assumptions regarding the singularity of the good, and ‘the impersonal unchanging divinity’ who supplies humanity with its ‘specific and ultimate telos’, conflict within the polis is inevitably ‘the result either of flaws of character in individuals or of unintelligent political arrangements’.31 Berlin traces this aspect of monism from its Greek roots in Plato and Aristotle through the Enlightenment to the twentieth century’s totalitarian states. From its apparently benign origins, the idea that if we all act rationally we will not come into conflict with one another, develops by the nineteenth and (especially) the mid-twentieth century, into an apologia for social engineering. Utopians and rationalists of one stripe or another tell us that no society (and certainly no society that aspires to perfection) has to tolerate the interminable differences of views and behavior among its citizens, or their stupidity and irrationality. The common assumption of these thinkers (and of many a schoolman before them and Jacobin and Communist after them) is that the rational ends of our ‘true’ natures must coincide, or be made to coincide, however violently our poor, ignorant, desire-ridden, passionate empirical selves may cry out against this process.32 Salvation by knowledge comes to take an especially sinister turn in the hands of certain of these thinkers who believe that ‘[c]ompulsion is also a kind of education’.33 We shall revisit these themes again in another context, but it is important to note here that Berlin comprehends that which was held in common, the monism, of the philosophia perennis that is so easy to miss, a commonality far more potent than the significant differences among the various schools of Western thought spanning some 2,000 years. Indeed, Berlin comprehends and marks the dangers in the predisposition to singularity, which opposes diversity and fears the social conflict that often accompanies pluralism.34 Berlin observed in his final essay: ‘I do not know why I always felt skeptical about this almost universal belief [in monism], but I did. It may be a matter of temperament, but so it was’.35 Whatever the source and the extent of the skepticism, however, he seems not to have disavowed the assumption he still held in common with the philosophia perennis – ‘that there could be no conflict between true ends, true answers to the central problems of life’ – until, that is, he encountered Niccolò Machiavelli, the Tuscan political genius whose views have troubled thinkers for some 500 years.36 Machiavelli soon laid the axe to the roots of Berlin’s vestigial monism.

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Niccolò Machiavelli ‘At a certain stage in my reading’, Berlin writes, ‘I naturally met with the principal works of Machiavelli.37 They made a deep and lasting impression upon me, and shook my earlier faith’.38 In the writings of Machiavelli which shook Berlin’s faith in the essential tenets of his philosophical inheritance was not one of the more obvious aspects of Machiavelli’s thought, for instance: on how to acquire and retain political power, or by what force or guile rulers must act if they are to regenerate their societies, or protect themselves and their states from enemies within or without, or what the principal qualities of rulers on the one hand, and of citizens on the other, must be, if their states are to flourish – but something else.39 Indeed, what shook Berlin’s faith, and set him on his quest to understand and advocate pluralism, was an idea, crucial to Machiavelli’s entire social understanding, the full implications of which Machiavelli himself apparently never explored critically or philosophically. In his essay, ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, Berlin offers his judgement as to why Machiavelli has mystified and troubled so many philosophers, ethicists and political theorists, and has provoked such divergent interpretations. The reason, according to Berlin, is that Machiavelli cuts across the essential monism of Western philosophy, calling it into question at the most fundamental level. And he does this simply by placing side-by-side the familiar idealist version of Christian morality and the antiqua virtus of the classical world, and by making it clear that while each of these moral world views is rich in values and committed to specific goods and ultimate ends, he unapologetically has chosen the values and the ends of the latter, while recognizing that many people will choose the values and the ends of the former. From Machiavelli’s vantage point, first as Secretary and Second Chancellor to the Florentine Republic, as a diplomatic envoy, and over the course of a lifetime both in and out of influence in Tuscan politics, he became convinced that if one wishes to build a strong, independent and effective nation, one must nurture in its leaders and citizens the same qualities that one sees reflected in the leaders of Periclean Athens, Sparta, the kingdoms of David and Solomon, Venice, and above all the Roman republic. Machiavelli was not a historicist, as Berlin rightly observes; Machiavelli believed that it was possible in his Renaissance Italy to reproduce something like the Roman republic, or perhaps the Rome of the early principate. But he believed that if one wishes to do this, if one wants to create a vigorous, powerful and free nation, one must develop ‘certain faculties in men, of inner moral strength, magnanimity, vigour, vitality, generosity, loyalty, above all public spirit, civic sense, dedication to the security, power, glory, expansion of the patria’.40 According to Machiavelli, the ancients understood that in order to develop these qualities among their leaders and citizens it was necessary to sponsor

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dazzling shows and bloodstained sacrifices that excited men’s senses and aroused their martial prowess, and especially by the kind of legislation and education that promoted the pagan virtues. Power, magnificence, pride, austerity, pursuit of glory, vigour, discipline, antiqua virtus – this is what makes states great.41 These were clearly not the values of idealistic Christian morality, nor were these the ends, the ultimate goals, expressions of the good of Christian morality. Berlin elaborates on the quality of virtù Machiavelli advocates: In order to cure degenerate populations of their diseases, these founders of new states or churches may be compelled to have recourse to ruthless measures, force and fraud, guile, cruelty, treachery, the slaughter of the innocent, surgical measures that are needed to restore a decayed body to a condition of health. And, indeed, these qualities may be needed even after a society has been restored to health; for men are weak and foolish and perpetually liable to lapse from the standards that alone can preserve them on the required height. Hence they must be kept in proper condition by measures that will certainly offend against current morality. But if they offend against this morality, in what sense can they be said to be justified? This seems to me to be the nodal point of Machiavelli’s entire conception. … For Machiavelli the ends which he advocates are those to which he thinks wise human beings, who understand reality, will dedicate their lives. Ultimate ends in this sense, whether or not they are those of the Judeo-Christian tradition, are what is usually meant by moral values.42 What one sees, then, in Machiavelli – and this is the cause of the scandal surrounding his thought, not the idea that there is a clash between morality and political necessity43 – is a differentiation between two wholly incompatible and conflicting ideals of life, and two wholly incompatible and conflicting moralities. Here Berlin caught his first glimpse of objective pluralism. Gray comments on Berlin’s revolutionary insight into Machiavelli: Different forms of life may be animated by distinct moralities which specify discrepant virtues, or which, even if they recognize the same or similar virtues, rank them very differently. The Renaissance morality epitomized in Machiavelli, which expressed a revival of the pagan virtues of the classical world … contained conceptions of virtu and superbia which like the idea of the great-souled man in Aristotle’s Ethics are wholly distinct from, and incompatible with Christian conceptions of humility and brotherly love.44 Machiavelli believed that the ultimate ends of human life are realized in the creation, or the restoration, or the ordinary maintenance, of a strong nation.

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In a sense, Machiavelli’s morality (and despite arguments to the contrary the phrase is not an oxymoron) was the ethic of the polis, a public virtue made substantial in the lives of people dedicated heart and soul to the greatness and prosperity of their nation. The means of Machiavelli’s morality were entirely consistent with this end. His values were unabashedly pagan, the virtù of ‘fortitude in adversity, public achievement, order, discipline, happiness, strength, justice, above all assertion of one’s proper claims and the knowledge and power needed to secure their satisfaction’.45 Over and against this worldly morality, Machiavelli places Christian morality in the form in which we encounter it in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. The fact that this is not the only morality which can authentically be described as Christian, or that this synoptic text represents only one aspect of Christian ethics, or that this morality stands in very real tension with other historical streams of moral thought within Christianity and among the communities of faith which understand themselves to be Christian, seems not to have occurred to Machiavelli, nor, indeed, to Berlin. Berlin summarizes the ideals of Christian morality as ‘charity, mercy, sacrifice, love of God, forgiveness of enemies, contempt of the goods of this world, faith in the life hereafter, belief in the salvation of the individual soul as being of incomparable value’.46 These values are indeed authentically Christian, but they do not stand alone, nor are they free of the quality of incommensurability that we shall observe elsewhere. But as far as he goes, Machiavelli has seen something very crucial here. And it is essential to note that Machiavelli does not dismiss this Christian morality as, in itself and according to its own standards, worthless. He does not deny the goodness, even the ultimacy of the goodness, of Christian morality. As Berlin makes clear, Machiavelli certainly does not say that ‘humility, kindness, unworldliness, faith in God, sanctity, Christian love, unwavering truthfulness, compassion, are bad or unimportant attributes’.47 What Machiavelli says is far more radical. He is certain that the central Christian virtues, however important they may be to reaching the ends of the Christian faith, are insuperable obstacles to the building of the kind of society that he wishes to see; a society which, moreover, he assumes that it is natural for all normal men to want – the kind of community that, in his view, satisfied men’s permanent desires and interests.48 The ideals of Christian morality, Machiavelli allows, may be wise for saints, prophets and angels, but Machiavelli knows precious few saints, he sees little to respect in the one prophet (i.e. Savonarola) he has personally seen in action, and little evidence of the existence of angels in his political world. ‘To advocate ideal measures, suitable only for angels, as previous political writers seem to him too often to have done, is visionary and irresponsible and leads to ruin’.49

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It is especially important to observe that Machiavelli does not simply object to Christian morality on the grounds that it is unrealistic to believe that people can live according to its standards. It is not, in other words, the inability in practice on the part of ordinary human beings to rise to a sufficiently high level of Christian virtue (which may, indeed, be the inescapable lot of sinful men on earth) that makes it, for him, impracticable to establish, even to seek after, the good Christian state. It is the very opposite.50 In Machiavelli’s view, the polis, the community, the state, the nation that lies at the end of Christian morality, is not the kind of society he wants, because it is not the kind of society he believes can thrive in this world. In fact, according to Machiavelli, the more likely a Christian morality is to successfully create a society that embodies its idealism, the more disastrous it will prove for everyone concerned. A Christian nation is, in other words, achievable in Machiavelli’s view; but it is not desirable. The Christian faith, according to Machiavelli, breeds weak people, and therefore weak societies, easy prey to the ruthless and the strong. Christian morality crushes the public virtues and the civic spirit of a people, he believes. It makes them willing to endure humiliations without complaint. Acquisitive foreign princes and despots can all too easily conquer those states led by idealistic Christians.51 Machiavelli, in the Discourses, expands on this theme as he compares the paganism of ancient Rome to the Christian religion of his time: [T]he old religion [Roman paganism] did not beatify men unless they were replete with worldly glory: army commanders, for instance, and rulers of republics. Our religion [i.e. Christianity] has glorified humble and contemplative men, rather than men of action. It has assigned as man’s highest good humility, abnegation, and contempt for mundane things, whereas the other identified it with magnanimity, bodily strength, and everything else that conduces to make men very bold. And, if our religion demands that in you there be strength, what it asks for is strength to suffer rather than strength to do bold things. This pattern of life, therefore, appears to have made the world weak, and to have handed it over as a prey to the wicked, who run it successfully and securely since they are well aware that the generality of men, with paradise for their goal, consider how best to bear, rather than how best to avenge, their injuries.52 Machiavelli’s criticism falls especially heavily upon those who have interpreted Christian religion in terms of quietism rather than in terms of action, or as Berlin says, ‘in terms of laissez faire, not in terms of virtù’.53 In some respects his critique of the Christianity of his day, under the control of

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Rome, is similar to that of the Protestants who were just then appearing on the historical horizon. Machiavelli died in 1527, and, though Berlin sees no evidence that the rumblings of the Protestant Reformation had reached his ears, one might find it difficult to believe that he was wholly unaware of matters and views which had already drawn the attention of popes and kings. However this may be, though Machiavelli is critical of the corruption of the papacy and the effect this corruption had on the church, his critique of Christian faith is not primarily a critique of Christian faith as the product of abuse. Indeed, he takes direct aim at Christian faith in its most ideal state. He does not judge Christianity for the fruits of its failure, but for the consequences of its success. Berlin observes that Machiavelli only modifies his judgement of Christianity at two points, though they are important qualifications. Machiavelli believed, and we have already said as much, that Christianity’s effect on society was to encourage ozio, a complacency, a passivity and moral sloth that prefers to avoid conflict and would rather suffer the violation of strong but evil people than to fight for the sake of the society, or the state. There is nothing for which Machiavelli feels greater contempt than the spirit of ozio, what Berlin describes as ‘quietism and indolence’, but which also conveys a combination of cowardice and a love for idleness.54 If Christianity encourages such a public vice, one cannot expect Machiavelli to respect it. But Machiavelli also observes that there is, in fact, nothing in Christianity itself which actually forbids public virtue. Indeed, Christian morality is far from uniform, and the morality attributed to Christianity by Machiavelli is only one form, or one aspect, among a very complex range of ethical options. While there are certainly idealist versions of Christian morality, and deontological expressions of this idealism, there are other very different understandings, both in the earliest Christian texts and throughout the history of the church. Machiavelli’s observations of Christian morality, and Christianity’s tendency to encourage ‘quietism and indolence’, to use Berlin’s phrase, is descriptive of what some have called the ‘Jesus ethic’, of certain monastic codes, and of some Anabaptist approaches to moral understanding, for instance. It is clear, however, that among many other streams of Christian faith, different from but no less rigorous than the idealist – not least among the magisterial reformers of the sixteenth century, such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, and in more recent years theologians such as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, H. Richard Niebuhr, and among Latin American theologians of liberation, like Gustavo Gutiérrez – Christian morality has been variously understood and practiced in ways that hold in irreducible tension the vocation of obedience to the word of God, the critical and unpredictable character of the moment of decision, and the political commitment of those who are as concerned about the creation and maintenance of a society, even a state, as with the moral responsibility of the individual Christian. Machiavelli also concedes that if Christian faith and morality had been practiced faithfully by all the princes of Christendom, then ‘Christian states

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and republics would be more united, much more happy than they are’. Always the realist, however, Machiavelli does not wistfully linger over the wish that the princes had been better Christians. The decadence of princes, indeed, the decadence of the church of Rome itself, contributed to the insecurity and impiety of Italy.55 Machiavelli’s concern was always with political realities. Christianity might perhaps have historically developed in ways more supportive of the vigorous states Machiavelli championed. Christianity might perhaps have taken a form more compatible with and productive of the virtues Machiavelli treasured. As it was, ‘Christians as he knew them in history and his own experience, that is, men who in their practice actually follow Christian precepts, are good men, but if they govern states in the light of such principles, they lead them to destruction’. Berlin continues, summarizing Machiavelli’s theme: ‘One can save one’s soul, or one can found or maintain or serve a great and glorious state; but not always both at once’.56 Berlin finds in Machiavelli a man at peace with himself and at peace with the choice he has made between two rival systems of morality.57 Machiavelli seems neither torn by the choice he has made, nor adrift from moral consciousness. He does not simply advocate unscrupulous behavior, as some mistakenly believe, perhaps hoping that they can excuse their own by invoking his name. Machiavelli has, rather, found a moral world view that he believes is worthy of the total investment of his life. He does not condemn those who have chosen the way of idealistic Christian morality. But he does ask such people to avoid civil leadership for the sake of society and for the sake of the salvation of their own individual souls. ‘But’, Berlin writes, ‘if a man chooses, as Machiavelli himself has done’, the course of political leadership and allegiance to the antiqua virtus, ‘then he must suppress his private qualms, if he has any, for it is certain that those who are too squeamish during the remaking of a society, or even during its pursuit and maintenance of its power and glory, will go to the wall’.58 Machiavelli may have been unaware of the potentially revolutionary implications of his account of these two rival moralities. But Berlin is not unaware. He discerns that Machiavelli has in effect shattered the conventional monistic ‘idea of the world and of human society as a single intelligible structure’ which ‘is at the root of all the many various versions of natural law’.59 If Machiavelli is correct, Berlin writes, ‘this tradition – the central current of western thought – is fallacious’.60 Virtually no one in Western thought had imagined, never mind suggested, that there might exist ends – ends in themselves in terms of which alone everything else was justified – which were equally ultimate, but incompatible with one another, [and] that there might exist no single universal overarching standard that would enable a man to choose rationally between them.61

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The principal question which emerges from Berlin’s account of Machiavelli, and the question which lies at the heart of the inability of many to understand and reconcile Machiavelli’s thought to their own sense of rightness, is this: What would it mean for us to make our choice not between a good and an evil both occupying places on a single universal, gradable moral scale, but instead to make our choice ‘between two incommensurable systems’ of morality, and that we must make this choice ‘without the aid of an infallible measuring rod which certified one form of life as being superior to all others’?62 Machiavelli, according to Berlin, ‘unintentionally, almost casually, uncovered’ this fact, this insoluble moral dilemma, that not all ultimate values are necessarily compatible with one another – that there might be a conceptual … and not merely a material obstacle to the notion of the single ultimate solution which, if it were only realised, would establish the perfect society.63 This is Machiavelli’s ‘cardinal achievement’, writes Berlin, and it stems from his de facto recognition that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other, that entire systems of values may come into collision without possibility of rational arbitration, and that not merely in exceptional circumstances as a result of accident or error … but (this was surely new) as part of the normal human situation.64 There is another aspect of Machiavelli’s pluralism, which challenges the philosophia perennis at the point of its inability to imagine a good society, which is also a conflicted society. Though Berlin does not explicitly explore this aspect of Machiavelli’s thought (and, if Henry Hardy is correct, might not entirely have agreed with Machiavelli at this point), I believe Machiavelli’s conception of social conflict supports Berlin’s own critique of utopias.65 Machiavelli, in contrast to the classical representatives of Western political thought, such as Plato and Aristotle, who, as we have already seen, viewed the ideal state as static and conflict-free, understands conflict as contributory to the strength, the vitality, the political health, and ultimately the stability of a society. Bernard Crick writes: Until Machiavelli every writer on politics had assumed that states cohere because of some moral unity: to Aristotle the polis was part of nature and existed for the purpose of unfolding the goodness potential in man; this is what Cicero means by saying that a ‘consensus juris’ is a necessary condition for republican rule; and it is at the heart of the Thomist teaching on natural law. Even if Augustine can challenge Cicero and argue that this consensus is not one relating to right and justice, but solely to interest, self-love and pride – ‘states cohere like bands of robbers’, yet this self-interest must still be all of one piece: if

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the thieves fall to quarrelling among themselves, their society is lost; they must hang together or they will hang separately. Even the realism of Augustine, however, would have strained at Machiavelli’s astonishing contentions that discord can actually strengthen a state and that a republic consists of at least two different ‘vivere’, ways-of-life or communities, not one.66 Machiavelli advances his interpretation of social conflict in the course of complaining about the critics of republican Rome who find fault in its political tumults and social tensions. These critics, he writes, ‘should reflect that the excellent results which this republic obtained could have been brought about only by excellent causes’.67 If it was conflict in the republic, in the form of a continual struggle between social classes, which led Rome to create tribunes, then conflict deserves praise, because the conflict contributed to the strength of the nation, and admitted a greater degree of liberty among its citizens; indeed, this conflict gave the general populace a larger stake in the leadership of the state.68 Machiavelli’s reflections raise the possibility that the existence of social conflict – with reference to competing interests, contrasting understandings of the good, and appropriate goals of the society – may be one of a society’s greatest potential strengths. This is why when dictators rise to power their first act frequently is to eliminate actual and potential countervailing elements in society such as political opponents and the press. Totalitarianism is, in this sense, the ultimate triumph of univocality and uniformity over discord and diversity. Certainly there are forms of conflict that are simply violent and destructive, that contribute not one whit to the prosperity and the well-being of a society. But conflict, vigorous and sometimes frightening, can also be evidence of social health rather than disease. We shall explore the implications of this aspect of pluralism in another context when we examine the roles conflict plays in communities of faith, but it is important to note at this point that Machiavelli provides a pluralistic reframing of the notion of the good when he discerns the positive value of social conflict. This, again, is generally consistent with Berlin’s account of Machiavelli, though Berlin himself was undoubtedly uneasy with the implications of at least certain forms of social conflict. For Berlin, while much of Machiavelli’s pluralism must be drawn implicitly from his choice of the antiqua virtus over idealistic Christian morality, and is not explicitly explored by the Renaissance thinker, nevertheless Machiavelli is (to use Gray’s phrase) ‘the modern progenitor of the idea that there may be, and indeed are, uncombinable and incommensurable values, virtues, moralities’,69 and that the existence of conflicting goods is a point of the strength, not of the weakness, of a society. Berlin must, however, move well beyond this implied doctrine in Machiavelli in order to begin to construct a positive conception of cultural pluralism. This he begins to do in his engagement with Giambattista Vico.

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Giambattista Vico It is perhaps significant that late in life, Berlin mentions Vico first in accounting for his views on pluralism.70 Whatever inspiration he drew from Machiavelli with regard to the incommensurability of systems of moral values, it was in Vico that Berlin first discovered those elements that would contribute to a genuinely positive and constructive concept of cultural pluralism. Berlin writes: What first shook me was my discovery of the works of the eighteenthcentury Italian thinker Giambattista Vico. He was the first philosopher, in my view, to have conceived the idea of cultures. Vico wanted to understand the nature of historical knowledge, of history itself: It was all very well to lean on the natural sciences as far as the external world was concerned, but all they could provide us with was an account of the behavior of rocks or tables or stars or molecules. In thinking about the past, we go beyond behavior; we wish to understand how human beings lived, and that means understanding their motives, their fears and hopes and ambitions and loves and hatreds – to whom they prayed, how they expressed themselves in poetry, in art, in religion. We are able to do this because we are ourselves human, and understand our own inner life in these terms.71 Berlin’s account of Vico concentrates on two closely related aspects of Vico’s thought: his cultural pluralism grounded in a profound sense of historicity, and his epistemology.72 Vico’s cultural pluralism While the philosophia perennis advanced the idea that there is an essentially ideal culture, a perfect society, toward which every human society in every age and place should strive, that this ideal society has a single set of values, purposes, aspirations and ends, and that every society, if it is to be a moral society, must order its existence, as Berlin observes, according to these ‘standards of excellence’ which are ‘universal, and timeless, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus’,73 Vico believed that history marks ‘a succession of human cultures’, each of which has ‘its own vision of reality, of the world in which it lived, and of itself and of its relations to its own past, to nature, to what it strove for’.74 A particular culture, in other words, is a social construct, the unique product of a particular people, through which they express their sense of who they are and what they care about in the language or languages they inherit, create, and shape through their worship of God, by the things they believe in, value, and hope for, the laws they make, the legends and myths they hold sacred, and the social institutions which are handed on to them, and are further formed and transformed by them as they hand these institutions on to others. What is most important, what is

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treasured and sacred, in one culture in a particular place at a particular time, may not be sacred to, valued by, or as important in another culture in another place at another time. This conception of human history which takes in the ‘panorama of a variety of cultures, the pursuit of different, and sometimes incompatible, ways of life, ideals, standards of value’, has emerged as Vico’s great contribution to Western thought, though it was largely ignored in his own time.75 And, although the religious aspect of Vico’s thought is well beyond Berlin’s interest, Vico, himself a deeply devoted Catholic, held his views on cultural pluralism not in spite of but precisely because of his belief in God – not a God revealed in private illumination or through individualistic and intellectualized reflection, but God as God reveals himself, Vico writes, ‘in public moral institutions or civil customs, by which the nations have come into being and maintain themselves in the world’.76 When, therefore, Vico studies the age of heroic poetry in Greece, for instance, he does so because he is convinced that God, the Creator, to some extent has made himself known in the historical particularity of nations and through their own creation of the various aspects of their diverse cultures. Vico’s theology, thus, giving priority to the plural over the singular, resists the deistic monism which emerged in the wake of rationalism. Vico, in fact, envisions his entire history of human ideas, to use his own tantalizing phrase, as ‘a rational civil theology of divine providence’.77 God works through the vast diversity of particular human cultures, each of which has its own values, goods and ends, toward God’s own ends. Whether humanity regarded God’s providence in terms of Jovian mythologies, or esoteric philosophy, it was the same God at work in a variety of ways. According to Max Harold Fisch, Vico’s ‘rational civil theology’ might be understood best ‘as a hypothesis to account for what [Wilhelm Max] Wundt later called “the heterogony of ends”; that is, for the uniform ways in which, while consciously pursuing their particular ends, men have unconsciously served wider ends’.78 Thus Vico is able to recognize the real and extraordinary diversity of societies, accounting for this cultural pluralism in a single teleological frame. Fisch continues, observing that Vico’s understanding of divine providence ‘may be compared to Mandeville’s earlier “private vices, public benefits”, with Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, and with Hegel’s “cunning of reason” ’. It is even possible, Fisch writes, that Vico actually ‘had Mandeville in mind when he said that the “public virtue” of the heroic Romans was nothing but a good use which providence made of their “grievous, ugly and cruel private vices” ’.79 Vico works out his understanding of cultural pluralism in his most mature work, Principi di scienza nuova (The New Science), where he contrasts the age of heroic poetry, the world of Homer, with other, later ages, such as the age of philosophical reflection in the Greece of Plato and Aristotle.80 ‘Imagination’, writes Vico, ‘is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak’.81 So ‘in the world’s childhood men were by nature

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sublime poets’.82 While lacking in conceptual skills, Homer is ‘unrivaled in creating poetic characters, the greatest of which are so discordant with this civil human nature of ours, yet perfectly decorous in relation to the punctilious heroic nature’.83 Homer’s art is inseparable from, indeed, is preeminently the expression of, his culture, the heroes of which were in the highest degree gross and wild … very limited in understanding but endowed with the vastest imaginations and the most violent passions … boorish, crude, harsh, wild, proud, difficult, and obstinate in their resolves, and at the same time easily diverted when confronted with new and contrary objects.84 As Berlin observes, Achilles, the ideal hero of the age of heroes, depicted by Homer as ‘a blameless warrior’, ‘is cruel, violent, vindictive, concerned only with his own feelings’.85 We may thrill to the power of Homer’s portrayal of his heroes, stand in wonder at their strength, their audacity and unfettered passion, at a vitality that leaps from the page and makes our greatest contemporary heroes seem pale by comparison; and, at the same time, we may well shudder in terror and dread at the idea of the Homeric heroes becoming our next-door neighbors. For that to be possible, however, as Vico understands all too well, we would have to live in a very different neighborhood altogether. The pride and appetites of Homer’s heroes, ‘the boiling fervor of their wrath’ and the boyish ‘frivolity of their minds’,86 the ‘frightfulness of the Homeric battles and deaths’,87 reflect their culture’s popular ideals so perfectly that one cannot imagine a poet of Homer’s imaginative force being produced in a kinder, gentler, more reasonable age. Nor can our contemporary environment (nor the Greece of Aristotle, nor Vico’s Italy, etc.) sustain such heroes. This, of course, is precisely Vico’s point. Vico writes of Homer: ‘these sentences, comparisons, and descriptions could not have been the natural product of a calm, cultivated, and gentle philosopher’.88 And even if the Homeric poems contained the most sublime mysteries of esoteric wisdom [and according to Vico any esoteric wisdom we find in Homer was a later corruption of the original text] … the form in which they are expressed could not have been conceived by a straightforward, orderly, and serious mind such as befits a philosopher.89 It is impossible, Vico believes, for a person to be a sublime poet, a poet of the heroic age such as Homer, and also a sublime metaphysical philosopher, because ‘metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses; metaphysics soars up to universals and the poetic faculty must plunge deep into particulars’.90 Indeed, according to Vico, Homer does not think in terms of universal concepts, of ‘abstract universals’, at all, but in terms of ‘imaginative universals’.91 That is,

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Homer’s poetic characters were themselves the embodiment of all those particular qualities which the people of his culture attached to what later would be called a genius. For instance, Achilles does not simply exemplify courage; Achilles is courage; Achilles embodies for the people of Homer’s age heroic valor. He was the embodiment of ‘all the feelings and customs arising from … [the popular notion of heroic valor], such as those of quick temper, punctiliousness, wrathfulness, implacability, violence, the arrogation of all right to might’.92 Homer’s poetry, his portrayal of the heroic character striding across the blood-soaked turf of fields of battle and raging against the gods, is inseparable from the popular imagination because the people are the wellspring of his portrayal. The people from whom Homer arises and to whom Homer speaks are the origin of Homer’s heroes. Homer gives poetic voice to the people’s imagination.93 However, Berlin observes, reflecting Vico’s own judgement: ‘Once true concepts – abstract universals – are created by civilised reason and not the imagination of an entire society, this kind of sublimity comes to an end’.94 The poetic imagination of Homer’s heroic age, the qualities of imagination for which the heroes in their emotional extremes and moral extravagances were ideals, has vanished forever from the earth. This attribute of heroic courage, or the quality of heroic audacity, common enough to the popular mind in Homer’s time and place, is now lost. We cannot produce this kind of poetry. But Homer’s poetry, so profoundly linked to his own heroic age, may just be accessible to us, Berlin writes, though ‘only by understanding the “wild, crude, and terrible” world from which it springs’, and ‘only if we abandon the idea of the artistic superiority of our own “magnificent times” ’.95 Vico’s statement, which Berlin quotes in part, bears quotation in full: 122 It is another property of the human mind that whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand.

123 This axiom points to the inexhaustible source of all the errors about the principles of humanity that have been adopted by entire nations and by all the scholars. For when the former began to take notice of them and the latter to investigate them, it was on the basis of their own enlightened, cultivated, and magnificent times that they judged the origins of humanity, which must nevertheless by the nature of things have been small, crude, and quite obscure.96 Beyond merely warning of the danger of our analogical thinking dissolving into anachronism, a warning no less pertinent for theologians than for social anthropologists and moral philosophers, Vico means to criticize in this passage what Berlin calls ‘one of the dominant aesthetic theories’ of Vico’s

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time, the view that there is some ‘timeless and objective criteria of excellence in the arts, in morality, in every other normative sphere’, according to which one may subject the cultural products of various societies.97 Vico criticizes the self-deception and cultural chauvinism of the supposedly objective critic, for instance, of Voltaire, who equated, Berlin writes, the ‘timeless and objective criteria of excellence’ with the fashionable tastes and aesthetics and moral judgements of his own age and culture. Voltaire compounds this selfdeception by assuming that these ‘enlightened’ values and ideals are always and everywhere identical.98 There seems to be another assumption lurking in this form of cultural chauvinism, that if persons of the later enlightened age wished to do so, they could produce the poetry, the arts and the ethics of the other more primitive cultures. They refrain from doing so simply because they have no such desire. This is nonsense, according to Vico. By contrast, Vico recognizes the historical embeddedness of a particular culture and its products. Berlin explains, elaborating on Vico, that ‘great creative masterpieces’ of the Homeric Greeks ‘belong to them’, and properly to no one else; once their ‘vision of the world changes, the possibility of that type of creation disappears also. We, for our part, have our sciences, our thinkers, our poets, but there is no ladder of ascent from the ancients to the moderns’.99 Myths are not, as certain Enlightenment thinkers liked to believe, merely ‘false statements about reality corrected by later rational criticism’.100 Certain things can only be expressed in terms of myths, and myths cannot be synthesized artificially. They emerge naturally, organically, from a culture that sees reality in ways fundamentally different from a culture steeped in the values and aspirations of the Enlightenment. Much the same can be said of poetry. Poetry is not a ‘mere embellishment of what could equally well be stated in ordinary prose’.101 There is that about being human which can be said in no other way but in poetry. The various cultural products of the age of heroic poetry ‘embody a vision of the world’, values, aspirations, ends, as authentic as that of Greek philosophy, or Roman law, or the poetry and culture of our own enlightened age – earlier, cruder, remote from us, but with its own voice, … belonging uniquely to its own culture, and with a sublimity which cannot be reproduced by a later, more sophisticated culture.102 As Berlin elaborates in another essay: For Vico there is no true progress in the arts; the genius of one age cannot be compared with that of another. He would have thought it idle to ask whether Sophocles is not a better poet than Virgil or Virgil to Racine. Each culture creates masterpieces that belong to it and it alone, and when it is over one can admire its triumphs or deplore its vices: but they are no more; nothing can restore them. If this is so, it follows that

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the very notion of a perfect society, in which all the excellences of all cultures will harmoniously coalesce, does not make sense. One virtue may turn out to be incompatible with another. The uncombinable remains uncombinable. The virtues of the Homeric heroes are not the virtues of the age of Plato and Aristotle in the name of which they attacked the morality of the Homeric poems; nor are the virtues of fifth-century Athens, for all that Voltaire thought otherwise, similar to those of Renaissance Florence or the Court of Versailles. There is both loss and gain in the passing from one stage of civilisation to another, but, whatever the gain, what is lost is lost for ever and will not be restored in some earthly paradise.103 Not only is there real and irretrievable loss in Vico’s cultural historicism, there is no place outside of history and human culture where one can stand from which to judge the superiority of one age over another, of ‘Racine or Addison to Milton or Shakespeare or Homer’.104 All humanity and all human creations exist within the matrices of particular historical moments. The art which is the perfect expression of Homeric Greece, remains beyond the reach of Dante’s Tuscany, and vice-versa. There are, in other words, very different, and even contradictory perfections, very different and sometimes contradictory values, goods, ideals and ends emerging from very different societies in different times and places. Thus, as Berlin observes, again moving from aesthetic reflection to his critique of utopian thought: ‘The notion of a perfect society in which all that men have striven for finds total fulfilment is consequently perceived to be incoherent, at any rate in terrestrial terms’.105 Berlin observes that Vico’s unsystematic works deal with many other matters, but the achievement above all others for which he should be remembered and celebrated is his remarkable apologia for a cultural pluralism grounded in history and his opposition to the ‘idea that there is one and only one structure of reality which the enlightened philosopher can see as it truly is, and which he can (at least in principle) describe in logically perfect language’.106 Vico’s epistemology Berlin’s analysis of Vico’s conception of knowledge builds on his account of Vico’s cultural pluralism; and, though the truth of Berlin’s observation that Vico did not possess sufficient talent to his genius is nowhere more apparent than in his epistemology, Vico’s essential insights remain fruitful. Vico’s theory of knowledge can be understood, from a critical perspective, as a rejection of the Cartesian doctrine that mathematics represents the methodological path to the discovery of the true nature of reality. Berlin writes, commenting on Vico, that mathematics does not, as Descartes and his followers maintained, ‘correspond to an objective structure of reality’; mathematics is ‘a method and not a body of truths; with its help we could plot

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regularities – the occurrence of phenomena in the external world – but not discover why they occurred as they did, or to what end’.107 In other words, Berlin writes, according to Vico, mathematics is not the doorway to the discovery of an objective structure, the eternal and most general characteristics of the real world, but rather invention: invention of a symbolic system which men can logically guarantee only because men have made it themselves, irrefutable only because it is a figment of man’s own creative intellect: ‘geometrica demonstramus, quia facimus; si physica demonstrare possemus, facermus’.108 Vico’s criticism of Descartes is grounded in his constructive account of two kinds of knowledge: coscienza (consciousness or conscience, which ‘has for its object il certo, the certain’,109) and scienza (‘knowledge or science’, which ‘has for its object il vero, the true’110). This distinction is the logical development of Vico’s premise that ‘in God knowledge and creation are one and the same thing’.111 One can only claim knowledge, scienza, a true understanding of the rationale, the purpose and meaning, the why, in other words, of one’s own creation. Scienza, as Berlin explains, is ‘knowledge per caussus, which can give complete truth, truth one can have only of what one has made – for example, of logical, mathematical, poetical creations’.112 By contrast, coscienza is ‘the knowledge of the “outside” observer of the external world – nature, men, things, motus, conatus, and so on’.113 Berlin observes that Vico’s thought is influenced here ‘by Bacon and Hobbes, by experimentalism, the possibility of understanding processes and objects that we can to some degree reproduce artificially in the laboratory, and perhaps also by the Neapolitan empiricists of the seventeenth century’.114 Vico writes: But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world, which, since men had made it, men could come to know.115 The scienza of the natural world is God’s alone because God alone created the natural world. God understands God’s creation, its processes and inner workings, intimately because God made it. Human beings, however, ‘do not know the natural processes per caussas’, and we cannot know natural creation in terms of scienza, but only coscienza, because we are not the

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creators of the natural world. Therefore, the inner workings of nature are not accessible to us as a form of verum, but only of certum.116 ‘But’, as Fisch observes, scienza of the world of nations, the civil world, the world of human institutions, is possible for men, because men have made it, and its principles or causes ‘are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind’.117 Contrary to Descartes, whose disdain for history, language and culture is notorious, Vico directs our attention to the world of human history, language and culture as that which is properly the realm of human scienza. And he does this principally through what Berlin calls his ‘boldest contribution’ to Western thought, ‘the concept of “philology”, anthropological historicism’, a scienza of the human mind which is also and at the same time a scienza of the history of the mind’s development. Vico displaces the Platonic and Cartesian ideas that knowledge consists of what Berlin describes as ‘a static network of eternal, universal, clear truths’, with an understanding of knowledge as ‘a social process’, and that ‘this process is traceable through (indeed, is in a sense identical with) the evolution of symbols – words, gestures, pictures, and their altering patterns, functions, structures and uses’.118 The knowledge of human history, languages, and cultures is, Vico says, ‘more real than [Geometry’s] points, lines, surfaces, and figures’, which are figments of the mathematician’s mind.119 Humanity makes history. Humanity creates languages. Humanity constructs cultures. Our attempts to understand these human creations are attempts to make sense of ourselves. And we can understand these human creations, Vico believes, even when the histories, languages and cultures, the customs, institutions and habits, are very foreign to our own experience. As we have already observed, Homer’s world was a brutal world, heroic, but a world that valued very different things from the world of a Renaissance humanist like Erasmus. Yet, despite the profound and contradictory values apparent in these two cultural worlds, it is possible for an Erasmus to recognize the humanity of a Homer and to imagine a human being living a human life and valuing the things Homer valued. This is, Berlin tells us, the crucial difference between Vico’s pluralism and the relativism of Oswald Spengler or Edward Alexander Westermarck. Berlin writes: Vico did not suppose that men are encapsulated within their own epoch or culture, insulated in a box without windows and consequently incapable of understanding other societies and periods whose values may be widely different from theirs and which they may find strange and repellent. His deepest belief was that what men have made, other men can understand. It may take an immense amount of painful effort to

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Isaiah Berlin decipher the meaning of conduct or language different from our own. Nevertheless, according to Vico, if anything is meant by the term ‘human’, there must be enough that is common to all such beings for it to be possible, by a sufficient effort of imagination, to grasp what the world must have looked like to creatures, remote in time or space, who practised such rites, and used such words, and created such works of art as the natural means of self-expression involved in the attempt to understand and interpret their worlds to themselves.120

This is the touchstone of Vico’s cultural pluralism: ‘[W]hat men have made, other men can understand’. Vico extends the indissoluble link of creation and knowledge across cultures. And in doing so he introduces into the intellectual history of humanity ‘a species of knowing not previously clearly discriminated’,121 writes Berlin, an approach to understanding similar to that which became common among ‘most modern social anthropologists’.122 Vico, without minimizing the real differences between cultures (indeed by emphasizing these very differences), seeks imaginatively to enter into cultural worlds far removed from his own, attempting to see those worlds through the eyes of their inhabitants. Vico believes this is possible. Vico believes that even radically different human cultures are ultimately understandable in their own terms, because both we and the creators of these different cultures are human, and we can imagine being human in the way that they are human – whether we find their way repulsive or attractive, terrible or wonderful. There are many gaps in Vico’s thought, as Berlin observes. He ‘is trying to say too much, and his notions are often mere sketches, inchoate, ill-formed. … he is at times carried away by the flood of disorganised ideas’.123 His thought is especially incoherent at the point at which his own faith relates to his historicism and cultural pluralism. ‘What, if any’, Berlin writes, is the relation of Vico’s undoubted Christian faith, his Catholic orthodoxy, to his anthropological, linguistic, historical naturalism, or of his teleology to his belief that to each order of culture belong its own peculiar modes of consciousness, not necessarily superior or inferior to its predecessors or successors?124 This is an extremely important question because, for Berlin, it is impossible to conceive of a thoroughgoing pluralism if one maintains a strong teleological conception of history. Yet, for Vico, teleology and a distinct and vigorous pluralism coexist. Fisch observes that at some points Vico seems to want to place his ‘Hebrew-Christian view of history’, and the accompanying assumption that many of the ‘basic [Hebrew-Christian] institutions, both sacred and secular, were established by God or Christ’, in a sort of anthropological storm-free zone, thus allowing what we might term his understanding of sacred history to remain virtually untouched by his critical

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belief that other human cultures and institutions, like those of ancient Greece and Rome, are merely human products.125 At other times, however, Vico draws parallels between Hebrew and pagan history, and the ‘distinction [between secular and sacred histories] loses importance, if it does not quite disappear, in [Vico’s] second cycle of ages in Christian Europe’.126 Despite these and other limitations in Vico’s thought, his view that cultures are irreducibly and often irreconcilably plural, and that persons in one culture can come to a real and profound understanding of persons in another culture, are of crucial significance. Vico believes that one can, through the exercise of imaginative insight, what he terms fantasia, ‘enter into’ or ‘descend to’ the experience of others in different cultures.127 Berlin sees in Vico’s epistemological fantasia a correspondence to what later German historicist thinkers described when they spoke of Verstehen (knowledge as understanding, ‘empathetic insight, intuitive sympathy, historical Einfühlung, and the like’128) in contrast to Wissen (the knowledge of the natural sciences).129 We are capable of the former kind of knowledge with regard to human societies, because as products of and producers of our own societies we are capable of imaginatively entering into and understanding other such societies, while, by contrast, we ‘cannot enter into the hopes and fears of bees and beavers’.130 According to Berlin, Vico was the first to make this distinction, and consequently he ‘uncovered a sense of knowing which is basic to all humane studies’.131 According to Vico, our lives and activities collectively and individually are expressions of our attempts to survive, satisfy our desires, understand each other and the past out of which we emerge. A utilitarian interpretation of the most essential human activities is misleading. They are, in the first place, purely expressive; to sing, to dance, to worship, to speak, to fight, and the institutions which embody these activities, comprise a vision of the world. Language, religious rites, myths, laws, social, religious, juridical institutions, are forms of self-expression, of wishing to convey what one is and strives for; they obey intelligible patterns, and for that reason it is possible to reconstruct the life of other societies, even those remote in time and place and utterly primitive, by asking oneself what kind of framework of human ideas, feelings, acts could have generated the poetry, the monuments, the mythology which were their natural expression.132 Vico’s concept of knowledge, according to Berlin, is in the final analysis neither a form of ‘knowing that’ or ‘knowing how’, but ‘is the sort of knowing which participants in an activity claim to possess as against mere observers’.133 But it is never simply reducible to the kind of participant knowledge, which falls back into skill acquisition, ‘knowing how-to’. It is, rather, Berlin continues, ‘knowledge by “direct acquaintance” with my “inner” states or by sympathetic insight into those of others, which may be

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obtained by a high degree of imaginative power’.134 But the importance of the role Vico gives to human imagination ‘must not blind us – and did not blind him – to the necessity for verification’.135 If we wish to resurrect the past or to encounter another culture in something approaching its own terms, we must submit our evidence and our imaginations to careful, rigorous critical examination. Berlin asks: Did not the great classical scholar, Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellendorff, tell us … that the dead cannot speak until they have drunk blood? But since it is our blood that we offer them it is with our voices that they talk to us, and in our words, not theirs. We must always be on our guards. It is always possible that ‘our claim to understand them and their worlds’ is illusory, a mere projection of our world onto theirs.136 But when critical rigor is combined with fantasia it is possible for us to bring the past to life, to hear the voices of those distant or long dead, to conjecture ‘their experience, their forms of expression, their values, outlook, aims, ways of living’, and in so doing to gain a better understanding of who we are, what we value and why we live the way we do.137 One who possesses this quality of historical or cultural knowledge engages with the past or another culture not merely in order to collect a set of facts or arguments or ideas, but in order to construct an inhabitable world, a world in which we can imagine ourselves living.138 John Gray has observed that, following Vico, Berlin ‘affirms that, when we study history, we are studying things that agents like ourselves have done and made; and the method appropriate to such study is one of imaginative empathy and reconstruction, not of nomological explanation’.139 Anyone who has read even a small proportion of Berlin’s literary corpus will recognize Berlin’s commonality with Vico in the manner in which he sympathetically and sensitively enters into the lives and historical moments of his subjects, seeking to understand what it meant for them to be human where and when they lived. Berlin is neither a romantic nor an idealist. He makes it clear that sharing a common humanity with those who have committed acts of cruelty and ruthless violence, and understanding something of who they were and why they thought and acted as they did, does not mean that he will not judge their actions as anything less than morally reprehensible. But it is precisely the fact that he shares humanity with people of very different cultures in very different times which makes it possible and necessary for him to engage them as they are, thinking and valuing and acting as they do, while remaining who he is in his own time and place, and as a subject of the moral context of his own culture. Berlin’s cultural pluralism, as we shall see, is more deeply indebted to Johann Georg Hamann and, especially, to Johann Gottfreid Herder, than to Vico. Yet Vico remained the primary touchstone for Berlin’s thought because he was the neglected genius who first conceived the idea that real questions and

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answers, values and aspirations in one culture might differ fundamentally from those in another.

Johann Georg Hamann One would have a hard time imagining a less likely intellectual hero for Isaiah Berlin than J. G. Hamann.140 Hamann’s mature writings are deliberately obscure and cryptic. His literary style is at times as inelegant as one can imagine. He seemed to take perverse delight in the fact that his German is virtually impenetrable.141 He was, in Berlin’s estimation, a fanatic, though this evaluation is not generally shared among Christian theologians, one of whom describes Hamann as ‘a modern Christian apologist of the first order, comparable in stature to Pascal and Kierkegaard’.142 Hamann could be a strident, and perhaps not always fair, critic of the intellectual work of others, particularly of his friend Immanuel Kant. For a thinker like Berlin whose humble agnosticism, lucid literary style, generosity and fairness to other thinkers, have been frequently celebrated, Hamann makes an odd intellectual hero indeed. And yet Berlin finds much in Hamann to admire and appreciate, and it is to this philosopher that Berlin addresses himself in some of his finest essays, as well as in a book-length treatment.143 Berlin writes, ‘If Vico wished to shake the pillars on which the Enlightenment of his times rested, the Königsberg theologian and philosopher, J. G. Hamann, wished to smash them’.144 Hamann’s eventual opposition to the Enlightenment, however, was not apparent in his early career. Until 1756, Hamann remained a fairly conventional proponent of the Enlightenment. Born in a city at the heart of pietistic movement where Kant’s pastor, Franz Albert Schultz, exercised significant influence, pietism seems to have played little or no role in Hamann’s intellectual development. Indeed, one student of Hamann’s work observes that ‘[m]ost of Hamann’s piety after he left home was in the form of window-dressing in letters for his parents’.145 After a succession of tutorial positions and while working for the business concern belonging to the Berens, a family of merchants in Riga, Latvia, Hamann went to London, where he underwent a profound religious experience, a conversion that represented the end of his career as a servant of the Enlightenment. Walter Lowrie, in his account of Hamann’s conversion, says that Hamann ‘discovered that self-knowledge is a descent into hell – he spoke frequently of die Höllenfahrt der Selbsterkenntnis – in which he beheld not only human depravity but the impotence of human wisdom’.146 Scholars have speculated on the unfolding of Hamann’s crisis of faith, the books he read, including the Bible, the letters he wrote, even his sexuality. It is very difficult to gain a clear understanding of the various contributing factors and the step-by-step development of this spiritual crisis. What remains clear are the consequences of his conversion. He emerged from this experience both religiously and intellectually changed, at least with reference to his

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pro-Enlightenment posture. In Hamann’s ‘Confession’, reflecting on his experience in London, he writes in characteristically Lutheran style: The last fruit of all world-wisdom is the recognition of human ignorance and weakness. This cornerstone is also the millstone which grinds to powder all men’s sophistries. So our reason is just what St. Paul calls the law – and the law of reason is holy, just and good. But is it given to make us wiser? No more than the law was given the Jews to make them righteous, but rather to convince us of the opposite, namely how unreasonable our reason is, and that our errors must increase because of it, as sin increased because of the law.147 So much for the optimistic rationalism, the worldly wisdom, of certain strands of the Enlightenment. This formerly rather conventional Enlightenment thinker, who had not long before planned to translate sections of the French Encyclopedia for a German audience, now renounced the Age of Reason altogether. Berlin believes that it was Hamann’s youthful engagement with the Enlightenment, not his rejection of it, that was uncharacteristic of him. If this is true, Lowrie’s evocation of the prodigal’s return with reference to Hamann’s conversion is apt. Like the prodigal son of Luke’s Gospel, Hamann apparently, if Berlin is correct, ‘came to himself’. He was converted essentially to the Lutheran theology of his upbringing, though of a profoundly mystical variety in which the Reisekarte of the Israelites (their vast spiritual and national history) became his own Lebenslauf (by which he mapped the landscape of his own individual Christian pilgrimage).148 While Kant and other Königsberg friends hoped that Hamann would eventually come round to their way of thinking, Berlin writes ‘they did not realise … that, despite his earlier leanings towards the Enlightenment, he was by temperament violently opposed to the whole system’.149 Though he appeared outwardly to be a product of Aufklärung, he was fundamentally a representative of another time and place, ‘basically a seventeenth-century man born into an alien world, religious, conservative, “inner-directed”, unable to breathe in the bright new world of reason, centralisation, scientific progress’.150 But, as Berlin understands, to attribute Hamann’s criticism of the Enlightenment to his religious conversion is only partially accurate. It is true that from his conversion onward he rejected central tenets of the Enlightenment, ‘and published a series of polemical attacks written in a highly idiosyncratic, perversely allusive, contorted, deliberately obscure style’, but he did this as much as an expression of his Germanic, as his Christian, identity.151 Berlin observes further that Hamann’s work became ‘as remote as he could make it from the, to him, detestable elegance, clarity, and smooth superficiality of the bland and arrogant French dictators of taste and thought’.152 Indeed, as Berlin explains in his Mellon lectures on

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Romanticism, Hamann’s thought expresses a native opposition in Germany, at the time a relative cultural backwater, to the French intellectual spirit of the age. ‘The truth about the Germans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Berlin says, ‘is that they constitute a somewhat backward province’.153 In comparison to France, to the glittering salons of Paris, to the glamour of the French court and the noble, worldly, radical philosophes, German culture looked dowdy indeed. ‘German culture drifted either into extreme scholastic pedantry of a Lutheran kind – minute but rather dry scholarship – or else into a revolt against this scholarship in the direction of the inner life of the human soul’.154 Confronted with a France which dominated and humiliated Germany at every turn, whose arts and sciences, literature and philosophy were the envy of the Western world, whose luminaries (e.g. Montesquieu, Condorcet, Buffon, Helvétius, Voltaire) were celebrated as the epitome of sophisticated humanity,155 the entire region of Germany suffered, according to Berlin, from a ‘huge national inferiority complex’.156 The time was ripe for thinkers like Hamann who would make a virtue of what many considered Germany’s basest qualities. Berlin focuses on two aspects of Hamann’s thought: his understanding of knowledge and of language. In both regards Hamann anticipates and prepares the way for his younger contemporaries Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi157 and Johann Gottfried Herder for the Romantic movement,158 and the protoexistentialism of Søren Kierkegaard.159 And, in both aspects of his thought, which I shall not attempt to artificially separate, we see the seminal insights into particularity and pluralism which Herder expands and develops critically. For Hamann, the created world, indeed the entire universe, is a kind of language by which God communicates to his creatures. ‘Things and plants and animals are themselves symbols’, Berlin writes: Everything rests on faith; faith is as basic an organ of acquaintance with reality as the senses. To read the Bible is to hear the voice of God, who speaks in a language which he has given man the grace to understand. Some men are endowed with the gift of understanding his ways, of looking at the universe, which is his book no less than the revelations of the Bible and the fathers and saints of the church. Only love – for a person or an object – can reveal the true nature of anything. It is not possible to love formulas, general propositions, laws, the abstractions of science, the vast system of concepts and categories – symbols too general to be close to reality – with which the French lumières have blinded themselves to concrete reality, to the real experience which only direct acquaintance, especially by the senses, provides.160 ‘To me every book is a Bible’, Hamann wrote, ‘and every occupation a prayer’.161 Hamann believed this was true because he believed that God speaks to humanity everywhere throughout God’s creation. ‘God speaks about creatures through and in creatures. When one man listens to another

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man’s speech carefully he can hear God’s voice. When man reads Scripture he should always praise “the great maker of these holy books” ’.162 Indeed, as Berlin observes, for Hamann, and specifically against those rationalists who believed that truth lies at the end of mathematical formulae, ‘God is a poet, not a mathematician’.163 Knowledge of the world which God created, the world in and through which God speaks, requires not the scientific skill of dissection, but the passion of a lover, not the rationalistic impulse for system building, but the crucial insight of the artist and the poet who understands that one participates through creativity in the being of a creative God. In many ways similar to the English poet William Blake, Hamann, in his love for the particular, for the concrete, for nature and human flesh, despises philosophers, who (in his view) like Kant, ‘suffer from a “gnostic hatred of matter” ’.164 The ambiguity of existence, its messiness and irrationality, is the playground of real knowledge, not the neat, bloodless systems of those who would reduce life to algorithms, rules and technocratic schemes, and separate flesh from spirit. Hamann’s controversy with C. T. Damm over the value of the German letter h is especially revealing with reference to Hamann’s critique of rationalism. Like the letter h which Damm, in the name of a perfectly logical language, attacked as irrational – Berlin explains that Damm objected to ‘the use of the letter h in many German words where it appeared to him to be superfluous, for instance between two syllables or after a consonant’ – God’s creation is littered with the arbitrary and the irrational, the unpredictable, ‘the element of fantasy in God’s direction of the world’, which can be apprehended only by faith, and not by reason.165 To argue for the value of the letter h, in Hamann’s view, was to argue for the value of human life itself. Of course, it is Hamann’s understanding of the relationship between faith and knowledge which is most crucial to his critique of rationalism, and which is most controversial, because Hamann believed that he had successfully appropriated David Hume’s critique of rationalism for the sake of Christian theology. According to Berlin, Hamann was a student of Hume probably from the time of his sojourn in London. And, although it would be perhaps too much to claim that he derived his entire understanding of faith, Glaube, from Hume (Hamann’s handling of faith is in many ways reflective of both Lutheran orthodoxy and pietism), certainly Hume’s treatment of belief in A Treatise on Human Nature made a deep and lasting impression on Hamann. Berlin tells us that Hamann mentions Hume for the first time in 1756. And, in 1787, that Hamann writes to Jacobi: ‘ “I studied [Hume] even before I wrote my Socratic Memoirs [i.e. before 1759] and this is the source to which I owe my doctrine of faith [Glaube]. … Our own existence and the existence of all things outside us must be believed and cannot be demonstrated in any other fashion” ’.166 Hamann entertained no illusions about Hume’s skepticism toward religion, but he appropriated constructively Hume’s critique of causation and the distinction Hume drew between logical relations and rela-

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tions in the world for the sake of his own fundamental attack on rationalism on behalf of Christian theology. Berlin writes: The doctrine that reason is unable to progress by means of purely logical steps from one statement of fact about the world to another – and that consequently the entire ontological structure of the Cartesian, or indeed any other rationalist metaphysics, was built on a central fallacy – that, to Hamann and his followers, was a boon of inestimable value; they used it as a battering-ram against the hated Wolffian philosophy that dominated German universities and that seemed to them to despiritualise the world, to reduce its irregular, living texture to an artificial pattern of bloodless categories, or, alternatively, in its empirical version, to the deathly materialism of Holbach or Helvétius, in which there was, for Hamann, no colour, novelty, genius, thunder, lightning, agony, transfiguration. In the course of this he transformed Hume’s psychological and logical concepts into religious ones; for Hamann, belief, faith, revelation, were ultimately one.167 The created world, that through which God the poet speaks, according to Hamann (and, in Hamann’s view, this was supported by Hume), must be taken entirely on faith. The reality of the external world cannot be demonstrated by reason alone. Hamann translates the Lutheran soteriological credo, sola fide, into a fierce criticism of the entire Enlightenment project. His friend Kant was scandalized by the idea that existence outside of us must be taken only on faith. Hamann, by contrast, was delighted. Again, Berlin writes: [I]f the reality of the external world is guaranteed by belief as a form of direct acquaintance, why should this also not hold of our belief in God, the belief or faith of those who daily and hourly see God in His creation, or hear His voice in His sacred books, in the words of His saints and prophets, to be found among the humblest and most unregarded of mankind.168 Hamann perceived that rationalism begins in the confidence (or, perhaps, the arrogance) that it can produce absolute intellectual proof for the existence of all that is real, but it ends in the tragic alienation of human beings from themselves, from the world around them and from the God who created them and this world. Those who want rationalistic proof for everything are ultimately reduced to intellectual paralysis. No rationalistic system can provide certainty, nor even access to the most immediate realms of experience. Rather, it is Glaube that makes it possible to act, to live, to know. And by and through this Glaube, the world we meet in the rich particularity of creaturely existence cannot be made to conform to the reductionist fancies of the philosophical system-builders who yearn for universals. Again, as Berlin writes, according to Hamann: ‘Universalism is an idle craving, an

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attempt to reduce the rich variety of the universe to a bleak uniformity, which is itself a form of not facing reality’.169 Hamann’s profound insight into the diverse nature of existence is best observed in his reflections on language. The Enlightenment promoted the view that language is merely the instrumental conveyance for ideas formed in the mind. Gray notes that, according to the philosophes so despised by Hamann, ‘language was a neutral medium of communication’, and ‘the primordial activity of language is the representation or signifying of a reality that is not itself linguistic. Language is then an ancillary to human thought and activity, its amanuensis, not its master’.170 Hamann, in a manner reminiscent of Vico (though he does not appear to have been dependent on Vico for the insight), understands language itself as thought. Indeed, as Berlin writes, Hamann understands that ‘language (or other forms of expressive symbolism – religious worship, social habits and so on) conveys directly the innermost soul of individuals and societies’.171 Hamann himself writes: All idle talk about reason is mere wind; language is its organon and criterion. (VI., p. 365) With me the question is not so much: What is reason? but rather: What is language? and here I presume to be the basis of all paralogisms and antinomies which one blames on the former; therefore it happens that one takes words for concepts and concepts for the things themselves. (G., V., p. 15) My reason is invisible without language. … Togetherness [Geselligkeit] is the true principle of reason and language, by means of which our sensations and representations [Vorstellungen] are modified. (G., V., pp. 508, 515)172 Words are not merely the husks surrounding the kernel of an idea; or, as Berlin says, language is not the clothing in which we dress thought. The process of thinking is identical with the process of symbolic representation. Herein lay the time bomb Hamann planted at the foundation of rationalism, though the custodians of that towering edifice failed to notice its presence there. As Berlin writes: [W]hen Hamann says in a letter to Herder, in one of the most profoundly felt of his tormented, seemingly endless pieces of selfexamination, ‘Reason is language, logos. On this marrow-bone I gnaw, and shall gnaw myself to death on it’, he stakes out one of his greatest claims to immortality.173 Thought and language are one.

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Language, that is, in its concrete, idiosyncratic particularity is human conception itself, and, as conception implies, it is a real participation in creation. One cannot think except in language. There is no nonlinguistic thought. Thus thought cannot be universal, it is grounded in particularity. Which is to say that all true thought is irreducibly cultural, specific, located in a precise moment and place. The dream of the Enlightenment to discover universal truth, immutable, untouched by the vagaries of history and human culture, is a chimera indeed. And to seek after it is to cut oneself off from the real. The Enlightenment conviction that language is merely a collection of various words – what Gray derisively calls ‘a constellation of linguistic atoms’ – words which one can combine, assemble and disassemble in ways to represent the real ideas in the head of the thinker, is challenged by Hamann’s view that language is a rich and deep matrix (often all the more profound, because many of its meanings lie deeper than reason, deeper than anyone is conscious of), an interlinked network, expressing the cultural and historical identity of particular peoples.174 ‘This linguistic or semantic holism’, Gray continues, the idea of a language such that to use it at any point is to invoke, to touch or be touched by, all the rest, is only an instance or application of an idea that is perhaps not much older than Hamann and Herder, the idea of culture.175 ‘The history of a people’, Hamann wrote, ‘is in its language’.176 Thus Berlin comments: There is no universal reason any more than a universal language – a ‘natural language’ is as absurd as a ‘natural religion’, ‘natural law’ and all the other fictions of the metaphysicians. Everything is concrete, is and was where it is in the world, in its specific relations to other concrete entities, and cannot be grasped without some faculty other than the generalising faculty that analyses everything into uniform units, and then wonders where the variety, the colour, the meaning have gone. The German romantic school of philosophy was destined to make much of these polemical claims.177 Again, we have already seen that these ideas of language and cultural pluralism were advanced on Vico’s front against the forces of the Enlightenment, and we shall see them further developed by Herder. But the basic understanding of culture, as we have it today, as an entire form of social life that expresses in its living matrices, in languages, institutions, arts and acts of worship, the self-interpretation and self-expression of an entire people, owes a great debt to Hamann.178 Despite the real differences in temperament and outlook between Hamann and Berlin, therefore, it is

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apparent why Berlin too owes so much to this eccentric eighteenth-century genius and to his disciple, J. G. Herder.

Johann Gottfried Herder The work of J. G. Herder,179 the German philosopher, poet and Lutheran pastor, will be familiar to many students of the history of Protestant theology. Karl Barth, Otto Pfleiderer and Emmanuel Hirsch, among others, have investigated various aspects of Herder’s thought.180 Berlin’s thought resonates with that of Herder more than with any other thinker, excepting only Alexander Herzen. Berlin finds in Herder much of the passion and zeal for diversity, the emphasis on human feeling, a sense of reality as a whole, and historical particularity as opposed to mere rationalistic system building, which one finds in Hamann; but these qualities which would inspire the Romantic movement were combined in Herder with a more careful analytical mind than Hamann’s, a conscious awareness of his indebtedness to the very Enlightenment which he critiques, and a robust commitment to empirical observation and science – qualities lacking in Hamann. Hamann was the sworn opponent of the Enlightenment, a warrior against what he saw as a dangerous enemy; Herder, by contrast, was the Enlightenment’s critic. The difference between them is as crucial to recognize as their similarities. In his 1964 essay, ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, Berlin profiles Herder’s original contributions to the history of ideas as falling into three general categories: populism, expressionism and pluralism. I shall follow Berlin’s general organizational scheme, understanding, as he did, that these three categories are so profoundly interrelated in Herder’s thought that it will be impossible (and, according to Herder, undesirable) to separate them discretely. As I follow Berlin’s organization, I shall also allow Berlin’s reflections on Herder to clarify certain crucial aspects of Berlin’s own thought, especially relative to social conflict and pluralism, as Berlin distinguishes it from relativism. Populism Berlin defines populism, with reference to Herder, as ‘the belief in the value of belonging to a group or a culture, which, for Herder at least, is not political, and is indeed, to some degree, anti-political, different from, and even opposed to, nationalism’.181 Berlin’s sympathy for Herder arguably displays itself most poignantly in their common appreciation for the human need to belong. It was in 1764, Maria Bunge observes, while Herder served in Berlin’s hometown of Riga, Livonia, now Latvia, first as teacher at the Domschule (cathedral school) and, after his ordination to ministry in the Lutheran church in 1767, as pastor and preacher for two leading churches in Riga, that he became acquainted with the plight of the oppressed Latvian,

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Lithuanian and Estonian peoples. Riga at that time was under the rule of the Russian empire, while the people lived directly under the control of the German-speaking aristocracy.182 Herder’s sensitivity to the needs of oppressed people, especially of the peasantry, who lived close to the land and whose identities were local, provincial, unique and very fragile, never abated. For Herder, belonging to a people – being grounded in the practices of a specific way of life in a particular place, living and understanding oneself as living in the midst of true, primary human relations, of fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, brothers, sisters and friends – was never an abstract notion. Belonging was concrete and real and essential for the formation of human identity. There could be, for Herder, no such thing as an individual person in isolation. Community molds us into what and who we are, even as we shape the communities that shape us. Community is always prior to, inclusive, and constitutive of individuality. Our identity, our particular humanity, is the gift of a particular social unit or community. Herder, apparently independently of Vico, and while moving well beyond Hamann, develops the idea of culture, the notion that human beings belong to groups that possess distinctive patterns and forms of life and language, traditions and institutions, values, myths and aspirations. ‘For Herder’, Berlin writes, ‘to be a member of a group is to think and act in a certain way, in the light of particular goals, values, pictures of the world: and to think and act so is to belong to a group. The notions are literally identical’.183 It is only in the context of his understanding of belonging that Herder’s conceptions of particularity and individualism make sense. For Herder, the notion of the solitary isolated individual is quite simply inconceivable.184 He rejects entirely the kind of individualism which has enjoyed such popularity in twentieth-century North America. Humanity is constituted and defined by its communal existence; it is the product of a specific climate and geography, place, time and historical influence, of a specific language, and particular values, institutions and traditions that are handed on and given contemporary expression in the lives, the actions, the beliefs and aspirations of the people belonging to particular groups. Herder explores the communal formation of individuals perhaps most profoundly in his analysis of the language and morals that we receive from our cultural predecessors. One can hear vividly the echo of Hamann’s voice in Herder, certainly; but one also hears in Herder’s voice the timbre and tone of the Enlightenment, which he critiques: Our noblest possessions do not come from ourselves; our understanding along with its powers, the way in which we think, act, and exist, is, as it were, inherited. We think in a language that our ancestors invented. We think in a way that was shaped and formed by many thinkers, enriched by the first geniuses of the human race, including those of other languages, who thereby graciously bequeathed to us the noblest part of

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Isaiah Berlin their existence – their innermost being, their acquired treasures of thought. Each day we enjoy and use thousands of inventions that have come to us from the past and in part from the most distant regions of the earth, and without which we would have been forced to lead a bleak and paltry life. We have inherited maxims and morals which not only illuminate the natural law that lies obscurely within us, but also inspire and empower us to soar above depression and the daily grind, to shake off prejudices, and, by feeling other souls who are filled with the same light of truth, goodness, and beauty, to unite ourselves with them in friendship and action far more intimately than irrational, inanimate objects could ever unite.185

According to Herder, history is alive within the languages we speak and the arts, wisdom, values and mores we treasure. Yet history, perhaps more for Herder than for any of his contemporaries, was so alive in its particularity that he could not imagine that a sixteenth-century Italy could recreate the Roman republic, as Machiavelli clearly believed. In a manner reminiscent of Vico, he expressed his sense of belonging to a culture in terms of a thoroughgoing historicism. Belonging to a people meant belonging to a particular time, a specific moment, unique, unrepeatable, real and concrete, once lost, lost forever. ‘[N]o two moments in the world’, Herder writes, ‘are ever identical’.186 Which brings us to Herder’s understanding of the profound and particular individuality of persons and whole peoples. Berlin quotes from Herder’s Yet Another Philosophy of History, noting how Herder sounds uncannily like Vico: How unspeakably difficult it is to convey the particular quality [Eigenheit] of an individual human being and how impossible it is to say precisely what distinguishes an individual, his way of feeling and living; how different and how individual [anders und eigen] everything becomes once his eyes see it, once his soul grasps it, his heart feels it. How much depth there is in the character of a single people, which, no matter how often observed, and gazed at with curiosity and wonder, nevertheless escapes the word which attempts to capture it, and even with the word to catch it, is seldom so recognisable as to be universally understood and felt. If this is so, what happens when one tries to master an entire ocean of peoples, times, cultures, countries with one glance, one sentiment, by means of one single word! Words, pale shadow-play! An entire living picture of ways of life, or habits, wants, characteristics of land and sky, must be added, or provided in advance; one must start by feeling sympathy with a nation if one is to feel a single one of its inclinations or acts, or all of them together.187 Galipeau observes that, like Vico, Herder in exploring the differences between human cultures ‘concluded that not only do we have to interpret

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cultures on their own terms, but that cultures are valuable because of their differences’.188 Herder is, therefore, especially scathing in his criticism of those historians and philosophers who in caricaturing persons or whole peoples reduce their wondrous variety and particularity to stereotypes. Sweeping generalizations render us ignorant of reality, and the assignment of general attributes too often only serves the purposes of propaganda. Berlin writes, summarizing Herder: ‘All history is an unending conflict between the general idea and the particular, all general ideas are abstractions, dangerous, misleading, and unavoidable’.189 As was true with Hamann, Herder’s commitment to particularity is at points similar to William Blake’s, who believed ‘To Generalize is to be an Idiot/To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit – General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess’.190 The cultural particularity of a specific people, according to Herder, is such that, for instance, the poetry of the German people shares more in common with German science, philosophy, domestic life and law, than it shares with the poetry of another people, with that of the Chinese, for example. There resides within the various activities of every culture a ‘common pervasive pattern in virtue of which they are seen to be elements in one and the same culture’.191 And that quality, Eigenheit, which a particular culture commonly possesses, that individuality, particularity, peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, perhaps even eccentricity, inherent in that people in that place at that time, ‘is not occult; no special non-empirical faculty is needed to detect it; it is a natural attribute and open to empirical investigation’.192 To belong, then, for Herder, means that one identifies oneself in terms of the historical and cultural particularity of one’s own people; one is, in some sense, integrated as a person by virtue of being integral to a specific culture. ‘That which people who belong to the same group have in common is more directly responsible for their being as they are than that which they have in common with others in other places’.193 In order to understand a person, then, one does not follow the approach of rationalism, to abstract the person as a thinking thing from their physicality, or to dissect the person into discrete constituent parts – body, mind and soul. Rather, to understand a person, one must seek to comprehend the whole person grounded in the whole culture, paying attention especially to the way the person’s actions and communications express his or her belonging to that specific people. Belonging, for Herder, had another aspect, also grounded in his experience. In 1771, Herder accepted the position of court preacher in Bückeburg, where he stayed till 1776. These were perhaps his most trying years. Herder, a scholar and pastor who loved literature and vigorous intellectual conversation, found himself, Bunge tells us, among militarists and more rigidly orthodox clergy. ‘He wrote to Johann W. L. Gleim on 9 August 1772, that he was experiencing in Bückeburg “a living death” ’. The loneliness of these years was broken only by Herder’s friendship with Countess Maria and his

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marriage, in 1773, to Karoline Flaschsland, both of which may have contributed to his deepening religious faith.194 Berlin’s reflections on Herder’s concept of belonging represent some of his most deeply moving statements, perhaps revealing something of Berlin’s own experience as the consummate insider, and ironically also an outsider, within the British establishment, and of his childhood exile and displacement, and his extraordinary sense of belonging to Russia, Britain and Israel. Berlin summarizes and expands on Herder’s thought on belonging: If you exile a German and plant him in America, he will be unhappy; he will suffer because people can be happy, can function freely, only among those who understand them. To be lonely is to be among men who do not know what you mean. Exile, solitude, is to find yourself among people whose words, gestures, handwriting are alien to your own, whose behavior, reactions, feelings, instinctive responses, and thoughts and pleasures and pains, are too remote from yours, whose education and outlook, the tone and quality of lives and being, are not yours.195 Berlin observes that for Herder one cannot exercise creativity – that essentially human activity – unless one feels at home. The full exercise of one’s humanity, in the image of God the Creator, thus, depends on one’s belonging. Drawing on the imagery of Psalm 137, and the experience of the Babylonian exile of the Hebrew people, Berlin says that Herder laments not only for the ‘material and moral miseries of exile’ which many of his fellow countrymen knew, but for the fact that they have been cut off ‘from their living centre’ and forced ‘to sit by the rivers of some remote Babylon, and to prostitute their creative faculties for the benefit of strangers’, and thus degrading, dehumanizing and destroying themselves.196 It was because Herder believed that human beings only come to a full experience of their humanity by living lives deeply rooted in a particular place, expressing in their own language the values, hopes and aspirations of a particular community of others, that he was such a relentless opponent of all forms of imperialism, whether military, cultural or religious. According to Herder, all empires rest on force. ‘There is nothing against which he thunders more eloquently’, writes Berlin, ‘than imperialism – the crushing of one community by another, the elimination of local cultures trampled under the jackboot of some conqueror’.197 Each local culture is a precious living creature, a unique organism, irreplaceable, and precious to the Creator who loves variety for the sheer sake of variety.198 Herder, Berlin observes, in contrast to Machiavelli, ‘cares nothing for virtù in the Renaissance sense of the term’; he sees the state, with its lust for conquest and manipulation of persons, lurking behind such public virtue.199 Thus Herder ‘cannot bring himself to forgive Rome for crushing the cultures of the peoples it had conquered, not even that of Carthage’.200 For Herder, it is an act of barbarism to annihilate a culture. Neither did

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Herder refrain from criticizing European Christians for their devastation of cultures and civilizations in the name of evangelism and mission. ‘[T]o foist a set of alien values on another Nation (as missionaries have done in the Baltic provinces, and are doing, for example in India) is both ineffective and harmful’.201 Again, Berlin writes, this time relating a story Herder tells: On this topic Herder remained uncompromising and passionate: ‘ “Why are you pouring water over my head?” asked a dying slave of a Christian missionary. “So that you can go to Heaven”. “I do not want to go to a heaven where there are white men”, he replied, and turned on his side and died’.202 Herder’s populism also stands as far as imaginable from the kind of predatory political nationalism that has characterized so much of the experience of Western civilization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Herder is relentless in his denunciation of the state (‘it robs men of themselves’ and ‘is the substitution of machinery for life’).203 He rejects the idea that there is any Favoritvolk (he explicitly rejects all mythologies of chosen nations, races or religions as those which in Western Europe and the Americas have bedeviled the past two centuries).204 And Herder anticipates Herzen in his repudiation of ‘any doctrine that preaches the sacrifice of individuals [or cultures] on the altar of vast abstractions’.205 There is in Herder an enthusiasm, a passion, for discovering people in the full, rich variety of their particular cultural experience, and for describing that experience, and understanding it, as much as possible, in its own terms. Herder understood that variety among cultures need not entail violence. ‘He does not see why’, Berlin writes, ‘one community absorbed in the development of its own native talent should not respect a similar activity on the part of others’.206 Expressionism Berlin describes expressionism as ‘the doctrine that human activity in general, and art in particular, express the entire personality of the individual or the group, and are intelligible only to the degree to which they do so’.207 He explains that he uses the term expressionism in its broadest generic sense, and not in the way it is used descriptively in the history of art with reference to the expressionist movement in the early twentieth century. Berlin, in other words, uses the term in describing Herder’s thought to distinguish the idea that all human works act as voices expressing who their creators are and what they feel and what they care about (which was Herder’s view), in contrast to the idea held by others that human writings and works of art are mere products, objects detachable from their makers, and understandable as independent entities divorced from the persons who produced them. The maker is, for Herder, so intimately related to his creation that he is known in

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what he has made. The artist, the writer, the composer is revealed in her art because her art expresses who she is. In addition, as an extension of this doctrine, Herder believed ‘that every form of human self-expression is in some sense artistic, and that self-expression is part of the essence of human beings as such’.208 Humanity cannot be understood, in other words, through the lens of utility alone. Humans are not merely pleasure-seeking or painavoiding animals; humans are not simply tool-making animals, nor animals in need of food and shelter, nor merely animals driven by the need to reproduce, nor even by the desire to live together socially. For Herder, humans live to express themselves creatively, in the image of the divine Creator.209 Herder’s expressionism (as with his populism) leads him to reflect on the meaning and purpose of language as a natural expression of human communal life. At this point, Herder reflects much of Hamann’s thought, and parallels Vico. Berlin observes: Human groups, large and small, are products of climate, geography, physical and biological needs, and similar factors; they are made one by common traditions and common memories, of which the principal link and vehicle – indeed, more than vehicle, the very incarnation – is language. ‘Has a nation … anything more precious than the language of its fathers? In it dwells its entire world of tradition, history, religion, principles of existence; its whole heart and soul’. It is so because men necessarily think in words or other symbols, since to think is to use symbols; and their feelings and attitudes to life are, he maintains (as Vico did before him), incorporated in symbolic forms – worship, poetry, ritual. This is so whether what they seek are pleasures or necessities: the dance, the hunt – primitive forms of social solidarity expressed and preserved by myth and formalised representation – in fact, the entire network of belief and behaviour that binds men to one another can be explained only in terms of common, public symbolism, in particular by language.210 Both Herder, and as we have already observed, Hamann as well, understood language as synonymous with thought. For Herder, words and ideas are identical; to think is to employ linguistic symbols.211 To use language cognitively to express oneself is the fundamental human activity. Thus, according to Herder (and Hamann before him), to understand human beings is to understand what they mean to say, what they intend to express, what they wish to communicate symbolically of themselves through their use of language.212 While, as Berlin observes, Herder seems to have struggled within himself, with his Lutheran colleagues and, most significantly, with his teacher Hamann, over the orthodoxy of his understanding of language – as a development of human society, God-given in the sense that God created humanity with the capacity to develop language and other aspects of

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culture, but essentially an ordinary, natural development of human society rather than a divinely implanted gift, innately born in humanity – by the end of his life he was finally and fully convinced that language is humanly generated and not innate. Indeed, according to Herder, language is humanity’s primary mode of self-expression precisely because it flows naturally from human culture. ‘Language’, for Herder, ‘expresses the collective experience of the group’.213 The living heart of a people, their expression of identity and values and aspirations, lies in their language as it has developed historically. Thus, according to Herder, the appropriate way to study humanity is to approach a people historically and philologically. Language serves as a bridge by which we gain access sympathetically to human cultures, are able to enter into them, to understand and describe them. Herder’s understanding of human expression has another facet, however. Berlin, in his Mellon lectures, says: Herder believed that one of the fundamental functions of human beings was to express, to speak, and therefore that whatever a man did expressed his full nature; and if it did not express his full nature, it was because he maimed himself, or restrained himself, or laid some kind of leash upon his energies.214 For Herder, art, in general, as well as spoken or written language, functions to express, to voice, the authentic perceptions and affections of humanity. It is natural for a person to express his authenticity, to speak who he truly is and what he cares about and feels, through language and art, and, in so doing, to express also the lifeblood and values of his culture. If, then, it is natural for humanity to express itself authentically, to reveal its heart, its passions, in and through its use of language and the arts, and in so doing to demonstrate the rich variety of ways of being human in particular cultures, then our great sin against our own humanity is artifice and pretense, our unnatural use of language, our inauthentic production of art objects, that does not arise from our real and particular experience of life, and does not express who we really are and what we really value and feel. By extension, our crime against human understanding is our rationalistic dissection and desiccation of language and cultural artifacts so that they no longer express the integrity, the richness, and diverse particularity of human cultures. This understanding of authenticity takes on the character of antiprofessionalism (and anticareerism) in Herder, especially when applied to art. Berlin writes: Herder is the true father of the doctrine that it is the artist’s mission, above others, to testify in his works to the truth of his own inner experience, from which it follows that any conscious falsification of this experience, from whatever motive – indeed any attempt merely to satisfy

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‘Anything that seems to Herder authentic delights him’, writes Berlin, ‘Everything that is natural is valuable’.216 Conversely, Herder abhors that which smacks of the artificial and the unnatural. ‘He condemns the anthropologies which treat men in general and leave the individual drained of too many differentiating characteristics’.217 Herein lies a crucial inspiration for the coming Romantic movement, for the philosophy of existentialism and the thought of Martin Heidegger and those like Rudolf Bultmann influenced by Heidegger, and, one might add, for the kind of appreciation of diversity that is only now reaching its zenith. Pluralism Berlin, in his discussion of Herder, defines pluralism as the belief not merely in the multiplicity, but in the incommensurability, of the values of different cultures and societies, and, in addition, in the incompatibility of equally valid ideals, together with the implied revolutionary corollary that the classical notion of an ideal man and of an ideal society are intrinsically incoherent and meaningless.218 In Berlin’s view, Herder’s pluralism, ‘his famous rejection of absolute values’,219 is the most revolutionary of all the implications of his thought. Berlin’s development of this insight – various aspects of which are found in his engagement with Machiavelli, Vico, Hamann and Herder – into a coherent idea, and his use of this idea in critical contrast both to moral absolutism and to subjective relativism, represents also Berlin’s single greatest contribution to the history of Western thought. Herder’s pluralism is deeply rooted both in his populism and expressionism. Humanity flourishes only in those natural societies, those communities which, Berlin writes, ‘grow spontaneously, like a plant’, not in those that are held together and regulated by force or laws, despots or

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bureaucrats. Each natural society ‘contains within itself (in the words of Yet Another Philosophy of History) the “ideal of its own perfection, wholly independent of all comparison with those of others” ’.220 One society is incomparable to another, and the values and aspirations of each society are incommensurable with those of others, because there exists no independent standard by which to judge all societies.221 ‘If Herder’s notion of the equal validity of incommensurable cultures is accepted, the concepts of an ideal State or of an ideal man become incoherent’, and not merely difficult or impossible practically to achieve.222 As Herder says: ‘Not a man, not a country, not a people, not a national history, not a State, is like another. Hence the True, the Beautiful, the Good in them are not similar either’.223 Berlin, in an especially lively passage, where again he parallels Herder’s thought to Vico’s, describes the extraordinary power of Herder’s insight into pluralism: Vico and Herder, despite all their extravagances and obscurities, taught us once and for all that to be a Homeric Greek or an eighteenth-century German is to belong to a unique society, and that what it is to ‘belong’ cannot be analysed in terms of something which these persons have in common with other societies or entities in the universe, but only in terms of what each of them has in common with other Homeric Greeks or Germans – that there is a Greek or German way of talking, eating, concluding treaties, engaging in commerce, dancing, gesturing, tying shoelaces, building ships, explaining the past, worshipping God, permeated by some common quality which cannot be analysed in terms of instances of general laws or effects of discoverable causes, recurrent uniformities, repetitions which allow common elements to be abstracted and sometimes experimented upon. The unique pattern in terms of which all acts which are German are interlaced, or which enables us to attribute a painting or even a line of poetry or a witticism to one age rather than another and to one author rather than another – of that no science exists. We recognise these manifestations as we recognise the expressions on the faces of our friends.224 According to Berlin, Herder advanced the understanding of cultural pluralism even beyond Vico, exploring cultures in many lands and ages. It was useless, according to Herder, to try to understand the heroic sagas of Scandinavia or ancient Hebrew poetry by comparing them to the aesthetic standards of his own, or any other, age. The ways in which men live, think, feel, speak to one another, the clothes they wear, the songs they sing, the gods they worship, the food they eat, the assumptions, customs, habits which are intrinsic to them – it is this that creates communities, each of which has its own ‘lifestyle’.225

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Each community, according to Herder, has its own historical and social personality, as we have already observed, its own ultimate ends towards which it orients its common life, its own languages and its own ways of conveying what it values and hopes for. And the constituent aspects of a particular community’s system of values are frequently at odds with the same aspects of another community’s value system. As Berlin writes, Herder ‘became convinced that what was true for a Portuguese was not necessarily true for a Persian’.226 Like Vico, Herder understood that there are losses as well as gains in the inexorable march of time and civilizations. Even the Romans, whose lust for acquisition and destruction of alien cultures Herder despised, ‘did what no one could imitate’, and when they disappeared from history, these qualities were lost forever.227 Berlin explains that Herder, like Hamann before him, though in a more balanced and measured way, was especially critical of French philosophes, like Voltaire, Helvétius, or H. T. Buckle, who believed that every human culture can be graded by comparing it to a set of universal and ideal standards or rules of human civilization, as one sees in Voltaire’s Musée imaginaire, ‘where the four great ages of man hang side by side as aspects of the single, selfsame peak of human attainment’.228 Herder, by contrast, believed that no human culture can be understood by comparing it to the criteria of another culture. Instead, the student of culture must develop Einfühlung for the other cultures he wishes to understand. Herder’s Einfühlung consists of a sympathetic understanding for, or empathy toward, or feeling into other cultures that not only recognizes but revels in their particularity and plurality, that seeks to understand ‘the outlook, the individual character of an artistic tradition, a literature, a social organisation, a people, a culture, a period of history’,229 and that finds in this profound plurality of cultures and the mutuality of individual existence a reflection of the character and will of the God who favors variety over uniformity.230 Herder describes an attempt by the Berlin Academy to determine which was the ‘happiest people’ in history. Herder’s response is characteristic. Every people at a certain time, and under certain circumstances, has had such a moment of happiness. ‘Otherwise’, he writes, ‘it was never a people at all’.231 But to try to compare happiness across the various national, linguistic and cultural boundaries was ludicrous because human nature is not the vessel for an absolute, independent, and immutable happiness, as philosophers define it. Rather it always attracts that measure of happiness of which it is capable: It is a pliant clay which assumes a different shape under different circumstances, needs and burdens.232 Even the nature of happiness changes, Herder explains, depending on the particularity of a people, that is, if we are to understand by the word happy a condition describing ‘the satisfaction of desires, the achievement of goals,

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and the quiet surmounting of needs’, because each particular people desires and pursues and needs according to its own way of life. ‘Basically, then, all comparison is disastrous’, Herder continues: As soon as the internal sense of happiness or the disposition changes, as soon as the external circumstances and needs fashion and fortify this new sense, who can then compare the different forms of happiness perceived by different senses in different worlds? Who can compare the Hebrew shepherd and patriarch with the [Egyptian] farmer and artist, the [Phoenician] sailor, the [Greek] runner, the [Roman] conqueror? Happiness does not depend on a laurel wreath, on a view of the blessed herd, on a cargo ship, or on a captured battle flag, but on the soul that needed this, aspired to this, attained this, and wanted to attain nothing more. Each nation has its own center of happiness within itself, just as every sphere has it own center of gravity.233 If one wishes to understand an alien culture one must ‘feel oneself into [sich hineinfühlen] everything’, that is, one must sympathetically enter the language, the region, the whole history of the people you want to understand and must empathize with every part of it.234 ‘This’, Berlin writes, ‘is what the historian, the critic, the philosopher must grasp, and nothing is more fatal than the attempted assimilation of the Mittelpunkt of one culture with those of others’.235 Each culture represents an entire way of interpreting existence according to its own lights, its own ways of valuing and aspiring. Gray finds in both Herder and Berlin a rejection of the various Enlightenment approaches (from Voltaire to Marx, who emerges, writes Gray, as ‘a paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker’) by which the human essence is [understood to be] what is universal in man, Gattungwesen, or species-being. … In contrast, in Berlin’s view, as in Herder’s, the human essence – if there is such a thing – is best expressed in cultural difference, in the propensity to fashion diverse forms of life with their divergent conceptions of flourishing.236 Either to praise or condemn one culture by standards which claim the aesthetic, or philosophical, or moral high ground is equally risky. While it is virtually impossible for us not to have preferences (even very strong preferences) with regard to civilizations and not to form judgements regarding the habits and arts and behaviors of other peoples – and Herder himself certainly had his favorite civilizations, and those he least favored, and even he made moral judgements on other nations – the position of outside judge, however inevitable, and perhaps at times even desirable, is always perilous and often potentially absurd and incoherent.237 So, too, is the position of the philosopher of history who has mapped out the progress of humanity,

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one civilization building upon another in an ever advancing construction toward a universal historical telos. According to Herder, one culture is never merely a means to another.238 Herder does believe in a form of Fortgang, an advancement or progress of human civilization, but for him this means, not the superficial notion of cultural progress that one finds in Voltaire, but, as Berlin explains: the development of human beings as integrated wholes and, more particularly, their development as groups, tribes, cultures and communities determined by language and custom, creating out of the totality of their collective experience, and expressing themselves in works of art that are consequently intelligible to common men, and in sciences and crafts and forms of social and political and cultural life that fulfil the cravings (conscious and unconscious) and develop the facilities of a given society, in its interplay with its alterable, but not greatly alterable, natural environment.239 For Herder, then, Fortgang primarily describes the ‘internal development of a culture in its own habitat’, moving ‘toward its own goals’.240 Berlin explains that, according to Herder, ‘each image of Humanität’ is ‘unique and sui generis’.241 Gillies says that for Herder the significance of Humanität lies in the way in which human reason variously responds to its specific context, its ‘climatic variations’. Reason, he continues, renders it possible for him [the human] to develop finer impulses and senses, an artistic ability, peacefulness, sociability, freedom, lawfulness, and, above all, the ideas or religion and immortality. All these are comprised in the compendious term Humanität.242 Gillies goes on to quote Herder: I wish that I could include in this word Humanität everything that I have said so far about the noble constitution of man for reason and freedom, finer senses and impulses, the most delicate and most robust health, the realization of the purpose of the world and rulership over it. For man has no nobler word for his destiny than himself [denn der Mensch hat kein edleres Wort für seine Bestimmung als Er selbst ist], in whom the image of the Creator of our earth lives in that form which could here be made manifest.243 While Herder clearly also appears to believe that ‘every culture has its own irreplaceable contribution to make to the progress of the human race’,244 (remembering, of course, that ‘race’ for Herder is a matter of linguistic grouping) and, while he is by no means consistent in discussing the manner in which various cultures relate to one another across the vast landscape of

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time, and to what extent and how they move across history toward some telos, he seems generally to have regarded history, as Berlin maintains, as a kind of drama in which God directs various troops of players to act for God’s own ultimate purpose. The drama has many acts and scenes, but, according to Berlin, neither climax nor center; nor should one expect one scene necessarily to build upon another in the development of a plot, nor even to relate to another. It is the whole drama, richly varied as it is, that is God’s ultimate will for humanity, according to Herder. God loves diversity for diversity’s sake, as God shapes humanity through the particularity of human existence.245 Berlin goes on to say that a better analogy for Herder’s conception of Fortgang may be a ‘cosmic symphony of which each movement is significant in itself, and of which, in any case, we cannot hear the whole, for God alone does so’.246 Berlin himself rejects categorically any form of what John Gray calls ‘historical theodicy’. This includes, Gray explains, all teleological interpretations of history, such as those we find ‘in Hegel and Marx, in Burke, and even in Vico and Herder. Teleological categories apply in the explanation of purposive creatures, such as individual human beings; they have no application to human history as a whole’.247 Indeed, Berlin maintains that a thoroughgoing pluralism and a teleological interpretation of history are mutually exclusive.248 We shall return to this issue in greater detail in another context, because it relates directly to the question, ‘Can Christians be pluralists?’. But it is vital to note at this point that in Herder, as in Hamann and Vico, some form of pluralism and some kind of teleological view of history were maintained simultaneously, though Berlin has serious doubts about the ultimate integrity and the viability of such forms of pluralism. Indeed, it is immediately after praising Herder for his conviction that each culture, because of its uniqueness, has its own contributions to make to human history, and that it is the extraordinary diversity of human cultures that is their greatest gift to other cultures, that Berlin goes on to say: No doctrine that has at its heart a monistic conception of the true and the good and the beautiful, or a teleology according to which everything conspires towards a final harmonious resolution – an ultimate order in which all the apparent confusions and imperfections of the life of the world will be resolved – no doctrine of this kind can allow variety as an independent value to be pursued for its own sake; for variety entails the possibility of the conflict of values, of some irreducible incompatibility between the ideals, or, indeed, the immediate aims, of fully realised, equally virtuous men.249 While Herder certainly does not promote a monistic conception of the true, the good, or the beautiful, he does possess a purposive or teleological interpretation of history in which all events and peoples, not despite, but precisely because of their diversity, serve the purposes of God. For Herder,

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this teleological aspect of history does not diminish God’s creative preference for the plurality, nor does it seem to serve a hidden bias toward uniformity, absolutism or universalism. Herder’s understanding of harmony between cultures apparently is grounded not in the hope that all cultures will find unanimous agreement, but in the recognition that each culture has ‘its own unique Schwerpunkt (“centre of gravity”)’, and unless we are able, by sympathetic inquiry into a particular culture, to grasp what its center of gravity is, ‘we cannot understand its character or value’.250 Toleration, then, for Herder, is not merely a negative virtue, the conventional Enlightenment forbearance (and the thinly disguised contempt) that extends tolerance to others with the assumption that when others disagree with us they must be wrong because their opinions do not conform to our elevated standards that reflect the single universal answers to the real questions of human existence. Rather, Herder understands toleration as a positive virtue, a recognition that because the differences in our cultural values are grounded in objective variations of whole ways of being together, it is fruitless to fight one another over who is right and wrong in these matters. As Berlin comments: ‘[E]ach culture has its own points of reference: there is no reason why these cultures should fight each other – universal toleration must be possible – but unification was destruction’.251 Our values must conflict, but, according to Herder, there is no reason why conflicts between peoples and cultures must turn violent. Our differences could just as easily be matters of celebration in recognition of the will of a Creator who is known in and through the variety woven into creation. Or, as Herder writes: ‘Each nation has its own center of happiness within itself, just as every sphere has its own center of gravity. The good Mother has taken good care of this, too. She placed tendencies toward diversity in our hearts’.252 Herder’s views have been described as relativistic. However, Berlin, in his ‘Pursuit of the Ideal’, vigorously, though with his characteristic courtesy, disagrees with Arnaldo Momigliano, who described the positions of Vico and Herder as cultural or moral relativism. Berlin writes, in response to Momigliano: He was mistaken. It is not relativism. Members of one culture can, by the force of imaginative insight, understand (what Vico called entrare) the values, the ideals, the forms of life of another culture or society, even those remote in time or space. They may find these values unacceptable, but if they open their minds sufficiently they can grasp how one might be a full human being, with whom one could communicate, and at the same time live in the light of values widely different from one’s own, but which nevertheless one can see to be values, ends of life, by the realisation of which men could be fulfilled.253 According to Berlin, relativism is individualistic, subjectivist, and ultimately agnostic toward the human experience of others. The relativist, writes

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Berlin, says in effect, ‘I prefer coffee, you prefer champagne. We have different tastes. There is no more to be said’.254 In other words, you being you and not being me cannot understand my tastes. You have no access to my experience. You cannot know how I can prefer what I prefer. My preferences belong to me, individually, subjectively. They are locked within my subjective world. You do not and you cannot understand my experience of being human. No one can. While some may question Berlin’s use of the word ‘taste’ to describe this rather more complex level of individual and subjective preferences and the correlative assumption that others have no access to know or to understand the preferences of another, Berlin is nonetheless attempting to put a handle on the insularity of the modern conception of relativism with reference to values and moral judgements.255 A phenomenon similar to that described by Berlin as relativism is noted in Robert Bellah’s study of individualism in the United States, especially with reference to religion. In one of the most memorable interviews in this important study, now some fifteen years old, the religion of a young nurse named Sheila Larson is profiled. Sheila explains her religious faith to the interviewers: ‘I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice’. Sheilaism has few actual tenets, Bellah explains, beyond a vague belief in God. When asked by the interviewer to define Sheilaism, she responds: ‘It’s just to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think He would want us to take care of each other’. Bellah observes that it is conceivable that in the United States, religious as it is, the time will come when there will be as many religions as there are people.256 Such a prospect would likely have troubled Bellah’s most significant literary conversation partner, Alexis de Tocqueville, very deeply indeed. Tocqueville, who used the word ‘individualism’ to describe the social realities he encountered in the United States, warned that those people who subscribe most enthusiastically to individualism may tend to ‘forget their ancestors’, to deny their descendants and to live in isolation from their contemporaries.257 ‘Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart’.258 The coupling of individualistic subjectivism with the realm of the affections, as one also frequently sees in contemporary America, and which has been a constituent of American society from its New England founding, takes us even closer to Berlin’s perceptive interpretation of relativism as a kind of subjective taste, or appetite, or aesthetic valuation, accounted for by the person as individually and perhaps independently acquired and reinforced as a matter of habit.259 Such relativism tends to place the adherent in a sort of closed continuum of the self, consequently devaluing the meaning of common society, and perhaps even seeing any form of community as a threat to the self.260 Berlin, in concert with Herder, emphasizes the reality of diversity among distinct and concrete communities, and the objectivity of

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their values as grounded in the practices of historically conditioned cultures, while also maintaining a real sense of common humanity. Berlin writes: [I]f we did not have any values in common with these distant figures [he has just referred to Plato and the novels of medieval Japan], each civilisation would be enclosed in its own impenetrable bubble, and we could not understand them at all; this is what Spengler’s typology amounts to. Intercommunication between cultures in time and space is only possible because what makes men human is common to them, and acts as a bridge between them. But our values are ours, and theirs are theirs. We are free to criticise the values of other cultures, to condemn them, but we cannot pretend not to understand them at all, or to regard them simply as subjective, the products of creatures in different circumstances with different tastes from our own, which do not speak to us at all. There is a world of objective values. By this I mean those ends that men pursue for their own sakes, to which other things are means. I am not blind to what the Greeks valued – their values may not be mine, but I can grasp what it would be like to live by their light, I can admire and respect them, and even imagine myself as pursuing them, although I do not – and do not wish to, and perhaps could not if I wished. Forms of life differ. Ends, moral principles, are many. But not infinitely many: they must be within the human horizon.261 I shall examine more closely Berlin’s concept of pluralism in contrast to relativism in Chapter 2, and in that context shall look more closely at the concept of incommensurability and the question of how members of one culture can make value judgements with respect to the actions of other societies (Berlin recognizes the inevitability of this fact). But for now, it is crucial to note that Berlin, especially in his analysis of the cultural pluralism of Vico and Herder, has found a way to account for and respect the extraordinary variety of ways human societies have found to express their deepest values and aspirations in concrete, historical forms of cultural existence. These values, ends, ideals, Berlin writes, ‘live and die with the social wholes of which they form an intrinsic part’.262 The members of these social groups are stamped indelibly with the character of the community’s particularity. ‘Each collective individuality’, Berlin continues, is unique, and has its own aims and standards, which will themselves inevitably be superseded by other goals and values – ethical, social and aesthetic. Each of these systems is objectively valid in its own day, in the course of ‘Nature’s long year’ which brings all things to pass.263 For Herder, this insight is fundamentally a theological one: ‘All cultures are equal in the sight of God, each in its time and place’.264

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A philosopher, Herder tells us, ‘is never more of a brute than when he most faithfully wishes to play God and when he confidently calculates the perfection of the world’.265 Such a philosopher is so self-absorbed, so blind in his own arrogance, that he does not realize that every historical line he draws appears to progress straight toward his ideal of perfection simply because the one drawing the line is determined to make reality conform to his own preferences. Heaven and earth have tried in vain to teach this philosopher the truth: In reality human beings always remain human beings, and by analogy to all things they are nothing but human. To perceive the form of angels and devils in human beings is an illusion! Human beings are but halfway between the two: defiant and despondent; aspiring in need, but growing weary in idleness and opulence. Cryptically, Herder continues: humanity is ‘a hieroglyph of good and evil, filling the annals of history!’.266 Herder remained relatively neglected in his own age, but for the hearing he received from a few like F. H. Jacobi and, to some extent, Goethe. However, his lasting influence was to come in the form of the Romantic movement, a child of which he was one of many fathers.

Romanticism A comprehensive analysis of Berlin’s interpretation of the Romantic movement remains well beyond the scope of this study. Berlin’s Mellon lectures (delivered in 1965; published in 1999)267 and his essay, ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will’ (1975),268 represent a remarkable critical engagement with a complex and controversial movement that has touched virtually every arena of Western life, from the artistic to the political. It is important, however, for the purposes of this study to note a few dimensions of what Berlin sees as the legacy of Romanticism, especially with reference to pluralism and social conflict, because it is clear that Berlin understands his cultural pluralism as moving beyond Herder, Vico and Hamann, important as they were to the development of his thought. Berlin, in his ‘Intellectual Path’, wrote that Herder’s idea that ‘mankind was not one but many, and the answers to the questions were many, though there might be some central essence to them all which was one and the same’, was taken up, he explains, and further developed ‘by the Romantics who said something wholly new and disturbing: that ideals were not objective truths written in heaven and needing to be understood, copied, practiced by men. Values were not found, but made; not discovered, but generated’.269 This revolutionary and – to most intellectual streams of Western thought, both secular and religious – heretical idea had been articulated by Herder, Hamann, Vico and, to some extent, by Machiavelli. But

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among the Romantics this idea came to be accepted with the authority of holy writ. ‘Restrained Romantics’, among whom Berlin numbers Kant (who believed that a ‘value is made a value … by human choice and not by some intrinsic quality in itself’,270 and ‘that the moral worth of an act depended on its being freely chosen by the agent’),271 Schiller (who believed that ‘[i]f man is to be free he must be free not merely to do his duty’, he ‘must stand above his duty and nature and be able to choose either’)272 and Fichte (who believed, ‘You become aware of the self only when there is some kind of resistance. You become aware of yourself not as an object but as that which is obtruded upon by some kind of recalcitrant reality’),273 together laid essential elements of the groundwork for the Romantic revolution. Upon their heels, poets, artists, historians, musicians and philosophers, many of whom were among what Berlin called the ‘unbridled Romantics’, overturned an entire world of safe, secure and certain assumptions. Their revolutionary views have entered the popular understanding to such a degree that even their most controversial ideas (controversial when first minted) are accepted as self-evident truisms in our time. ‘Thus’, Berlin writes, no one today is surprised by the assumption that variety is, in general, preferable to uniformity – monotony, uniformity, are pejorative words – or, to turn to qualities of character, that integrity and sincerity are admirable independently of the truth or validity of the beliefs or principles involved.274 In his ‘Apotheosis of the Romantic Will’, Berlin charts Romanticism’s reversal of the fundamental assumptions regarding knowledge and axiology. He maintains that in virtually every corner of the Western world, from the age of Plato to the age of Comte, most people accepted the idea that it matters more what you believe than how fervently you believe it. Throughout these ages, it was generally believed that a cold, clear comprehension of reality is far superior to a deeply held, if utterly groundless, even erroneous idealism. And, of course, virtually everyone thought that the One is good and true and beautiful, but the many is inherently suspect. It took the Romantic movement to reverse these basic assumptions, though the seeds for their reversal, as we have seen, were sown by Machiavelli, Vico, Hamann and Herder (and by Montesquieu, Jacobi and Burke as well).275 Indeed, according to Berlin, it was the Romantic movement that finally and irrevocably broke the monopoly view that salvation is knowledge, a view which had held firm in every version of the philosophia perennis, from the Greeks to the Enlightenment. Berlin summarizes the seismic changes that accompanied Romanticism; and in his description of the radical new doctrines of this movement we can hear the voices of Hamann and Herder:

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For the disciples of the new philosophy suffering was nobler than pleasure, failure was preferable to worldly success, which had about it something squalid and opportunist, and could surely be bought only at the cost of betraying one’s integrity, independence, the inner light, the ideal vision within. They believed that it was the minorities, above all those who suffered for their convictions, that had the truth in them, and not the mindless majorities, that martyrdom was sacred no matter in what cause, that sincerity and authenticity and intensity of feeling, and, above all, defiance – which involved perpetual struggle against convention, against the oppressive forces of church and state and philistine society, against cynicism and commercialism and indifference – that there were sacred values, even if, and perhaps because, they were bound to fail in the degraded world of masters and slaves; to fight, and if need be die, was brave and right and honourable, whereas to compromise and survive was cowardice and betrayal. These men were champions not of feeling against reason, but of another faculty of the human spirit, the source of all life and action, of heroism and sacrifice, nobility and idealism both individual and collective – the proud, indomitable, untrammelled human will.276 The Romantic movement, characterized by Goethe’s Werther and Lord Byron’s mournful heroes, established two propositions that have become so widely accepted in our time, especially after their success in the existentialist philosophical formulae that were taken over by various popular schools of psychotherapy, that they are virtually assumed in much of Western society in precisely the same way in which the central tenets of the philosophia perennis were assumed in previous ages. Berlin explores these two propositions in his Mellon Lectures. First: Humanity is distinguished not by knowledge of values (as though their being is fixed and they must only be discovered), but by their creation. The construction or creation of values is a distinctively human achievement, according to the Romantics. Berlin writes: You create values, you create goals, you create ends, and in the end you create your own vision of the universe, exactly as artists create works of art – and before the artist has created a work of art, it does not exist, it is not anywhere.277 Thus it is not conformity to a ‘right’ set of values that determines humanity’s greatness, but the act of courage and will which seeks to shape one’s own values. Second: There is no set structure or pattern to the universe to which humanity must adapt or conform itself. There is only the process of universal self-creativity. Berlin explains that according to the Romantics,

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Isaiah Berlin The universe must not be conceived of as a set of facts, as a pattern of events, as a collection of lumps in space, three-dimensional entities bound together by certain unbreakable relations, as taught to us by physics, chemistry and other natural sciences, the universe is a process of perpetual forward self-thrusting, perpetual self-creation.278

The universe can be conceived of as hostile to the existence of humanity, and thus as that which perpetually opposes humanity in a ruthless conflict, upsetting every human attempt to make itself at home in the universe, but which can also prove the mettle of humanity through the anguish of this conflict. Or, the universe can be thought of as open to creative partnership with humanity, a participation in creation in which humanity can find its identity and freedom. But in every case, it is the exercise of the human will, whether tragically, heroically, or in creative triumph, that matters. The most enduring implications of the Romantic movement flow logically from these two propositions. Berlin finds in Romanticism the appearance of ‘a new cluster of virtues’. The motives that drive humanity (which, though hidden, we can control) are more important than the consequences of our actions (over which we have little or no control). Thus the highest virtue of all is, in the term favored by the Romantics, sincerity. Sincerity will be renamed ‘authenticity’ by the existentialists, who are, in Berlin’s view, among the direct descendants and true heirs of the Romantic movement. Romanticism introduces at this point something altogether new to the lexicon of Western moral thought, yet it has become so much part and parcel of the intellectual furniture of our own time that it may seem to have been around forever. Romantics valued the sincerity and courage with which a conviction is held more highly than the conviction itself. Berlin observes that before the Romantic movement it was virtually inconceivable for someone to say in effect: That person is a Protestant (or a Catholic, or a Muslim, an Empiricist or a Rationalist, etc.) and I believe his views are repugnant and destructive, but I respect the courage with which he holds those views and I admire his sincerity. Berlin writes: The fact that he is sincere, that he’s prepared to lay down his life for the nonsense in which he believes, is [for the romantics] a morally noble fact. Anyone who is sufficiently a man of integrity, anyone who is prepared to sacrifice himself upon any altar, no matter what, has a moral personality which is worthy of respect, no matter how detestable or how false the ideals to which he bows his knee.279 Again, prior to the Romantic movement, this idea was virtually inconceivable because it was the content of the belief that mattered, not the affective condition or intention of the believer.

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The attitude, which we now commonly call moral idealism (i.e. idealism in the sense of ‘living one’s life for the sake of one’s own high ideals’) is, Berlin tells us, relatively new. In its full-blown version, it was introduced into Western thought by the Romantics, though it follows naturally upon certain aspects of the thoughts of Hamann and Herder. It also would have been virtually impossible to imagine this form of idealism, had sincerity not become a virtue in and of itself, had the taking of positions simply on principle and in the face of impossible odds not become in effect a heroic virtue. In the realm of human behavior and human values, Romanticism passionately rejected the entire notion that there are fixed objective criteria for determining right and wrong, good and bad, and replaced these criteria with the will of the human subject. Astutely, Berlin says that ‘we are children of both worlds’, no longer fully accepting the world described by the philosophia perennis, but not altogether sure of the Romantic vision of reality either. ‘We are products’, he continues, ‘of certain doubts – we cannot quite tell. We give so many marks for consequence, so many marks for motive, and we oscillate between the two’.280 At the end of the day, Berlin believes that despite the excesses of Romanticism, and the sometimes tragic consequences of the movement (and, as Berlin so clearly understands, there is simply no doubt that to some extent fascism is also an heir to Romanticism), we owe the Romantics a real debt. With reference to pluralism and social conflict and tolerance, we are indebted to Romanticism at very least for calling into question the central unifying teachings of the philosophia perennis with such force that the questioning of its tenets entered popular Western culture. The Romantics at their best understood the ruinous consequences of believing that there can be only one true answer to life’s questions and of enforcing this belief upon all people. The Romantics, Berlin writes, perceived that if you really believe there is one single solution to all human ills, and that you must impose this solution at no matter what cost, you are likely to become a violent and despotic tyrant in the name of your solution, because your desire to remove all obstacles to it will end by destroying those creatures for whose benefit you offer the solution.281 The Romantics, again Berlin argues, made popular the ‘notion that there are many values, and that they are incompatible; the whole notion of plurality, of inexhaustibility, of the imperfection of all human answers and arrangements … all this we owe to the romantics’.282 Finally, by focusing our attention on the irreducible conflicts between the ideals we hold, the Romantics also help us understand that in order to live together we must, in Berlin’s words, learn to ‘make do’. What began as a ‘passionate, fanatical, half-mad doctrine’, that we must each create our own ideals out of nothing, can lead to the very down to earth ‘appreciation of the necessity of tolerating others’.283 Simple humane openness to the

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perspective of other persons, to hearing their perception of the world grounded in their experience and history, as ordinary, as mundane and unspectacular as this appears, is the flip side of the passionate will of the very ‘dangerous to know’ Lord Byron and Goethe’s tragic Werther. Toward the close of ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, Berlin observes with characteristic sanity: Of course social and political collisions will take place; the mere conflict of positive values alone makes this unavoidable. Yet they can, I believe, be minimised by promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair.284 This is, according to Berlin, the best we can do in a pluralistic human society. And human society if it is healthy, if it is fed by the multitude of deep, rich streams of human cultures and histories, is and must remain inevitably pluralistic. Given not only our human frailties and failings, ‘the crookedness of our timber’, as Kant has it in one of Berlin’s favorite quotations, but even and especially when we are acting at the behest of the better angels of our souls and are seeking to live in the most admirable ways we can imagine, the plurality of conflicting goods, of incommensurable values and ends we seek to achieve, makes it necessary for us to seek also this ‘uneasy equilibrium’ and to repair it when it is broken. However dull this solution may appear, Berlin tells us, it just may be sufficient.285 Having in summary fashion worked through Berlin’s engagement with Machiavelli, Vico, Hamann, Herder and the Romantic movement, I now ask that we turn our attention to three specific aspects of our communities of faith, reflecting on the reality of pluralism, the persistence of social conflict, and the question of tolerance. In each case, we shall begin our consideration of these subjects from a specifically theological perspective, but in each case we shall attempt to bring our theological reflections into conversation with Berlin’s social theory, in light of a variety of other voices.

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Can Christians be pluralists? Value pluralism and the gift of diversity

So the remedy grows to be worse than the disease, and takes the form of those orthodoxies which rest on the simple puritanical faith of individuals who never knew or have forgotten what douceur de vivre, free self-expression, the infinite variety of persons and of the relationships between them, and the right of free choice, difficult to endure but more intolerable to surrender, can ever have been like. Isaiah Berlin1

Can Christians be pluralists? Some first-person singular reflections Can Christians be pluralists? This is a question that in the view of many people – both Christians and non-Christians – must be answered resoundingly, ‘No!’. The Christian faith, for many, if it is to remain true to Jesus Christ who, according to the Fourth Gospel, said, ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes unto the Father, but by me’, makes a universal, absolute, and exclusive claim on everyone in the world. Christ’s way is singular, as is his truth. And the life he offers, eternal in quality and everlasting in duration, is granted on the condition of adherence to his message to the exclusion of all others. For many, the Christian faith reflects an entire metaphysical picture, a coherent, universal Christian world view, whole and complete. Whether inspired by Platonic, Neoplatonic, Stoic or Aristotelian sources, this understanding of Christianity endures essentially as a religious version of the monistic Western philosophia perennis, which we reviewed in Chapter 1, providing the one true answer to every genuine question under heaven. For others, however, the answer to the question ‘Can Christians be pluralists?’ seems so obviously to be ‘yes’ that the question hardly needs to be asked at all. Whether schooled in the civil-religious pluralism that for many people is inseparable from the traditions of liberal democracy in Western Europe and North America, or in the theological tradition of classical Christian liberalism fed by the headwaters of nineteenth-century romanticism, or in the pragmatic theism (or, perhaps, pantheism) of William James,

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there are many who see the Christian faith as a vital expression of human religious faith either at the apex of the variety of world religions or as one among equals in a pluralistic universe (or, as with James, a pluralistic ‘multiverse’).2 There are even Christians in the great Protestant confessional traditions, among them adherents to the Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican communions, whose liturgical lives and doctrinal claims are theologically rich, but who are also convinced pluralists, who hold it as a solemn duty to reply in the affirmative to our question. As I began research on Isaiah Berlin’s value-pluralism, and began working through his now extensive literary corpus, I simply assumed that Christians can be pluralists. Indeed, with confessional Christians in the last group mentioned above, I saw it as a matter of responsibility to be a pluralist. It was, in fact, Henry Hardy, who, without knowing it at the time, pulled in my reins and reminded me of how difficult the idea of pluralism remains for many Christians and non-Christians. Hardy, who describes himself as a lapsed Anglican and has written some probing articles on the subject of pluralism and religion,3 was genuinely puzzled by the idea that a Christian – that is, a practicing, confessing Christian, and one who refuses to allow the most crucial tenets of Christian faith to be reduced for the sake of interfaith dialogue – could really engage in the kind of thoroughgoing pluralism that Berlin championed. His caution led me to back away from my eager, though incautious, assumption that Christians can be pluralists. Stepping back, it became clear to me that this question must be asked as much as possible while holding my prior assumption – that is, my assumption that the question can be answered in the affirmative – somewhat in abeyance. It also became clear that if I were to take this question seriously, I would have to listen carefully to the voices within the various Christian traditions that have replied no. And I would need to question more closely those who have answered affirmatively, and yet whose affirmation might be misleading – might, in fact, be an affirmation to another question altogether and not to the question ‘Can Christians be pluralists?’ at all. What became apparent before long was that any good answer to this question requires the drawing of some very clear distinctions. Depending on how you define Christian, and depending on what you mean by pluralism, the answer to our question might well be yes or no. Depending on what elements in Christian faith one’s community emphasizes, and depending on the subtleties of one’s pluralism, or the fact that one might be calling something pluralism which is something else altogether, the answer could turn on a dime and contradict itself. All of these issues, which emerged in the early months of reflection on this question, are pertinent, as we shall see. But, as I examined Berlin’s thought more closely, and engaged in various aspects of the lively debates on pluralism, in the end I arrived at some very different conclusions from those which I had anticipated.

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Thomas Hardy, the novelist and poet, once observed that ‘a consistent man of long life may, somewhat to his surprise, be a person of advanced views in youth and of retrograde principles in old age, by the mere fact of remaining just the same’.4 The truth of Hardy’s adage has been proven repeatedly. I am not quite sure, however, what it means to discover that one has moved significantly over many years only to discover that the faith of his community had long ago outraced him, and had arrived at his most radical conclusions centuries before he was born. Perhaps God really is the only iconoclast left.

Drawing Berlin’s distinctions One of the most valuable contributions Isaiah Berlin made to the history of ideas is the way he distinguished between monism, relativism and pluralism. His definitions cut across conventional usages of these terms in sometimes surprising ways. This is one reason that I believe his social theory offers a fresh perspective on the place of pluralism in communities of faith. Before turning to an explicitly theological examination of the issue of pluralism, it may be helpful to clarify Berlin’s distinctions between monism and relativism, and to observe at least two additional distinctions within his understanding of pluralism. Again, his approach to using these terms does not always coincide with the ways in which other scholars have gone about this task, but the distinctions he draws within his own system of categories may prove all the more useful because they are drawn differently. Monism Berlin describes monism as that view which holds the truth to be one and indivisible, identical for all people in all places at all times. As we have already noted, for the monist, every real question has one and only one answer. Every real problem has a single solution. And, whether one discovers these answers and solutions in sacred texts, prophetic utterances, or ecstatic religious experiences, through a process of disciplined and carefully regulated scientific methodology, on the lips of primitive people unsullied by civilization, or at the hand of democratic majorities, the truth can, at least in theory, be discovered by anyone; and if discovered it will be consistent with and will harmonize with all other established truths, because every truth, whether in the world of science or of human values or religious faith, must be consistent with all other truths. In the history of Christian theology, the great representatives of monism have included those streams of faith that descend from Plato and Aristotle. This history includes the names of some of the church’s most influential thinkers such as Athanasius, Augustine and Aquinas. Though the Protestant Reformation tested the boundaries of this monism – especially the monistic assumption that there is one single universal natural law, and

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the monistic tendency to discount particularity in taking account of human life, values and commitments – the currents of monism were often too strong to resist, especially for the successors to the first evangelical reformers.5 After the dawning of the Age of Reason, Berlin detects this monism as a significant undercurrent influencing many of the basic assumptions of philosophers such as Descartes, Locke and Kant, though the philosophies of each were, as Berlin frequently observes, profoundly different in many respects. Christian theology has struggled for centuries over the doctrinal, liturgical and ecclesiastical implications of monism. Without doubt, the message of the church has been dominated by absolutist and exclusivist claims within a monistic framework. And, yet, the faith, the faith-discourse and the practices of the church in particular communities, in various cultural contexts and historical moments, has exhibited a startling pluralism made all the more striking by the doctrinal, ecclesiastical-political and liturgical attempts to affirm and sometimes enforce uniformity in the name of Christian unity and catholicity. In one way or another, the church has strived within its own heart and soul between two alternatives, the first expressed by Cyprian’s ‘Extra ecclesiam nulla salus’ and the second, a fundamental openness to the diversity and plurality implicit in the Christian doctrines of creation and incarnation that threaten as much as they promise. Berlin discerns in monism a driving uniformitarianism, a leveling tendency toward sameness, a fear of diversity and an anxiety in the face of what some philosophers, such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jürgen Habermas, have termed ‘the other’. Berlin, largely because of the terrible repressions and persecutions he witnessed both at the hands of communists and fascists, remained throughout his life deeply antagonistic to the social forces within monism that enforce uniformity and unanimity, and vilify those who do not conform, those whose otherness cannot or will not be reduced to uniform expectations, harmony and social consensus. In contrast to those who argue for monism, Berlin believed that variety is, in and of itself, a good thing, a viable end of human life, and that a society is fundamentally enriched by the diversity of its members. Relativism While Berlin apparently found monism comparatively easy to describe, relativism proved more difficult, partly because its application to various parties (both derogatorily and positively) in this century has made it harder to settle on an acceptable definition. As Berlin observed, however, the best way to determine the meaning of a word is to observe its usages; and in Berlin’s writings the term relativism is used to designate a personal, usually individualistic, preference for one thing over another on the basis of subjective, often private experience. In a sense, relativism is preference for a particular object predicated on preference as a motive.

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Berlin thus attempts to express relativism’s atomistic, quasi-aesthetic quality by describing it as a taste. According to Berlin, a relativist says: ‘ “I prefer coffee, you prefer champagne. We have different tastes. There is no more to be said”. That is relativism’.6 In other words, while appearing to leave room for every other person to experience life on his or her own terms, this socially agnostic relativism (agnostic at the most basic human level, which says, ‘I cannot know your humanity, nor you mine’) locks others out of our individual subjective experience of the world and us out of theirs. It restricts our affiliations, our relationships, to the most superficial level, and tends to deny the possibility of a community of shared or common experience. John Hick expressed precisely this form of relativism when he equated the confession of a Christian with romantic infatuation: ‘That Jesus is my Lord and Savior is language like that of a lover, for whom his Helen is the sweetest girl in the world’.7 Relativism is a position which many Christians and non-Christians find objectionable, a position in which matters of real importance, matters of life and death, matters of conscience and faith, are trivialized into matters of preference, private opinion and taste. There is another aspect of relativism, however, which Berlin describes and rejects. He alludes to it in his 1980 essay ‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteenthcentury European Thought’, in the course of countering the charge that Vico and Herder were relativists. Berlin writes: Because of their conception of the cultural autonomy of different societies … and the incommensurability of their systems of values, Vico’s and Herder’s opposition to the central tenets of the French Enlightenment have commonly been described as a form of relativism. This idée reçue seems to me now to be a widespread error. A distinguished and learned critic has wondered if I fully appreciate the implications of the historical relativism of Vico and Herder which, unacknowledged by them, dominated the historical outlook of these Christian thinkers and constituted a problem which has persisted to this day. If I grant the assumption that Vico and Herder were in fact relativists – that is, not merely historicists who hold that human thought and action are fully intelligible only in relation to their historical context, but upholders of a theory of ideology according to which the ideas and attitudes of individuals or groups are inescapably determined by varying conditioning factors, say, their place in the evolving social structures of their societies, or the relations of production, or genetic, psychological or other causes, or combinations of these – on an assumption of that kind, the point made by my critic was valid. But I now believe this to be a mistaken interpretation of Vico and Herder, although I have, in my time, inadvertently contributed to it myself.8 Berlin, in the course of rejecting the idea that Vico and Herder are relativist, describes a relativism that is essentially deterministic in form, by which the

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thoughts, convictions and actions of individuals are not simply influenced by a variety of factors in their historical, cultural and societal context, but are inevitably and, one might say, fatalistically determined by any number of these factors, from genetics to psychosocial variants, to act or think in one way instead of another. This sort of relativism says, in effect, ‘I cannot help believing as I do. I am programmed this way’. Such ideological determinism adverts that one simply has no choice about what one is or does. According to this kind of relativism, one is a product – or, as contemporary culture seems to imply more and more, one is a victim – of circumstance. This form of relativism undercuts the freedom of persons to be responsible, the fundamental human liberty to be other than what their environment suggests, to be moral agents, to be themselves and to take responsibility for themselves. Berlin takes his critique of this deterministic form of relativism one step further, however. And, by doing so, he demonstrates the common agnostic thread running through relativism. He writes: Relativism, in its modern form, tends to spring from the view that men’s outlooks are unavoidably determined by forces of which they are often unaware – Schopenhauer’s irrational cosmic force; Marx’s class-bound morality; Freud’s unconscious drives; the social anthropologists’ panorama of the irreconcilable variety of customs and beliefs conditioned by circumstances largely uncontrolled by men.9 Again, relativism brings one to stand before the other and to say, ‘I cannot know you. I cannot understand your world of experiences. I cannot begin to imagine who you are, or what motivates you, or what you care about. I do not know what you mean when you say that you are human’. This we have already noted. But this time ‘the other’ before whom we stand may be the face staring back at us from the mirror, because each of us in this form of relativism becomes alienated from and utterly unknowable even to ourselves. Such is the auto-alienating force, the auto-da-fé,of relativism. The point that Berlin attempts to make in constructing an objective pluralism is this: ‘Relativism is not the only alternative to universalism – what [Arthur] Lovejoy called “uniformitarianism” – nor does incommensurability entail relativism. There are many worlds, some of which overlap’.10 Berlin’s understanding of relativism is crucial especially from a theological perspective, as we see in our reflections on the historicity of the church. There is another reflection regarding relativism, which is essential for our understanding of Berlin’s thought, and the application of his thought to ecclesiology. For Berlin, exclusionary monism, with its claim to absolute knowledge of the single universal truth, the one true solution, is simply the other side of the coin of that form of relativism which also claims, either implicitly or explicitly, to be able to evaluate the various moral and axiological systems of humanity and to judge them relative to one another, either as equally mistaken, or as equally valid. Both absolutism and relativism assume

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that the one making the judgement can somehow stand outside or rise above history and culture, and can appeal to certain criteria of valuation against which all human systems of values and beliefs can be evaluated. Berlin’s understanding of this ironic fact that absolutism and relativism exist as polarities on the same monistic continuum will also prove important for our theological analysis of pluralism. Some of the most insightful theological critiques of pluralism, for instance those of Alan Torrance and Gavin D’Costa, thus are more appropriately criticisms of relativism, and not of objective pluralism per se, at least not as Berlin portrays it. ‘Pluralism’, as Torrance writes, ‘suggests that all religions and philosophies contain elements of truth and true revelations, but that no religion can “claim final definitive truth”. This leads to the conclusion that the main religious traditions share more or less equal degrees of validity’.11 Such a ‘pluralism’ demands that its adherents hold to this central theological truth claim, ‘that truth is found in various “fragmentary and incomplete” forms within the claims of other religions’.12 This demand for faith adherence represents not an inclusion of all others; rather, as D’Costa perceptively observes, it represents ‘a form of exclusivism’.13 Pluralism is frequently characterized in these terms. However, as we shall see, despite the application of the name ‘pluralism’ to this position, it is not the objective pluralism for which Berlin argues, but is simply another form of relativism, yet another attempt to account for diversity (in this case, religious diversity) within a monistic framework, specifically that framework grounded in and determined by ‘the Enlightenment project’.14 The confusion proceeds, at least in part, because some philosophers of religion persist in describing their work as pluralistic when it remains relativistic.15 It is generally known that Isaiah Berlin was a champion of pluralism, indeed, that he was one of the twentieth century’s most indefatigable apologists for the causes of pluralism, tolerance, personal liberty, and open democratic societies. What is less widely understood is that for Berlin there are at least two quite distinct forms of pluralism: first, the kind of pluralism one discerns in Johann Georg Hamann, Giambattista Vico and Johann Gottfried Herder; and second, Berlin’s own thoroughgoing pluralism. The first form of pluralism represents little or no problem for many traditions of Christian faith, though it will prove more or less attractive to the doctrinal tradition of one’s Christian community depending on a variety of factors we shall explore. The second form of pluralism, Berlin’s own approach, however, may pose significant problems for many Christians, as we also shall see.

Pluralism 1: the pluralism of Hamann, Vico and Herder One might be justified in distinguishing between the pluralism of Hamann and that of Vico and Herder. But I believe, in the final analysis, that any distinction between these seminal thinkers is of degree rather than kind. I will begin, however, by making a few general characterizations with reference

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to Hamann before looking at Vico and Herder. Because I have already presented Berlin’s general assessment of each of them, my discussion in this section will be relatively brief. Hamann’s pluralism is robust and far-reaching, grounded in a rich sense of historicism and a deep respect for the variety of human cultures. His pluralism also represents a profound theological weltanschauung that attempts to account for both the revelatory rationale of the God who communicates with humanity through a vast array of means, and for the unpredictable, the suprarational and irrational elements in creation that resist the superficialities of those who would try to reduce all reality to a rationalistic ideology. In contrast to certain strains of the Enlightenment, especially in France, Hamann believed that all truth is concrete and particular, never general. If one wishes to understand anything, one must attend to the variable specificities of historical context, to particularity, to the local, even provincial, to the historically, linguistically and culturally embedded ways of a people. Hamann rejected all attempts to construct systems of thought that divert one’s attention from the complex and often contradictory realities of existence. As Berlin says of Hamann: ‘History alone yields concrete truth, and in particular the poets describe their world in the language of passion and inspired imagination’.16 As we have already observed, Hamann believed that attention to the messy and diverse character of historical reality and the passionate language and imagination of poetry were the best ways to gain access to truth, because God is a poet, not a mathematician. In almost every way Hamann’s pluralism accords with the pluralism of Vico and Herder: his historicism, his respect for particular cultures, and his reflections on language, all attest to a pluralism that is open to the astonishing variety of ways that different peoples have wrestled with what it means to be human and what it means to live humanly together in communities. Hamann resists the attempts of strict rationalists to ignore and despise history, or of certain representatives of the French Enlightenment to reject the folkways of the provincial and the primitive in the name of a higher, truer culture, i.e. their own. Perhaps in Hamann’s piety (mistakenly described at times as his ‘mysticism’), the combination of his teleology with his conception of revelation – that God speaks through every aspect of creation, from the mystery of the hiddenness of humanity and the open book of the universe itself to the written text of the Christian Bible, and that God wills to draw humanity by faith into a participation in God’s purposes – that we find a definitive boundary or limitation, a fence set round his pluralism which separates him by some degrees from Vico and Herder. Hamann, sometimes like an ecstatic Hebrew prophet, at other times like certain philosophical empiricists, and always with a profound respect for what Gwen Griffith Dickson has described as the way ‘the various features of our experience – ourselves, others, language, the world, ultimately God – are all inextricably related’,17 demands that we become attentive to the world

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that surrounds us, rather than the mental abstractions we are tempted to substitute in the place of complex and concrete historical realities. Hamann draws together his sense of the immediacy of God, the divine communicator and revealer, with God the purposeful creator. His pluralism, while taking account of the variety of ways human cultures have sought to answer the most important questions pressed upon them by their creaturely existence, finds a point of unity in God’s purpose for creation, a purpose God speaks in and through the universe and invites humanity to share wherever historically and culturally they find themselves. This is surely stressed in Hamann’s writings more than in Vico and Herder. But, again, any difference between Hamann and Vico and Herder on this point would be one of degree only because, as Berlin observes, for both Vico and Herder, ‘the pattern [of human history] – every section of it – serves God’s purposes; the different characters of each culture are imposed by this pattern – a species of temporalized natural law’.18 In some sense, then, Vico and Herder simply raise the stakes in the game, increasing the tension between, on the one hand, a pluralism that takes seriously the historically specific diversity of human cultures, the very different ways people in these various cultures express who they are through the things they value and the ends for which they live, and on the other hand, a fundamental belief that the plurality of human cultures, values and ends ultimately serves God’s purposes, God’s own ends. While the cultures of the world, from the culture of Hebrew shepherds to Roman senators, from Homer’s Greece to Renaissance Italy, afford ‘a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate, above all equally objective; incapable, therefore of being ordered in a timeless hierarchy, or judged in terms of some one absolute standard’, nevertheless, for both Vico and Herder there remains a fundamental teleological aspect to their thought grounded in the conviction that God is working through all of the cultures of the world to achieve God’s own telos. While pluralism reigns supreme in human history and cultures, Vico and Herder posited singularity in the hidden heart of God. Indeed, the God whom Vico and Herder adore is a God who loves diversity for the sake of variety itself, who has woven plurality into the very fabric of creation and who delights in this variety, and, at the same time, is working through the staggering pluralism of creation to accomplish those final purposes known ultimately only to God. Berlin finally, despite the debt he acknowledges to all three, Hamann, Vico, and Herder, resists their version of pluralism specifically because of its teleology. He writes: No doctrine that has at its heart a monistic conception of the true and the good and the beautiful, or a teleology according to which everything conspires towards a final harmonious resolution – no doctrine of this kind can allow variety as an independent value to be pursued for its own sake; for variety entails the possibility of the conflict of values, of some

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John Gray, as noted in the previous chapter, observes that according to Berlin it is appropriate to speak teleologically of individual persons, so as to affirm that they are ‘purposive creatures’, that they work toward ends and that they construct meaning from and for their lives. But to speak in this manner of history as a whole is to introduce into the discussion an ‘historical theodicy’ that inevitably favors the values of some cultures over others and that undercuts the value of pluralism as an end in itself.20 Gray’s usage of the phrase ‘historical theodicy’ with reference to Berlin merits closer investigation, because it is both apt in describing Berlin, and is theologically interesting. Normally, in the world of Christian theology the term theodicy is reserved to describe ‘the vindication of divine providence in view of the existence of evil’.21 N. H. G. Robinson defines the word as follows: Theodicy is the name given to that type of theological argumentation which, accepting a basis in theism, seeks by reason to reconcile belief in the goodness, wisdom and power of God with any contrary evidence, such as the existence of evil, and so to ‘justify the ways of God to men’. Thus, so far as it goes, a theodicy seeks to supplement faith by sight.22 The origin of the term is eighteenth-century, dating from Leibniz’s employment of the French equivalent, Théodicée, a word compounded of the Greek theos, of course, for God, and dikü, that is, justice.23 What Gray conveys in using the term to describe Berlin’s rejection of a teleological interpretation of history is this: Berlin resists any attempt, religious or secular, of trying to justify the evils and misdeeds of the present by appealing to a larger purpose, to a great and glorious goal that lies just beyond the horizon of the present. Berlin writes perhaps most convincingly of his rejection of historical theodicy, in his essay on Alexander Herzen, the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual with whom he identified so profoundly. Herzen saw danger in the great magnificent abstractions the mere sound of which precipitated men into violent and meaningless slaughter – new idols, it seemed to him, on whose altars human blood was to be shed tomorrow as irrationally and uselessly as the blood of the victims of yesterday or the day before, sacrificed in honour of older divinities [in another place Berlin echoes Herzen in describing these new false gods as modern Molochs].24 Berlin continues later in the same essay, and one can discern in his description of Herzen the echo of his own deepest pluralistic and liberal commitments:

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[Herzen] believed that the ultimate goal of life was life itself; that the day and the hour were ends in themselves, not a means to another day or another experience. He believed that remote ends were a dream, that faith in them was a fatal illusion; that to sacrifice the present or the immediate and foreseeable future to these distant ends must always lead to cruel and futile forms of human sacrifice. He believed that values were not found in an impersonal objective realm, but were created by human beings, changed with the generations of men, but were none the less binding upon those who lived in their light; that suffering was inescapable, and infallible knowledge neither attainable nor needed. He believed in reason, scientific methods, individual actions, empirically discovered truths; but he tended to suspect that faith in general formulas, laws, prescription in human affairs was an attempt, sometimes catastrophic, always irrational, to escape from the uncertainty and unpredictable variety of life to the false security of our own symmetrical fantasies.25 No grand abstractions, no castles in the air, no promised land, no chosen people, no eschatological kingdom, no state purged of counter-revolutionaries, no ultimate omelette can justify the breaking of any number of eggs. This protest lies at the heart of Berlin’s rejection of any ‘historical theodicy’. Berlin witnessed too often the cynical and the idealistic, the callous politicians, the dreamy-eyed utopians and the ruthless tyrants from Lenin, Trotsky, Hitler and Stalin to Mao, Pol Pot, and, we might add, to false messiahs and mad, charismatic religious leaders, marching down the same terrible path provisionally rationalizing and justifying the most appalling injustices, repressions, cruelties, murders and mass suicides by invoking some teleological interpretation of history. While that perfect future or perfect society, for which so many have died, remains temporally deferred, not yet quite reached, the habit of breaking eggs only grows.26 Many philosophers and theologians have raised concerns similar to Berlin’s, and no one can remain insensitive to this issue after what we have witnessed in the twentieth century. No teleological view of history is safe from abuse, according to Berlin, but no historical theodicy is necessary for the existence and promotion of communal values and ends. For Berlin, there are no answers in the back of the textbook of history. In his estimation, despite the tremendous contributions that Hamann, and especially Vico and Herder, have made to the history of ideas in Western thought, in the end they do not take us far enough because of their profound commitment to a teleological view of history. This being said, however, Berlin also affirms the pluralism of Vico and Herder in virtually unprecedented terms. [T]hey are inviting us to look at societies different from our own, the ultimate values of which we can perceive to be wholly understandable ends of life for men who are different, indeed, from us, but human beings,

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Certainly neither Vico nor Herder understood their form of pluralism as unChristian. They believed that they had found a way to account for the extraordinary diversity of approaches that people of various cultures have taken in different times and places to be human, to build human societies, to express worthwhile aspirations and objective values, and to live toward ends they believe are important, appropriate to human life, and ultimate. For both Vico and Herder, the values and ends of people in these various cultures were understood as genuinely human ways of living together; and both Vico and Herder could understand these ways as human, though Vico did not belong to a culture that valued what Homer’s heroic culture valued, and Herder’s way of being human was strikingly different in many ways from the lives of the nomadic Hebrews he studied. Though both would probably have agreed on precious little with Joseph de Maistre, they undoubtedly would have agreed with his view that there is no such thing as man in the world. In the course of my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians etc. … But as for man, I declare that I have never met him in my life; if he exists, he is unknown to me.28 For both Vico and Herder, and of course Hamann as well, there is no humanity in abstraction; only humanity in particular historical communities, and these communities are imaginatively available to us. We can understand what it means for other people to be human, to value and live for the things they care about, even if we would not live as they do in our own cultural and historical contexts. It is even possible, with Vico and Herder, for the values and ends of various cultures to be understood as incommensurable with one another, and yet to recognize that within these respective cultures their values were objective and ultimate, and sometimes quite unique in the history of the world.

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Berlin draws a clear distinction between this objectively, historically and culturally grounded pluralism and what is frequently termed cultural or historical relativism. He writes: The fact that the values of one culture may be incompatible with those of another, or that they are in conflict within one culture or group or in a single human being at different times – or, for that matter, at one and the same time – does not entail relativism of values, only the notion of a plurality of values not structured hierarchically; which, of course, entails the permanent possibility of inescapable conflict between values, as well as incompatibility between the outlooks of different civilizations or of stages of the same civilization.29 By contrast, according to Berlin, relativism rejects the very idea of ‘objective values’. Some forms of relativism ‘maintain that men’s outlooks are so conditioned by natural or cultural factors as to render them incapable of seeing the values of other societies or epochs as no less worthy of pursuit than their own’.30 Some versions of cultural relativism, he writes, so ‘stress the vast differences of cultures’ that members of ‘one culture can scarcely begin to understand what other civilizations lived by – can only describe their behaviour but not its purpose or meaning’.31 The skepticism produced by ‘the best-known type of modern historical relativism’, he explains, is inevitable given its assumption that human beings are so ‘wholly bound by tradition or culture or class or generation to particular attitudes or scales of value’ that the ‘outlooks or ideals’ of members of other cultures seems utterly ‘unintelligible’.32 If, in other words, everything one does is simply a matter of cultural or historical determinism, as certain forms of relativism hold, it becomes meaningless to inquire into the objectivity of anyone’s cultural values; objectivity is rendered a literally meaningless term. Berlin continues: This is not at all Vico’s position; nor, despite one or two remarks, is it in general that of Herder either. This [cultural or historical relativism, in contrast to objective pluralism] would indeed have been, to say the least, a strange doctrine for Christian thinkers, however unorthodox, to hold.33 We shall explore the ways in which certain theological concerns either limit or eliminate the possibility of pluralism. What Hamann, and especially Vico and Herder, provide, however, is a viable historicism and an objective pluralism of cultures constrained by a teleological grounding in the purposes of God. Berlin’s own pluralism goes further than Hamann, Vico and Herder, however, and provides a model of thoroughgoing pluralism unlimited by any theological concerns.

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Pluralism 2: Berlin’s thoroughgoing pluralism One might be tempted to describe Berlin’s pluralism by saying that it is similar to that of Hamann, Vico and Herder provided one omits their teleological interpretation of history. But this would simply not account for the positive force, the originality and significance of Berlin’s own thoroughgoing pluralism, nor would it assist those of us who as Christians (and as Christian theologians) wish to evaluate whether or not, or to what degree, we can theologically appropriate Berlin’s approach to pluralism. Perhaps there is no better place to begin a description of Berlin’s pluralism than to reflect on his final brief statement on the subject. He writes: I do believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek, and that these values differ. There is not an infinity of them: the number of human values, of values which I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character, is finite. … if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding.34 Certainly for Berlin there is no hidden monistic agenda lurking under the surface of his thought. There is no undisclosed monistic conception of metaphysical purpose, no divine providence ‘according to which everything conspires towards a final harmonious resolution’.35 There is no single transhistorical and universal truth demanding the assent of all people, in every culture, for all time. Neither is there a single absolute good, or a metanomos, against which the morality of all cultures throughout history must be judged. Nor, indeed, is there one absolute conception of beauty, timeless, eternal and ubiquitous. For Berlin, there is no absolute and universally valid set of criteria in relation to which all things can and must be measured, and thus arranged into a single harmonious hierarchy of values. There is, according to Berlin, no Archimedean point outside of human history and values from which one (whether one is an absolutist or a relativist) can evaluate all human values and beliefs. Various cultures at different historical moments have defined truth, good and beauty in particular ways, and their cultures have expressed and pursued those ends – those ultimate and objective ends – which they believed were appropriate and right. And yet, as different as cultures are, and as diverse as their values and ends may be, it is possible for a human being living in Oxford in the latter half of the twentieth century, by diligent effort and imagination, to understand something of what it would mean to be human, to live in a human society, and to value and work toward the ends pursued by a human society such as the one in which Homer performed his epic poems. The fact that I can understand as human the values and ends of another society does not mean that I am bound to endorse them, however, as Berlin

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himself frequently makes clear. From within our own historical and cultural particularity it is possible, and probably inevitable and necessary, that we should form judgements based on our understanding of the good, the true and the beautiful. As Berlin says, if I pursue one set of values I may detest another, and may think it is damaging to the only form of life that I am able to live or tolerate for myself and others; in which case I may attack it, I may even – in extreme cases – have to go to war against it. But I still recognize it as a human pursuit.36 In other words, I may oppose something for a variety of reasons and retain respect for the plurality of human cultures, but I cannot simply write off the cultures of others as inhuman. For instance: to understand the social, cultural and ideological factors that contributed to the rise of Bolshevism or Nazism, and to recognize among the peoples that tacitly or actively contributed to the success of these tyrannies, the human factors, the fears and anxieties, the idolatry of race and blood, the nationalistic hubris, the perverse ideologies and twisted idealisms and personal greed that contributed to an unwillingness to resist, all of which allowed these political forces of repression to succeed, and to recognize these factors, furthermore, as representing ways of valuing that are ultimate and objective, is not to approve of them. If anything, Berlin’s understanding of such extremes of cultural axiology emphasizes the human freedom and the responsibility of the members of any society. Again, Berlin writes: I do not regard the Nazis, as some people do, as literally pathological or insane, only as wickedly wrong, totally misguided about the facts, for example in believing that some beings are subhuman, or that race is central, or that Nordic races alone are truly creative, and so forth. I see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.37 The recognition of the existence of a plurality of objective values and ultimate ends which function in various cultural and historical contexts does not imply that one must accept as valid these values and ends. But it does mean that one must recognize the wide variety of ways of being human and of living together in human society that have been variously pursued, and the irreducible incommensurability of many of the values and ends that human societies have pursued. It also means that we recognize that our critique or judgement of other human values and ends is grounded in our own cultural and historical context, in the context of our own pursuit of objective values and ultimate ends, and that we do not occupy a privileged position outside of all culture and history from which to judge others or ourselves.

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No poet has equaled the vigor and power of Homer’s heroic poetry, but that poetry is inseparable from a human culture whose people valued things most of us do not value, a culture that expressed the humanity of Homer’s world in ways inconsistent with many of our most precious values, a culture, indeed, in which people lived for the sake of ends (ultimate ends) few of us would live for. Much the same could be said of the world of the biblical ‘Judges’, and of David’s Jerusalem, of the Roman empire of Augustus, the Tuscany of the Medicis, the Ming dynasty, and on and on. This, of course, was the crucial point Berlin discovered in Machiavelli. The Florentine diplomat and political thinker has stumped scholars for centuries, but what Machiavelli discerned, according to Berlin, is simply this: Christian morality which values charity, forgiveness of enemies, selfsacrifice, self-abnegation, and otherworldliness represents a completely different set of objective values and ultimate ends from the antiqua virtus of Republican Rome. The latter, devoted to public-spirited strength, and courage, the assertion of self and devotion to worldly ambition, power, justice and the willingness to take vengeance on one’s enemies, represents another way of living in a society altogether, indeed of another society altogether, the values and ends of which are no less ultimate and no less objective than the Christian way. Machiavelli’s critical insight, according to Berlin, was not that public leadership demands unscrupulous behavior or political shady dealings. His insight was more profound altogether than this. In fact, Berlin’s Machiavelli was a moralist arguing for another moral code, a pagan code of public virtue. Berlin’s interpretation of Machiavelli is profound, its implications farreaching. In Berlin’s view, there are in various cultures, and frequently in the same culture, and sometimes in the same individual, conflicting and incommensurable values and ends, equally ultimate and equally objective. These conflicts are unavoidable and intractable. And there is no place outside of time and space, outside of our own axiological worlds, that we can stand to make our choices between them. We must, in a manner appropriate to our own historical, cultural and social groundedness, choose among these competing values and ends without the assistance of a transhistorical, metaethical set of criteria that might provide an Archimedean point outside of human history and culture from which we can choose infallibly. And as we choose between these values and ends, we must do so in the knowledge that to choose certain worthwhile values and ends may necessarily mean that we are rejecting other values and ends no less important to us, and that our choices frequently entail losses between these values and ends that are irremediable and irretrievable. If anything, Claude Galipeau’s summary of Berlin’s pluralism only raises the stakes: He sees five elements in Berlin’s pluralism: First, there is a multiplicity of good ends and admirable ways of life. Second, good ends and admirable ways of life may conflict. Third,

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conflict entails the incompatibility of some ends and ways of life, or that they cannot be combined without loss. Fourth, some ends and ways of life are incommensurable, or cannot be measured according to one universal standard. And fifth, no comprehensive synthesis of moral goods can be revealed by either reason or faith.38 We have already touched on the last two points noted by Galipeau, but it is important to note the way in which he states the first three. In Berlin’s pluralism: ‘there is a multiplicity of good ends and admirable ways of life’, these ‘good ends and admirable ways of life may conflict’, and ‘conflict entails the incompatibility of some ends and ways of life, or that they cannot be combined without loss’. If the good, the true and the beautiful are historically and culturally specific, as Berlin believes, a simple empirical confrontation with the facts reveals that if one culture differs greatly from another in what they value and live for, it does not necessarily mean that one is right and good and that the other is wrong and bad. Further, it may be that the goods of one culture are so totally different from those of another that they cannot even be compared. Berlin frequently moves to the arena of aesthetics to make this point. The poetry of Shakespeare is not an improvement over that of Homer. The two are simply incomparable, each giving voice to human cultures that seek very different values and ends. The music of Elgar and Bach cannot be placed on a single comparative scale, though many critics are tempted to do precisely this. Their compositions are incommensurable. They stand within different musical cultures in very different historical contexts, valuing very different things, working toward very different ends. Anyone who wishes to learn poetry or musical composition may wish to enter into and learn from the work of all of these, but if one wishes to understand each, each must be understood in his own context as a composer who valued certain things and not others, who strove for certain goals while leaving others alone. Perhaps most radically of all, according to Berlin, the diverse objective values and ultimate ends of life which emerge from various historical and cultural contexts cannot simply be combined without loss. Irreparable loss is an essential feature of historicism. Whatever the combination of particular historical and cultural factors, of personal factors (including the very unpredictable factor of personal genius or creative gift), of social, familial and economic factors which gave us Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets and Mozart’s symphonies, concertos and operas, they come together only fleetingly, and subsequently are lost forever to history. Even closer to home, the values that many in our Western popular culture of personal autonomy and psychological self-improvement hold most precious, values such as personal self-reflectiveness and self-knowledge, of mental health and psychological well-being, may actually work against other things that we value just as highly, such as artistic genius. John Gray,

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reflecting on this feature of Berlin’s thought, specifically with reference to the conflict between the value of autonomy and other values, writes: A successful psychoanalyst might have turned Van Gogh into a contented bourgeois; it is unlikely that it would have left him with the power to paint as he did. It is not only that the ideal of autonomy crowds out other ideals of life, then, but that it may be self-limiting in the individual case as well. The pursuit of autonomy through enhanced self-knowledge may deplete in a person powers and capacities that are centrally constitutive of the self his choices have created, that are necessary for the pursuit of projects by which that self is defined, and which are recognized by others as essential for the accomplishment of intrinsically valuable activities. This must be so, indeed, if our individual natures may contain conflicts and contradictions, such that our personal powers, cannot be augmented across the board. It may well be, for example, that profound self-knowledge is in many people an impediment to the vitality required in successful practical action, or to the intensity of vision needed in artistic creativity; it may even be true of many people that the examined life is not worth living.39 Could a well-integrated and self-aware Van Gogh or Beethoven, an emotionally balanced Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath, or a Hemingway without the self-destructive fixation on death, have created as they did what they did? Even the most basic, the most important values of human life, such as those which reflect the human need for self-expression, self-knowledge and psychological well-being, stand in conflict with one another. Berlin understood this as few others have, but he also understood something more, that conflicts between our values are neither rare nor exceptional, but are typical of human social existence. Believing, as Berlin does, that human values are a human creation, not a creation simply of individuals, but of entire human societies as they attempt to understand what it means to be human and to live humanly together, then the central ‘problems’ of pluralism have to do, not with trying to harmonize diversity within a larger monistic framework, but with negotiating our lives through the complex tangle of often incommensurable values and ends that compete for our allegiance, affection and time. This negotiation of incommensurable values may take a form as personal as the choice we make between a celibate calling and the vocation of marriage, or a form as public as an entire society’s wrestling with the values enshrined in its constitution between the freedom of political expression and the maintenance of order, the promotion of the economic interests and the defense of local standards of decency. Berlin’s pluralism of values is an attempt to describe the concrete complexities of human social existence in a manner that takes seriously the moral agency, the freedom and responsibility of persons. We shall examine these issues again in the next chapter in the context of our reflec-

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tions on social conflict. For now, it is vital that we explore specifically the implications of Berlin’s objectivity for Christian theology. From a theological perspective, the primary question that emerges is fairly straightforward: Can a Christian share the kind of thoroughgoing pluralism we find in Isaiah Berlin? The key to answering this question lies in whether, or to what degree (1) one believes that Christianity necessarily entails a monistic claim to a single, universal and absolute standard by which good, truth, and beauty are judged; (2) one believes that faith in the triune God revealed in Jesus Christ provides us with a place to stand outside of history and culture from which to judge the values and ends of ourselves and others; and (3) one believes that a teleological view of history is constitutive to and inseparable from Christian faith. In other words, both the extent of absolutism and the historical teleology of certain forms of Christianity bear directly on the degree of pluralism possible or desirable for a particular Christian tradition. It is clear that the humility of Berlin’s pluralism, which rejects the idea that we as human beings can transcend our historical and cultural contexts and can claim for ourselves a privileged position above history and culture from which to judge the values and ends of others, is not altogether without parallel in Christian thought, though Berlin would probably have resisted the Christian version of this teaching. Judgement belongs to God, we Christians are taught, not to humanity. Jesus of Nazareth told his congregation on the mount: ‘Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get’ (Matt. 7:1–2). This teaching was viewed as so typically ‘Christian’ that versions of it entered into the writings of a variety of early Christian communities, as is attested by the texts they produced. The Pauline church taught: ‘Therefore you have no excuse whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgement on another you condemn yourself’ (Rom. 2:1). And in this at least the Jerusalem community seems to have been in agreement with the Pauline: ‘There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbor?’ (James 4:12). Though Christians frequently assert a claim that because of their belief in Christ they are entitled to some extrahistorical ground from which to make ultimate judgements on the values and ends of others, there is perhaps nothing so certain as the fact that this is the one thing Christians cannot have. Though Berlin would have seen the appeal to the ultimacy of God’s judgement as problematic, his warning is crucial for Christians to remember in the face of those absolutists who believe that because they are Christians they now share a God’s-eye view of the world; and Berlin’s caution is no less crucial in the face of relativists who believe that a particular philosophical perspective gives them access to a privileged position (and to privileged expert information) from which they can judge all religions in relation to one another. There is a healthy skepticism within various texts of the New

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Testament, which resists either religious or, by extension, scholarly humbug, though many gloss over this in their desire to find in the Bible confirmation or support of their own views and values. As we shall see, other texts from these same communities – and especially from the Johannine community – also make absolutist and exclusivist claims in the name of Christ. This fact cannot be denied. The aspect of irremediable loss is another understanding implicit in Christian scripture, though there are forces for harmony and uniformity countering this understanding as well. Generally speaking, the variety of Christian religious experiences and practices of faith, though historically well attested, stands in an uneasy relationship to certain Christian texts, which, from the time of the very earliest churches, have demonstrated a deep commitment to singularity. But, even within the New Testament, the most important collection of Christian texts (each text of which in one way or another seems to wish to enforce unanimity in religious experience and doctrine), there is considerable conflict. The Christian way of St Paul, for instance, is not simply synonymous – is, indeed, often in conflict – with the Christian way of St James and the Jerusalem church, though the ways of both (and both reflect whole communities of Christian faith and practice) are enshrined in the Christian canon; and choosing to live one’s life according to the teachings of one may result in the loss of worthwhile aspects of the values of the other. Protestants historically have framed the difference between the Pauline way and the way advocated by Jerusalem as a contrast between faith and works. If we minimize, attempt to harmonize or deny the differences between these two Christian ways we cut ourselves off from much of the creative power of the message of Jesus Christ; and, yet, as Martin Luther understood (though his solution was classically monistic), the ways of both cannot both be honored in one’s life. Choices must be made. These choices between authentically Christian ways entail irreparable losses. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Berlin’s exclusion of historical purposiveness runs counter to various understandings of divine providence we find virtually throughout Christian scripture, dependent as it is and building as it does on the Hebrew understanding of God’s involvement in human history, specifically God’s working out his purposes in and through the children of Israel. Even an abbreviated account of the notion of the teleological perspective of Judaism and Christianity represented in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures would run to volumes, from the divine covenant with Abraham in Genesis 12 to the Pauline promise: ‘We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose’ (Rom. 8:28). For many Christians, facing and making sense of the ordinary discomforts and losses of existence and attempting to rationalize the problem of evil and human suffering, the thoroughgoing pluralism of Berlin is simply unacceptable. But, it must also be said, there are crucial texts in both the Hebrew and

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Christian scriptures that resist the human yearning to find meaning and divine purpose in the movement of history. The books of Job and Ecclesiastes do not stand alone, though they come to mind most immediately in this context; the Psalms, which as Bonhoeffer reminds us is not only the book of praises for the Hebrew people but is the prayer book of Christians, as well as many of the parables of Jesus, and the Marcan account of Jesus’ betrayals and death, represent a way of faith that finds hope as much a burden as a blessing. It would not therefore be easy, even for Christians with a well developed understanding of divine providence, simply to dismiss Berlin’s pluralism, and especially his unwillingness to accept rationalizations for the evil that humanity does in the name of a perfect future. Berlin’s perspective on pluralism holds considerable promise for Christian theology. For the moment, however, I want to resist responding to the question of whether or to what extent Christians can share Berlin’s pluralism, because in order to answer this question properly, we need to expand our discussion by examining, if only briefly, some of the ways philosophers and theologians since the Enlightenment have tried to understand the absolutist or exclusivist claims of the Christian faith.

Theological choices: Lords of the Rings, or the great divorce of heaven and history There can be no doubt but that historically the Christian faith has often believed itself to possess some form of absolute, exclusive, and unique access to truth about God, a belief that has been translated by certain Christian communities into a claim for a privileged relationship with God and priority over other religions. The phrase itself, ‘absoluteness of Christianity’, belongs, as Reinhold Bernhardt reminds us, to Hegel and Schelling, and to preeminently ‘the philosophy of German idealism’, that flourished in the nineteenth century. ‘[Q]uite evidently’, he writes, ‘talk of the absoluteness of Christianity does not originate in the Bible’.40 Certainly, Bernhardt is correct in distinguishing between the philosophical usage of absoluteness and the various biblical expressions of faith in God alone, which carry more the sense of unflinching allegiance than of metaphysical speculation grounded in a coherent world view. Yet Carl Braaten41 is also correct, at least in part, and he articulates a not uncommon Christian view on the subject, when in beginning his essay, the title of which incorporates Hegel’s phrase, he writes: ‘It is a philosophical concept that expresses what the classical Christian tradition understood by the dogma of the incarnation as well as deep convictions of the biblical communities of both Old and New Testaments’.42 Running through the teachings of the Christian faith is something of an absolutist theme, emerging in one place and another, a belief in uniqueness and singularity and exclusivity with reference to access to God and truth about God.

94 Can Christians be pluralists? As we have already noted, the Fourth Gospel places an absolute and, indeed, exclusive claim on the lips of Jesus: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes unto the Father, but by me’ (John 14:6). The Epistles of First, Second, and Third John testify to the devotion of those within the Johannine community(ies) to one another, to those within the community who obey God’s word (described as God’s children; the little children; the brothers and sisters) and the community’s exclusion of those without or in opposition to their community(ies) (those who still dwell in darkness, those who love the world, and those who left the community and are now antichrists). But the Johannine texts are predated by others, including, as Braaten reminds us, Acts 4:12, which says: ‘there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved’.43 Jesus himself is said to have warned his hearers that they must obey him or their metaphorical houses will crumble (Luke 6:46), and they will not enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 7:21). And when Jesus attempted to convey what it means to follow him, he emphasized the costs (‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’ [Mark 8:35–36]), the conflict (‘Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven’ [Matt. 10:32–34]), and the difficulty in staying to the singular course (‘For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it’ [Matt. 7:13–14]). St Paul warns that all humanity earns death as recompense for its sins, and that the only remedy for the ‘wages of sin’ is ‘the free gift of God’ which is ‘eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom. 6:23). Other texts, from chapter 1 of the Epistle to the Colossians to the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, make universal and exclusive claims. In light of the documentary evidence of the early church, it is a sentimental and superficial view of Christian faith, indeed, that does not admit and attempt to take into account the fact that exclusive and universal claims are made in the New Testament. Of course the Old Testament had already traversed the path of the absolute and exclusive claim which YHWH makes on his people, not least in the text from Deuteronomy 4:39 which Braaten cites: ‘Know therefore this day, and lay it to your heart, that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other’.44 The recognition of YHWH as God and Ruler over the Hebrew people is the central fact of the history related in Hebrew scripture.45 The absoluteness of YHWH ’s claim is enshrined in the story of the Exodus, in the giving of the Torah to the people of Israel, and specifically in the enunciation of the Decalogue: ‘Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me’ (Exodus 20:1–2; cf.

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Deut. 5:6). It is the absoluteness of YHWH ’s claim on Israel that is specifically handed on in the teachings of Jesus to his auditors when he makes the Schema (‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might’ [Deut. 6:4–5]) the first of his two greatest commandments: The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength’. The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’. There is no other commandment greater than these. (Mark 12:28–31; cf. Matt. 22:34–40; and Luke 10: 25–28) It has often been observed that neither of these commandments is original to Jesus. Both are grounded in the traditions of faith into which Jesus was born, and from which he emerged. The first, as noted above, is a restatement of Deuteronomy 6:4–5, the second of Leviticus 19:18. Braaten charts the continuity between the absolutism and exclusivism in the biblical witnesses and in later expressions of the church. He writes ‘when Martin Luther called Christianity the “vera et unica religio” (the true and unique religion), he was merely passing on what virtually all Christians by then were taking for granted’.46 The exclusive and absolute claim of the Lord God had, centuries before Luther, been expressed in ecclesial terms. Such was certainly the force of Cyprian’s ‘Extra ecclesiam nulla salus’, as Braaten observes,47 though Cyprian’s maxim makes little sense if taken out of the context of his assertion of the episcopal unity of the church.48 Despite centuries of venerable tradition, however, the claims of the Christian faith to unique authority and exclusive access to God were in for a very rough ride as the Age of Reason dawned, even while they were extended in ways that went beyond the biblical witnesses. With the rise of the Enlightenment, the assumption that Christianity’s claim to religious truth was absolute, exclusive and unique came under serious and sustained fire. G. E. Lessing, as Braaten observes, attempted to rationalize and, perhaps, to make palatable the relative status of the Christian message by means of his Enlightenment drama Nathan the Wise, which Peter Demetz describes as a ‘comedy of ideas in the guise of a fairy tale’.49 According to Lessing’s legend, narrated by Nathan the Wise, In days of yore, there dwelt in eastern lands A man who had a ring of priceless worth Received from hands beloved The stone it held, An opal, shed a hundred colors fair, And had the magic power that he who wore it, Trusting its strength, was loved of God and men.50

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Each who possessed this ring was intended to hand it down to his favorite son, and each recipient became in turn the reigning prince. ‘At last this ring, passed on from son to son,/Descended to a father of three sons’, who loved his sons equally well.51 The father’s love presented him with a peculiar problem: ‘in pious frailty’, Lessing writes, the father had promised the ring to each of his beloved sons. When he drew near to death, the father struck upon the ingenious and desperate solution. He would have two counterfeit rings forged so he could keep his word to each of his children. A jeweler was sent for and the counterfeits were made. They looked precisely like the true ring. Not even the father could tell them apart. Thus the father called the sons, gave each his blessing and each his ring, and died. ‘Scarce is the father dead’, Nathan continues, ‘when all three sons/Appear, each with his ring, and each would be/The reigning prince’.52 It was impossible for any of the three sons to know whether the ring he had received was the original and true ring. No test could be devised by which the true ring’s efficacy could be demonstrated. ‘Each of the three sons’, Braaten comments, ‘thinks he has the true ring and considers the others false. The three sons go to the wise judge Nathan, who becomes the spokesman for the superior counsel of Lessing himself and the new philosophy of the Enlightenment’.53 The judge tells them that the best course is for each son to recognize the most obvious fact ‘that you, all three, [your father] loved; and loved alike’, and that each should believe that his own ring is the true one, leaving the outcome, the final judgement on the ring’s veracity, to the ages of the ages. Someday (‘in a thousand thousand years’), the identity of the true ring will be proven. In the meantime, so the judge counsels, each son should seek to emulate his father’s love, live humbly, in mercy and in peace, submitting himself to God’s will and leaving final judgement to God alone.54 As Braaten points out, Lessing’s story raised all sorts of doubts about the absolute and exclusive claims of Christian faith and its relationship to other religions. Lessing said, in effect, that there may well be one true faith, but there can be only one true faith; and there is no way to know which of the many religions that exist is the true one. If there is convincing proof of the truth of a particular religious faith, it lies somewhere else than this mortal world, in the realm of the absolute and the eternal, perhaps, but certainly not in time and space.55 Obviously, in light of Berlin’s analysis of the philosophia perennis, Lessing’s ‘solution’ to the problem of multiple religious faiths lands us in the quandary from which monism (no matter how enlightened) can deliver us. Only one answer to the real question can be true. Tolerance, for the enlightened mind, is forbearance of the mistaken opinions of others. Nothing more. The truth, singular, will be unveiled at some point in the future. Until then, let us condescend to live and let live. Perhaps, after all, we may be the mistaken. Lessing himself held to a profoundly teleological view, as Franklin Baumer observes, believing that humanity is moving through the providence

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of God into a maturity that will possess ‘higher conceptions of God and moral conduct’ than are available to us through the primers available in Judaism and Christianity.56 At any rate, according to Lessing, and according to many others in the Enlightenment, again as Braaten comments, the point of religion is to inculcate piety and morality, and that all the religions are able to do for their adherents. As for Christian apologetics, it faces an ‘ugly big ditch’, with history on one side and the eternal truth on the other. In Lessing’s unforgettable words, ‘Accidental historical truths can never become proofs for necessary truths of reason’.57 This frequently quoted passage comes from Lessing’s essay, ‘On the Proof of the Spirit and the Power’, in which his memorable axiom immediately follows this comment: ‘If no historical truth can be demonstrated, then nothing can be demonstrated by means of historical truths’.58 Thinkers from Kant to Fichte, from Hegel to Kierkegaard, tried in a variety of ways, with more or less success, to come to terms with the problematic relationship between history (the immediate and contingent realm of our experience) and eternity (the inaccessible realm of absolutes, ideals, and the truth), a dichotomy that runs through Western thought from Plato onward. Christian theologians, pastors and congregations have struggled to make sense of the claims of the church (the often absolutist and exclusivist claims of the church) with reference to Jesus Christ in light of the Age of Reason. Braaten writes: The nineteenth century produced conflicting responses to the problem of the absolute religion. Orthodox supranaturalism retreated from history into an authoritarian system secured by the doctrine of the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture. The absolute in history is defined in the dogma of the incarnation, but need not be put to the test by the historical method. On the other side was Neo-Pietism, which postulated an immediate relation to the absolute in the depths of personal religious experience. The relativities of history neither help nor hinder the access of subjective inwardness to the essence of Christianity as a religion. A third position beyond Orthodoxy and Pietism was that of theological liberalism, which intended to give history its full due and to live with the implications. The result was an historicism that relativized all religions, including Christianity.59 Among the Christian thinkers in the last group to which Braaten referred, who wrestled most profoundly with ‘the problem of historicism and its negative impact on the claim of Christianity to be the absolute religion’, was Ernst Troeltsch.60 ‘His practical, moral concern in the presence of pluralistic, centrifugal modern civilization’, as H. Richard Niebuhr attested, ‘is evident throughout his total work’.61 Indeed, throughout his work one

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senses the energy and vitality of a mind convinced that something new and vital and rich in possibilities lay within the grasp of those who have the courage to take seriously the historical reality and social context of the Christian faith. ‘Troeltsch’, writes Braaten, ‘returned to Kant … and placed theology once again in face of that great ugly ditch, an a-historical absolute on the one side and historical relativity on the other’.62 In a manner not entirely unlike Herder, Troeltsch discerned in history the extraordinary diversity of ever new responses in unexpected contexts, a seemingly unlimited variety of human expressions, of languages, of ways of living socially and of being human, of uniquely individual and unforeseen values and beliefs and worthwhile ends. There might, reasoned Troeltsch, be a single divine reason, or divine purpose of life, hidden within the folds of history; but if there is, it does not tend toward uniformity or singularity or universality. Troeltsch was convinced that reality is fundamentally diverse, and, though early in his career he believed that Christianity stood at the pinnacle of the world’s religions, in time he came to believe that Christianity’s role is not to stand above other faiths as the universal arbiter between their competing spiritual claims, nor even as the culmination of a general human religiosity that draws together in itself, that Christianity harmonizes and reconciles all that is true of other religions. Rather, for the mature Troeltsch, the Christian faith simply stands beside other religious faiths, as one faith among many. It cannot claim a position of spiritual hegemony over the faith of any other culture. Like all religions and, indeed, like all other historical phenomena, Christianity has its own particular historical and cultural individuality, and it must be understood in terms of its historical and cultural individuality if it is to be understood at all.63 In contrast to his contemporary, Adolf von Harnack, Troeltsch rejected the notion of ‘the essence of Christianity’ as an abstraction drawn from the generalization of history (Troeltsch places Harnack in continuity, at this point, with Herder’s philosophy of history, though his assessment of similarity between the two is questionable).64 Troeltsch sought instead to understand the concrete and complex historical reality of Christianity, the way Christians behave and believe and think, in the variety of cultural contexts in which Christian faith was lived out socially. In his response to Harnack, for instance, Troeltsch maintains that if there is any such thing as an ‘essence of Christianity’ – and he notes that this phrase is inextricably linked to ‘modern, critical and evolutionary history’, especially after François René de Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du Christianisme (1802), and would be a phrase alien to Catholic theology, orthodox Protestantism and even the mainstream of the Enlightenment65 – this ‘essence’ consists in the remarkable ability the Christian religion demonstrates to adapt, to change and respond socially and theologically to the various challenges with which history confronts it.66 There is a deep similarity between Troeltsch’s understanding of

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the ‘essence’ and Herder’s concept of the divine purpose of Christian faith. In contrast to Harnack’s approach to determining an ‘essence of Christianity’, and also in contrast to attempts by Locke, Schleiermacher, Hegel and the Tübingen school to do the same, Troeltsch writes: A genuinely historical point of view reveals to us such a variety of interpretations, formulations, and syntheses that no single idea or impulse can dominate the whole. Thus the essence of Christianity can be understood only as the new interpretations and new adaptations, corresponding to each new situation, produced by Christianity’s historical power. The essence of Christianity differs in every epoch, resulting from the totality of the influences in each age. … The definition of the essence of Christianity that I would put as the basis of dogmatics reads as follows: Christian religious faith is faith in the rebirth and higher birth of the creature who is alienated from God – a regeneration effected through the knowledge of God in Christ. The consequence of this regeneration is union with God and social fellowship so as to constitute the kingdom of God.67 While Troeltsch states that Christianity cannot be understood as ‘the absolute religion on the basis of a historical way of thinking or by the use of historical means’, he also at times thought that Christianity represents the highest expression of religious or spiritual truth for Western European culture. He considered as valid the claims to religious or spiritual truth of other religions, and entertained the possibility that the divine is revealed through the faiths of other peoples in other cultures. In the face of what he saw as the historical impossibility either to establish the primacy of ‘one historical religion’ over all others, or to create ‘a religion completely emancipated from history’ on the basis ‘of the common content of all religions, or a religion based on philosophical principles’, and the practical impossibility to construct ‘a religious world-view and a religious proclamation on the basis of the history of religions’, Troeltsch says ‘we are thrown back upon history and upon the necessity of constructing out of history a world of ideas that shall be normative for us’.68 Troeltsch appears here, and in some other contexts, to be on the verge of moving toward a fresh way of dealing with historicism and the absolute claims of Christian faith, an approach that reconceptualizes Lessing’s ugly ditch, exchanging the Enlightenment’s monistic framework for a fully pluralistic one.69 However, at the end of the day, Troeltsch continued to attempt to account for diversity within a monistic framework, and his historicism was never entirely free from cultural and historical determinism. Thus Troeltsch’s remarkable and frequently brilliant analysis of religious experience collapses into relativism and (despite his protests) into a form of pious skepticism.70 ‘Troeltsch raised questions he could not answer’, writes Braaten, and his professorial move in 1915 from theology (which he taught successively at

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Göttingen, Bonn and Heidelberg) to the history of philosophy and civilization (at Berlin, where he remained until his death in 1923) symbolized for many, including Karl Barth, that Troeltsch, however brilliant and however pious he undoubtedly was, had reached a theological dead end.71 It was from this theological dead end that Karl Barth attempted, in one of the boldest moves in the history of Christian thought, to extricate theology altogether, to shift Christian dogmatics from ‘endlessly looking back and forth between the two separate poles of the absolute and the historical’.72 Indeed, Braaten, in support of the argument that Barth’s work should be understood somehow in continuity with that of Troeltsch, alludes to Wilfred Groll’s Ernst Troeltsch und Karl Barth – Kontinuität im Widerspruch (‘continuity within the contradiction’), in which Groll makes the case that, while not minimizing Barth’s critical assessment of Troeltsch, Barth’s theology presupposes Troeltsch’s analysis of the problem of Christian absoluteness and history.73 In other words, Barth’s thought – specifically his earliest theological writings – lies also, though ironically, in a broad trajectory that culminates in John Hick’s philosophy of religion. The thesis articulated by Groll (and rehearsed by Braaten), in fact, does seem plausible, especially given the way in which Barth, in the second edition (and thereafter) of his Epistle to the Romans, and under the influence of Franz Overbeck, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Søren Kierkegaard, places faith in Jesus Christ (as opposed to the merely human inclination toward religion) altogether beyond the reach of history by placing the act of God in history as the antithesis of empirical historicism. Braaten argues that when Barth wrote his Epistle to the Romans, with its powerful affirmation of the absolute transcendence, the wholly otherness, of God, ‘Barth was thinking precisely of Troeltsch’s hard lesson about the relativity of all things historical, including Christianity as a religion, the historical Jesus, and the resurrection as an event of history’.74 An examination of Barth’s Epistle to the Romans certainly bears out this thesis, though Barth explicitly mentions Troeltsch only once in the entire book. Barth writes (and his comments deserve to be quoted at length): Jesus Christ our Lord. This is the Gospel and the meaning of history. In this name two worlds meet and go apart, two planes intersect, the one known and the other unknown. The known plane is God’s creation, fallen out of its union with Him, and therefore the world of the ‘flesh’ needing redemption. This known plane is intersected by another plane that is unknown – the world of the Father, of the Primal Creation, and of the final Redemption. The relation between us and God, between this world and His world, presses for recognition, but the line of intersection is not self-evident. The point on the line of intersection at which the relation becomes observable and observed is Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus, – born of the seed of David according to the flesh. The name Jesus defines an historical occurrence and marks the point

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where the unknown world cuts the known world. … The point on the line of intersection is no more extended onto the known plane than is the unknown plane of which it proclaims the existence. The effulgence, or, rather, the crater made at the percussion point of an exploding shell, the void by which the point on the line of intersection makes itself known in the concrete world of history, is not – even though it be named the Life of Jesus – that other world which touches our world in Him. In so far as our world is touched in Jesus by the other world, it ceases to be capable of direct observation as history, time, or thing. Jesus has been – declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Holy Spirit, through his resurrection from the dead. In this declaration and appointment – which are beyond historical definition – lies the true significance of Jesus. Jesus as the Christ, as the Messiah, is the End of History; and He can be comprehended only as Paradox (Kierkegaard), as Victor (Blumhardt), as Primal History (Overbeck). As Christ, Jesus is the plane which lies beyond our comprehension. The plane which is known to us, He intersects vertically, from above. Within history, Jesus as the Christ can be understood only as Problem or Myth. As the Christ, He brings the world of the Father. But we who stand in this concrete world know nothing, and are incapable of knowing anything, of that world.75 When Barth later in the book explicitly quotes Troeltsch, tangentially, in the course of his reflections on death and resurrection, it is to affirm Troeltsch’s essential argument regarding the relativity of history while claiming the primacy of the mystery of God in revelation. Barth writes: Over all historical possibilities and probabilities and necessities and certainties death is supreme, for they all are mortal and passing to corruption. Were there a direct and causal connexion between the historical ‘facts’ of the Resurrection – the empty tomb, for example, or the appearances detailed in I Cor. xv – and the Resurrection itself; were it in any sense of the word a ‘fact’ in history, then no profession of faith or refinement of devotion could prevent it being involved in the see-saw of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, life and death, God and man, which is characteristic of all that happens on the historical plane. There is under this heaven and this earth no existence or occurrence, no transformation, be it never so striking, no experience, be it never so unique, no miracle, be it never so unheard of, which is not caught up by relativity in which great and small are inextricably woven together. Therefore, if the Resurrection be brought within the context of history, it must share in its obscurity and error and essential questionableness. Against the influence which the Resurrection has exerted upon individual souls must then be set the far more obvious distortions and disfigurements of which it has been the cause. … Think of those 150,000 years of human history and of ‘the

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It is perhaps most significant that it was Barth, the preacher, the minister in a local community of faith, who wrote these words about the crisis of faith in a wholly other God. He speaks as a person who must wrestle with the necessity and the meaning of standing week after week in the presence of his parishioners to speak a human word that aspires to be also a word of God. Barth witnessed the horrors of war and the hardening of war, and from his own profound encounter with the Christian Bible, he struggles to understand and speak about how Christians can understand and speak of God. There is a gulf between the historical identities of his hearers and their hope, between the miracle of their faith and the object of their faith. Barth’s theology, above all else, is a reflection on the problem of trusting and knowing God. There is, he tells us, an unbridgeable chasm between history and eternity. Is there also, he wonders, a corresponding chasm between our believing and our knowing. Can we speak of knowledge of God at all? Can we help but speak thus? Barth’s Epistle to the Romans stands as perhaps the most extravagant theological text of the twentieth century, a text that deconstructs every human religious utterance using the name of Jesus Christ, and ushers us into a new Christian century of the Christian religion under the judgement of this particular name. But, if the Epistle to the Romans can be described in this manner, it is so at least in part because of Troeltsch, and because of Troeltsch’s anguished struggle of the soul. Even as Barth ‘had to abandon the ship that had Troeltsch at the wheel’, as Braaten writes, Barth conceded the correctness of Troeltsch’s crucial insight, that ‘history has no place for absolutes’.77 Barth, however, does far more than this with respect to the problem of history and faith. Barth places the one who has faith in Jesus Christ within history in such a way that there can be no question of relativism or abso-

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lutism. Faith in Christ, according to Barth, does not bestow on the believer access to that eternal perspective (that is, that place outside of time and space) from which one may judge the relative merits of one religion over another, any more than faith in Christ grants the believer the divine power to judge the sins of any mortal. All people lie under the judgement of another who is entirely other. ‘Faith’, as Barth says, ‘is awe in the presence of the divine incognito; it is the love of God that is aware of the qualitative distinction between God and man and God and the world’.78 A believer in Jesus Christ is, therefore, simply one ‘who puts his trust in God, in God Himself, and in God alone’.79 The exclusive trust in this God does not grant privilege to the one who trusts. The believer is not exempted by trust in Jesus Christ from his or her own historical groundedness, from belonging to a particular culture, which includes receiving from a particular culture the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. No assumption regarding the relative truth or untruth for one or another’s faith is necessary to trust Jesus Christ, neither is any assumption that two of the rings must be false for any one to be true. Barth’s understanding of faith opens the door for a constructive approach to pluralism. A Christian, in the spirit of Troeltsch (and Vico, Herder and Berlin) can, by the power of imagination, and through the exercise of sensitivity and considerable historical skill, enter into another culture to understand it as human and to imagine what it might mean to live humanly (and faithfully) in that other place and time, while respecting the real distance between the other’s culture and one’s own. However, a Christian is not given by virtue of faith in Christ the ability to stand above all cultures and their respective religious faiths, to pronounce from a privileged, ‘divine’ perspective judgement on their beliefs and practices by appealing to transhistorical and transcultural criteria. This does not mean that a Christian is unable to render judgement with respect to the values, beliefs and ends of another religious faith. A Christian may indeed, from within his own cultural and historical context, from within the context of trust in the God whom we believe to be revealed in the history of Israel culminating in Jesus of Nazareth, from within the language and history of Christian faith and practice, and from the perspective of the various attempts to formulate normative theological and moral constructs that hold true to the church’s history of faith in Jesus Christ, speak in criticism, and sometimes in very forceful criticism, against any other faith or against those in his own religious faith, or against those who have no religious faith, with whom he disagrees. To oppose does not necessarily entail disrespect of the other. And we may find it necessary to oppose the values and ends of others whose pursuit of such ends we believe would devastate the world and human society. But there is no getting outside of history and culture in making our moral judgements. Moral judgement is historically grounded. There is no escaping time and place. Implicit in Barth’s critique of idolatry, of willful confusion of the creature with the Creator, is a denial of all human claims to absolutism.

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Barth’s theology is teleologically grounded (his thought in many respects is especially comparable to Hamann’s), and, despite the crucial insights it yields for pluralism, Barth’s thought is ultimately monistic (though one can hear in Barth’s doctrine of God promises unfulfilled of a theological pluralism that springs from God’s own plurality). But Barth never forgets the infinite qualitative difference between humanity and God. In his understanding of Christian belief as an act of radical trust in the ‘impossible possibility’ of God, relativism and absolutism are rendered foolish and idolatrously arrogant.80 Troeltsch, for all his brilliance and piety, could not have foreseen the implications of Barth’s protest against idolatry (a protest that called into question the entire Liberal Protestant project that Troeltsch represented) for Troeltsch’s own attempt to understand the diversity of faiths; yet, ironically, it was Barth’s iconoclasm that makes it possible for us as Christians to remain true to our faith claims and practices while accounting for religious diversity in a pluralistic framework. It is questionable whether Barth was ever, or at least whether he remained, as ‘indifferent’ to history, or to ‘the purely historical questions’, as he says he was in the 1916 letter to Thurneysen which Braaten cites.81 Barth’s powerful statements about the relative insignificance of history in the Epistle to the Romans – e.g. his extraordinary statement at the beginning of the third chapter: History is the display of the supposed advantages of power and intelligence which some men possess over others, of the struggle for existence hypocritically described by ideologists as a struggle for justice and freedom, of the ebb and flow and old and new forms of human righteousness, each vying with the rest in solemnity and triviality. Yet one drop of eternity is of greater weight than a vast ocean of finite things.82 – must be balanced against his own life of political and social activity. Throughout Barth’s life one discerns the commitment of one who believes that the world of human affairs matters very much indeed. What is certain is that Barth was one among several theologians in the 1920s whose dialectical theological method represented an affirmation of the transcendent God who alone is absolute, who breaks in upon humanity as Word of God addressed in and through the proclamation of the kerygma, and who is apprehended by humanity only in the faith that God gives in the hearing of the preaching of the Word.83 As we have already observed, all one finds on the field of the history of belief, according to Barth, is the hollow, the hole, the negative space created at the point of contact between the Word of God and the person of faith, an existential point of contact that corresponds to the crater created by the impact of the incarnation on the field of human history. But this point of contact amounts virtually to the same thing as a mathematical point. It takes up no space itself. It cannot be historically investigated, and is apparent only because of the effects of

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the Word of God upon the faith of the hearer, if there are any tangible effects. At any rate, all effects of faith evoked by the Word of God, like all things historical, are matters of uncertainty, ultimately unreliable, and ultimately indecipherable. Braaten reflects perceptively at this point on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s criticism of Barth’s theology, particularly on the way that Barth attempts to develop a constructive dogmatic on the basis of his location of the realm of revelation beyond the reach of historical verification. Bonhoeffer described this, Braaten says, as Barth’s ‘positivism of revelation’, in contrast to the historical positivism then so much in vogue.84 In each form of positivism, one finds a reduction of the other. The positivistic historian dismisses out of hand the idea that the divine or the eternal can possibly impinge on the historical. Practitioners of this form of positivism sometimes pour contempt on the very notion that there can be anything of value that cannot be verified historically. In the case of certain Barthians, although I believe it is doubtful that Barth can finally be placed in this group himself, it is history that is devalued while theology becomes a largely intellectualized aesthetic parlor game, in which the players systematically follow out the consequences of faith presuppositions in the development of a coherent structure of thought, the coherence of which is taken to be proof of the system’s truth. Braaten writes: Along with a positivism of revelation goes the rejection of apologetics and that implies the irrelevance of reasons not to mention proofs. Theology is content to retreat to the sheer datum of the kerygma, the Word of God, in splendid isolation from the problems raised by the modern consciousness of history.85 Again, I am less convinced than Braaten that Barth can finally be placed in the latter category. Barth, as one sees especially (but not solely) in his interviews, letters, and occasional writings in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, remained to the very end of his life extremely difficult either to co-opt in support of the various theological schemes of his followers, or to be categorized by anything as superficial as the various labels his opponents, friends and disciples tried to attach to him, including epitaphs like ‘positivism of revelation’, ‘dialectical theology’, ‘the theology of crisis’, and especially ‘neo-orthodoxy’.86 Be this as it may, Barth’s Epistle to the Romans continues to leave the question of the absolute claims of Christianity unanswered. It does this, at least in part, because whatever else Christianity represents, it certainly consists in culturally and historically contextualized responses by persons in communities of faith to the God whom we believe is revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, whom we worship, adore and follow as Christ, as one whose own historical existence, continuing counsel, and future coming as Lord of all creation matter as much as his moral teachings and his miracles. Christians, like the proverbial angels of medieval lore, do not merely dance

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on the mathematical pinhead of a dehistoricized existential crisis in the hearing of the Word of God. Christians, in other words, have not only a vertical life, but a horizontal one, and one that has genuine communal continuity in space over time. God did not abhor the Virgin’s womb; nor, according to the witness of scripture, does God consider the realm of creation, the realm of history and culture, to be off limits. The God we seek to know, according to scripture, is revealed in and through this world. In other words, despite the brilliance and faithfulness of the Barthian approach to the problem of historicism and the absolute claims of Christian faith, the problem is still very much with us. And it has become more, not less, critical to address the problem because, if anything, the marketplace of faith options has become more lively, more varied, and more accessible to the general population than in the first decades of this century when Barth made his bold move. The course of Christian isolationism may appear attractive, but an ideological ghetto is no less enervating or defeatist just because it has the imprimatur of hallowed theologians. Braaten, therefore, in the most intriguing section of his essay, asks us to consider picking up with Troeltsch where Barth left off. To this end, Braaten explores Troeltsch’s rejection of both orthodox theological and Hegelian attempts to claim for Christianity ‘a uniquely normative position’. He goes on to quote Troeltsch: ‘It is impossible to construct a theory of Christianity as the absolute religion on the basis of a historical way of thinking or by use of historical means’.87 Then he summarizes Troeltsch’s conclusion: Christianity is a completely historical phenomenon radically conditioned by the historical situation in which it emerged as well as by the historical factors involved in its further development. Someone has called Troeltsch the Heraclitus of modern theology. There is nothing in the Christian religion that is not interwoven with the fabric of its ongoing historical environment. Historical reality shatters every attempt to interpret Christianity as absolute religion.88 If, however, as Troeltsch maintains, ‘Christianity is a purely historical relative phenomenon. What’, Braaten asks, ‘is then to prevent us from slipping into an absolute relativism?’.89 This is, of course, the million-dollar question. Troeltsch wants to retain the idea that Christianity contains ‘the highest religious truth relevant to our European cultural situation’, thus preserving, at least among his social peers, the idea that Christianity still possesses a kind of cultural hegemony in the context of Western Europe, though not a universal priority. But it may be that Troeltsch, at this point, is considerably less helpful, precisely because of his cultural limitations. And perhaps we can gain better perspective on Troeltsch’s thought, and how we might proceed with the question of Christian relativism, by looking briefly at religious relativism in its fullest and most capable expression to date, in the thought of John Hick.

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Of revolutions, Copernican and otherwise On first glance, Hick’s thought appears to have much to offer, especially to that line of liberal Christianity that has consistently seen itself as the alternative to absolutist and exclusivist forms of Christian theology. Braaten observes that Hick suggests he is ushering the church into a ‘Copernican revolution in theology’.90 While perhaps a bit grandiose in his claim, Hick does appear to know something that others do not. Braaten quotes from Hick’s book, God and the Universe of Faiths, published in 1973. And I shall follow suit, though I would like to cite Hick more extensively in order to highlight the commonality Hick shares with Troeltsch. He writes: Now the Copernican revolution in astronomy consisted in a transformation in the way in which men understood the universe and their own location within it. It involved a shift from the dogma that the earth is the centre of the revolving universe to the realisation that it is the sun that is at the centre, with all the planets, including our own earth, moving around it. And the needed Copernican revolution in theology involves an equally radical transformation in our conception of the universe of faiths and the place of our own religion within it. It involves a shift from the dogma that Christianity is at the centre to the realisation that it is God who is at the centre, and that all the religions of mankind, including our own, serve and revolve around him.91 Hick (as Braaten also observes) advocates what he calls ‘a shift from an ecclesio-centric to a theo-centric understanding of the religions’.92 The goal of Hick’s thought, at least at this point, seemed to be to place all the world’s faiths on an ‘equal footing’ by centering the theological focus on God, instead of on the church – or on Christ. However, the promise of Hick’s selfstyled ‘revolution’ soon fizzes out, when we discover that really Hick has landed us back in the counsel of Nathan the Wise. In fact, as Braaten observes, Hick’s ‘revolution’ represents nothing more than a warmed-over 1970s version of the history of religions school and a superficial and reductionist reading of Troeltsch, ‘without acknowledging any gains or benefits from the Barthian critique of religion or the broader Neo-Reformation hermeneutical retrieval of the gospel character of the New Testament message’.93 In fact, Hick’s so-called Copernican revolution could have learned a great deal from a close reading of Barth’s Epistle to the Romans, especially at the point of Barth’s warning against idolatry, which disallows both absolutism and relativism. William Rowe’s analysis of Hick complements Braaten, precisely at this point, though in a rather surprising manner. While it is the problem of polytheism in Hick’s thought and the related issue of psychological projection that Rowe addresses in a recent essay on religious pluralism, in fact, Rowe’s analysis of Hick is particularly illuminating with respect to why many discussions of religious pluralism fail to get beyond the position of religious relativism. Rowe refers to Hick’s 1989 study,

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An Interpretation of Religion, and his 1995 book, The Rainbow of Faiths, to examine Hick’s Kantian distinction between ‘the Real as it is in itself’ (the noumenal world) and the Real as it is experienced and conceived by us (the phenomenal world).94 Hick advances his argument, in the latter of these books, in his chapter on ‘The Pluralistic Hypothesis’.95 According to Rowe, ‘The Real’, for Hick, designates ‘the transcendent reality “authentically experienced in terms of different sets of human concepts”, as the different gods and impersonal absolutes belonging to the major religious traditions’.96 The problem, Rowe observes, is that Hick’s reliance on Kant suggests not only ‘that the Real itself, although beyond human concepts and direct experience, is nevertheless, experienced through the different divine phenomenal realities met with in different religious faiths’, a fact that is not terribly controversial for many Christians, but Hick also suggests (if he is true here to the Kantian framework from which he is borrowing) that just as the phenomenal objects in Kant’s philosophy are existing entities (cabbages, stones, etc.), so too the phenomenal objects through which the Real is manifested in various religious traditions (YHWH , Allah, the Holy Trinity, Shiva, Brahman, the Tao, etc.) are themselves actually existing beings or realities.97 As to whether Hick intends to suggest both conclusions, one is left somewhat in the dark. Rowe traces in some detail the debate over this aspect of Hick’s recent thought. George Mavrodes, writes Rowe, responded to Hick’s Kantian construct by saying ‘that Hick may be “the most important Western philosophical defender of polytheism” ’,98 and, in a further response to Hick, Mavrodes claimed that his reading of Hick’s An Interpretation of Religions, led him to believe that for Hick the various gods worshiped in the world’s major religions (i.e. Allah, the Holy Trinity, Shiva), together with the various ‘objects of adoration’ (such as Brahman and the Tao), were both ‘distinct from one another’, and ‘real beings’. ‘That is what led me to the conclusion that Hick was really a serious (descriptive) polytheist’.99 Mavrodes, in the end, backed off from his original view, and now believes that for Hick none of the gods and objects of adoration are real at all.100 Rowe observes how difficult it is to determine exactly what Hick’s view is regarding ‘the ontological status of the personal and impersonal manifestation of the Real in different religious traditions’. However, Rowe himself believes ‘that Hick’s own view comes closest to the view that the gods are projections of the religious imagination, creations of the human mind through which we encounter what is truly ultimate reality’. The gods are not, in other words, Rowe continues, merely psychological projections with no real objective reference, as Sigmund Freud maintained, but while they are products of human imagination, they reflect the religious experiences of

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humanity ‘with what is truly ultimate and beyond all literal description, the Real itself’.101 Rowe then makes an interesting and distinctly monistic move of his own, no less interesting because it represents a counterbalance to Hick’s monistic approach (and Hick in his fairly conventional approach to religious skepticism – despite his claims to radicalism – is working within the same monistic and modernist framework inherited from the Enlightenment as that with which Rowe is working): Here then, is what I take to be Hick’s reasoning on this matter. In Christianity, God is held to be a trinity and the sole creator of the world. In Islam, Allah is held to be a purely unitary being and the sole creator of the world. And other monotheistic faiths may hold that their gods are the sole creators of the world. Quite apart, then, from Hick’s theory of religious pluralism, it is apparent that not all of these gods can be real beings, for it is impossible that there should exist different beings, each of which is the sole creator of the world. So, whether Hick’s theory of religious pluralism is true or false, it is clear that a polytheism in which all these deities, so described, are real beings is impossible. At best then, a polytheism in which these beings are reduced to beings whose properties do not entail the nonexistence of other deities can be true. And such a polytheism is compatible with Hick’s theory of religious pluralism. For, shorn of their incompatible attributes – being the sole creator of the world, etc. – each deity can be a real being through which the Real is manifested to the faithful in the various monotheistic religious traditions. And similar remarks can be made concerning the impersonal absolutes in other religious traditions. So, given Hick’s hypothesis of religious pluralism, Mavrodes’s original view that Hick is a polytheist is not altogether incorrect. For Hick explicitly allows that religious pluralism can accommodate such a view. But just as clearly, Hick nowhere suggests that it is his own view. … What is more likely to be his own view is the model on which the gods of the various faiths are ‘projections of the religious imagination’. On this model, as I noted above, there are no such real beings or absolutes as Allah, Shiva, Brahman, the Holy Trinity, etc. Are they then merely hallucinations, like Macbeth’s dagger? Hick rejects this suggestion because he thinks that these imaginary beings serve as the means by which the Real is experienced in human life.102 Two decades after Hick said that the pious confession (which Braaten quotes), ‘[t]hat Jesus is my Lord and Savior is language like that of a lover, for whom his Helen is the sweetest girl in the world’,103 he appears to have advanced formally, but not materially, beyond the relativistic solution to the absolutism of Christianity which bases matters of religious faith on personal preference – that is, preference predicated on nothing more than preference! In other words, Hick remains mired in that form of relativism to which

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Berlin refers in his analogy of personal tastes. Hick (and, for that matter, Rowe also) attempts to take account of diversity from within a monistic framework. This is, of course, what Rowe fails to critique adequately in Hick because his own monism is no less profound than Hick’s, though Rowe’s analysis of Hick is often trenchant. Hick seems to believe that he can somehow place himself above all religions and faith communities (and, therefore, above histories and cultures) to survey the range of human religions from a bird’s-eye, if not God’s-eye, view. And he gives the impression that it is feasible from such an Archimedean point to make judgements with reference to some sort of objective criteria that also lie outside the particular histories and cultural contexts of religious communities.104 What Hick does not seem to recognize is that no one has access to such a transhistorical and transcultural perspective, that such a standpoint is beyond humanity’s reach (there is no ‘point’ on which we can take our ‘stand’). And, on a more personal note, no one can be universally or generically religious (certainly there can be no such generic Christian) anymore than one can be universally or generically human. Humanity and religious faith are historically and culturally particular. Incidentally, I am reasonably certain Hick would assume that most people cannot be universally religious, thus his own investigations into the way religious people imagine their gods in various contexts. What I am saying, however, is that the claim that no one can be universally or generically religious (or universally and generically human for that matter) includes the scholar, the one observing and speaking about religion, and not just those local and parochial practitioners of a religion who are being observed by the scholar. The failure to take account of one’s own religious faith, concretely practiced and lived out in certain ways, in the context of a particular community of faith, drawing on particular faith traditions (and ignoring, omitting or rejecting other traditions), believing certain things, worshiping and adoring a particular God (while rejecting or disbelieving the existence of another God) – or, and this cannot be ignored, the failure actually to practice and live out of a particular faith community at all – makes it impossible to see the reality of the situation, makes it impossible to understand the very real difference between the kind of relativism that characterizes Hick’s thought and the kind of objective pluralism which Berlin describes.105 The difference between the two carries extraordinary ecclesiological consequences. There is no universally privileged position outside of history and culture to which humanity has access and from which anyone (including scholars in religion!) can assess the religious faith of others. Had Hick paid closer attention to Troeltsch’s sophisticated attempt to account for religious diversity and Barth’s courageous move to locate the crisis and miracle of one’s own faith at the point of God’s act in Jesus Christ, an encounter which however profound does not impart to us the prerogatives of God, then Hick

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might have found an authentically revolutionary alternative. And had Rowe, et al., discerned that in their fascinating intramural scuffle over ‘religious pluralism’ they are not actually arguing over the nature of religious pluralism at all, but are still just trying to make sense of diverse religious beliefs within a monistic framework, unable to find a way out of the polarity of absolutism and relativism, then their criticism could have moved them beyond the rearrangement of the furniture of monism in the same tired metaphysical apartment. A pluralistic approach to faith and religious communities, if we are to take Berlin’s thought seriously and if we are to learn from both Troeltsch and Barth, is grounded in the awareness that while each of us can be (and I believe should be) willing to hear others articulate their faith from within their own faith traditions as practiced in their own faith communities and expressed in their own communities of faith discourse, and while we can by considerable effort and imagination sympathetically understand what it might mean as human beings and as persons of faith to believe what they believe and to worship as they worship, we cannot simply loose the slips of our own faith with its traditions and practices, and the faith communities that have formed us and through which we have been transformed, to somehow rise above all faiths to a privileged position where we can appeal to timeless universal standards and principles by which to judge the relative adequacy or inadequacy of the faith claims and the values and ends of others. Whatever we have to say in praise or criticism of the religious faith (Christian or non-Christian) of others we must say from within our faith context, from the specifics of our histories and cultures. And, as Christians, we must say whatever it is we have to say aware that Christian faith, faith in the triune God revealed in Jesus Christ, does not offer us a divine perspective from which unerringly to judge the faith of others against infallible eternal criteria. This is something we cannot possess, however much we desire it, however firmly we trust in God. We could have learned this from Barth’s Epistle to the Romans, and from his stern warnings against any religious attitudes that blur the distinction between the divine and the human.106 Returning to our extended conversation with Carl Braaten, then, Braaten’s analysis is particularly helpful because he invites us to explore the implications of a variety of Christian ways of thinking about the relationship between Christian faith and history. Again, his work is suggestive for the approach I have taken, though I would not want to ascribe my approach to him. (In other words, I am not sure he either foresaw this application of his thought or would approve of my conclusions.) As he moves in his article toward making his own constructive statement, Braaten returns to Troeltsch by referring to an essay by the eminent Troeltsch scholar Robert Morgan, in which Morgan heralds Wolfhart Pannenberg as ‘the finest contemporary spokesman’ of Troeltsch’s approach to historical theology.107 According to Braaten, Pannenberg describes yet another aspect of Troeltsch’s thought:

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that there is more to Troeltsch than ‘the strong case he made for the incorporation of Christianity into the history of religions and for the principles of historical relativism’.108 Pannenberg writes: ‘Troeltsch related Christianity and Christian theology to the modern context with a perceptivity and insight that have not been surpassed’.109 Troeltsch’s classic study, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, was written, Braaten tells us, just as Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer were reminding the theological world of the cruciality of the eschatological in Jesus’ preaching. Troeltsch, like many influenced by Weiss and Schweitzer, believed that if Christian faith is to remain true to the message of its founder, it must recover the eschatological character of ‘the kingdom of God’. What Troeltsch realized was that one could reformulate the problem of the relationship between the absoluteness of Christianity and history in eschatological terms.110 While Christianity, the church, and the faith claims of Christians remain fully historical – thus Christianity remains one among many religions – Jesus’ own preaching of the eschatological kingdom of God is absolute. In Pannenberg’s words: ‘Jesus himself had consigned “absolute religion” to “the world to come” ’.111 Pannenberg’s positive assessment of Troeltsch’s description of the historical implications of the eschatological message of Jesus does not mean, however, that Pannenberg is uncritical of the way in which Troeltsch draws on Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom of God to say that ‘the absolute belongs essentially to the future end of history’.112 Indeed no. Pannenberg believes that the way ‘in which Troeltsch connects the future to the present’ using ‘the category of purpose’ is problematic. Braaten quotes Pannenberg at length, and his criticism is valuable in our context: The category of purpose which is so central for Troeltsch does not fit the eschatology of the kingdom of God, because in Jesus’ message the coming kingdom is not an extension of human purposes, but comes without any human intervention. … Moreover, the influence of the category of final purpose makes Troeltsch give a one-sided emphasis to the kingdom of God as something in the future, at the expense of the presence of this future in the history of Jesus, an aspect to which he allows only passing significance. Connected with this must also be Troeltsch’s inability completely to escape from the difficulties of relativism. Precisely because his idea of the absolute was a final goal in the sense of something totally beyond the present experience of history, present experience in his account necessarily lacks the absolute: its truth lies outside itself.113 While Braaten’s evaluation of Troeltsch may somewhat overstate the case against Troeltsch – Braaten is unconvincing when, at one point, he says that, ‘Troeltsch’s Christology failed to produce a criterion of what is distinctively Christian’ – nonetheless his assessment of Troeltsch’s limitations, especially

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in light of Barth’s distinctive Christology, is essentially correct. While Troeltsch’s ‘Jesus placed the absolute in the future Kingdom … primitive Christianity transferred this absoluteness to the person of Jesus, endowing him with such titles as Messiah, Lord, and Savior’.114 Indeed, contrary to the views of what we might call the left wing of those influenced by Troeltsch (including, in some sense, Hick), the early church’s Christology and ecclesiology were attempts to make sense of the ways in which the Jesus who proclaimed the kingdom of God had laid claim to their lives and their life together. Neither Troeltsch nor many of his followers have explored the role of God as Spirit in relation to the history of the Church. This lack of pneumatology is unsurprising given the assumptions of their historicism, but the lack has serious theological, more specifically ecclesiological, consequences, whatever the reason. It tends to reduce the process through which the church, especially in its first centuries, discerned the identity and character of Jesus Christ to the level of rationalization. The church itself understood this process as an extension of the hearing of the preaching of Jesus, as appropriation of the witness to Christ under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in and through its concrete historical existence. Thus, in the end, despite his attempt to ground the particularity of the claim of God expressed in Jesus’ eschatological message, what one has in Troeltsch is precisely the relativism which Pannenberg notes. Troeltsch, while eschatologically deferring the absolute beyond the historical horizon, continues to operate within a monistic framework, believing that one can somehow – if only in theory – rise above the messy, inchoate field of history to make judgements based on criteria that will hold for all persons, in all times and all places. This monism is the source of his relativism, and it is into this relativism that we almost inevitably fall when trying to account for diversity within a monistic framework while trying to avoid absolutism. But what would it mean to account for religious diversity within a pluralistic framework? As I mentioned earlier, Braaten’s assessment of Troeltsch suggests an answer, in that he (in concert with Morgan and Pannenberg) observes the way in which Troeltsch attempts to recover the eschatological character of the gospel for the sake of theological discourse. Unfortunately, because of the tenacity of Troeltsch’s monism, he was unable to work the seam of particularity in his own rich faith, but returned to his bird’s-eye view outside of the concrete faith of his community in trying to assess the relative value of the Christian religion and other faiths from without. But what if one could find a way to speak from within one’s own community of faith, to remain true to (and to remain within) that particularity while hearing the faith of others speaking from out of the richness of their practice of faith in their own particular contexts and histories? This would require resisting the temptation to make absolute claims, either on behalf of an ideal, transhistorical set of criteria beyond all religions, or of making our own faith claims absolute. And it would mean resisting the perhaps even

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more subtle temptation to make judgements on the relative value and trustworthiness of religious faiths from a superior position outside human histories and cultures. Such an approach, of speaking and listening to other faiths from within the practice and expression of faith of our own religious communities, could represent a significant practice of objective pluralism in matters of faith. Certainly the form and content of certain varieties of Christian faith adhered to and practiced in particular faith communities could limit how extensive such pluralism might prove. There are Christians (for example practitioners of Protestant fundamentalism) who articulate the very firm belief that the claim of Christ upon the lives of individuals everywhere and for all time is absolute and exclusive, and whose practical ecclesiology is frequently defined in terms of a strict ‘us’ versus ‘them’ identity. Their deep commitment to certain biblicist assumptions makes it necessary for them also to make an absolute claim to a singular truth available only to members of their form of Christian faith. While they are (sometimes unfairly) painted as sectarian or even cultish, for these Christians their dedication to strong boundary commitments sees monism and exclusion and the rejection of pluralism as positive and Christian virtues. Some Christian communities, in contrast, may believe that absolutism, exclusivism, and strongly teleological interpretations of history are inappropriate to the call to follow Jesus of Nazareth. Some may, in fact, reject Christian missions and evangelism as chauvinistic and culturally imperialistic, and welcome the idea that diverse historical and cultural contexts give rise to a variety of competing religious beliefs, values and ends. Thus they may have no hesitation in adopting Berlin’s thoroughgoing pluralism. In exploring the ways various Christian communities express their faith and the limitations various aspects of their faith place on pluralism, I have come to believe that there are Christians who hold to virtually every perspective on monism and pluralism under the sun, from fundamentalist absolutism and isolationism to the pluralism of Hamann, Vico and Herder, from the qualified exclusivism of the liturgical conservatism of AngloCatholicism to the thoroughgoing pluralism of Berlin, from the Christologically grounded universalism of the mature Barth to the relativism we find in Hick. Again, the form and content of the faith practiced and adhered to in one’s religious community limits in different ways the extensiveness of one’s pluralism. But it is possible for Christians to exercise an authentic pluralism (and many Christians do) that does not attempt to limit the faith claims of one’s own community while entering into serious conversation with those whose faith is profoundly different. This is practicable as long as one eschews the claim for oneself and one’s faith of a privileged authoritarian position over all other expressions of religious faith. Such pluralism does not necessarily represent a constructive theological alternative in itself (though Rowan Williams and Raimundo Pannikar, and perhaps also

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Stephan H. Daniel, point toward precisely such a constructive alternative grounded in the Christian doctrine of the triune God115), but in humility merely confesses that to make an absolute judgement on the faith of other communities is to claim to know more than we can know about God’s activity in the world. And, as persons of faith ourselves, who are engaged in communal practices of faith, and whose faith is alive and robust, rich in celebration, content and meaning, active in assessing and interpreting and allocating the traditions that have influenced our faith communities, we can be prepared to hear the witness of persons of other faiths, recognizing that even (and especially) at those points at which we disagree – perhaps profoundly disagree – we can nevertheless understand how human persons can have and can practice such a faith as theirs. This quality of pluralism, ‘real’ pluralism (objective pluralism) practiced by ‘real’ Christians (confessing, practicing Christians who refuse to submit their faith to reductionism), again, is made possible if we do not believe that our faith in God grants us a privileged position outside of the particularity of our own faith, somehow above history, culture, and all religions, which allows us to pronounce judgement on the relative truthfulness of one religion over another. It is, however, precisely to this point that some people of faith are unwilling to go because of the content and practice of their particular religious beliefs, that is, because they believe that their religious faith must be accorded de facto a privileged position, that their believing in God has granted them a spiritual hegemony over others, a divinely superlative position from which they are able to see as God sees. It is also from this point that various monistic children of the Enlightenment draw back, believing, as modern students of history and religion and as scholars, that they stand somehow in a privileged position above all religions, capable of judging the merits of one religion over another, or the relative deficiency of all, or the relative subjectivity of all, or (alternately) believing that all religious beliefs and practices are so thoroughly determined by historical and cultural factors that they cannot be understood by any outsider. There is no denying the fact that many persons of faith will simply reject objective pluralism in religion because of the fear of what it would mean to their own claims to universal truth, claims they believe they can and must make because of their faith adherence and the implicit monism of their positions. But there is no reason that one must necessarily believe that objective pluralism compromises one’s personal faith in the God revealed in Jesus Christ, in the one who, as the oldest hymn of the Christian faith affirms, ‘though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness’, and ‘being found in human form … humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross’ (Phil. 2:6–8). The Christ whom Christians follow in the way of servanthood and in the way of the cross (we also believe) invites us to share not his deity, but his humanity.116

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The many and the other: closing questions To summarize what has been said to this point: Being human in a particular time and place entails ways of living and belonging, valuing, believing, and aspiring that are historically and culturally specific. Indeed, one might say that to be human means to be grounded in historical and cultural specificity, limited precisely and concretely in time and place. Certainly, from a Christian perspective, this awareness lies at the heart of the doctrine of the incarnation. To recognize that all human beings – with their conceptions of living together and belonging socially with one another, and their values, beliefs, and ends for which they live – are also historically and culturally grounded and are therefore often quite different from and even in conflict with other people (perhaps including us) in other places and times, does not prevent us from understanding their humanity, or from imagining what it might mean to be human as they are human and to live and believe and hope as they do. Nor does recognition of the fundamentally pluralistic character of social reality prevent us from taking issue with the beliefs, values and ends of others, recognizing that our disagreement or opposition emerges from within the perspectival horizon provided us in our own cultural and historical contexts, including our religious faiths.117 Nor, again, is the relationship between our historical and cultural contexts and our religious faith merely a deterministic one. Indeed, history, culture and religious faith are remarkably fluid in themselves and in relationship to one another, so much so that it is untenable to claim that one has no choice but to live or believe as one does. There resides at the heart of our being human a terrible and wonderful freedom, no less profound than the historical and cultural givenness in which each of us finds ourselves. Our belonging to a particular social context can never excuse our inhumanity, our cruelty and brutality. But neither can we, without losing something as crucial to our identity as our freedom, choose to live in a state of cultural or historical amnesia, cutting ourselves off from the particular societies, the communities of faith, the histories and cultures that have shaped us. Finally, to be a Christian is to be a particular sort of Christian. It means to belong to a particular sort of Christianity practiced in particular ways in particular places by particular communities of persons celebrating, claiming and constructing particular traditions and histories. But what does all of this mean for our doctrines of the church? It is to this task that we must now turn. Paul Tillich, in his classic monograph, Dynamics of Faith, argues, ‘Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned’.118 The concrete shape of this ultimate concern takes many forms, religious as well as secular. Tillich reminds us that for the pious Jew ultimate concern is focused in the Schema: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might’ (Deut. 6:5). ‘Faith’, Tillich writes, ‘for the men of the Old Testament is the state of being ultimately and unconditionally

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concerned about Jahweh and about what he represents in demand, threat and promise’.119 For a pious Christian, on the other hand, the focus of ultimate concern is the person of Jesus Christ whom Christians believe reveals the triune God and redeems humanity from sin. But for a Reformed Jew in Dallas, Texas, let us say, and an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem, the ultimate concern of belonging to the Lord is expressed in a variety of ways, depending on their responses to differences in their contexts, and the faith and cultural traditions they claim. For a Maryknoll priest in Latin America, a Baptist layperson in Montgomery, Alabama, the Anglican bishop of Norwich, or a member of one of the indigenous Christian churches that have developed since the collapse of colonialism in Africa, the ultimate concern of Jesus Christ is expressed in very different ways. What Tillich helps us to understand is that the distinctive character of one’s faith lies in one’s being ultimately concerned. Faith is not, according to Tillich, adherence to a specific set of doctrinal positions (though faith may lead to this), the negation of doubt (because faith often entails the courage to doubt), the surrender of our individual responsibility to think and act in order to be accepted by a social group (since faith may place us in profound conflict with our communities), nor ‘an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence’ (the deficiency in which requires either the church’s authority, or an act of will on behalf of the believer, or sufficient emotional intensity to become efficient).120 In contrast to all of these things that faith is not, Tillich writes, faith ‘is participation in the subject of one’s ultimate concern with one’s whole being’.121 Tillich’s description of faith invites us to think about faith as the particular and elemental act of worship and devotion, a state of ultimate concern that places an absolute and perhaps even exclusive claim upon our lives so that we burn, body and soul, to know and to serve the subject of our adoration. When a pious Jew speaks of faith as ultimate concern, he speaks of the claim the Lord God of Israel has placed upon him as a Jew, as a child of the covenant, as a participant in the life of his community of faith. The absoluteness and exclusiveness of the claim (and, here, I want us to notice the specific employment of both of these terms) extend throughout the life of the particular community of faith and the life of the person of faith. But this absolute and exclusive claim on this community and its members does not grant the members of this community a position outside of history, culture, and all religions, from which to judge the relative adequacy of the ultimate concerns of others. Much the same could be said for a Protestant Christian who believes, in the words of the twentieth-century confession, the Theological Declaration of Barmen, that ‘Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in the Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death’.122 This is a declaration of allegiance, a binding of the person of Christian faith, against all odds, to hear the call of

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Jesus Christ above all others, and to trust and obey Jesus Christ as the one Word of God in opposition to all the voices of tyrants (the confession is directed specifically against Hitler and the National Socialists) who want the church either to serve their ends or else to die. Again, for the pious Christian to have Christ as his ultimate concern, or for the pious Jew to be ultimately concerned for the Lord God of Israel, and in both cases for their ultimate concerns to place them under absolute and exclusive claims of loyalty and worship, does not necessarily grant them a privileged position from which to judge the adequacy of the faith – i.e. the ultimate concern – of persons in other religious communities. But perhaps this only raises more questions. And, at this point, I must speak specifically out of my own faith community, as a Reformed Christian. Early in my research into Berlin’s pluralism, Henry Hardy asked me in a letter, ‘was Jesus a pluralist?’. ‘No’, I responded. There is no question that Jesus was not a pluralist. Christians might well be pluralists. And I believe that in the previous pages I have demonstrated a viable way in which some Christians may think about religious pluralism based in part on Berlin’s thought and in conversation with several key theologians of the past century. But, no, Jesus of Nazareth was not a pluralist. Jesus, whom those in my tradition believe to be the Christ, was a person of his own time and place. He was, we believe, God incarnate. And he was limited both historically and culturally as God by his incarnation. Otherwise the word incarnation has no real meaning or significance. God emptied himself in becoming human, which means, at least in part, that God became a particular person and knew the limitations that the particularity of mortals entails. Jesus was a specific man – not humanity in general or in abstraction. Jesus was located in a particular place – Palestine. Jesus inhabited a particular time – the first century, not the sixth or the nineteenth. Jesus was a Jew – racially and religiously. To say that Jesus was not a pluralist is, in a sense, no more surprising than to say that Jesus had, let us say, brown eyes rather than blue, that he was from Nazareth rather than Athens, or that he spoke Aramaic rather than Latin. Jesus of Nazareth – the apocalyptic preacher, the moralist, the rabbi, crucified by the Romans on a charge of sedition, called Messiah by his followers, the one Christians for centuries have believed to be the Son of Man and the Son of God – was not a pluralist. Apparently, neither were the early Christian communities, as is attested in the documentary evidence of the Christian canon, the letters and gospels that emerge from the earliest period of ecclesial formation. But this is where the story becomes really interesting. Hardy distinguishes between participatory and descriptive pluralism, and his distinction is valuable for our ecclesiological reflections. The practices of the early Christian communities, the variety of understandings of what it means to be Christian, even their various interpretations of who Jesus of

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Nazareth is and what his significance is, the diversity of Christian celebration and practices, the forms of worship and of ecclesial life that proliferated as the nascent Christian movement spread, all reflect a stunning diversity that the church attempted at times to undercut, to prevent, to proscribe, and if all else failed, to deny. And, indeed, as was noted in the introduction, the Christian canon itself reflects this too, as the word that precedes every gospel account symbolizes: kata (‘according to’). However, while it is clear that the early church demonstrates a participation in pluralism, as Hardy observes: It doesn’t follow from there being a diversity of practices that such diversity has to be consciously assented to or approved of by those who exemplify it. Nor does the opposite follow, of course; it is one question whether diversity exists, another whether it ought to exist.123 The church has never been comfortable with its own participation in pluralism; that is, the church has never really come to terms with its ordinary multivalent and polymorphic practices of faith and the implications of its practical pluralism. ‘Why not?’, we might well ask. The answer is theological, not historical. The issue of pluralism in the church is first and foremost a question of the doctrine of God. It has its roots in the perennial debate over the unity and plurality of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, the unity and plurality of God’s creation, and the meaning of the incarnation. Which is to say that the church’s difficulty with its pluralism is evidence of the difficulty it has in coming to terms with who God is and what God does. The fact that, for Christians, God is revealed as one in whom there are ‘different and fundamentally contradictory qualities’ only contributes to the tensions in Christian theology and in the life and practice of Christian communities.124 One way to reflect on the problem the church has with who God is and what God does is to reflect on God’s relationship as creator to the world Christians believe God created. Colin Gunton, in The Triune Creator, begins his study of the Christian doctrine of creation with the familiar question: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’.125 This is the question of humanity faced with the wonder of life itself. But this question implies other more subtle, more difficult and (perhaps) more terrible questions, questions that both proceed from, and reveal, and to some extent counter the solipsism typical of human egocentricity: ‘Why is there something “other”?’. ‘Why is there something “other” than God?’. ‘Why is there something “other” than me?’. The scandal to the human ego – in the more common and nontechnical sense of the word ‘ego’ – is that creation is other-shaped. It is a scandal to our myth of self-sufficiency, to our seamless coziness with God, and to our usually unspoken conviction that if God exists then God exists for me and for no

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other. It is a scandal also to our resistance to the fact that creation includes the other’s stubborn difference and is not limited to me and my ways of being human. Reading the pages of the ancient Hebrew stories of creation in Genesis, one is pulled into the narrative by the rhythm of God’s making, of God’s proliferating life, this swarming, flocking, scattering, contradictory life God creates, life diverse and rich and dangerous, life along with and life over against, life’s life-making out of death, and life’s life-giving toward and through death and dying, life for the sake of life. And as God makes and apparently delights in what is made and what spins off into a life (in some real, though limited, sense) of its own, God punctuates God’s life-creation with cries of ‘good’, ‘good’, and ‘very good’. For Christians, this otherness, the diversity and plurality woven into the very fabric of creation, corresponds to the otherness of God’s own being in communion, the life of God as Divine Source, Word and Spirit, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Speaker, Spoken, Speech, the eternal life that never ceases to speak, and that speaks into existence the world that is a spoken world, a world of words, and word-worlds. Indeed, for Christians the continuing reality of the world corresponds to God’s conversation of God. And this conversation is embodied alterity – scandalous, upsetting to our mythologies of solitude, of wanting to be alone with a lonely God, of wanting ultimately to control ourselves and others and so to be a god unto ourselves. God’s gregariousness judges our idolatrous solipsism, for we wish God spoke to us and to us alone. But God does not. Creation is not about me. Creation is about the otherness of the other, an otherness grounded in an expression of the wholly other, a whisper of the divine who speaks, is spoken, is speech.126 The ecclesiology which does not take seriously the semiotics of creation as the text of divine alterity, as the rich narrative of unreserved divine existence (of divine existence that leaves nothing unspoken, that holds nothing in potentiality, that embodies all, even at the level of contradiction) fails also to account for the reality of the church’s plurality, the pluralism of the faith and practice of the church. But what church ever has faced its pluralism in light of creation’s diversity? A bare windowless monad might create. But such a god would never have created such an exuberant and obscenely extravagant world. Yet for so much of the church, and for so much of the church’s history, our ecclesiologies have seemed perfectly suited for a bare windowless monad and not for the triune God whom we believe never stops talking diversity into existence.127 Can Christians be pluralists? I have answered yes. In fact, many Christians are pluralists. But can churches? Can churches openly admit their plurality? Can they come to theological terms with the history and contemporary challenges of their diversity arising from this history? Can they learn to appreciate the plurality of faith demanded by the canon of sacred texts we call the Bible, in a way that honors the fact that these texts together press us toward a pluralism that individual books of the same Bible deny if taken

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alone? Can they bless the pluralism that has characterized their own history of faith and variety of practice? These are far more difficult questions – especially if we allow ourselves to shift from the third person plural (they) to the first (we). The church’s track record is not especially good. Christians, especially of the Protestant sort I usually commune with, seek to affiliate with people whose experiences, whose values and beliefs and aspirations are as much like their own as possible. And, together, we would seem to want to create and adore a God in the image and after the likeness of our particular experiences, our own values, beliefs, and aspirations. We would make the provincial absolute and rob the provincial of its particular significance if we could. This is not news. But is there an alternative to the denial of pluralism that leads to exclusion, arrogance, inhospitality, intolerance and, on occasion, violence among our communities of faith? Can we, I wonder, stand historically and culturally within a particular faith tradition, made up of many traditions, confident that the God revealed in the history of the Hebrew people and in the person of Jesus Christ did not weave diversity into the fabric of creation by mistake, but that God did so because God loves variety as an end in itself ? Can we believe that God draws humanity into a real participation in the creation of the values and ends that give meaning to our lives, and that the historical plurality of churchly forms, the startling, tangible and persistently varied practices of the faith in Christian communities argues concretely and eloquently for a diversity that our confessional statements bear witness to, though they and many of our official pronouncements and private conversations demonstrate anxiety at this reality? Yes, we can. And many Christians do. We shall explore these ideas in the next two chapters. But it seems to me that our approach will likely appear to many of our co-religionists as an inglorious, unspectacular and unheroic course of action, a mundane sort of approach unlikely to inspire zealots, utopians and potential martyrs. At the close of the previous chapter, I alluded to Isaiah Berlin’s modest proposal that the best we can do in living together as human beings is ‘to maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices … in the light of the limited range of our knowledge and even of our imperfect understanding of individuals and societies’.128 Berlin adds, ‘A certain humility in these matters is very necessary’.129 If it does require ‘a certain humility’ to embrace an objective pluralism that denies neither the faith we hold precious nor scorns the faith of another, who better to practice this humility than those people whose Lord has promised that the meek, the merciful, the pure of heart, and makers of peace are especially blessed (Matt. 5:5–9). This seems to me spiritually sane.

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The application of Isaiah Berlin’s understanding of social conflict to communities of faith

My thesis is … that, since some values may conflict intrinsically, the very notion that a pattern must in principle be discoverable in which they are all rendered harmonious is founded on a false a priori view of what the world is like. If I am right in this, and the human condition is such that men cannot always avoid choices, they cannot avoid them not merely for the obvious reasons which philosophers have seldom ignored, namely that there are many possible courses of action and forms of life worth living, and therefore to choose between them is part of being rational or capable of moral judgment; they cannot avoid choice for one central reason (which is, in the ordinary sense, conceptual, not empirical), namely that ends collide; that one cannot have everything. Whence it follows that the very concept of an ideal life, a life in which nothing of value need ever be lost or sacrificed, in which all rational (or virtuous, or otherwise legitimate) wishes must be capable of being truly satisfied – this classical vision is not merely utopian, but incoherent. The need to choose, to sacrifice some ultimate values to others, turns out to be a permanent characteristic of the human predicament. If this is so, it undermines all theories according to which the value of free choice derives from the fact that without it we cannot attain to the perfect life; with the implication that once such perfection has been reached the need for choice between alternatives withers away. Isaiah Berlin1

If and then The history of the Christian Church has been characterized by a yearning for unity no less persistent and no less apparent than its experience of conflict. St Paul closes his second letter to that cauldron of disquiet, the Corinthian church, with an admonition: ‘Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you’ (II Cor. 13:11). The implication seems fairly obvious that in Paul’s estimation there was no current local address in Corinth for the God of peace. The spokesman for the Jerusalem church, St James, tells his hearers that the wisdom which comes from God is ‘pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 123 hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace’ (Jas. 3:17–18). James, no less than Paul, appears eager, perhaps anxious, that his auditors embrace a quality they do not yet own. As we have already noted, Jesus’ words, ‘I have not come to bring peace, but a sword’ (Matt. 10:34), rings more true than even his aboriginal apostles apparently wished. Churches historically have institutionalized in their liturgy and polity the priority they place on agreement (for instance, with statements of commitment on the part of ordinands to promote the unity and concord of the church, or prayers for preservation in conflict or rest in peace).2 Yet these very statements of encouragement, admonition and order imply a reality of churchly life that is anything but peaceful. To chalk this conflicted history up solely to human frailty and sin, or as a battle between good and evil, is to fail to recognize the conflicts that lie even at the heart of the worthwhile goals and good ends for which we attempt to live. It is here that Isaiah Berlin’s thought remains so valuable from a theological perspective. Berlin quite unintentionally helps us as Christians to lay claim to the moral and axiological complexities and contradictions embedded in our common human life, and to do so in a way that can honor the diverse choices we are compelled to make among the various values, goods and purposes we serve. I would, therefore, like to try to restate ecclesiologically Berlin’s conception of the monistic view of values and ends as follows (my apologies to Rudyard Kipling): If there is but one true answer to every real question, And if all other answers are necessarily false; If there must be only one dependable path towards the discovery of these true answers, And if every true answer must be compatible with all other true answers so as to form a single whole untroubled by dissension, discord or contradiction, Then the Christian yearning for peace, unity and agreement are essentially synonymous. There can be peace only where there is unanimous agreement, And there can be no peace wherever the possibility for disagreement is permitted. To do otherwise is to condone falsehood, And God, the single undifferentiated divine author of truth, categorically excludes falsehood. However: If God is not the abstract singularity of unitarian thought, or the bare windowless monad of the Enlightenment, but is the diverse communion of coeternal modes of existence (unity in triunity assumes differentiation) which exhibit ‘different and fundamentally contradictory qualities’,3

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Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith And if the world and human existence which God created and continues to bring into existence (a humanity created in the very image and likeness of God) is so complex that there can be more than one true answer to genuine moral or axiological questions; If there are various paths by which different societies and religious communities in this world arrive at true answers; and, If, therefore, some true answers stand in tension or even in contradiction with other true answers so that an integrated universal system of all true answers is a utopian dream or a pious fancy; Then peace and wholeness in a community of faith can be grounded in a unity (not unanimity) that recognizes as its strength the community’s diversity and the irreducible otherness of those in such a community, because the need for agreement is relativized by the creative power of pluralism.

God, in such a theological model, is both the author of truth and the subtle weaver of the tales of plurality in our various social existences. God is, in other words, the creator exemplar of a diversity that bears witness to the fullness of God.

A necessary evil? Nicholas Rescher attempts to construct a political account of the diverse and complex aspects of social existence in his critique of Jürgen Habermas. Rescher’s work bears examination as we seek to better understand Berlin’s potential contribution to Christian theology. In contrast to what Rescher terms a ‘dogmatic uniformitarianism’, on one hand, which ‘sees our cognitive and practical problems as admitting of only one possible solution’, and a ‘relativistic indifferentism’ on the other hand, that ‘dissolves every sort of position into the indifferentism of personal interests, [or] “matters of taste” ’, Rescher proposes his version of ‘pluralism’ in an attempt to come to terms with reality in its wholly diverse complexity.4 His study addresses specifically the political reality of society, and opposes ‘a utopianism that looks to a uniquely perfect social order that would prevail under ideal conditions’.5 Because, as he says, ‘we live in an imperfect world’, our social theory must seek to make ‘incremental improvements within the framework of arrangements that none of us will deem perfect but that all of us “can live with” ’.6 While those who seek consensus tend to ‘[d]o whatever is needed to avert discord’, ‘always and everywhere work[ing] for consensus’, by contrast the pluralist will ‘[a]ccept the inevitability of dissensus in a complex and imperfect world’, ‘[s]trive to make the world safe for disagreement’, and ‘[w]ork to realize processes and procedures that make dissensus tolerable if not actually productive’.7 Rescher observes, for example, the way in which strong and effective leaders surround themselves with advisors who are willing to vigorously express their differences of perspective, aware that good decisions emerge

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 125 from the airing of differences, not from ‘a collective opinion’ that ignores or smoothes out disagreements.8 What is needed, in Rescher’s view, is not a society that denies or tries to avoid disagreement in a utopian quest for unanimity or even consensus, but a society that manages its conflicts and dissension so as to avoid ‘specifically harmful and damagingly counterproductive forms of disagreement’ so as to take the fullest possible advantage of the benefits of diversity.9 ‘It is simply – and mercifully – wrong’, Rescher writes, ‘that pluralism is the manifestation of an inherently harmful social malfunction’.10 Diversity of views, of values and purposes is present in every society. These differences are shaped by a number of variables, as he observes, such as: ‘[t]he diversity in people’s experiences and epistemic situations’, ‘variation of “available data” ’, ‘[t]he variability of people’s cognitive values (evidential security, simplicity, etc.)’ and variations in ‘cognitive methodology and the epistemic “state of the art” ’.11 A social arrangement that fails to come to terms with empirical pluralism, that insists on the maintenance of agreement or consensus in decision making is simply unable to deal with the complexities of reality. According to Rescher, ‘[a] social arrangement is valid (appropriate) to the extent that – comparatively among all the actually (realistically) available possibilities – it causes the least dismay i.e. minimizes the overall extent to which people are seriously dissatisfied by its adoption’.12 The test for a good decision in such a society could be framed in the following question: Recognizing the realities with which we are dealing, can most of us live with this decision? Rescher’s approach rejects the idealism of both John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, the first of which depends for validity on a society’s members making a perfectly rational decision under ideal circumstances, the second depending on whether the decision is made ‘through the processes and procedures that would govern an ideal discussion’.13 Rescher’s rejection of political idealism and uniformitarianism is theoretical and pragmatic. He is aware that historically it has been the urge for social homogeneity which brought us episodes like the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from Spain [especially in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries], the night of St Bartholomew in France [23–24 August 1572, when Protestants were massacred at the instigation of Catherine de’ Medici], and analogous tragedies throughout history.14 A society that rejects diversity, whether knowingly or not, risks setting itself on the road to suppression and tyranny, whether the victims are ethnic minorities, adherents to religious faiths, or others who do not fit into the dominant faction’s understanding of truth, purity and rightness. It is, in fact, the yearning for homogeneity that lies at the source of the ‘Balkanization’ of contemporary society, and not the love of diversity.15 Ethnic cleansing is the result of the hegemonic elevation and privileging of

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ethnic and nationalist and religious chauvinism at the expense of respect for the difference of the other. But, as Rescher observes, if a society wants to learn to value its diversity, it must learn ways to allow its members ‘to flourish despite (and perhaps even to some extent because of) a lack of consensus’.16 He continues: To accept diversity, to rest satisfied with dissonance, to live with the idea that others think differently from ourselves – even in this very matter of whether striving for consensus is a good thing – calls for adopting a certain sort of value scheme.17 In essence, Rescher opts for a pragmatic social pluralism that recognizes the wisdom of countervailing valuing systems, conflicting beliefs, vigorous differences of opinions, and competition among moral claims in a society that has come to terms with its own limited understanding of the world.18 For Rescher, the acceptance of pluralism and dissension is necessitated because no one has access to the answers in the back of the book. However, although Rescher makes use of certain aspects of Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism, and, indeed, quotes from Berlin’s critique of monism in his final chapter, ‘Problems of Consensus as Political Ideal’, he does not come to terms with Berlin’s more radical and fundamentally more subversive understanding of pluralism.19 Pluralism, for Berlin, in contrast to Rescher, is not a provisional necessity to which we must resort merely because we (being finite) cannot know which truth among many is the real truth in an imperfect world. For Berlin, pluralism as a philosophical and social approach to life is a positive and necessary provision, given the inescapable and irreducible plurality of values and goods, ends and truths created in and by human societies. In other words, pluralism is not a grudging procedural recognition of ‘a necessary evil’ of existence caused by the epistemological problem of our limited perception. Pluralism is an enthusiastic embrace of the world in its pluriform reality. Thus, however valuable Rescher’s understanding of the practical role of dissensus for a healthy society, at the end of the day he fails to risk a thoroughgoing axiological pluralism in society dependent not on a fundamental flaw or imperfection in existence, but dependent on life’s essential grace, that is, the extravagant diversity and plurality of creation. Rescher’s critique of uniformitarianism does, however, raise again the issue of utopianism that we touched upon earlier, and to which we will now return briefly. It is utopianism that reveals the most attractive and, for that very reason, the most dangerous elements of the church’s yearning for communal agreement.

Must there be a better world somewhere? The American blues legend, B. B. King, sings of a life on the rocks with the wistful refrain, ‘There must be a better world somewhere’,20 and thousands

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 127 throughout history have agreed. Much the same message is echoed by newspaper columnist Bernard Levin: ‘The real world in which we have to live is manifestly imperfect, but instead of accepting that obvious truth and making the best of what we have, we yearn for something that no less obviously cannot now be found’.21 It is, he tells us, humanity’s ‘yearning for perfection, which appears in a thousand guises’, that leads us to place our hope in utopias, rather than to accept and make do with ‘the real world, in which we have to live’.22 This yearning, whether for perfection, or simply for something better, doubtless can produce a lively and useful tension in society. When, for example, on 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King Jr announced from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, ‘I have a dream’, he helped empower many people of many races in his generation to ‘dream’ a new social and political reality into existence. His dream had legs, one might say, a critical imaginative force capable of mobilizing a political and social transformation in the real world. Simply imagining a better society can lead people to question unjust beliefs and practices, and to find the courage to replace the unjust with the more just. In his anthology, The Faber Book of Utopias, John Carey says, ‘Anyone who is capable of love must at some time have wanted the world to be a better place, for we all want our loved ones to live free of suffering, injustice and heartbreak’.23 The desire for ‘a better world somewhere’ can motivate us to work for a better world here and now. The problem with utopian yearnings, however, lies in the human impulse to move from making various improvements in a society to constructing a comprehensive utopia, a wholly perfect and perfectly coherent society grounded in a monistic confidence that the single right way has been discovered and will now be put into place. The meaning of ‘perfect’ is really the sticking point here. ‘Those who construct utopias’, Carey writes, build on the human longing for a better world, but more often than not ‘[w]hat they build may … carry within it its own potential for crushing or limiting human life’.24 The problem with utopias, in other words, is not that they are ‘nowhere’ or ‘no-place’, as Thomas More’s venerable old neologism implies. The problem is that when we try to create utopian societies we tend to harm far more than we heal. From a theological perspective, the utopian dilemma is particularly knotty. My colleague Scott Black Johnston, in his extensive research into the theological significance of the concepts of heaven and hell, observes that though they have waxed and waned periodically depending on the precise moment in history, some notion of an afterlife ‘heaven’ or ‘paradise’ has characterized most sorts and conditions of Christianity, as it also characterized certain forms of the Judaism from which Christianity emerged. The theological difficulty surfaces when Christians try to relocate heaven (specifically those versions of heaven one might describe as idealized human societies) to earth. Almost inevitably the results are tragic. We all know only too well the consequences of charismatic religious leaders who have

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attempted to shape ‘perfect’ religious societies and theocratic worlds within this world. Jonestown’s swelling corpses and Waco’s horrific inferno represent only two fairly recent Christian manifestations in a long and tortured history that includes the sixteenth-century Anabaptists of Münster and the first-century CE Jewish Zealots at Masada. Historically speaking, utopias (religious and civil) tend to end up as societies suppressive within and closed to others without, sometimes with suicidal or homicidal results. The experiences of human society at large fare no better than those of religious groups. The twentieth century witnessed the most devastating advances in utopian experiments the world has ever seen, from the cold cruelty of Stalin’s archipelagoes (could Marx have possibly foreseen such a twisted version of his communist secular religion?) and Hitler’s social nightmare (the most terrible imaginable fulfillment of Herzen’s prophetic warning against the idolatrous holocausts demanded by political Molochs) to the genocidal fields of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.25 Berlin’s critique of the idea of the perfect society is especially instructive. In light of his critique, it may be possible to speak of a ‘good society’, but whatever social ‘good’ means in a Berlinian framework, it cannot remain a singularity. I will only briefly rehearse Berlin’s critique of utopias in order to explore more closely, in this context, the positive role of certain forms of conflict in human society. As was noted earlier, utopias share a monistic conception of truth. Again, according to monism, as Berlin describes it, there can be only one right answer to every real question, and no right answer can possibly contradict another right answer. Ideally, all right answers form a coherent whole so that values can be ranked in relation to one another. The utopian goes a crucial step further. Suppose we are able to discover all the right answers to all the real questions of human existence, and suppose we can assemble all of these right answers into a single coherent whole so that one only needs to know the right answer in order always to do the right thing. Then what might it mean for us to be able to construct a perfect society based on this demonstrably right way of living according to all the right answers? We could (could we not?) develop a ‘final solution’ to all of the problems of human social life. And, if such a perfect society is within our grasp, is there any price too great for us to pay in the short term to make this society a long-term reality? The repression of those people who disagree with our perfect vision of society must be justifiable, must it not? The suppression of ways of life that do not conform is reasonable too, is it not, because the ultimate good is so great? After all, those who disagree and those who do not conform to the right way cannot be right. Their beliefs and actions threaten a perfect world where we can all live in peace. Truth is singular. Falsehood is plural. Even the curtailment of freedom is justifiable, is it not? For what is the loss of freedom, when compared to the greater good of a perfect society that has all the right answers?

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 129 Berlin looks into the starry eyes of the utopian dreamer and sees there a reflection of the madman who will stop at nothing to enforce his will on others, who will sacrifice anything to achieve his social vision. Berlin perceives the historical danger of a monistic conception of truth given political power – and, we might add, religious credence. Berlin also understands the soul-stultifying power implicit in the static character of utopias. A utopia has literally no place to go but down. If a utopia is by definition the perfect society (a perfect society, again, that is conceived in a monistic sense, as an aggregate of persons whose common life is regulated by the single right answers to all the real questions and in which all the right answers are ranked hierarchically so there need never be conflict between true values and ends, and thus where the responsibility to make choices between competing goods is rendered obsolete), then any change whatsoever must be regarded as a fall from perfection, and thus as a deadly threat to the society’s integrity and survival. Control becomes the primary concern for the utopian society, and anxiety the dominant emotion both for the controllers and the controlled. Even the most benign utopia must conspire in the suppression of difference, because intractable differences spell doom to a static society that has already arrived at monistic perfection. Indeed, any alternative answer to any question threatens the coherent form of social life.26 This is where Berlin’s contribution perhaps becomes most valuable for our present ecclesiological reflection: the perfect society (and, by extension, the perfect religious community) can tolerate no conflict. If truth is singular, and truth has been both discovered and institutionalized hierarchically throughout the society, any disagreements and any differences must be regarded as demonstrations of falsehood and as threats to the life and future of the community. If a particular church or religious community understands itself as an ‘ideal’ or ‘perfect’ society, then conflict must be seen as a manifestation of personal and social imperfection, of a lack of intelligence, wisdom, understanding, of outright rebellion against the good, and of pernicious evil. Choice, and the personal responsibility that goes with it, is excluded from such a utopian religious community. Obedience is the only requirement of its members. Lewis Coser’s analysis of ‘sects’, in contrast to ‘political parties’ and ‘churches’, parallels Berlin’s critique of utopias, and deserves at least a brief rehearsal. ‘A sect’, according to Coser, as its Latin etymology suggests, consists of [people] who have cut themselves off from the main body of society. They have formed a restricted group that rejects the norms of the inclusive society and proclaims its adherence to a special set of values and rules of conduct.27 In distinguishing the ‘sect’ from less restrictive, more inclusive social groupings, Coser, of course, is following Max Weber (Troeltsch also follows Weber,

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using his taxonomy of ‘religious social organizations: the church, the sect, and mysticism’).28 Both in religion and in politics, the sect characterizes itself as the visible domain of the true believer, the saint as insider. Thus even the secular sect partakes something of the quality of gnosticism. Coser writes, The members of a political sect relish the comforting assurance that they are ‘in the know’, that they have attained an esoteric knowledge denied to nonmembers. They are thus enabled to turn the tables on a society that has rejected them.29 The sect, as is also true for some utopias, offers those who have been social outsiders the opportunity to become insiders, the socially impotent to become powerful and important, if only relatively so among the fellow members of the sect. The closed community of true believers offers a degree of comfort and security grounded in ‘the collective strength’ of the sect.30 But the restrictiveness of the group, and the group’s antagonism toward the outside world, can make it ‘progressively more difficult’, Coser believes, for the sect to find a ‘common universe of discourse with potential converts’.31 It is possible, in other words, for members of a sect to become ever more displaced from the world at large – including those in the world who might potentially be attracted to the sect – in proportion to their becoming more securely ensconced as members of an internally coherent, exclusive society. Estrangement from the world at large for sect members may take the form of developing and using a rarified language familiar to group members but strange and impenetrable to outsiders. But, more than anything, the estrangement is characterized by the group’s suspicion of, and turning their back on, society at large as the realm of the unredeemed, that which we (the members of the sect) are not and over against which we define ourselves, by a commonality of vision in contrast to the dangerous, the evil, or, simply, the foolish world out there which, though the vision may appear baffling to those without, coheres rationally for those within the sect, justifying and reinforcing a divorce from the world. The more successful the sect becomes in separating from the world beyond its boundaries, the harder it must work at maintaining the fiction that such a break is possible, because no sect is or ever can be divorced from the culture that forms its context. Culture inevitably bears counterculture. As with utopias, the greatest peril to threaten the sect does not come from the world without, of course, but from conflict, disagreement and difference within. Unlike the church, made up of saints and sinners, people of good will and ill will at various levels of commitment and maturity, or the political party that seeks to include a cross-section of persons who share a variety of related (but not identical) values and interests, if only for the purpose of winning a general election, for the sect ‘any internal conflict necessarily cuts so deep that it endangers the very basis of the sectarian

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 131 consensus’.32 A dissenter represents a mortal threat to the survival of the sect. Thus the sect invests considerable energy in rooting out, prosecuting and expelling ‘heretics’, so as ‘to maintain or increase cohesion among the remaining ‘worthy’ participants’. But always the ‘remaining “worthy” participants’ remain a potential threat to the sect, no less so than those already expelled.33 For religious, no less than political, sects, repression and persecution, then, are not aberrations. They represent an ordinary state of social being.34 And when sectarian attitudes enter into the life of churches and other groups, the consequences can be particularly fierce and bitter. Purges in religious groups, from Savonarola’s Tuscan bonfire of the vanities to the schism that produced the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, share something of the terror of a civil war; friend turned against friend, and neighbor against neighbor, in the hunt for the unfaithful among us. There is an old saying sometimes still heard among some Southern Baptist and Church of Christ church members in the American South, that ‘only good wood splits’. Perhaps the lamentable divisiveness of fundamentalist Southern Baptists in the United States points to the sectarianism that lies at the heart of their doctrine of the church. If so, they are certainly not alone.35 Though a religious sect is not synonymous with a religious utopia (a sect can be non-utopian, though it would be difficult if not impossible for a utopia not to be sectarian), they share a monistic axiological and social framework, which separates them from non-idealistic groups.36 It is to this shared framework we now turn. The utopian model of the religious groups has its roots in Platonic and (especially) Aristotelian concepts of society, that is, of the polis, which promotes the singular common good and whose life is ordered by a hierarchy of coherent, non-contradictory virtues. In order to better understand the pluralist alternative to a monistic or utopian model of the church, it will be useful to explore the Platonic and Aristotelian original. Alasdair MacIntyre, perhaps the most persuasive and insightful contemporary interpreter of Aristotle’s social and ethical thought, observes that Aristotle’s concept of ‘the unity of virtues’, which he inherited directly from Plato, opens Aristotle to criticism from those that MacIntyre describes as spokespersons of ‘the modern liberal view’, who believe that Aristotle presents ‘too simple and too unified a view of the complexities of human good’, and paints a portrait of Athenian society in particular, and Greek culture in general, that flattens their actual, historical diversity of values, of conflicting goods, of varied and even contradictory virtues, into a featureless moral geography. Aristotle’s portrait of the polis exaggerates ‘moral coherence and unity’ and has been criticized as hopelessly reductionistic.37 MacIntyre, in fact, finds it hard to disagree with this ‘modern liberal’ argument – an argument that becomes only more persuasive in light of questions raised with reference to cultural analysis by perceptive postmodern critics.38 But, before dismissing this aspect of Aristotle’s thought, MacIntyre examines

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why he holds so tenaciously to ‘the unity of the virtues’ – as MacIntyre observes, ‘an unnecessarily strong conclusion’, even from Aristotle’s ‘own point of view’.39 For both Plato and Aristotle, society, if it is to be a ‘good’ society, must reflect the singularity of ‘the good’. Goodness excludes conflict, because singularity excludes contradiction. Conflict, for Plato and Aristotle, as we observed earlier, is essentially evil. As MacIntyre writes, ‘For Aristotle, as for Plato, the good life for [humanity] is itself single and unitary, compounded of a hierarchy of goods’.40 Neither Aristotle nor Plato would have been able to acknowledge the good of a social-political conception like that of Niccolò Machiavelli who, in his Discourses, understands conflict as contributory to the strength, the greatness, the political health and social stability of the state of republican Rome.41 Machiavelli’s political thought is grounded neither in a pragmatic avoidance, nor an opportunistic ignorance of the good, but in an alternative conception of goodness and virtue to that of Plato and Aristotle (and to the official virtue of Christian Italy, it must also be said). There are, for Machiavelli, different, contradictory, conflicting and competitive goods within as well as between societies. Mere knowledge of the goodness of a good does not insure right action. It is often necessary to make choices between competing goods. And, the various goods cannot simply be ranked hierarchically, one good leading to another. Nor is there a commanding reference, an external authority to which one may appeal by which to rank one good in relation to another, so providing an infallible assurance that one is making the right choice. There is the possibility of several right (and wrong) choices. This political state of being, far from undermining a society, actually contributes to its vitality. Indeed, in Machiavelli’s view, it was in part the loss of public conflict specifically over the good (good for whom?), which led eventually to the corruption and weakness of Rome. Berlin (as we have observed already), in his classic essay on Machiavelli,42 and Lewis Coser, in his groundbreaking analysis of the functions of social conflict (to which we shall return),43 confront us with a vision of political reality that does not allow a Platonic or Aristotelian metaphysical preference for singularity to obscure our encounter with the obvious: that there are in every society competing goods, frequently incommensurable ultimate ends, and axiological structures grounded in these goods and ends, and that the existence of these political and moral countervailing forces is not evidence of the weakness, but rather of the vitality, of a society. Their existence may indeed be a society’s greatest strength, providing there is also a fundamental and undergirding respect for others (specifically for the irreducible difference of the other) which takes the concrete form of permitting the voices of others to be heard and their values to be taken seriously. Because the competing goods within a society represent entire ways of life and ways of being in relationship grounded in conflicting visions ‘of how the world works’,44 grounded in complex interpersonal and intrapersonal histories, as

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 133 well as in cultural and social histories, and (this must be reiterated) because they are directed toward a variety of different ultimate ends (not merely toward contradictory relative goals), individuals belonging to any particular society are faced with ‘agonistic’ choices; choices which are not simply between good and bad, but often between objective and competing goods. Hence John Gray’s description of Berlin’s thought as ‘agonistic liberalism’.45 The choice of the adjective ‘agonistic’ leads us back to a crucial distinction in Greek thought, and specifically to MacIntyre’s analysis of Aristotle’s account of virtue. For Aristotle, as we have observed, guided as he was by metaphysical presuppositions regarding the singularity of the good, and ‘the impersonal unchanging divinity’ who supplies humanity with its ‘specific and ultimate telos’, conflict within the polis is inevitably ‘the result either of flaws of character in individuals or of unintelligent political arrangements’. MacIntyre continues: This has consequences not only for Aristotle’s politics, but also for his poetics and even his theory of knowledge. In all three the agôn has been displaced from its Homeric centrality. Just as conflict is not central to a city’s life, but is reduced to a threat to that life, so tragedy as understood by Aristotle cannot come near the Homeric insight that tragic conflict is the essential human condition – the tragic hero on Aristotle’s view fails because of his own flaw, not because the human situation is sometimes irremediably tragic – and dialectic is no longer the road to truth, but for the most part only a semi-formal procedure ancillary to enquiry.46 The theological implications of MacIntyre’s interpretation of Aristotle could hardly be more crucial, especially because of their ecclesiological implications. Not only is there an agonistic quality to moral decisionmaking if we must choose from among the conflicting goods that arise from the historical and theological complexity of the traditions that nourish our communities of faith, there is also an agonistic depth in all aspects of churchly life because of the rich complexity of human social existence and because of the character of the triune God who is not a simple singularity. Could we not say, then, that this is why the symbol of the church is a cross and not a circle, certainly not the kind of darkened circle we find in a period (or full stop) ‘.’ or in a mathematical point, or in the point of absolute singularity at the origin of the universe, according to some theoretical physicists? The cross is, after all, both crossing and open-ended while the circle is closed. Philosophical and theological dialectics (and, by extension, dialectical theology) is, therefore, not simply (to use MacIntyre’s phrase) ‘a semi-formal procedure ancillary to enquiry’, but is indeed ‘the road to truth’ (and this is especially true for those who share a trinitarian theological legacy), because the truth we seek is truth about the creation of a triune

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God, the God whose very being is plurality in union, mutuality in difference, who freely resists monistic singularity as divine Source, Word, and Spirit. This is why the ecclesiology of Reinhold Hütter may be potentially so problematic, because of the manner in which it appeals to a conversationstopping ecclesial authority in the name of God. If I may digress, briefly, I believe some reflection on Hütter’s ecclesiology will prove illuminating for our larger discussion of conflict and the church. While Hütter’s critique of Karl Barth’s pneumatology touches on an apparent weakness in Barth’s ecclesiology (certainly there are no surprises here; Avery Dulles, for one, observed the lack of what might be called historical continuity in Barth’s doctrine of the church, a critique which may or may not be valid),47 his rejection of Barth’s dialectical theology seems to imply that the church can somehow preempt the freedom of God in its speech about God. This is, of course, always the theological issue that underlies a preference for singularity over plurality in creation. Hütter writes: Because Barth ascribes no unique work of any concretion or duration to the Holy Spirit, eschatology must become the outstanding epiphany of the ‘empty’ place that through conscious reproduction of absence creates a kind of presence. But precisely this is the fulcral point: The work of the Holy Spirit does not leave this place empty. It is always ‘salutarily’ occupied in word and sacrament. … As Christ’s Spirit, it is Christ’s consoling presence, one that generates faith even though it is not yet ‘seeing’, and one that nonetheless assures the reliability of the vita passiva and relieves theology of dialectics, if not peregrinatio. Christ’s ‘place’ is thus never really empty. Rather, it is occupied unequivocally by Christ in the Holy Spirit, with an unequivocalness that itself is the ground of faith such that theology, too, can be engaged with the unequivocalness of faith (albeit not with the unequivocalness of eschatological perception, but neither with the equivocalness of a dialectic that must also behave as if God takes with one hand what he gives with the other).48 Hütter seems to opt for an epistemology somewhat similar to that which MacIntyre ascribes to Aristotle: a non-agonistic, certainly non-dialectical, approach to knowledge. He seems to assume that if Christ is present, there is no need for dialectical language about God. If this is accurate, Hütter’s theology would be consistent with the view that plurality, diversity and conflict in the church are evidence, not of richness, but of failure and untruth. Barth’s dialectical approach to the knowledge of God reminds us, however, that even God’s name consists in God’s refusal to be named. To say this is not an admission of failure, but a celebration of the freedom of God. If Barth is correct, it would be perilous indeed to attempt to move from the reality of God as the ground of faith (perhaps even to speak, as Hütter does, of ‘an unequivocalness that itself is the ground of faith’) to the unequivo-

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 135 cality of human faith, and a corresponding unequivocality of human speech about God. Does such a move, if Barth is correct, not risk precisely a transgression of the first commandment, a confusion of that which is human with that which is God? Again, and perhaps even more fundamentally, is not such a confusion of unequivocality with the reality of God already a move toward idolatry? This seems to have been Barth’s concern. And it is a concern that presses us toward a more complex understanding of God and a more pluralistic conception of God’s world and of the church than that which Hütter advocates. We should in no wise take lightly Barth’s warning, in commenting on God’s appearance to Moses in the burning bush: Whether we take the verb as present or as future ‘I am that I am’ means: ‘I am who I am (or, who I will be)’. But that means the One of whom there is no other objective definition but what He gives of Himself by being who He is and by acting as He does. There is therefore no objective definition that we can discover for ourselves. We might say of this revelation of His name that it consists in the refusal of a name, but even in the form of this substantial refusal it is still really revelation, communication and illumination. For Yahweh means the Lord, the I who gives Himself to be known in that He exists as the I of the Lord and therefore acts only as a He and can be called upon only as a Thou in His action, without making Himself known in His I-ness as if He were a creature. We must now glance at Exodus 33:19, where the same name is expressly paraphrased by the words: ‘I am gracious to whom I am gracious and shew mercy on whom I shew mercy’. God is the One who is called in this way and not another: as He posits and gives Himself in His action. God is the One whose being can be investigated only in the form of a continuous question as to His action. Any other name is not the name of God. Any knowledge of any other name is not the knowledge of God. It is in this way and not another that God stands before man.49 To say, as Hütter does, that the Holy Spirit, Christ’s spirit, takes Christ’s place among us, does not in any way lessen the necessity for dialectical (and metaphorical, analogical and, at times, even equivocal) speech about God: at least, not if Barth is correct. Speech that faithfully responds to God’s self-revelation and not to our desire to control the ‘other’, cannot pretend to unequivocality. God the ‘altogether other’ resists our claim to knowledge and privileged speech. God’s presence demands of us, as God’s presence demanded of Moses, a stuttering, or dialectical response. For Barth, nothing else, certainly nothing less, is appropriate or faithful to the reality and freedom of the God revealed in Jesus Christ as the ground of human faith. But, to go one step further, and to bring these specifically theological reflections back to the question of human knowledge of creation: dialectical epistemology reflects an understanding of the complexity of our knowledge of the world, a world whose agonistic reality cannot be accounted for in any other way.

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Returning again to MacIntyre’s assessment of Aristotle: If we follow MacIntyre’s argument, we find that Aristotle’s metaphysical assumptions cause his thought to be strangely at odds with itself. Aristotle’s metaphysics, according to MacIntyre, sit askew his politics. The ultimate end of human life for Aristotle is contemplation. It is through contemplation that one comes to oneself. However, in order for a person to be free to pursue such contemplation, ‘material prerequisites and social prerequisites are necessary’. The person’s social embeddedness, which is a political given, and the individual’s involvement in the concern for, the pursuit of, and accretion of those acquisitions which constitute one’s ‘household’, and which make it convenient for one to spend one’s time in contemplation, are held to be subordinate to the highest goal of the good life which is metaphysical contemplation itself. Yet, as MacIntyre observes, ‘the notion that their possession and practice is in the end subordinate to metaphysical contemplation would seem oddly out of place’ in ‘many passages where Aristotle discusses individual virtues’.50 Herein lies one aspect of the unreality of Aristotle’s ethics that discounts history and the historical actuality of society, as a movement towards a single particular telos, and which consequently undermines its formation of virtues in and among persons.51 Aristotle, in other words, lacks a clear conception of historicity at either the societal or the personal level, which is to say (by another road) that the static is assumed to be the essential and ideal state of persons and societies. And, because Aristotle did not possess an adequate conception of historical process with reference to human nature and human society (‘there is’, writes MacIntyre, ‘no history of the polis or of Greece or of mankind moving towards a telos’52), human nature is fixed, and all classes of humanity are fixed and unchanging; virtue resides in a historically closed shop. ‘Thus’, MacIntyre continues, a whole range of questions cannot arise for him, including those which concern the ways in which [people] might pass from being slaves or barbarians to being citizens of a polis. Some [people] just are slaves ‘by nature’, on Aristotle’s view.53 The ecclesiology that remains rooted in such an understanding of human persons and human societies – and it must be reiterated that there are ecclesiologies that spring from precisely such an understanding – finds plurality, difference, change, openness toward others who really are altogether, irreducibly and tenaciously other, and growth in any sense besides duplication threatening. If God is reducible to absolute singularity, then absolute singularity is in some sense divine. If a society is good inasmuch as it has arrived at a single conception of the good, then it must remain static and unchanging, or else it is descending into folly and evil. And if community is the mere replication of ‘one’ so that every other is reduced to unanimity, then conflict represents another fall from paradise, the end of communion

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 137 (and, of course, it is commonplace to hear members of religious communities discuss conflict among their adherents in terms approaching these phrases). The problem, of course, is that the monistic understanding of God, humanity and human society does not account for the diverse reality of social existence, or, more significantly, for the theological significance of the God who creates an irreducibly plural universe. Monism certainly does not take account of the social reality of the plurality of conflicting goods that confront us. It also seems to me that an appreciation for the difference of others is grounded in a confidence and a considerable level of comfort with our own difference among others, our own irreducible otherness in the presence of the stranger, which reflects our own strangeness to others. Pluralism, as a theological posture toward the diversity of society, does not demand that we adopt yet another form of social exclusion, rejecting those who do not agree with our pluralistic sensibilities; nor must it insist that everyone conform to ‘our’ pluralism, i.e. pluralism understood as ideology. The goal and orientation of pluralism as a theological posture are far more subtle and far more humble, perhaps simply to respect the other as ‘every bit the other’, while respecting our own difference in the face of others.54 To imagine a ‘good’ society is to conceptualize our deepest longings, our most elemental values, the purposes and goals for which we are willing to live and to die. But to imagine a good society is not the same as to imagine an ideal one or a perfect one. This is why, for Berlin, it is crucial to come to terms with the persistence and the decline of utopian ideas, especially in Western European culture. It is possible, of course, to imagine a society (and, I would argue, a ‘good’ society) in which conflict over values and ideas, interests, aspirations, needs and ends, rages in a lively social and political praxis. But it would not be possible to call such a society a utopia, because a utopia is by very definition (at least, according to Berlin’s definition) static and unchanging, beyond social tension and political realism, rooted in the monism of the philosophia perennis.55 There is, according to Berlin, no recipe for making a heaven of earth that can avoid its becoming a hell. The dream itself is flawed, not merely because utopias are hard to practically manage, but because the dream itself is incoherent. Thus Berlin writes: If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict – and of tragedy – can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition.56 This is why Berlin sees the failure of utopias not only as a pragmatic, or a historical, or (to use his word) an ‘empirical’ failure. Their failure is fundamentally logical and theoretical. In this case, it is the theoretical which has priority of consideration over the empirical: utopias fail because they fail to

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take account of the pluralistic character of social reality at the fundamental theoretical level. ‘The need to choose’ from among conflicting goods, ‘to sacrifice some ultimate values to others’, Berlin writes, ‘turns out to be a permanent characteristic of the human predicament’.57 Which takes us into the very heart of Berlin’s understanding of the incommensurability of values, perhaps his most crucial contribution to social and political theory.

When worlds (of values) collide ‘Here is a nightmare for those who hate conflict’, begins a column by Martin Marty in the 27 January 1999 issue of The Christian Century. He continues: [T]ake a not very large or airy room in Washington, D.C., and jam it full of tables and microphones, chairs and cameras. Put a document on the table to test at a ‘public airing’. Now invite to the table representatives of groups who are rarely in the same room together. Tell these antagonists that you would like them to talk about four issues that divide Americans, especially religious Americans: reproductive rights (which, to no one’s surprise, quickly gets reduced to abortion); the rights of homosexuals; world population; and church and state.58 A nightmare indeed. Reading Marty’s description of the setting, one can almost feel one’s abdominal muscles tighten and pulse quicken. Staunch advocates, coalition members, religious leaders representing the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Council of Churches, and the Christian Legal Society, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs and other assorted compeers all are confined in a small space and told to express their views and the commitments of their constituencies. Marty notes that a room full of such high-powered advocates as these might be expected to erupt into the sort of brawl one sees on the Jerry Springer television show. The document being aired was titled To Speak and Be Heard: Principles of Religious Discourse. The hope with this document, certainly not the first nor probably the last of its ilk, was to help conflicting parties deal with conflict in a more civil manner without trying to force disputants either to ‘leave their convictions, passions and intensities at the door’ or merely to ‘make tolerance the highest virtue or ask that relativism rule’.59 The gathering, Marty observes, did not in fact degenerate into a brawl after all. Nor did the group opt for a lowest common denominator approach to dialogue. Instead, the group established a fairly straightforward guiding principle: everyone will be able to advocate his or her perspective in a context of mutual respect, though not of agreement. To borrow Rescher’s phrase, they found a way ‘to make the world [at least their world, on that day, in that room] safe for disagreement and … to realize processes and procedures that make dissensus tolerable if not actually productive’.60

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 139 I mention this episode, in part, simply to observe the persistence of strong differences among religious people of good will, committed to influencing the society in which they live, and the desire on the part of many to find a way to speak, and to be heard, and even to listen to others. In the next chapter we will look at the question of tolerance, and whether toleration as it has emerged as a doctrine of the Enlightenment is an adequate goal for religious discourse. Our focus for the moment will remain on social conflict, specifically the character of social conflict as an expression of our concern to pursue the various and, sometimes, incommensurable values and ends, which we believe constitute a worthwhile common life. But in both of these chapters our concern will be to find concrete ways to understand, perhaps to reconceptualize, and to deal with differences over the values and purposes that diverse religious communities identify as worthy of pursuit. Berlin’s social theory provides a way of conceptualizing social conflicts, especially irresolvable conflicts of an axiological and moral nature, that arise from the cultural and historical experiences of various communities, including faith communities, and to understand such conflicts not as a regrettable abnormality, but as a normal feature of social existence, and indeed as something potentially positive. The purpose of the approach I shall take to understanding the conflicts we experience over ideas and values, moral options, aspirations and beliefs, is to seek to hear and understand what is being expressed about God, God’s creation, and a humanity whom Christians believe is created in the image of God, so that we can enlarge our understanding of one another, certainly, but also so that we can enlarge our understanding of the God who is far greater, and a world and humanity far more complex, than can be expressed in any monistic conceptual framework. To attend with respect to the other – every other – is also to respond respectfully to God and God’s creation. But to respect the other does not necessarily mean that we must agree with the other, certainly not if we believe that the reality of our social existence is pluralistic. We listen to one another, not abstractly, but as persons grounded in our own historical, cultural and social particularity, shaped and formed by certain communities of faith, faith practices, traditions, beliefs and aspirations. This must be recognized in order for real communication to occur across the margins of difference, and this must be recognized as we listen and speak, because our differences matter so much. To abandon difference in the quest for communication, especially religious communication (including the perhaps clichéd categories of ecumenical and interfaith ‘dialogue’), is to forsake the possibility of the historically unique, that which may never appear again.61 Obviously this is of concern for adherents to trinitarian Christian faith with our belief that the event of Jesus Christ is unique, utterly without historical precedent, and in a category of its own.62 Indeed, to abandon difference for the sake of communication is to nullify the very possibility of communication that is anything more than simply talking to ourselves in the ramblings of religious solipsism – which is not communication at all.

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The differences between us make communication possible as well as necessary. At every social level (from one-on-one social engagements to relations between large groups, communities and societies), whether among those communities with which we most closely identify or the various communities – and, again, this is especially true of religious communities – from whom we differ most profoundly but with whom we try to live and converse in a diverse civil context, it is in fact difference which makes community possible. Only others can be in relationship. This is the hidden message of trinitarian theology, that there is in God genuine alterity, indeed that God consists in persons in alterity. And it is in the character of this alterity to define the meaning of divine union as communion. A Christian doctrine of God, like that of Jürgen Moltmann’s, for instance, that gives ‘De Deo trino’ priority over ‘De Deo uno’ makes it possible for us to proceed from the historical interpretation of the Trinity – the unveiling of the plurality of God in and through the life of Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit – to an understanding of the meaning of ‘the union of the tri-unity of God’, as Moltmann says, ‘a concept which is differentiated and is therefore capable of being thought first of all’.63 Such a doctrine of God, that is, ‘a social doctrine of the Trinity’, speaks directly to the meaning of human community, as that which reflects the triune imago Dei, and to the meaning of a community of faith in the trinitarian God. Whatever the limitations of this approach to the doctrine of God, the insight it provides into the connection between the alterity of God as trinity and the irreducible alterity of others in human society, is indispensable. The image of a singular divine being might well be reflected in the individual human being – and many theologians, from Augustine onward, have explored the image of God (even construed as triune image) in largely individualistic terms. But the image of the God whose very being is in communion – whose ‘wholly otherness’ does not only mark the boundary between divine and human, but marks out real differentiation in mutuality in the life of God – could only be reflected in human relatedness. If we reduce identity to being identical, we place personhood in thrall to singularity, and singularity inevitably excludes real community.64 Social conflict, arising from real differences over matters of vital interest, and community, which embodies respect for every other, go hand in hand. Again, Berlin’s understanding of conflict is particularly illuminating because he recognizes the fundamental and irreducible incompatibility among many of the things we care most about, and the conflicts we engage in over the goods and purposes for which we live and work. This is, according to John Gray, the ‘idea of enormous subversive force’ that animates all of Berlin’s work.65 It is also, I would add, an idea of enormous constructive theological force, and one that may help us reframe the conflicts we face within and among religious communities. In order to explore the theological significance of Berlin’s theory of incommensurable values, I will focus especially on John Gray’s perceptive interpretation of this aspect of Berlin’s thought.

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 141 To understand the incommensurability of values at the most basic level, we would do well to reflect primarily on how we negotiate our common goods and options in making moral choices. The Aristotelian model, as we have already seen, assumes that doing good does not require a radical moral choice among competing goods; it requires primarily knowledge of the good. As we have noted repeatedly, there is for monism only one correct answer for each real question. The moral challenge of human life, then, is to know what the correct answer is. Armed with this knowledge, one need not worry whether a particular moral choice will conflict with other moral commitments. The good life is constituted by a harmony of goods, all goods existing in a hierarchy, which can, at least in principle, be discovered. One good never conflicts with another.66 This understanding of moral decision making is, Gray writes, a feature, not only of Aristotelian philosophy, but also ‘of the Christian tradition’.67 Certainly it is a feature of many Christian traditions, and of most Western Christian traditions – though not all. Those traditions which hold that all ‘moral and practical dilemmas we face in mortal life’ are ‘in principle soluble by reference to the will of God’, and that believe ‘the ideas of deity and of perfection are conjoined’, as Gray observes, do indeed share the Aristotelian understanding of axiological and moral monism. Such Christian traditions cannot acknowledge ‘an ultimate moral tragedy, an unredeemed loss of value or a conflict of right with right, since to allow this would be to subvert the providential order and so undermine the very possibility of theodicy’.68 There are, however, Christian communities of faith and practice, and communities of Christian theological discourse, which do not find it necessary to speak of God and Christian responsibility in these monistic terms, as we have already observed, and which would resist an apologetic theodicy, as the justification of ‘God’s ways to man’ (to echo Housman’s memorable phrase69). Having said this, it is important to reiterate the general accuracy of Gray’s observation (which parallels Berlin’s) with a simple, but important, qualification: For many Christians, as is true for some Jews and, perhaps, most Muslims, ‘the idea of the best of all possible worlds must be a meaningful one, since, if it is not, the monotheistic conception of divinity is destroyed’.70 This is especially true if monotheism is understood in monistic terms, as in Unitarianism (either Unitarianism, as in the denominational Unitarian Universalist Church in North America, which reaps an inheritance of sixteenth-century anti-trinitarians such as the Socinians and seventeenth-century followers of John Biddle, as well as the moderate deism of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalism, or the practical Unitarianism so common among contemporary Protestant adherents in North America) as a metaphysic of the absolute singularity of God. ‘Berlin’, writes Gray, ‘rejects this foundational Western commitment. He denies that genuine goods, or authentic virtues, are, necessarily, or as a matter of fact, such that peaceful coexistence among them is a possible state

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of human life’.71 Which brings us back to our attempts to make moral decisions on the basis of the values we inherit in our societies; societies which are complex and fluid, and made up of a variety of communities of practice and discourse. We may from time to time find it necessary to choose among goods with nothing above or outside of them to guide our choice between them. The choice may become even more difficult because the goods that stand before us may stand in contrast or even contradiction to one another. And the choice we must make may be further compounded, or made additionally agonistic, by the awareness that to choose one is to lose or at least to compromise the virtues inherent in the other, at least in the short term, and possibly forever. Thus an individual who desires to be both merciful and just, may well find it necessary in a particular context to act for justice, aware that mercy is lost in this decision. This is the essence of the problem of incommensurable values, on the most basic personal level. The concept of incommensurable values is used by Berlin to speak of the diversity, the competition and rivalry, and the uncombinability of certain goods. Berlin’s usage of the term incommensurable is similar to its common usage in mathematics; that which is incommensurable has ‘no common measure (integral or fractional)’, i.e. ‘no common standard of measurement’. That which is incommensurable is ‘not comparable in respect to magnitude or value’.72 The concept of values, as Gray observes, can loosely designate ‘goods, options, virtues, whole conceptions of the good or entire cultural traditions or forms of life, or merely wants and preferences’.73 To speak of such values as incommensurable is to point to the fact that sometimes it is impossible to compare, to combine, even to harmonize values, practically or logically; indeed, sometimes it is impossible to pursue one good without definitively rejecting another, because some goods are simply so different, even contradictory, that they cannot be pursued alongside others. The situation is compounded because there is no central or external mediating value – no meta-value, to adapt a term from postmodern thought – which mediates among and arbitrates between the claims upon us of various goods. Joseph Raz’s definition of incommensurable values, alluded to in Gray’s exposition, is particularly helpful: to say that values are incommensurable ‘is to say that they cannot be the subject of comparision’.74 Gray elaborates on Raz, clarifying the radical claim of incommensurability in contrast to mere indeterminacy: It is significant that, in Raz’s account of it (as, implicitly, in Berlin’s), incommensurability of values (goods, options, and so forth) is distinguished sharply from rough equality, and also from indeterminacy. Incommensurability is not rough equality because ‘if two options are incommensurate then reason has no judgement to make concerning their relative value. Saying that they are of equal value is passing a judgement about their relative value, whereas saying they are incom-

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 143 mensurate is not’. Indeterminacy of values arises when it is neither true nor false that one option is better than another or that they have equal value. Such indeterminacy is a pervasive feature of language and of human action, but it does not seem to capture what is meant by incommensurability. Indeed those who are suspicious or sceptical of the very idea of incommensurability often invoke indeterminacies in our judgements as an alternative to any deeper or more radical denial of incommensurability. Incommensurability is thereby eliminated, to be replaced by incompleteness or imperfection in our judgements of value.75 The nature of incommensurable values lies, therefore, not in our limited ability (our ignorance, frailty, or lack of discernment) to determine the relative merit of social goods and values, or their proper relationship to one another. Rather, incommensurability speaks to the plural and at times contradictory character of the values and goods themselves. Incommensurability describes the fact that as these values and goods arise and are shaped in particular human societies, they are sometimes simply incomparable and competitive with each other. Thus Gray writes decisively: ‘Incommensurability among values discloses itself … as a breakdown or failure in transitivity’.76 Gray illustrates in typically Berlinian fashion by appealing to aesthetics. If we wish to discuss comparatively the great dramatists Aeschylus and Shakespeare, we find that the fact that they share a genre (tragic drama) does not assist us in comparing their work. They are simply incomparable. [T]hough their work falls within a single recognizable genre, yet its content and structure, its styles and themes, the background of beliefs and conventions it presupposes, and the forms of life it depicts, are too different for them to be comparable in terms of value as exemplars of tragic drama.77 One could compare Aeschylus with Euripides. But, Gray says, even if one concludes that Euripides is a greater dramatist than Aeschylus, it does not follow that Euripides is greater than Shakespeare. According to Gray (and for Raz, and for Berlin as well): two things (values or options, goods or ends) – in this case the artistic achievements of two tragic dramatists – may be said to be incommensurable ‘if it is possible for one of them to be improved without thereby becoming better than the other, and if there can be another option which is better than the one, but not better than the other’.78 There is in the case of Aeschylus and Shakespeare neither a common standard of measurement nor a comparability between the two in respect to magnitude or value. The art of each expresses an entire web of social valuations and cultural self-understandings, whole ways of being human in the world and of articulating the meaning of that humanity,

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rendering it impossible to say, for instance, that Shakespeare is greater to Aeschylus. Gray’s illustration, of course, evokes other illustrations of incommensurability in Berlin. We have visited some of these illustrations in another context, but it may be helpful to reiterate them as we attempt to understand the relationship between the incommensurability of values and social conflict. In Berlin’s essay ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, he says that Vico ‘would have thought it idle to ask whether Sophocles is not a better poet than Virgil, or Virgil than Racine’.79 Though all three are poets, each expresses the humanity of profoundly different, and utterly incommensurable, social and cultural contexts. The poetry of each is no more comparable than are the cultures to which they give voice. Each culture creates masterpieces that belong to it and it alone, and when it is over one can admire its triumphs or deplore its vices: but they are no more; nothing can restore them. … The virtues of the Homeric heroes are not the virtues of the age of Plato and Aristotle in the name of which they attacked the morality of the Homeric poems; nor are the virtues of fifth-century Athens, for all that Voltaire thought otherwise, similar to those of Renaissance Florence or the Court of Versailles. There is both loss and gain in the passing from one stage of civilization to another, but, whatever the gain, what is lost is lost for ever and will not be restored in some earthly paradise.80 Berlin’s understanding of incommensurability presses still further than Vico’s, of course. There is simply no justification for comparing the virtues of Homer’s world and those of Aristotle’s, as there is no legitimate comparison of the beauty of Homer’s epic poetry and the beauty of Aristotle’s philosophy. The ‘unapproachably sublime’ poetry of Homer cannot be divorced from ‘a cruel, savage and, to later generations, morally repellent age’. We have already observed this cultural understanding in our discussion of Vico in Chapter 1. Berlin reminds us here that the very idea of ‘an ideal world’ in which ‘all excellences’ (all the qualities necessary to give us all the aesthetic treasures of the world) exist in perfect harmony, is logically as well as pragmatically incoherent.81 Homer and Dante, Dante and Galileo, Aeschylus and Shakespeare, simply cannot share the same mail code. We may (and, perhaps, sometimes we must) make judgements about the values and purposes, goals and aspirations of another society or age. Communication sometimes takes the form of confrontation. But we must do so with humility, recognizing that every valuation is grounded in our own cultural experiences, our own histories and the traditions we claim (and the traditions we sometimes create82), the values and purposes, goals, and aspirations we have inherited and participate in, contribute to and, in turn, shape. We may legitimately make critical judgements on the relative merit of the accomplishments, actions and artistic products of an age or culture in

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 145 comparison with comparable accomplishments, actions and products of that age and culture. What we simply have no historical justification to do is to appeal to a timeless, transhistorical, universal standard by which to make these judgements; nor have we any mandate to tear the artifacts and accomplishments of an age from their cultural context (e.g. by praising Homer while refusing to acknowledge that the literary Homer is the expression of the Homeric culture). Returning to our discussion of ethics: it is important to note that simply to identify two options that lie before us as incommensurable does not in any sense detract from their possible significance; nor does it mean that we can adopt a posture of apathy toward choosing between them. Incommensurability does not denote indifference; ‘it marks the inability of reason to guide our action, not the insignificance of our choice’.83 Gray presses home this point by contrasting a monistic view of values with the concept of incommensurability found both in Raz and Berlin. Suppose, he tells us, that a person decides to exchange ‘the pleasures (and anxieties) of a family life for a career as a sailor’. A monist with a deep appreciation for boating might say that the person has given up the relatively lesser pleasures derived from domestic tranquility, marriage, childrearing and a settled life of hearth and home for the greater pleasures of adventure, travel, shipboard collegiality and excitement on the high seas. ‘If valuepluralism is correct’, Gray writes, ‘this view is totally wrong. What one loses [in one form of life] is of a different kind from what one gains [in another]’.84 There are, Gray explains, many ways to live one’s life, whole worlds of living that differ from others. The life of the soldier is a very different life from that of a career diplomat, for example. The life of a scientist is different from that of a politician. And the life of a teacher is different from that of a monk, or a nun, a hospice caregiver, or a banker. ‘Contrary to Aristotle, no hierarchy can be established by any rational procedure among such diverse forms of human flourishing’.85 Each form of life has its own rewards and joys, its own struggles and difficulties; each life must be taken as a whole and understood, and judged, from the inside out. The soldier may never be able to understand the life of a nun, nor may the teacher be attracted to the life of a politician. To choose one life over another means, in some sense, to renounce unknown the joys and sorrows of the life not chosen. The losses are irreparable, but so are the gains. ‘By incommensurability, then, is meant incomparability – the incomparability of valuable cultural objects, activities, reasons for action or forms of life’.86 And the choices we make (or, in many cases, the choices we refrain from making) among the incommensurable options before us stamps indelibly the kind of humanity we will live, the specific ways in which we will flourish. The driving force behind Berlin’s social thought, particularly his understanding of the incommensurability of values, is his philosophical

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anthropology. Humanity, according to Berlin, is self-transforming, ‘able to choose freely, within the limits imposed by nature and history, between rival, mutually incompatible ends’.87 It is, indeed, Berlin’s anthropology that illuminates his understanding of the incommensurabilities among (and conflicts between) rivalrous goods, a state of affairs which necessitates the making of radical choices – or, perhaps more accurately, acting freely in the face of incommensurable options88 – ultimately without the decisive arbitration of reason.89 With characteristic humility, Berlin assesses the extent to which the best resources of reason, specifically philosophy, can assist people in making the choices they must in their lives. He writes: The task of philosophy, often a difficult and painful one, is to extricate and bring to light the hidden categories and models in terms of which human beings think (that is, their use of words, images and other symbols), to reveal what is obscure or contradictory in them, to discern the conflicts between them that prevent the construction of more adequate ways of organising and describing and explaining experience (for all description as well as explanation involves some model in terms of which the describing and explaining is done); and then, at a still ‘higher’ level, to examine the nature of this activity itself (epistemology, philosophical logic, linguistic analysis), and to bring to light the concealed models that operate in this second-order, philosophical, activity itself. … The goal of philosophy is always the same, to assist men to understand themselves and thus operate in the open, and not wildly, in the dark.90 Philosophy, and indeed reason itself, can be particularly helpful, as Gray also observes, in illuminating ‘the incoherences of practice’.91 But neither philosophy nor human reason can finally resolve these incoherences. Berlin does not seek to throw humanity to the wolves of irrationalism, obscurantism and fanaticism. He remained throughout his life a modest, reasonable intellectual with a deep respect for empirical studies and careful analytical thought, a critic of the Enlightenment, but a supremely enlightened man. The elegance and incisiveness of his prose and, indeed, the astonishing pace of his lectures, reveals a well ordered, rational and quick mind. What Berlin accentuates, however, is the fact that many crucial conflicts over values and ends of life, and ‘dilemmas of practical life, political and moral’, remain tenaciously ‘insoluble, radical and tragic, and undecidable by rational reflection’.92 If humanity is to face reality, therefore, it must face the reality of the choices which must be made aided, but not rescued, by reason. Hence Berlin’s philosophical anthropology and the danger posed to his anthropology by utopian idealism. Utopianism, undergirded by a relentless axiological monism, seeks to form persons who place a higher valuation on conformity than freedom, eschewing personal responsibility for the safety

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 147 and predictability of restraint, artificially segregating the members of their sects from the larger world, restricting their movements and social interactions, thereby undercutting their full development as free moral agents. Utopias, in Berlin’s view, run a course contrary to the fundamental character of humanity (humanity’s participative role in its transformation), afraid of what freedom will do to the people they seek to control. Berlin finds freedom, with all its attendant agony, angst and ambiguity, to be the critical formative engine of the human race. Gray writes of Berlin’s anthropology: [Berlin’s] is a view of man as inherently unfinished and incomplete, as essentially self-transforming and only partly determinate, of man as at least partly the author of himself and not subject comprehensively to any natural order. It is also a view of man in which the idea of a common or constant human nature has little place, one in which the capacity of man as a supremely inventive species to fashion for itself a plurality of divergent natures is central. Berlin’s rejection of the view of man as a natural object in a natural order, subject to natural laws and intelligible in his behaviour and nature by reference to those laws, and his pluralist conception of man as a self-transforming species which invents a variety of natures for itself, puts him closer to the Romantics and to the thinkers of what he calls the Counter-Enlightenment than it does to the Enlightenment, whose values of intellectual emancipation and rational self-criticism he nevertheless steadfastly defends.93 For Berlin, the choices which human societies and persons make, shape them. Indeed, Berlin believes that it is its self-inventiveness that is most characteristic of humanity. What he says of John Stuart Mill, might be said with equal or greater force of himself: Mill believes that man is spontaneous, that he has freedom of choice, that he moulds his own character, that as a result of the interplay of men with nature and with other men something novel continually arises, and that this novelty is precisely what is most characteristic and most human in men. Because Mill’s entire view of human nature turns out to rest not on the notion of the repetition of an identical pattern, but on his perception of human lives as subject to perpetual incompleteness, self-transformation, and novelty, his words are today alive and relevant to our own problems. … He does not demand or predict ideal conditions for the final solution of human problems or for obtaining universal agreement on all crucial issues. He assumes that finality is impossible, and implies that it is undesirable too.94 Humanity, according to Berlin, must make the choices that shape us without the guidance of an infallible external authority that orders all goods in an established hierarchy so that humanity need only know the position of a

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good in relation to other goods to know which must be selected – whether that authority claims the title of religion, rationalism, reason or common sense. Berlin, as we have already observed, chooses an agonistic anthropology over the static, non-conflictive anthropology that emerges from the philosophia perennis. The social consequences of this choice are theologically significant. Human nature, for Berlin, and in contrast to Aristotle, is not ‘unalterable or even unaltered’. He writes, ‘it does not so much as contain even a central kernel or essence, which remains identical through change’.95 Rather, it is through people’s ‘efforts to understand the world in which they find themselves and to adapt it to their needs, physical and spiritual’ that they ‘continuously transform their worlds and themselves’.96 There is a rich and vast (though not infinite) variety of human natures that can be created in and through the lives of societies. The Homeric society that authored the Iliad and the Odyssey produced human beings whose character and aspirations were reflected in and expressed by these texts. The wandering Hebrew tribes – whose ancient stories of Elohim and YHWH and the strange patriarchs who spoke with God under these names echo through the ages like the shouts from walls of desert mountains – shaped persons who came to love vulnerability to God and an astonishing capacity to sacrifice to God (Abraham) as much as roguish independence (Jacob), and mercy as much as justice (Joseph and his brothers). Societies themselves, like the persons they beget, are transformed over time because of the paths they choose.97 For Berlin, the vast spectacle of human social inventiveness and the variety of ways human cultures have created their common lives is of supreme interest, a spectacle in which some societies at particular historical moments commit to one good (perhaps of audacious courage) while refusing to choose another good (perhaps prudence), and in which other societies try to live in the breach between choices (perhaps between peace and self-defense, or between justice and mercy) because they cannot abandon either good without losing something they cannot lose and still be who they are, and yet they cannot with integrity but act in particular moments without making a heartrending choice between incommensurable options.98 Theologically, the concept of co-creation is woven into some of the most venerable narratives of the Christian and Jewish faiths. From the myths of creaturely beginnings, in which God gives Adam the responsibility to name the creatures that God has made, and of God’s sharing with humanity covenants that draw humanity together in the names of Noah and Abraham, to the story of God’s giving to humanity the divine Spirit and Word which, as in a second creation, creates with human participation communities and whole futures unforeseen and unimagined, it is the supreme act of divine vulnerability for God to invite humanity to create, invent, improvise and make. And it is something very like a concept of cocreation which Berlin is advancing, though in a thoroughly secularized

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 149 version. In both, it is real creation we are speaking of when we speak of the ‘self-creation’, ‘self-formation’, ‘self-transformation’ or (as I prefer) the ‘selfinventiveness’ of human societies and humanity, though it is never creation ex nihilo, as Gray acknowledges, ‘for the self that transforms itself through the choices it makes is itself unchosen, since it is always a deposit of the choices made by others, now and in generations that have gone before’.99 Berlin’s understanding of objective pluralism is closely related to society’s self-inventiveness. Each society forms for itself a vast matrix of understandings of the world, interpretations and expressions of what it means to be human, and to value and work toward those things they believe humans ought to value and work toward. And these matrices of values are concrete, objective and ultimate. ‘There is’, Berlin writes, ‘a world of objective values. By this I mean those ends that men pursue for their own sakes, to which other things are means’.100 The culture, the language and social norms, the literature and philosophy, of Aristotle’s Greece represent the expression of what that particular society meant when it used the word anqrwpov. ‘I am not blind to what the Greeks valued’, writes Berlin, ‘their values may not be mine, but I can admire and respect them, and even imagine myself as pursuing them, although I do not – and do not wish to, or perhaps could not if I wished to’.101 The entire form of life represented in the social and intellectual, religious and artistic expressions of Aristotle’s Greece are profoundly different from our own contemporary societies. But the differences between their way of being human in the world and the ways of our cultures are not matters of mere taste, or preference, or individual subjectivity. They are concrete, objective, and ultimate with reference to the claims they make on members of a particular culture. Berlin, according to Gray, is close to the later Wittgenstein in his understanding of the way in which entire human societies invent themselves as ‘practitioners of diverse cultural traditions, with distinctive collective identities’. These societies ‘form for themselves divergent worlds of practice, distinct forms of discourse and thought, each with its own history’. In both Wittgenstein and Berlin, ‘[i]t is these diverse networks of practice’ that ‘accord to moral judgement its objectivity’.102 In contrast to a relativism which reduces one’s conception of truth and one’s commitment to ends and values to the level of subjective preference, one may be false or true to such public (and, therefore, objective) worlds of values and worlds of common practice.103 We have already reflected on the ways in which values can be incommensurable, can clash within a single person, or between individual persons, and the implications of this empirical fact for moral decision making. There is, of course, a broader public sense in which values can and do clash, i.e. those clashes between the objective values of entire social groups, communities and civilizations. When these clashes occur, Berlin intimates, good things can happen. Certainly bad things can happen too. And Berlin (as we have

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already observed) stood opposed throughout his life to physical violence, cruelty and bitter social conflict. But it is also clear that Berlin comprehended the creative possibilities for persons and societies to confront and learn from the clashes of values between them. Some of Berlin’s most compelling lines are written to clarify the benefits of coming to terms with differences (sometimes very great differences) between persons, groups and cultures, but such a ‘coming to terms’ in no way assumes that these conflicts are resolvable. To the contrary, the very tenacity of many conflicts testifies to the vitality of humanity and of human societies in their ability to flourish in diverse ways. One person believes, let us say, in always telling the truth. Another believes that it is, in certain circumstances, not only acceptable to lie, but necessary to do so. These two people can describe to one another the way they have come to hold these values as members of a particular community, and as beneficiaries in particular moral and faith traditions. They can discuss their different points of view and they can rehearse the philosophical and axiological theories and personal experiences that have led them to believe and to act as they do. But, at the end of the day, they may simply have to disagree over what most of us would accept to be a matter of considerable import: truthfulness.104 Values sometimes clash: justice and compassion, liberty and equality, spontaneity and planning, preservation of life and defense against tyranny. And the fact that these values clash, and the fact that we must in the moment make choices of one over another, does not in any way diminish any of these values. Sometimes we must make agonizing choices among values that are so important to us and to our societies that to abandon any of them to some degree diminishes our common life. We may wish for a less complicated world. But we will wish in vain.105 Berlin writes: These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are. If we are told that these contradictions will be solved in some perfect world in which all good things can be harmonised in principle, then we must answer, to those who say this, that the meanings they attach to the names which for us denote the conflicting values are not ours. We must say that the world in which what we see as incompatible values are not in conflict is a world altogether beyond our ken; that principles which are harmonised in this other world are not the principles with which, in our daily lives, we are acquainted; if they are transformed, it is into conceptions not known to us on earth. But it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act.106 To be human, to belong to human societies in which our humanity is forged in the give and take of communal existence, as we negotiate the differences and learn from the clashes of these differences, is for Berlin the ordinary, common human vocation. There is no humanity without the clash of values

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 151 and the responsibility to choose and to be shaped by these choices. There are no families, nor human communities, no societies, peoples, nations, no churches, synagogues nor mosques beyond the reality of such conflicts. However difficult it may be to wrestle with the values and options that confront us in life, there is simply no humanity and no community without conflict, tenacious, persistent and intractable. For those of us who are Christians, it is ironic indeed that we should speak so fervently for a gospel that has so much paradise and no Gethsemane. More of this later. But first, we must explore another stream of thought that parallels and illuminates Berlin’s, that of Lewis Coser.

The crucible of conflict While some may doubt that conflict has a legitimate or positive social function, and while the monistic legacy of the Western philosophia perennis sometimes translates into a pragmatic distrust or fear of social conflict (or, at best, ambivalence toward it), one would be mistaken to say that such has always and everywhere been the case. Coser, therefore, opens his study of social conflict with three telling epigrams, all three of which direct the reader’s attention to voices that have spoken in favor of some form of social conflict. The first epigram is from Machiavelli’s Discourses. We have already quoted and commented on this passage, in which Machiavelli takes issue with those who ‘cavil at the dissension betwixt the Patricians and the Plebians’ of Rome, unconscious that this conflict lay at the very core of the vitality and strength of Rome’s republic. Coser next quotes Alfred North Whitehead, from Science and the Modern World (1925): ‘The clash of doctrines is not a disaster, it is an opportunity’. Finally, he cites Marx, from The Poverty of Philosophy (1910): ‘It is the bad side that produces the movement that makes history, by providing the struggle’.107 Perhaps the tragedy of two world wars and the debris of countless social reforms gone wrong (including among them political reforms and revolutions that shared the name of Marx) had sobered Coser’s colleagues. The unconscionable legitimation of violence in the name of great causes could hardly fail to make thoughtful scholars and leaders draw back from giving an unconditional imprimatur to social conflict.108 Perhaps Coser’s colleagues had simply come to exemplify the social and political status quo earlier sociologists railed against. Or, perhaps, they were at mid-century simply speaking with the voice of Eisenhower’s America, one still reeling from the anti-communist witch-hunts and their ensuing consequences. Whatever the causes of sociology’s reticence on the subject of the social functions of conflict, Coser believed that social conflict is of such perennial importance that it must again be moved to the front of the sociological agenda. A continued neglect of the study of conflict could not be sustained. In many ways, Coser sought to fulfill the rather modest task of reminding

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his readers that social conflict may not only be detrimental; it also frequently plays any number of positive social functions.109 Coser’s review of the attitude toward social conflict among sociologists from the turn of the century through the Second World War clarifies why he believes conflict deserves reinstatement as a potentially positive social factor.110 While he finds in sociologists like Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, and others of the University of Chicago school of sociology, an understanding of the positive functions of conflict,111 Coser’s primary conversation partner is Georg Simmel, whose essay Conflict was published in English in 1955.112 A brief summary of several of Coser’s theses, and their resonance with Berlin’s social thought, will, I believe, prove instructive to our ecclesiological reflections. Conflict, according to Coser, has the capacity to bring about a number of essential social responses. He sees conflict as a basic form of ‘human interaction’, observing a kind of complementary rhythm between ‘conflict and co-operation’ in social interactions, a relationship that should not be understood merely oppositionally, as though conflict and cooperation were discrete.113 Rather, they are phases of a single integrated ‘process which always involves something of both’.114 Beyond this observation, Coser supports Park’s more controversial (and more interesting) idea that conflict plays a role of crucial and formative significance for the emergence of human self-consciousness and the self-consciousness of human social groups.115 Conflict, therefore, is not simply one among many aspects of organized society which must be accepted; nor is it just one movement in a sort of interactive social yin and yang, whether through a pragmatic give and take of local politics or the dialectical struggle of history that one finds in Marxism. Conflict, for our purposes, represents that ordinary dimension of social engagement by which individuals and groups, through the means of negotiation, dissension and disagreement, can come to an understanding of who they are, what they care about, and what they should do in relation to others who may or may not agree with them. Social conflict – specifically axiological conflict, i.e. conflict over ends, values, aspirations, beliefs and ideas – catalyzes groups in distinguishing who they are as they attempt to differentiate themselves from, integrate themselves into, and express themselves in the context of a larger society. Axiological conflict, which, of course, is the category of most significance for our study of Berlin, allows individuals and groups to clarify their relationship to others in society at large by achieving self-definition and a coherent sense of identity. There is considerable resonance between Coser’s judgement that conflict makes behavior ‘conscious and self-conscious’ and Berlin’s generally positive appraisal of that aspect of philosophical Romanticism, especially as exemplified in Fichte, which sees conflict as the crucible of self-consciousness. Berlin articulates this aspect of Romanticism when he writes: ‘It is the impact on me of what is external to me, and the effort to resist it, that makes me know that I am what I am, aware of my aims, my nature, my essence, as

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 153 opposed to what is not mine’.116 This is an idea of considerable force both on individual and broader social levels. One’s consciousness of oneself emerges in conflict, in striving in relation to that which is not one’s self. An understanding of myself as subject (as ‘I’) emerges in the engagement of my will in relation to another. Conflict, therefore, is neither an impairment to self-understanding, nor necessarily to our relationship with others. It acts as the crucial catalyst to that self-invention which lies at the heart of Berlin’s conception of objective pluralism.117 Conflict also serves an important role in what Coser describes as ‘groupbinding’. He explains: ‘It seems to be generally accepted by sociologists that the distinction between “ourselves, the we-group, or in-group, and everybody else, or the others-groups, out-groups” is established in and through conflict’.118 Familial, tribal, ethnic, political, national, and religious groups define themselves in part in opposition (though this oppositional self-definition never exists in complete isolation from constructivist self-definition). Groups say who they are and what they care about at times by saying who they are not and what they do not care for. We saw in our earlier discussion of sects some socially destructive dimensions of this kind of self-definition by conflict. But, as Coser observes, this approach to self-understanding is neither necessarily negative nor hostile.119 ‘Conflict with other groups’, Coser writes, ‘contributes to the establishment and reaffirmation of the identity of individuals and the group, and maintains their boundaries against the surrounding social world’.120 For example, a female Canadian religious scholar and a male religious scholar from the United States might find considerable room for agreement if, let us say, they are both Liberal Protestant Christians. Their agreement might, in fact, lead them into an argument over certain values on which they differ significantly – an argument, incidentally, that would not have been imaginable if they did not share some values. As they explore their differences, they may find that the more interesting things about them are not the things they hold in common, but the things on which they differ. And, further, they may find that their differences are the very things that characterize most fruitfully their self-identity. Coser makes an important distinction at this point, ‘between conflict and hostile or antagonistic attitudes’. Hostility and antagonism, both of which are assumed by many to be inseparable from conflict, are, in fact, ‘attitudes’, ‘sentiments’, involved in our ‘predispositions to action’, but are not essential to conflict itself.121 This distinction is crucial to understanding Berlin’s attitude toward conflict. Those forms of conflict which are expressions of bitterness, hostility and antagonism, especially those forms of conflict that result in physical violence, were abhorrent to Berlin throughout his life. However, vigorous intellectual conflicts, conflicts over ideas and beliefs and values, were often a pleasure to him. And, as we saw earlier, his analysis of Machiavelli provides a theoretical framework in which to understand even the value of social and political conflict over the profound differences that

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shape one group’s identity and values in contrast to another’s, and which contributes to the vitality and viability of a society. Again, from a religious perspective, this aspect of conflict theory, in both Coser and Berlin, may help us to understand why certain mergers between religious communities (whether they are mergers of local religious congregations or various ecumenical relationships) can be as devastating, in terms of the vitality of the merged groups, as splits or schisms – sometimes even more so. If a group loses its identity in a merger, it may have lost something irreplaceable, and it may lose one of the prime reasons adherents belong to that particular religious group. This is true, at least in part, because identity is inseparable from particularity. One is never generically ‘human’, or ‘faithful’. One is a complex amalgam of particular identities. Not just Catholic or Muslim. American Catholic, and Shiite Muslim get us closer to identity. But the more we modify the nouns of identity, the truer to form we are. Again, the conflicts between our beliefs and values help us understand more clearly who we are and what we believe, as well as how far we can go. That the values and beliefs we hold make objective and even ultimate claims on us is not relativized by the claims the values and beliefs of others make on them. The objectivity of our values and theirs marks a boundary between us, but difference does not necessarily or inevitably require either hostility or antagonism. ‘Conflict’, writes Coser, ‘is not always dysfunctional for the relationship within which it occurs; often conflict is necessary to maintain such a relationship’.122 Why? Because when members of a group express their dissension, and greet the conflict as an opportunity to take seriously their dissent, the adherence of dissenting members to the larger group may be strengthened. If one does not have ways to appropriately channel disagreement and dissent, Coser explains, then ‘group members might feel completely crushed and might react by withdrawal’.123 Those members of a group, or those groups in society, whose voice is refused a hearing tend to have very little stake in any common life or future with the group. One of the most basic truths of political organization is: the most dangerous person or group is the one who has nothing to lose. If for no other reason, groups and societies should think twice before cutting off opportunities for vigorous dissent, a sociological fact that takes on theological significance in the resolution of conflict in the church. A victory of one group over another that has the effect of silencing the defeated party may be short-lived and shortsighted indeed.124 Coser sees the danger of repressing conflicts and disagreements, in ignoring complaints and dissension. An organization is wise, he writes, to provide ‘specific institutions which serve to drain off hostile and aggressive sentiments’.125 What we might describe as essentially cathartic social institutions can act as safety valves to reduce the more extreme disruptive effects of conflict while allowing differences between individuals and groups to be expressed.

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 155 It is at this point that Coser reflects on one of Georg Simmel’s more interesting and potentially useful ideas: the distinction between ‘realistic’ and ‘nonrealistic conflict’. Coser explains that for Simmel, realistic conflicts ‘occasioned by clashes of interests or clashes of personalities contain an element of limitation insofar as the struggle is only a means toward an end’.126 Should the parties in such a conflict find that their interests can be met or their goals be achieved through some means other than conflict, there is no reason why they cannot pursue those other means. However, ‘where the conflict arises exclusively from aggressive impulses which seek expression no matter what the object, where in the conflict the choice of object is purely accidental’, there is no real limitation of the conflict, ‘since it is not the attainment of a result, but rather the acting out of aggressive energies which occasions the outbreak’.127 This ‘nonrealistic’ conflict itself becomes the end, not a means to an end. Coser quotes John Dewey in illustration of this distinction. According to Dewey, people ‘do not shoot because targets exist, but they set up targets in order that … shooting may be more effective and significant’.128 Tyrants, coup leaders and bullies, from Adolf Hitler to Slobodan Milosevic and George Speight, have used and manipulated racial and ethnic hatred for their own purposes. But the hatred they fuel and make use of is not rationally or realistically grounded in the particular race or ethnic groups they choose to vilify. In fact, the object of the aggressor’s hatred and aggression is arbitrary and interchangeable. Such aggression and hostility, because it is not realistically grounded in the object of conflict, can be shifted from one group to another, from one ethnicity or race to others.129 Realistic conflict, by contrast, according to Coser, ‘will cease if the actor can find equally satisfying alternative ways to achieve his end’.130 Indeed, the realistic conflict itself can be understood as an attempt to achieve a particular end, thus it is open to critical reflection and assessment, discussion by conflicting parties, and negotiation as to means. Obviously realistic conflicts, even when they highlight intractable conflicts between rivalrous ends, are potentially more positive than nonrealistic conflicts. Yet it is at this point that Coser’s analysis is less helpful than we might hope because, while he apparently wants to see conflict as functionally positive, his definition of conflict remains mired in violence (Coser’s definition of conflict includes the phrase ‘the aims of the opponents are to neutralize, injure or eliminate their rivals’). For Berlin, the concept of conflict is not limited to violent and hostile forms, but may reflect striving, struggle, rivalry, competition, and other non-hostile adversarial qualities. Berlin’s sustained critique of utopian solutions to human differences, however, underscores Coser’s analysis of nonrealistic conflict. Berlin understands only too well that in the twentieth century it has been the yoking of nonrealistic antagonism to military force and social engineering that has resulted in war and genocide on a scale previously unimaginable. It is against this backdrop that Bernard Crick describes the task of the political leader.

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Instead of exploiting the elemental fears and visceral antagonisms (and racial/ethnic and tribal chauvinism) of a people to serve the leader’s despotic self-interest, a political leader has the responsibility to ‘hold divided societies together without destroying diversity’.131 It represents the very death of politics to fan the flames of what Coser calls nonrealistic conflict.132 ‘Politics’, Crick writes, ‘involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people’.133 Crick does not in any way minimize the underside of difference, the opposition to values and beliefs that one may find abhorrent. The values of some people may ‘be genuinely repulsive to us’, he writes. However, in a complex society in which the interdependence of diverse peoples is not a luxury, but a concrete necessity, ‘we have to learn to live with them’.134 Of course, Crick brings us round again to Rescher’s mandate that we must ‘strive to make the world safe for disagreement’,135 and to Berlin’s pragmatic anti-utopian politics of give and take.136 Coser observes a strange calculus of conflict that will be familiar to anyone who has served either as a family therapist or a Middle Eastern negotiator: ‘the closer the relationship, the more intense the conflict’.137 There exists in closer social relationships a tension between hostility and affection. Hostile feelings, when they routinely arise in the course of these closer relationships, are said to be suppressed by group members to avoid conflict. Hostility may also be channeled through passive aggression, which subverts open conflict and the possibility for understanding one another on the other side of open conflict, while also serving to stoke the fires of personal antagonism. Whether suppressed or subverted, hostility is inadequately dealt with in many close relationships, such as families. Among close social groups, which, for one reason or another, fail to provide institutional or quasi-institutional means (gripe sessions, staff meetings, group counseling, diplomatic relations) through which dissension and hostile feelings can be channeled, the suppression of hostility can reach a dangerous level. Wrath may be stored up consciously or unconsciously against some future time when scores will be settled. The fear of open conflict in close groups, leading to a greater and greater accumulation of suppressed dissension, ‘is likely to further intensify the conflict once it breaks out’.138 And almost inevitably, conflict will eventually break out. This situation is further exacerbated in those social groups that make a greater or more comprehensive claim on ‘the total personality’ of group members or adherents.139 A group that lays claims to a person’s body, mind and soul, one’s whole person – in contrast to affiliations among people who share only limited interests – is at greater risk of extreme or violent conflicts. For example, a family or a church tends to have more intense conflicts than, say, a civic club. Anyone who has ever been involved in a bitter family dispute or a split in a religious congregation will recognize the accuracy of Coser’s observations.140 Hostility and resentment, long pent-up, deep and infectious, sometimes seeking no end but hurt, can lash out in such conflicts,

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 157 the more viciously the longer it has been denied, suppressed or subverted into passive aggression.141 When serious splits or schisms do occur, and when members who have been deeply invested in the maintenance of a group defect from or abandon the group, they are often treated with more hostility than are persons who have been only casually invested in the group. ‘Renegadism’, writes Coser, ‘is perceived by a close group as a threat to its unity’.142 The renegade, by leaving the group, ‘signifies and symbolizes a desertion of those standards of the group considered vital to its well-being, if not its actual existence’.143 In many ways, the entire history of the church (from its earliest struggle for identity in relation to the synagogue and temple to more recent intracommunion conflicts in Episcopalian, Lutheran, United Methodist, and Presbyterian Churches in North America) serves as a massive case study in this dynamic of conflict. What is at stake in the treatment of ‘renegades’, according to Coser, are the boundary lines of the group (and thus the group’s core identity), the validity of which the renegade has radically called into question by leaving. The conflict between a group and a renegade extends beyond the actual departure of the renegade (indeed, the conflict frequently only intensifies after the renegade has departed the group) because the group often attempts rhetorically and physically to reestablish the integrity of its self-definition in light of the renegade’s defection. We might call this the Judas syndrome, recalling how the writers of the New Testament read Judas’ betrayal back into earlier narratives in the Gospels. Renegades (aka traitors, apostates and backsliders) may become as prized by groups in opposition to the group from which they have departed, as they are despised and feared by their original group. The renegade, the insider who betrays the group by leaving (thus becoming arguably the most threatening form of outsider), is similar to the heretic, an insider who betrays the ‘group’s central values and goals’ by radically reinterpreting them.144 The signs and symbols, creeds and confessions, hopes and ends of the group are given by the heretic a meaning fundamentally at variance to the official or received teachings of the group. The heretic, rather than going over to ‘the enemy’, competes for the loyalty of the members of his or her group in the name of a rival identity.145 If anything, the threat to the boundaries of the group is exacerbated even more by the heretic than by the apostate, because it is in the very nature of heresy to raise fundamental questions as to the meaning of the group’s boundaries.146 Of course, these observations should not lead us to think that such struggles over apostasy and heresy inevitably weaken a group, especially the church, as Coser clearly understands: (1) Heretics, in particular (and the term heretic can be a tricky one for the church), have sometimes played a vital, ultimately positive role in the church, as the doctrinal conflicts they incite have honed, deepened and subtly shifted the church’s self-understanding, identity, boundaries, values, beliefs and aspirations.

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(2) The ways in which the vigorous dissension heretics introduce into the life of the church over its boundaries, traditions and beliefs has sometimes contributed to the church’s overall health, contributing to the church’s flexibility and strength (though this latter benefit sometimes is only realized long after the controversy).147 One might even say that were it not for heretics (including the heterodox and those whose contemporary heresy became the orthodoxy of another day), the church’s thought would not have developed with nearly as much sophistication and subtlety that it has.148 From a great distance, we tend to reduce the complexities of theological conflicts, smoothing over their more interesting aspects, but if we pay attention to the details of particular controversies, we find that often it has been the heretics who have given the orthodox their more serviceable symbols and terms, and who have raised the more fundamental and fruitful questions.149 Berlin, in his observations on the subversive role that philosophy plays in society at large, may shed some light on the church’s struggle to come to terms with its heretics: [I]f it is only in philosophy that true creativeness is always identical with an act of rebellion, a transformation and transposition which in relation to tradition is always subversive – if this is so, then indeed there is a peculiar connection between philosophy and liberty, philosophy and non-conformity, philosophy and the need for freedom from repression, whether by the State or any other suppressing agency, which is relatively absent from other disciplines and is indeed unique.150 Philosophical investigation has (perhaps ironically) remained at the intellectual heart of the church from its earliest days: sometimes residing uneasily with its faith claims, sometimes inspiring resentment, sometimes fear – but always there. From time to time, the threat to the unity and concord of the church posed by the philosophical thought of one generation becomes in another generation the normative teaching. Here the empirical pluralism of the church struggles against its general ideological preference for monism. Something similar is at work in the conflicts over the moral soul of the church. Someone has said that when the Roman Catholic church begins a teaching by saying that ‘the Church has always and everywhere taught … ’, one should be prepared to hear that church reverse its stand. It is frequently easy to be fooled by the apparent intransigence of a church body on a particular issue into thinking that the church seldom changes its mind. In fact, churches frequently change their mind on issues of great significance to their communicants. But a church often does so with a deft sleight of hand, rather like a conjurer. While our eyes are following the magician’s misdirection we fail to notice the trick he has actually played. Watching his right hand we fail to observe the card disappear up his left sleeve. For example, while mainline

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 159 Protestant communions have argued for decades over the ordination of homosexuals, we may fail to notice that another issue which only a generation ago seemed impervious to change, in fact changed radically, though with very little discussion: i.e. divorce. Mainline Protestant churches gradually followed the general demography so that divorce, though never really approved, became generally accepted. Theological reflection tended to follow and react to the shift in practice, rather than take leadership. Perhaps nowhere is it more obvious that conflict is the ordinary state of the church, a state broken from time to time with brief spells of rest and ressourcement, than in relation to its struggles over beliefs and practices. The myth of a church ordinarily at peace remains one of the most destructive continuing ecclesiastical fables, encouraging the faithful at times to resent both those who raise uncomfortable questions and those who attempt to recover aspects of the church’s tradition demonstrating the church’s resistance to these questions. Perhaps we would be better served in our various churches if we faced the conflicted character of our ordinary existence, recognizing the extraordinary diversity of faith and practice represented in the midst of our struggles over ecclesial identity. Consider Georg Simmel’s observation that ‘[c]ontradiction and conflict not only precede unity but are operative in it at every moment of its existence. … There probably exists no social unity in which convergent and divergent currents among its members are not inseparably interwoven’.151 Certainly, as we have already observed, Berlin and others understand that the complex nature of contemporary societies, especially in North America and Western Europe, and the fact that most societies are made up of such a staggering variety of cultural, social, historical, ideological, political, religious and racial-ethnic streams of life, virtually guarantees that every social group is to a large degree polymorphic and polyvalent, and that homogeneity, as a genuinely descriptive social term, is frequently so relativized as to be left standing on the sidelines – if not rendered positively meaningless. The fear of multiculturalism and the hostility and violence against immigrants, as articulated, for instance, in Germany since its reunification, is grounded both in a mythology of racial purity and of national unity that is unsustainable in light of the facts of social history.152 But, of course, Germany is not alone in its myth-making of cultural homogeneity. Unity is everywhere a more fluid and dynamic concept than is popularly imagined. Unity, as we have already observed, is not synonymous with singularity, nor does it require consensus. Neither is unity necessarily static. Conflict is operative (at some level) ordinarily as every group continuously negotiates its identity and values within itself and in relation to other groups. That being said, however, Coser is perceptive in observing that ‘conflicts arising within the same consensual framework are likely to have a very different impact upon the relationship than those which put the basic consensus in question’.153 While Coser perhaps places too much weight on the concept of ‘consensus’, he is, nevertheless, approaching an issue of critical importance.

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Significant dissension in a group, even a small and close social group, can be tolerated if the dissension does not threaten the definitive terms of the group’s existence, or if the group’s self-understanding, its identity, is such that dissension is interpreted within a larger framework of social norms as a legitimate function of the group. There are groups, which are organized specifically to debate extremely sensitive and divisive issues: for instance, the staff of advisors on foreign policy and national security that serve the president of the United States. The fact of such groups’ continued existence is not threatened (rather, underscored) by the vigorous and sometimes acrimonious conflicts its members engage in, because these groups exist precisely for the purpose of exploring and critiquing rival views in order to offer the president genuine policy and operational options. However, as Coser observes, if there are conflicts that contribute to unity, there are also conflicts that tear groups apart.154 What, he asks, are the conditions that lead to the one and not the other? Obviously, the purpose of the group, as noted above. Some groups exist to disagree. Their raison d’être lies in vigorous, sustained conflict, argument, and dissension. There are other groups which, although their mission is not specifically to disagree, yet understand many kinds of disagreement as tolerable and, indeed, valuable, either because the differentiation of the members of the group (either differentiation of roles, tasks, or scope of interest) assumes a necessity for diversity, or because the group’s members are valued not only for their dedication to the larger mission of the group, but for the potentially very diverse perspectives they bring to the table. Even in marriages and families, one hears complementarity and mutuality referred to as virtues. Some families can, in fact, tolerate a high degree of conflict over even very serious questions (care of children, for instance) because of the value they place on the positive aspects of disagreement. Both complementarity and mutuality assume significant difference, even contradiction, among those in relationship, or else the terms are meaningless. The ‘same’ (that which is identical) is not in relationship; it is merely itself. Only others can be in relationship, and otherness assumes difference. But what happens when the matter of conflict actually calls into question the existence of the relationship? Then conflict, as Coser notes, ‘tears apart’. For instance, among many married persons in North American society, a conflict over the fidelity of one partner or the other can spell the end of the marriage relationship because it calls into question the terms of the marital union. A conflict in many churches over what it means for a member to be a ‘righteous’, ‘pure’, or ‘orthodox’ can signal a division that is unbridgeable because membership in the group is so profoundly dependent on the characteristics and qualifications of its members. Coser recalls J. S. Mill’s contention that it is possible [for a group] to pass through turbulent times without permanent weakening of the political structures only if: ‘However

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 161 important the interest about which [people] fall out, the conflict did not affect the fundamental principles of the system of social union’.155 Which, of course, means conversely that the fabric of social groups can be weakened in those conflicts that do affect ‘the fundamental principles of the system of social union’. For churches this is a particularly difficult line to walk. There are in Christian scripture extraordinary disagreements over even fundamental principles underlying a Christian ‘system of social union’, not least regarding the conditions, qualifications, goals and behaviors expected of the members and leaders of a church. It is clear from even a survey of only the Pauline letters that qualifications for church membership and ordained leadership, and the social, religious and political expectations placed on members of the church, and dozens of other related issues, vary according to local situations and needs from which only the vaguest possible general principles of relationship can be extracted. These various expectations are sometimes contradicted by other biblical voices. Entire denominations have been founded on the basis of one line of tradition (including biblical tradition) in opposition to another. Woven into the teachings of Christianity as contained in its scriptures are many of the conflicts that have troubled communions over the centuries. One might hope that such conflicts could produce some sort of unity, if only in the sense that there is at least an agreement to disagree among the various communions within a larger context of fellowship. The fact that this is not the case does not detract from the fact that virtually every Christian community accepts as authoritative for faith and practice, generally the same set of biblical texts from which springs both their unity and disagreement. We have already noted the way in which conflict between groups can help them clarify boundaries and strengthen the group’s self-identity. Some groups pursue conflict relentlessly as though the absence of an enemy would utterly undo them. During the Cold War, it became apparent that at some level the USA and the USSR needed one another. Much the same can be said of perennial enemies: the National Rifle Association and various progun-control groups; pro-choice and anti-abortion groups; the religious right and religious liberals. There are even ‘dog and pony shows’ periodically mounted by personalities, like the traveling debate between pornography king Larry Flynt and Moral Majority head Jerry Falwell, in which their conflict becomes public entertainment, for their mutual gain. Conflict as self-definition translates for some into conflict as self-justification. From there to conflict as opportunism is not much of a stretch. There is, of course, something legitimate even in the function of social conflict as antagonistic self-definition. The changes made in tobacco legislation owe a great deal to the efforts of those groups that set out on a kind of holy war against ‘big tobacco’. However, there is also a grave danger in this function of social conflict. So Coser quotes Simmel:

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Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith Within certain groups, it may even be a piece of political wisdom to see to it that there be some enemies in order for the unity of the members to remain effective and for the group to remain conscious of this unity as its vital interests.156

Among some groups, however, the need to find and keep enemies is more closely related to the goal of group survival than to achieving a larger social end. For example: a group dedicated to the eradication of a particular social ill may find itself at something of a loss if it succeeds and that ill is in fact eradicated. The group must redefine its mission, find another ill, or disband. Behind every witch-hunt lies anxiety about a group’s viability and insecurity regarding its identity. So they hunt for witches and hope the supply of witches will never run out. Berlin saw in this particular function of conflict something almost inevitably sinister. Yes, some people do address themselves to negative goals, to seek out and destroy all sorts of enemies. But, in his view, such a way of life is self-limiting. People, Berlin maintains, do not primarily live by fighting against the negative. This kind of conflict yields, in his view, a less full and less rich quality of human existence. People live, instead, Berlin writes, by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible. It is from intense preoccupation with these ends, ultimate, incommensurable, guaranteed neither to change nor to stand still – it is through the absorbed individual or collective pursuit of these … more often than not without conscious hope of success … that the best moments come in the lives of individuals and peoples.157 To find oneself or one’s group in opposition to another so sharply that one must define the other as an enemy may, upon occasion, be inevitable. Such conflicts do arise, and sometimes are unavoidable. And such conflicts can have positive results. But to make a habit of defining oneself by defining another as an enemy, in the final analysis, is detrimental to one’s identity and mission. The bitterness of antagonism and conflict in relation to a group’s enemies is only increased, as Coser observes, when participants in a conflict ‘feel that they are merely the representatives of collectives and groups, fighting not for self but for the ideals of the group they represent’.158 In such cases, when the individual’s responsibility is subjugated to the cause or ideals of the collective, the conflict tends ‘to be more radical and merciless’ than a conflict ‘fought for personal reasons’.159 It is the peril implicit in this loss of individual responsibility that Berlin speaks against, for instance, in his critique of ‘historical determinism’160 and of ‘the great magnificent abstractions [e.g. nation, party, progress, the forces of history] the mere sound of which precipitated [people] into violent and meaningless slaughter’.161

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 163 Finally, social conflict can act as a stimulus to groups to encourage the establishment of ‘new rules, norms, and institutions, thus serving as an agent of socialization for both contending parties’, while also reaffirming previously ‘dormant norms’, and thus encouraging greater participation in social life.162 Conflict can also encourage groups to reformulate ‘power relations’. While conflict is often thought of as ‘disruptive and disassociating’, in fact it may serve as ‘a means of balancing and hence maintaining a society as a going concern’.163 Conflict can also have the effect of breaking up hardened patterns of social behavior, making changes in social affiliations, associations and coalitions, imaginable. Alliances across previously unbreachable boundaries can pave the way for new social relationships. It is even possible that a conflict between previously antagonistic parties or groups can lead to new, more constructive understandings between them. This is not to ignore the intensity of the original causes of their disagreements, nor even other less positive consequences of the conflict, but is merely to observe that sometimes conflict leads the way to new and potentially more positive relationships between previously unrelated or estranged groups. Historically some of the most interesting social developments have occurred precisely along lines of prior antagonism: for instance, the Vikings who for generations terrorized northern England, settled there and in time were integrated into local culture. More recently we have seen the United States change its relationship with postwar Vietnam to that of trade partner, a relationship unforeseeable in the immediate wake of the Vietnam War. Within conflicting groups, conflict can also contribute to significant, and previously unimaginable, levels of social participation. ‘Coalitions and temporary associations, rather than more permanent and cohesive groups, will result from conflicts where primarily pragmatic interests of the participants are involved’.164 Such loose coalitions and temporary affiliations between parties or groups tend to happen in more flexible social structures, according to Coser, ‘because, in rigid societies, suppressed conflicts, if they break out, tend to assume a more intense and hence more “ideological” character’.165 Parties and groups can remain fairly free to associate in new ways in order to pursue common interests, or to achieve common goals, while in a more ‘ideological’ context, such informal affiliations remain suspect. ‘The unifying character of conflict is seen more dramatically’, Coser explains, ‘when coalitions and instrumental associations produce agreement out of relationships of competition and hostility’.166 In such situations, the breakthrough can be dramatic indeed, as we saw in the relationship between Israel and Egypt in the late 1970s, and more recently in Northern Ireland. By contrast, the kind of unification which emerges commonly for military purposes is relatively fragile and superficial. Recent events confirm this also, in the military alliance forged between the United States and the European Union in opposition to Serbia’s aggression against ethnic Albanians. Coser explains that such alliances are minimal because

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they express each group’s ‘desire for self-preservation’, but, of course, they can be more minimal still, expressing each group’s desire to symbolize its opposition to aggression. One is reminded by Coser’s description of the tentative, sporadic nature of alliance making and the associations that arise during and in the wake of conflict, of Berlin’s perceptive analysis of the collisions of interests and principles between groups and peoples. Clearly, what Berlin sees in the midst of such real-world conditions of conflict and struggle is the way in which people can make some positive things happen, balancing needs and interests and claims, reaching compromises, negotiating a way between conflicting values like equality and liberty, law and mercy, setting priorities, making painful choices, always in a provisional mode, never final, never absolute, never finished, dealing with consequences that somehow are not exactly what we anticipated and outcomes that are not what we had hoped for. ‘So we must engage in what are called trade-offs’, Berlin writes, ‘rules, values, principles must yield to each other in varying degrees in specific situations’.167 Such is the nature of the conflicts we live through, and through which we are shaped as persons and communities, groups and societies.168 There is no final word to be said here. But there is something else, which we must say from the perspective of the church.

Incommensurable gardens One might say that as Christians we live our lives between two gardens, the first a garden of Eden, a mythical paradise, from which we are supposed to have fallen, the other of Gethsemane, where a man whom Christians believe to be God incarnate wept until he sweated blood. Both are gardens replete with choices, though not without losses – terrible, irrevocable losses. Neither garden is very easy for us to think about clearly, for a whole host of reasons. The origins of the first garden may be, as Isaiah Berlin thought, rooted in Jewish and Christian yearnings for an idyllic (and monistic) golden age long ago when everything was perfect, a world which humanity forever lost because it did not make the single right choice. Humanity, hence, is alienated from that garden, or so the story goes. Our imaginations stretch toward a fabled concept we cannot inhabit, though faith often transforms longing to hope, and Eden reemerges as eschaton. The second garden, lying across the Kidron Valley, just beyond the walls of Jerusalem, is rife with humanity so real, so tangible – and so conflicted – that its very soil is drenched with an agonizing choice entailing irretrievable loss no matter which way one turns. ‘If it be thy will, take this cup away’. This is a supplication to the silent God that lies at the heart of every human prayer of consequence. The first garden is too far removed for us to know it well. Perhaps the second garden is too close to home for us to gain any real perspective on it. Afflicted as the human race is with chronic presbyopia, we find it all too difficult to focus on who we are deep in our own conflicted souls.

Berlin, social conflict and communities of faith 165 I cannot really imagine living in the first garden, whenever it might occur (whether in the midst of mythical antiquity, or in some suspended future age). But I know the second garden as though it were my own backyard. The incoherence of the hope of a perfect utopia repels me, though I am aware that there are those people for whom the primal garden is a supreme attraction and the promise of heaven is a consolation more vital than the breath of life itself. The conflict of the anguished soul in Gethsemane seems to me, however, to be the signature of humanity written with the hand of God. Or is it the signature of God written with a human hand? I cannot say. But it is this signature, written in blood, which the church must trace with its life, or else lose its soul.

4

Is toleration a Christian virtue? Beyond the disrespect of Enlightenment forbearance

Toleration has failed to capture the popular imagination, because it is not a passion: the reluctant acceptance of a burden, putting up with what one cannot avoid, is not exciting enough. Nor has education been of much help, as was seen when in 1933 the most educated nation in Europe suddenly became the most intolerant that had ever existed. The educated have as poor a record for tolerance as the ignorant, because it is as easy to be infected by intolerance as by the common cold. … However, this does not mean that humanity is powerless in the face of fundamentalism and dogmatism. The taste for toleration has deep roots, but it is not necessarily from one’s ancestors that one acquires it. Theodore Zeldin1

Not exciting enough Not exciting enough? No. Not by a long shot. Putting up with the erroneous views of others, even for the quid pro quo of cultivating a climate in which others will extend to me the privilege to articulate my (correct) views, is never exciting enough to inflame passion, as Zeldin astutely observes. Such is the burden of toleration as forbearance. But the necessity for toleration is a burden no less heavy. ‘The difficulty with toleration’, writes Bernard Williams, ‘is that it seems to be at once necessary and impossible’. This is especially true, Williams adds, when it comes to matters of religious faith, where people are likely to find ‘others’ beliefs or ways of life deeply unacceptable’. The problem with toleration is that ‘[w]e need to tolerate other people and their ways of life only in situations that make it very difficult to do so. Toleration, we may say, is required only for the intolerable’.2 The underlying dilemma of toleration, of course, goes much deeper, and is precipitated by the often unspoken, sometimes unconscious, but persistent and tenacious, monism of Western thought which Isaiah Berlin charts. If we come to different answers to an authentic question of values, beliefs, aspirations, and ends of life, one of us must be right, and the other must be wrong. In order to guarantee some semblance of civilized society among us, we

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 167 agree, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps grudgingly, to endure, to put up with, to forbear, to tolerate one another’s views. But each of us knows in his own heart of hearts that only one of us can be right, and that the other must be wrong. Tolerance, as forbearance, represents an implicit expression of condescension cloaking an even more profound (though perhaps unconscious or unintended) disrespect for the other. If she were wiser, smarter, better informed, less biased, we suspect, perhaps, if she were more holy, more open to the truth, she would have the right answer (i.e. she would have arrived at my answer). She does not, and she is wrong. I, however, am a big enough person, an enlightened enough person, to permit error in the mind of another. Indeed, my tolerance of her error only serves to further demonstrate my generosity and moral superiority. Not only do I have the right answer to the real question, I tolerate those who are wrong.3 Berlin understands tolerance to be the product of certain streams of the Enlightenment, most notably shaped by figures such as John Locke. But tolerance, as we know it today, has also benefited by incorporating insights from certain critics of the Enlightenment, like Herder, and especially by representatives of the Romantic movement, such as Fichte. It is in Berlin’s account of tolerance that one discerns the critical, though subtle, differences in the use of the term which take us beyond the bare concept of forbearance to yet another quality altogether, one which we would probably do well to call by another name than toleration.4 Toleration, as it emerged from certain representatives of the Enlightenment and found a place in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social thought, according to Berlin, is grounded in two essentially pragmatic motivations: to insure some measure of civility in the discourse of civil society and to produce in this society the conditions necessary for individual gifts of expression and originality to flourish – within limits.5 Berlin describes this form of toleration in his essay, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’. While Mill ‘detested and feared standardization’, writes Berlin, dreading, on one hand, that human beings were conforming in a ‘collective mediocrity’, and, on the other, longing for nothing more than ‘the widest variety of human life and character’, he believed that toleration, as a kind of forbearance exercised toward the views of others, was the only reliable way to protect individuals from one another, and ‘from the terrible weight of social pressure’.6 Berlin writes: Toleration, Herbert Butterfield has told, implies a certain disrespect. I tolerate your absurd beliefs and your foolish acts, though I know them to be absurd and foolish. Mill would, I think, have agreed. He believed that to hold an opinion deeply is to throw our feelings into it. … He asked us not necessarily to respect the views of others – very far from it – only to try to understand and tolerate them; only tolerate; disapprove, think ill of, if need be mock or despise, but tolerate; for without conviction,

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There can be no doubt but that Mill’s concept of toleration goes considerably further than that of John Locke, for whom toleration largely amounted to a kind of truce between civil and religious authorities to respect the boundaries of one another’s realms. Civil officers are, according to Locke, responsible to make and enforce public laws, to keep the peace and insure order. Their authority, however, is altogether temporal. ‘The magistrate as magistrate hath nothing to do with the good of men’s souls or their concernments in another life, but is ordained and entrusted with his power only for the quiet and comfortable living of men in society’.8 The religious, on the other hand, are responsible to attend to what Locke understood to be an altogether private and, with reference to theological doctrine, speculative (as contrasted with the public and empirical) realm of opinions about God and the eternal salvation of one’s soul. Only ‘speculative opinions and divine worship’ enjoy ‘an absolute and universal right to toleration’, writes Locke.9 Magistrates should resist the temptation to attempt to enforce conformity of religious views because they have no authority beyond the temporal world either to condemn or to reward. Nor, explains Locke, are attempts by civil authority to control religious faith practically effective. All a magistrate can do is restrain the outward behavior of a person. He cannot by force make a person believe that which the person does not believe in the privacy of his own conscience. The magistrate can by force produce hypocrisy among the citizenry, but not religious fidelity. Locke’s conception of the church as ‘a voluntary society’, consisting of like-minded individuals who seek the salvation of their souls and the worship of God after the same manner, underscores the cruciality of persons’ not being constrained by external civil force in religious matters.10 Religious faith remains, for Locke, essentially private in nature. Toleration should be extended to the religious by the state so that people can seek unfettered the salvation of their souls and a true conception of God.11 This limited understanding of religious toleration is woven into the essential framework of much of the discourse on the limits of civil power over religious matters in secular states to this day, and underlies the uneasy agreement between the two enshrined in the doctrine of the separation of church and state in the federal constitution of the United States. It assumes that, while ideas about God should presently be restricted to the private world of beliefs rather than the public world of knowledge, in eternity the truth about God is knowable and singular. Having said this, however, it is important to

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 169 note that for Locke even religious toleration was, in fact, neither absolute nor all-inclusive. Catholicism was not to be tolerated, in Locke’s view, because, he argued, their allegiance to the Roman papacy compromised their allegiance to the English monarchy.12 Nor were atheists to be tolerated, since they could not take oaths in the name of God.13 Mill’s perspective, again in Berlin’s view, goes significantly further than Locke’s delimited, though seminal, formulation of tolerance, specifically in understanding the value of the proliferation of different views in society.14 But the family resemblance remains.15 ‘The great dispute in all this diversity of opinions’, wrote Locke, ‘is where the truth is’.16 Mill’s rationale for toleration, and his passionate defense of it, never contradicts this benchmark of Enlightenment forbearance: the truth is singular, though ‘[s]ceptical respect for the opinions of our opponents [is] preferable to indifference or cynicism’.17 By contrast, critics of the Enlightenment such as Herder understood toleration not merely as a provisional code of conduct engaged for the sake of keeping a superficial peace between the correct and the mistaken, but as an organic expression of a society that has found a variety of ways of being human and of flourishing humanly together. In other words, for Herder, tolerance is not grounded in the assumption of error, but in recognition of the diverse reality of social existence and the proliferation of ways of valuing and believing in the world as we find it. Nor are the perspectives a person holds reduced to merely private opinions somehow separable from the person’s belonging in and to particular publics, but are understood as inextricably bound up with the cultures to which a person belongs. The values, beliefs, aspirations and ends for which people live in community are public matters. They are shared and objectively demonstrable. Toleration, for Herder, then, is a positive virtue, which recognizes the differences in our cultural values that, in turn, represent the objective variety of whole ways of being human. Conflict is inevitable as individuals representing different cultures, and indeed as entire societies (often made up of diverse communities), come into contact with one another. But conflict need not inevitably be either destructive or violent, as we have already observed. And, in a social environment that assumes that difference does not necessarily signal error, in which the fact that one accords voice to others does not assume condescension, conflict can become constructive, as we have already observed. Real respect for the other is possible, and can be valued and engendered in a society: I do not merely condescend to tolerate your error. An altogether new possibility is opened up: I listen to your understanding of being human, of living humanly in community, of being faithful, or of rejecting faith. I listen to you not just for points of commonality between your experience and mine, between your community’s ways of valuing and the valuing of my own, but precisely and specifically, I listen to you to hear and understand the differences between us and the communities, traditions, and whole ways of being human we represent.

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To do so is to recognize a reality greater and more complex and more profound than any particular individual human experience can account for. This is not to say, as some superficially do, that ‘all roads lead to the same destination’. Indeed, no. In fact all roads do not empirically lead to the same destination. Some roads parallel, while others lead to many very different destinations. But, by listening to the differences of others among us, I may discern something about the destination toward which their community is bound and what it means to be a people who care to strive toward that end. I may never want to go there, but I can come to understand why someone else might. This act of social empathy is worthwhile, in the view of Herder (and of Berlin), in and of itself. The Romantics invested the toleration advocated by critics of the Enlightenment, like Herder, with an altogether new virtue, ‘sincerity’. This was, according to Berlin, a radical move in the history of Western thought. As he observed, it is impossible to imagine, for example, a Catholic of the sixteenth century saying: ‘I abhor the heresies of the reformers, but I am deeply moved by the sincerity and integrity with which they hold and practise and sacrifice themselves for their abominable beliefs’.18 Indeed, quite the contrary was true. For virtually all Christians – Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant – throughout most of the history of the Church, the sincerity of heretics, unbelievers and people of other faiths was viewed as making them more dangerous, and more to be despised – not less. A sincere heretic could wreak more havoc than an insincere one. Speaking for his hypothetical sixteenth-century Catholic, Berlin continues: ‘Only truth [singular, indivisible, absolute and universal] matters: to die in a false cause is wicked or pitiable’.19 Certainly, it was not considered admirable. According to Berlin, it was the Romantic movement, especially as represented by Fichte with ‘his celebration of will over calm, discursive thought’, which preached that ‘the sacred vocation of man is to transform himself and his world by his indomitable will’.20 The will to create, to invent oneself, above all else, to strive against insurmountable odds, to make meaning of one’s life and to invest oneself with a sense of oneself in the face of resistance: these were the goods of Romanticism. The cardinal sin for Romantics was to prostitute oneself, one’s talent, ‘to sell out’, ‘to falsify’ what one believes for the sake of gain or comfort, safety or security. The cardinal virtue, conversely, was sincerity – what would today (in the wake of the influence of the existentialist movement in philosophy, psychology and theology) be called authenticity.21 One’s vision of the world might differ from that of others. What mattered most for the Romantics was not so much the substance of the vision as the sincerity of the seer. The impassioned heretic (or for heretic read: ‘poet’, ‘artist’, ‘hero’), rejected by society, denied by friends, betrayed by loved ones, alone but unbowed before the blows of adversaries and fate, was a greater person than the rich priest (again, substitute virtually any other vocation) who conformed to orthodox views purely for the sake of safety, security or

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 171 material gain. That which deserves our esteem is the force and the courage of personal will, not the consistency of argument with an established standard. The remarkable achievement of the Romantic movement lies in the sea change it produced in the common sentiment of Western civilization. Over and against the long-respected wisdom which professed a belief that truth is one – and the accepted preference for the one over the many, and the disregard for the motivations and aspirations of those who do not share one’s understanding – there prevailed another way of evaluating human worth, achievement, beliefs, aspirations, values and ends of life. Berlin writes: Thus no one today is surprised by the assumption that variety is, in general, preferable to uniformity – monotony, uniformity, are pejorative words – or, to turn to qualities of character, that integrity and sincerity are admirable independently of the truth or validity of the beliefs or principles involved; that warm-hearted idealism is nobler, if less expedient, than cold realism; or tolerance than intolerance, even though these virtues can be taken too far and lead to dangerous consequences; and so on.22 According to Berlin, the Romantics reframed the axiological assumptions of Western civilization. The notion of toleration, not as a utilitarian expedient to avoid destructive strife, but as an intrinsic value; the concepts of liberty and human rights … the notion of genius as the defiance of rules by the untrammelled will, contemptuous of the restraint of reason at any level represent ‘elements in a great mutation in western thought and feeling that took place in the eighteenth century, the consequences of which appear in various counter-revolutions all too obvious in every sphere of life today’.23 According to Berlin, the Romantic rejection of monism, coupled with its interpretation of tragedy as an inevitable consequence of life, helped redefine the political concept of toleration. Tragedy does not belong only to the mistaken. It is not simply our faults that make us tragic. Life is unavoidably agonistic, laced with tragedy, because we frequently must choose between conflicting goods and incommensurable values. Tragedy, to one degree or another, is the common province of all people as they seek to live their lives together amid inevitable conflicts over the ultimate ends of life and the values that serve these ends. Toleration, then, is not something we extend to the pitiable, to those whose errors we must simply endure. We tolerate in others what is an ordinary feature of life for us all – i.e. the assumption of difference.24 Michael Walzer’s analysis of toleration in many respects parallels Berlin’s. Walzer distinguishes five meanings to the term toleration, as ‘an attitude or state of mind’ which sets the conditions for our social interactions with

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those who are different. His distinctions not only represent virtually the entire range of possibilities offered by that form of toleration that emerges from the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment, but suggests the direction for that ‘tolerance’ which is ‘beyond toleration’. The first three senses in which Walzer uses the word toleration reflects contrasting features common to Enlightenment forbearance: (1) ‘a resigned acceptance of difference for the sake of peace’; (2) a ‘passive, relaxed’, benign indifference to difference; and (3) a ‘principled recognition that the “others” have rights even if they exercise those rights in unattractive ways’.25 The fourth and fifth meanings of toleration distinguished by Walzer generally reflect an attitude like that found in Berlin’s account of Herder and the Romantics, in which toleration is understood as (4) an ‘openness to the others; curiosity; perhaps even respect, a willingness to listen and learn’; and (5) the enthusiastic endorsement of difference: an aesthetic endorsement, if difference is taken to represent in cultural form the largeness and diversity of God’s creation or of the natural world; or a functional endorsement, if difference is viewed, as in the liberal multiculturalist argument, as a necessary condition of human flourishing, one that offers to individual men and women the choices that make their autonomy meaningful.26 What is perhaps most significant in the shift from toleration as Enlightenment forbearance (the condescension to permit social space to the other, even if I believe the other is wrong) to the kind of tolerance the Romantic has toward the sincere person (whose ‘truth’ consists in being true to his vision by force of will) or to the tolerance Herder or Berlin extends to others (whose differences are accepted, if not endorsed, in a liberal multicultural society, as expressions of their culture) are the underlying assumptions about the nature of reality – and the nature of truth. In the end, Berlin makes an empirical affirmation, playfully evoking a passage from the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of John: ‘In the house of human history there are many mansions’.27 His statement coyly masks the passion of a pluralistic attitude toward the difference of the other which is far more compelling, and far more radical, than what usually is named by the term toleration. Indeed, Berlin’s pluralism undermines toleration as forbearance, and renders the very word tolerance problematic. Walzer perceives the limits to the viability of that form of ‘toleration’ which enthusiastically endorses difference. He writes: But perhaps this last attitude falls outside my subject [i.e. toleration proper]: how can I be said to tolerate what I in fact endorse? If I want the others to be here, in this society, among us, then I don’t tolerate otherness – I support it. I don’t, however, necessarily support this or

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 173 that version of otherness. I might prefer another other, one who is culturally or religiously closer to my own practices and beliefs (or, perhaps, more distant, exotic, posing no competitive threat).28 There is a subtle, but important, difference between endorsing the value of pluralism in a society as an end in itself and endorsing the specific forms of difference that emerge in a pluralistic society. It is one thing to affirm that differences enrich our common life, and quite another to endorse all the differences themselves which are expressed in the marketplace of ideas and commitments. Walzer observes that in any pluralist society there will always be people, however well entrenched their own commitment to pluralism, for whom some particular difference – perhaps a form of worship, family arrangement, dietary rule, sexual practice, or dress code – is very hard to live with. While they endorse enthusiastically the existence of the conditions in society that insure freedom for persons to pursue ends and values that are very different from their own, ‘they tolerate the instantiated differences’.29 That is, they merely tolerate these specific differences. In other words, it is possible, on one hand, to endorse a policy of social openness (even to reject a society’s privileging of the axiological claims of one group over another), and, on the other hand, to personally only tolerate certain differences when they present themselves to us because of the values and ends we share within a particular community in the larger society. Furthermore, it is clear that there are boundaries within any complex society, which must be set for what is acceptable social behavior and what is not. Given the increasing reality of social pluralism, the setting of these boundaries becomes increasingly a matter for negotiation in and through our public institutions, the credibility of which are constantly at stake in these negotiations. Berlin, as we have already observed, believes that the best we can do in this situation is to commit ourselves to a sort of tentative, ongoing and inevitably open-ended process of negotiating the limits of social acceptance in various circumstances and social contexts, with the understanding that the differences of values and ends we encounter in our complex societies represent entire ways of being human together. We may oppose (and sometimes we are compelled by the values we hold sacred even to reject) certain beliefs and practices. But we have very limited appeal to ‘universal’ standards of behavior in doing so. For the most part, we are best served by our stating our axiological claims conscious of the ways in which they represent the cultures in which we share, understanding that our moralities and beliefs express our experiences of being human and of living together humanly through particular histories, rather than attempting to claim for them an absolute and universal extra- or supra-historical authoritative high ground. However, in order for us to carry on this level of mutual social recognition,

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the cultural groups and communities in a given society must have some (perhaps considerable) ‘faith’ in the public institutions through which we negotiate our differences. On this point I shall have more to say.30 But is tolerance ordinarily enough? If the differences of others are not simply expressions of untrue answers to good questions, but express culturally appropriate answers grounded in another community’s asking of these questions, for me merely to tolerate the existence of those whose answers differ while ignoring what is different about them may represent a profound loss to myself, my community and the larger society in which we share. If reality is so large, so complex, that it consists of many diverse and even contradictory answers to appropriate and good questions, then I may be cutting myself and my community off from something of enormous potential value when I refuse to hear and to seek to understand the differences of others.31 Thus Charles Taylor argues: [I]t is reasonable to suppose that cultures that have provided the horizon of meaning for large numbers of human beings, of diverse characters and temperaments, over a long period of time – that have, in other words, articulated their sense of the good, the holy, the admirable – are almost certain to have something that deserves our admiration and respect, even if it is accompanied by much that we have to abhor or reject. Perhaps one could put it another way: it would take a supreme arrogance to discount this possibility a priori.32 Taylor’s perspective does not represent a view born of postmodern political correctness. It represents for many a profound philosophical, even theological, or religious conviction, as Taylor again observes: ‘Herder, for instance, had a view of divine providence, according to which all this variety of culture was not a mere accident but was meant to bring about a great harmony’.33 God, many Christians believe, is the great pluralist, at work in and through the diversity of an ever-expanding multiverse. God’s ends may be irreducibly plural. Whether or not toleration is a specifically Christian virtue, it is a virtue that many Christians value and practice. But perhaps even this is not enough for us as Christians to say. Perhaps what is demanded of us – and demanded of us precisely as a matter of faith, in the presence of others who remain irreducibly other, who are (in some real sense) wholly other, and made in the image of the God whose otherness is wholly irreducible – is something rather different from toleration. Perhaps Taylor’s ‘admiration and respect’, approaches this posture in the face of otherness, an openness that leaves room for moral judgement, but that represents real openness toward ways of being human and of living humanly together that remain for us foreign, beyond us, wholly other. Such admiration and respect must allow us – rooted as we are in our own cultures and histories, in our own faiths – to hear and to risk being transformed in relationship to the other.

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 175 Miroslav Volf understands what is at stake for Christians in finding an appropriate social response to the other. His metaphor of ‘embrace and exclusion’ embodies the tension we inevitably feel over our relationship to the other, a tension which we cannot transcend and remain human, but which we cannot dismiss and remain Christian.34 But if tolerance, whether it inspires passion or not, is not enough, what is?

Toleration, by any other name The limitations of the concept of toleration have led some scholars to test new terms. Henry Hardy has suggested ‘radical tolerance’ and ‘acceptance’, the first of which is intended to express greater openness toward difference than is assumed in the older word, with its Enlightenment associations; the second goes a step further, implying a willing reception in a multicultural society of different or conflicting ideas, though not necessarily an endorsement of them. Perhaps the most provocative sustained exploration (at least, in print) of an alternative to the term toleration is that of John Gray in his recent essay, Two Faces of Liberalism. Both building on, and providing significant critical response to Berlin’s objective pluralism, Gray observes the importance and limitations of toleration in contemporary society. Toleration is an expression of modern liberalism, which ‘embodied’, Gray writes, ‘two incompatible philosophies’. From one perspective, ‘liberal toleration is the ideal of a rational consensus on the best way of life. From the other, it is the belief that human beings can flourish in many ways of life’.35 Contemporary Western civilization owes an inestimable debt to the traditions of liberal democracy which gave us a society that values more the toleration than the suppression of ideas, a society that, through its relative tolerance, has engendered a considerable diversity of cultural, artistic, social and political expressions that enrich our common life. Based on the history of scientific and medical advancement alone, it is easy to see why liberalism values toleration as ‘the ideal of a rational consensus on the best way of life’.36 Yet herein lies the paradox at the heart of liberalism. According to Gray ‘If liberalism has a future, it is in giving up the search for a rational consensus on the best way of life’.37 The task, in Gray’s view, is to renegotiate the liberal ideal that ‘a common life … does not rest on common beliefs’ in the context of our contemporary societies ‘which are much more deeply diverse than those in which liberal toleration was conceived’. In doing so, we must come to terms with the contradictory faces of liberal toleration: the one which actively, and through the prescriptive institution of what Gray calls ‘a universal regime’ based on ‘universal principles’, seeks to establish a society that insures toleration among its subjects because a tolerant society is the best possible social arrangement; the other which more modestly seeks to encourage ‘a project of coexistence that can be pursued in many regimes’. Gray counts John

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Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Rawls and F. A. Hayek as representatives of the prescriptive form of liberal toleration, while numbering Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Michael Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin among the exemplars of the quest for peaceful coexistence in the midst of a variety of ways of life.38 The contrast between these two versions of toleration is by now familiar to us. Underlying the tolerance of a John Locke, and underlying his prescriptive ideal of a society that represents ‘the best life for humankind’, is the pervasive monism of Western culture. Limited toleration is an essential aspect of Locke’s ideal society, a society also characterized by ‘a universal rational consensus’.39 For Gray, this vision of liberal toleration simply cannot respond adequately to the tenacious reality of human social diversity. Rather than seek some imagined utopian realm in which unanimity reigns, ‘[i]t is better to begin by understanding why conflict – in the city as in the soul – cannot be avoided’. As beneficiaries of the legacy of ‘liberal toleration’, we do not need a model for social engagement ‘based on a rational consensus on the best way of life, nor on reasonable disagreement about it, but instead on the truth that humans will always have reason to live differently’. Gray’s model for social engagement responsive to the contemporary challenges of cultural, ethnic and religious diversity is what he calls ‘modus vivendi’.40 Modus vivendi expresses the belief that there are many forms of life in which humans can thrive. Among these there are some whose worth cannot be compared. Where such ways of life are rivals, there is no one of them that is best. People who belong to different ways of life need have no disagreement. They may simply be different. Whereas our inherited conception of toleration presupposes that one way of life is best for all humankind, modus vivendi accepts that there are many forms of life, some of them no doubt yet to be contrived, in which humans can flourish.41 The Latin term modus vivendi can be rendered quite simply as ‘a mode of living’. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines it as ‘a working arrangement between contending parties, pending the settlement of matters in debate’. Commonly, the term is used for ‘the way in which anything is done’. An 1879 usage, noted in the OED, observes, ‘This formula is in daily use to express a practical compromise’.42 Gray’s usage of the term does not reflect the conditionality of the OED definition, as though the social arrangement were simply held in suspension awaiting a final resolution, but it does reflect the persistent underlying state of social contention. ‘The aim of modus vivendi’, writes Gray, ‘cannot be to still the conflict of values’.43 Such would not only be practically impossible, it would be undesirable as well, given the potential richness for any society of the irreducible differences of its constituents. Rather than resolving

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 177 conflict, modus vivendi is intended ‘to reconcile individuals and ways of life honouring conflicting values to a life in common’.44 The sheer variety of ways of life that make up contemporary society, the conflicting values, beliefs and aspirations represented in this variety, and the astonishing diversity of traditions, histories, whole worlds of experience from which these ways of living and values emerge, offer an insoluble problem to that tradition of liberal toleration (shaped by the dominant monism of the Enlightenment without benefit of the counter-Enlightenment and Romanticism) which assumes that ultimately there must be a single ‘best’ way of life.45 Where the received tradition of toleration as forbearance (even liberal forbearance) sees an enigma, an irremediable difficulty and potential crisis in social diversity, modus vivendi perceives an occasion for celebration. Indeed, according to Gray, modus vivendi recognizes the plurality of ways of living as an unparalleled opportunity for the enrichment of our larger social life. ‘We do not need common values in order to live together in peace’, writes Gray. ‘We need common institutions in which many forms of life can coexist’.46 While it is impossible, and undesirable, to gain complete agreement of an axiological nature, he believes it is viable to establish institutional safeguards for persons and groups to coexist securely and peacefully. We shall return to this idea when we reflect specifically on ecclesiastical adaptations of Berlin and Gray, vis-à-vis Michael Walzer’s analysis of the regimes of toleration. Gray understands that his conception of modus vivendi is paradoxical, that ‘[i]t seems to imply a tolerance of contradiction that classical logic prohibits’, specifically in embracing the kind of value-pluralism taught by Berlin. Value-pluralism is closer to ethical theories which affirm the possibility of moral knowledge than it is to familiar kinds of ethical scepticism, subjectivism or relativism. It enables us to reject some judgements about the good as being in error. At the same time, it means giving up a traditional notion of truth in ethics. To affirm that the good is plural is to allow that it harbours conflicts for which there is no solution that is right. It is not that there can be no right solution in such conflicts. Rather, there are many.47 Despite the contradictions, and despite the very real tensions, intellectual and pragmatic, created by such value-pluralism (‘objective pluralism’, to use Berlin’s phrase), humanity encounters the good in diverse and incompatible ways, and our social theory must take account of this reality, or become the victim of it. By moving the site of consensus from the axiological level, i.e. from the ways of life themselves – from the values, beliefs and aspirations we do not necessarily share – to the development of institutions that safeguard the coexistence and mutual security of communities of persons pursuing

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various, incompatible and sometimes competing ways of life, Gray offers a way for diverse communities of persons to conceive of living together within a larger society that honors difference and allows for the integrity of particular communities and persons. Gray is especially perceptive in critiquing the tendency of liberal toleration to focus primarily on the ideals and values of the individual without sufficiently taking into account the cultural, social and historical rootedness of persons, or the manner in which many of the most profound conflicts over values occur within individuals (not merely between them) because of the conflicting ways of life, the communal histories, cultural traditions and complex mythologies that shape us all and that compete with one another as we engage in moral judgements. The situation we face is not, Gray reminds us, merely a modern problem.48 Human beings throughout history have been shaped by a variety of often conflicting ways of life, abounding in competing values, beliefs and aspirations.49 But the complexity of contemporary society, the extent and degree, and the consciousness, of its cultural diversity, its irreducible heterogeneity, certainly moves the problem to the front burner for us. Of course, as we have already observed, the diversity of social, cultural and ethnic factors is not the only source of axiological conflict within and among us. Competing human needs and desires, often within the same culture or social group, are at times in conflict, and these conflicts emerge ordinarily in individuals.50 But it is specifically the tendency of conventional liberal toleration not to understand the collective nature of persons. And this undercuts its effectiveness to deal with difference in a contemporary society characterized by cultural pluralism, that is, diversity on a social (rather than merely individual, personal) scale. What might be called Locke’s ecclesiology (his view that the church is an association of like-minded individuals voluntarily banded together in a manner consistent with their private consciences for the ends of worship and the salvation of their souls) has become transmuted into a social theory of liberal toleration. While it is true that we do often associate with others on the basis of shared preferences, our preferences are themselves given their specific shape by the ways of life in communities, which provide us with our social and cultural identities. Tolerance, which focuses on the individual as the primary locus of difference, can never adequately respond to the complexities of pluralism in contemporary society. The challenge of pluralism is not simply to endure the odd opinions of someone who does not think or believe like me. Rather, it is to accommodate institutionally entire ways of life we do not share within the larger societies that we do, in fact, co-inhabit. Just as important, an understanding of association predicated principally or solely on individual preferences (wherever they originate) will inevitably subvert respect for and acceptance of the other. Gilbert Meilaender, in a review article for the Christian Century, mentions Michael Walzer’s study of

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 179 Puritan society some thirty years ago. Walzer, he tells us, then observed that, ‘by turning the family into something more like a voluntary association, more like a political bond, the Puritans had lost the kind of pluralism that includes profound family loyalties’.51 The values, ideals, beliefs and aspirations of a person are trivialized when abstracted from the social and cultural contexts that give them their moral force and when transmuted to the context of individual voluntarism. Yet it is precisely such abstraction that conventional liberal toleration codifies in the forbearance of individual differences. Not only this, but the conditionality of association that is the hallmark of voluntary groups makes it very difficult for members of these groups to grow, to change their minds, to influence and potentially challenge the group itself to change. Thus a form of the utopian ideal of unchanging perfection becomes in the voluntary association, the (if merely tacit) rationale for intransigency. Those who would be different are, sometimes explicitly, asked to leave the voluntary religious association (church) to which they belong and to join another. What is missing – at an institutional level – in such associations are precisely the unconditional bonds one finds in some families, what the Christian faith expresses when it uses the term ‘grace’. We shall explore this issue in greater detail presently. Gray, like Berlin, understands that in defending the freedom of humanity to flourish in different ways in societies, the ultimate goal of this freedom is not merely to encourage a variety of individual lifestyles (although this, in itself, is not an unworthy goal in Berlin’s version of liberalism). For Berlin, as for Gray, thriving as human beings, living well, requires that people participate in the matrices of social practices and traditions that represent specific cultures, what Gray calls ‘ways of life’. And if persons hope to participate in particular ways of life, and if they hope to do this in the complex and pluralistic world in which we find ourselves, they must find ways to coexist, politically and institutionally, with other persons in other communities which thrive in very different ways.52

Ecclesiastical challenges of pluralism Recently I attended an official gathering of the Protestant denomination to which I belong, the Presbyterian Church (USA). Commissioners, consisting of ordained ministers and elders, from across our regional judicatory (what we Presbyterians call a presbytery) met to hear reports from committees and to conduct church business.53 One of the reports we heard was from our presbytery’s delegation to the annual General Assembly, the national gathering of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Like most mainline Protestant communions, the Presbyterian church is periodically in some considerable conflict over a variety of social issues. The issue which has received most attention in the press in recent years is the ordination of self-affirming, practicing homosexuals. The shadow lurking in the back of most minds at this

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presbytery meeting was a particular vote on the ordination of homosexuals at this year’s General Assembly, and an anxiety over whether or not we as a church will split over this issue. The splitting of churches (at the congregational as well as the denominational level) provides an instance in ecclesial life that is revealing of the tensions and contradictions in our ecclesiologies. The church understands itself to exist both as an expression of the action of God and of human action, as a social body whose existence, unity and integrity has little or nothing to do with the initiative or preferences of its human members, and, at the same time, as a voluntary association of persons dependent upon mutual agreement for its survival and its bonds of unity.54 God, in the first instance, according to a variety of Christian theologies, calls the church into existence by the power of God’s creative Word and Holy Spirit. The narrative basis for this doctrine lies in a variety of biblical texts, from the calling of Old Testament figures, to Jesus’ calling of his disciples and the call experience of Saul of Tarsus. The church’s existence, from this theological perspective, is unconditional and coextensive with a vocation received from God. The church’s integrity, its mission, its identity, its survival, even its bare existence, ultimately do not depend on human initiative or rely on human interests, ideals, and intentions. Even the church’s unity consists in its union with God through Jesus Christ, and does not depend on agreement between the members of the church. The most recent confessional statement of the Presbyterian Church (USA) affirms this understanding of the church when it says: The same Spirit who inspired the prophets and apostles rules our faith and life in Christ through Scripture, engages us through the Word proclaimed, claims us in the waters of baptism, feeds us with the bread of life and the cup of salvation, and calls women and men to all ministries of the Church.55 When the Second Vatican Council speaks of the church as having been brought into existence by Christ’s ‘preaching the Good News, that is, the coming of the kingdom of God, promised over the ages in the scriptures’, and uses the biblical images of the Church as ‘a sheepfold’, a ‘flock’, ‘a cultivated field, the tillage of God’, ‘the building of God’, ‘that Jerusalem which is above’, and, preeminently, as ‘the Body of Christ’ of which Jesus Christ is the head, it also stresses God’s initiative, God’s action, in respect to the church.56 There is something like the non-voluntaristic sense of belonging to and identity among a family that corresponds to this concept of church. What God has brought into existence, no one can break asunder. A child may be an obedient child or a disobedient one, but one cannot alter the fact of the relatedness of a mother and her daughter – not even the mother or the

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 181 daughter. There is astonishing variety among the members of a body, yet the body persists in organic wholeness. Ears, eyes, feet and hands, internal organs, like lungs, liver and heart, bones and soft tissue, despite their organic and functional dissimilarities, all belong to the same body and are necessary to the overall health of that body. None can be excluded from it without adversely affecting the body’s wholeness. Obviously the church as body has acted to excise from membership a variety of persons over the centuries on a variety of grounds. But that which provides the bonds of unity in churches characterized in these terms tends to be the act of God, not the response of members. The unity exhibited in these churches lies primarily in the creativity and grace of God through Jesus Christ, not in the unanimous agreement of the membership over their beliefs, values and aspirations.57 The diversity assumed in the ‘Body of Christ’ metaphor does not in itself counter the pervasive monism among many Christian communities who hold to such an ecclesiology. And it is possible to couple this ecclesial view with utopianism. However, the notion of unconditionality that lies at the heart of this aspect of the doctrine of ecclesiology allows for the real possibility of difference, and can provide some resistance to schism. There is in this ecclesiological perspective the potential for considerable breadth of inclusivity, reminding us that Jesus himself warned his followers not to oppose those who worked miracles in God’s name just because they were not among Jesus’ immediate circle of disciples: ‘If they are not against us, they are for us’. But there is more to the doctrine of ecclesiology than this. There is also an enduring voluntaristic aspect to the church’s self-understanding, and it is not accurate to attribute it entirely to John Locke (though his formulation of ecclesial voluntarism is especially influential in our time). The Bible itself enshrines the voluntary, the responsive, associational aspects of church. The book of Acts tells the story of the first generation of the church expanding as hearers became convinced of the preaching of the apostles. Especially in the Johannine writings, there is a sense of the outsider and the insider, the children of God who are in the community and the children of the devil who are not, those who share in the knowledge and love of God through Christ and those who reject the love of God and do not abide in God’s love. The extension of association is seen as an extension of a particular form of faith and life, and the reservation or withdrawal of this association represents, conversely, a threat to one’s relationship to God and one’s eternal status.58 The vitality of the church as a voluntary association should not be overlooked. Those Christian communities, which understand themselves primarily in voluntaristic terms, tend to exhibit a liveliness sometimes lacking among churches that do not. Chiefly because voluntary associations depend on communicating with and attracting the outsider in order to survive and grow, they may be more open to and adaptive in response to certain shifts in culture. And yet, as we have already noted, they can also be

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less open to difference within their community of faith, and may define themselves specifically by rejecting certain aspects of the prevailing society. Those communities of faith whose associations depend for their bonds of unity primarily on their members sharing values, ideals, beliefs, aspirations and ends of life, are relatively fragile, sometimes brittle, in their social fabric. This is especially true to the extent to which voluntary communities define terms like ‘Christian’ or ‘faithful’ or ‘righteous’ on the basis of relatively narrow ranges of belief and behavior. When the voluntaristic ecclesiological perspective is coupled with monism, and especially when this monism is expressed in utopian terms, voluntaristic churches tend toward sectarianism.59 Which brings us back to church splits. The church which understands membership primarily as a matter of unconditional belonging, is relatively resistant to splits, in comparison to the church which understands membership principally as a matter of voluntary association. In the current struggle of Presbyterians (and various other Protestant communions) over the ordination of practicing homosexuals, there are other complicating factors. Those who favor the ordination of homosexuals may favor ‘a live and let live’ policy. ‘The church is big enough’, they may argue, ‘for a variety of views on this matter’. The denomination at a national level, from their perspective, can simply allow the provision for gay ordination, for example, and leave it to local congregations either to call or not to call homosexuals to ordained leadership in their own congregations. This is certainly a reasonable view, and one which many believe secures the peace and concord of the church. However, those who believe that homosexuality is a sin, and who believe that the moral identity of the church is at stake if homosexuals are ordained, do not believe they can simply condone it without, in their own view, compromising the purity and unity of the church to which they belong. Another complicating factor involved in this particular conflict has to do with the question of authority. Most of the people on the various sides of this conflict agree that they are seeking to know and to do the will of God, that they are guided in some real sense by the Bible, by the confessions and historical experience of the church, and by their own consciences. It is at this point that it becomes most clear that there are many conflicting traditions within every religious tradition. For instance, what most Presbyterians call singularly ‘the Reformed tradition’ (that is, that stream of Protestantism which finds its source principally in the sixteenth-century Calvinist reformations in Switzerland, France, the Palatinate and Scotland) actually represents several related but contrasting and sometimes contradicting streams of traditions, often with their own core assumptions, values and beliefs at odds with one another. It is not uncommon for one side or another to claim that the Reformed tradition is clearly on their side. Most of the time, despite what side makes the claim, they are right.60 Further complicating the issue is the fact that even people ‘on the same side’, for instance, in the present conflict over homosexual ordination, may

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 183 be there for very different reasons, sometimes in response to a general spirit of liberalism that cannot tolerate intolerance, sometimes in visceral reaction to rather elemental (and frequently unfounded) fears about the dangers posed by persons who are homosexual, sometimes as representatives of a theological, social, ecclesiastical or political ‘party’ within the church, sometimes as guardians of various interests, sometimes as seekers after the truth, sometimes for personal gain, and sometimes acting out of profoundly painful personal experiences. The conflict over ordination in the Presbyterian church, as it currently stands, represents a crucial test not simply of the boundaries of toleration in a particular church, but of acceptance, of openness, and of respect among people who believe themselves to be followers of Jesus of Nazareth. There is no possibility for comprehensive churchwide agreement, for consensus, or even harmony at the axiological and theological level with reference to this issue. The question is whether this church can provide within itself social space for difference over this issue (and other differences that elicit a similar level of vigorous dissension and visceral reactivity). If a faction within the church believes that the church cannot be the church if it permits a particular difference, if the church’s identity cannot be construed by this faction so as to include the difference, then no institutional consensus can be reached, and a split in the community is virtually inevitable. The church which splits always stands in real danger of becoming sectarian, believing itself alone to be the upholder of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, however these terms are defined. If, however, various factions within the church can agree that the identity of the church is such that it can accommodate particular axiological and theological differences, then an institutional solution is possible. There may be no solution to a particular conflict for a specific communion, for the Presbyterian Church (USA) in this case, short of a separation of fellowship. But there may be solutions, depending on the construal of the church’s identity in light of a specific difference. This raises the question of how Christians can conceive of the identity of the church in ways that allow for significant differences among its membership. In order to explore this question more fully, I would like to adapt Michael Walzer’s analysis of ‘regimes of toleration’ to the institutional life of the church. In many ways, Walzer provides the kind of pragmatic institutional approach to the ongoing negotiation of social and cultural, ethnic and axiological differences that both Berlin and Gray call for. Walzer, like Berlin and Gray, believes that diversity is in and of itself generally a worthwhile end, that tolerance, ‘or, perhaps better, the peaceful coexistence of groups of people with different histories, cultures, and identities’, ‘is always a good thing’.61 Like Berlin and Gray, Walzer believes that there is no single best social arrangement, not even when it comes to nurturing the conditions necessary for toleration and openness to difference.62 ‘We are tempted, perhaps, to formulate a single response’, he writes. ‘But even highly similar encounters and transactions are necessarily differentiated when they

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engage different groups of people and when they are reflected on by men and women with different histories and expectations’.63 Like Berlin and Gray, Walzer believes that while a society that allows the coexistence of difference (even at the most minimal level of tolerance) is, on the whole, a better society per se than one which does not, this ‘is not to argue that every actual or imaginable difference should be tolerated’.64 And finally, like Berlin and Gray, Walzer recognizes that those social arrangements that permit or actively encourage some level of toleration should not be taken for granted; they are ‘sufficiently rare in human history that they require not only practical but also theoretical appreciation’.65 Before tracing the ecclesiastical implications of Walzer’s ‘regimes’, however, I should make one additional observation, in answer to the implied question, ‘Are there ways of ordering our ecclesial life that promote greater degrees of toleration for and, perhaps even, acceptance of, the differences of others while insuring the theological integrity of the church?’. In light of Berlin, Gray and Walzer, I would argue ‘yes’. But there are significant (and obvious) exceptions, which should be mentioned at the outset. Those churches that believe that their religious identity requires members to hold virtually identical beliefs, values and practices will find it very difficult, if not impossible, to sustain anything more than a minimal level of toleration, and that minimal level probably only for people who are not members of their religious group. Outsiders, perhaps designated as ‘the lost’, or ‘unbelievers’, (or ‘separated brethren’) function for the group to confirm the position and benefits of the group’s members, and may be tolerated as such in the larger social context with an attitude Walzer describes as ‘resigned acceptance of difference for the sake of peace’.66 Members are less likely to find much toleration for diversity among the constituents in their own groups, and the tolerance extended to outsiders is laced with disrespectful forbearance. While one finds this denial of toleration to group insiders commonly among relatively small fundamentalist religious sects, it is possible even among larger denominational bodies, for instance, among Missouri Synod Lutherans and Southern Baptists.67 Walzer surveys Western social history, drawing on his knowledge mainly of Europe, North America and the Middle East, to describe five political models that permit varying degrees of toleration among constituent social groups and individuals in those groups. I will seek to relate his typology both to the degrees of toleration already described, and to various manifestations of ecclesiastical institutionalization. The most ancient social arrangements that provided a measure of toleration among their constituent groups were ‘the great multinational empires’. Walzer writes: ‘Here the various groups are constituted as autonomous or semi-autonomous communities that are political or legal as well as cultural or religious in character, and that rule themselves across a considerable range of their activities’.68 The functions of government in these empires were carried out through official bureaucrats who did not tend to intervene

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 185 in the workings of local communities ‘so long as taxes are paid and peace maintained’.69 The imperial rule – and Walzer is thinking in particular of the ancient Persian, Ptolemaic Egyptian, and Roman empires – ‘is historically the most successful way of incorporating difference and facilitating (requiring is more accurate) peaceful coexistence’.70 In these empires, there was brutality and repression under the hand of autocratic regimes, but there was also extensive tolerance that allowed for the survival and preservation of different communities with different ways of life, with distinct histories and traditions, religious beliefs, and local social institutions. The closest ecclesiastical parallel to this regime is the Roman Catholic church at certain periods in its long history. While many of the same criticisms can be leveled against Catholicism as against certain imperial regimes – brutality, repression and autocracy have not been unknown, for instance, as in the suppression of Celtic Christianity, the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition, and the collusion of the church with autocratic civil rule – the Catholic church has also at times exhibited a tolerance for enormous diversity in whole ways of living Christianly, and of institutionalizing these Christian ways of life, among, for example, Benedictine monks, Mendicant friars, Jesuits, provincial parishioners, religiously inspired revolutionaries, scholarly communities and military societies. The local expressions of faith – including the syncretistic adaptations of Catholicism to provincial belief systems – were often accorded a fair range of autonomy within the larger context of Roman Catholic allegiance. Because the unity and identity of the church as imperial regime rests largely in its hierarchy (which corresponds to the imperial bureaucracies that oversaw the ordinary affairs of daily life, often from a considerable distance), it can, sometimes ironically, sustain its sense of self in the midst of considerable cultural difference.71 Even today the Roman Catholic church boasts remarkable diversity with regard to ethnicity and culture, rivaled only by the neo-evangelical empire. The Roman Catholic church is in a period of hierarchical entrenchment that, to some degree, threatens at least officially the relative diversity it has enjoyed on the local and regional levels, and among members of various religious orders. Yet there remains astonishing diversity of faith and practice, of ethnicity and culture in the Catholic church. The Roman Catholic church and the international neo-evangelical movements, in fact, both encourage considerable diversity with reference to ethnicity and race, as well as social, educational and economic backgrounds. In recent years, both empires have been far more inclusive of these kinds of demographic differences than have traditional mainline Protestant denominations – including those denominations that tend to identify themselves with liberal social and political policies. While both Roman Catholicism and the neo-evangelical movement tend to discourage variance on certain theological and moral issues, it is apparent that the moral issues represent a stronger claim on their identity than the theological, at least for the latter.72

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And, especially among the neo-evangelical churches, their strong congregational polity means that while there is a shared sense of belonging at national and international levels among them, much is left to the ‘local option’.73 Walzer’s second regime of toleration is less visible than the empire, though perhaps more crucial from an ecclesiastical perspective. It is the ‘international society’. While, he observes, the category is something of an ‘anomaly’, in that it is not a ‘domestic regime’, and some would say that it is not a regime at all, but ‘an anarchic and lawless condition’, Walzer understands the international society of nations as making up a discernible body. ‘All the groups that achieve statehood and all the practices they permit … are tolerated by the society of states. Toleration is an essential feature of sovereignty and an important reason for its desirability’.74 Through their various official associations, through diplomatic relationships, through formal international structures, such as the United Nations and international tribunals, nations extend to other nations toleration of practices and beliefs within their national borders, acknowledging the sovereignty of states in the international community, their ‘political independence and territorial integrity’. This arrangement, in Walzer’s view, constitutes ‘a much stronger version of the communal autonomy maintained in multinational empires’.75 There are, of course, limits to what this international society of nations will tolerate. The most obvious limits are seen in the responses of the international community to the violation of the sovereignty of nations by other nations (as we saw in the international reaction to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait) and atrocities against ethnic groups of such magnitude that the international community is forced to intervene (as we see in the responses of the United Nations, the European Union and the international court to genocide committed in the Balkans). Christendom, at least in the West, represents an analogy to the regime of international society. Protestants have largely come to terms with the idea that the church’s identity and integrity do not depend on unanimity in forms of ministry, that various communions maintain within their own denominational boundaries their own polities, offices and forms of ministry. There are, of course, various polities and offices and forms of ministry reflected in the New Testament, as well as various differences of understanding relative to power structures and the nature of Christian ministry. Local communities, from the earliest days of church history, organized their common life, their worship and ministry in various ways. Today, analogous varieties of forms of ministry are reflected among denominations, at least according to the Protestant ecumenical settlement.76 There exists among most denominations of Christendom a toleration of one another somewhat similar to Walzer’s understanding of the toleration among the member states of international society, again: ‘All the groups that achieve statehood and all the practices that they permit … are tolerated by

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 187 the society of states’.77 Thus while some denominations do not adhere to the forms of ministry of others, they either recognize (within the ecclesial bounds of the other denominations) the functional legitimacy of different forms of ministry, or at least recognize the privilege of the other denominations to determine for their own communions what forms ministry will take. The church, understood as an ‘international society’ of various denominations, then, tolerates a fair diversity of forms of ministry among constituent groups, and can (and does) tolerate a fair diversity of other differences. There is even, among some communions within this ‘international society’, substantive mutual recognition of ministry (as one sees in recent developments between the Lutheran and Episcopal churches, for instance) which is reminiscent of the treaty alliances of nations, and which goes well beyond mere forbearance of difference. The World Council of Churches has functioned to some degree as an institutional expression of a sort of international, specifically ecumenical, society primarily for mainline Protestant Christians, though the organization does not pretend to speak with one voice for all churches, or even to appeal to all segments of the world of Christendom. Those churches that do affiliate with the World Council of Churches tend to endorse difference with some enthusiasm, though not without significant moral and theological boundaries. Perhaps the most promising approach for the current Presbyterian dilemma over ordination, and for other communions in which there is significant diversity over axiological and theological issues, is what Walzer identifies as ‘consociational states’. He writes: ‘Examples like Belgium, Switzerland, Cyprus, Lebanon, and the stillborn Bosnia suggest both the range of possibility here and the imminence of disaster’.78 Consociational states are formed when two or three states ‘agree to a constitutional arrangement, design institutions and divide offices, and strike a political bargain that protects their divergent interests’.79 The success of such regimes lies in the maintenance of trust and mutual respect especially among the leadership of the various communities that agree to coexist. The success of this arrangement also requires a willingness to maintain a balance of interests and concerns among constituent groups, guaranteeing the security of each group through the reliable functioning of shared institutions. ‘Commonly’, Walzer writes, ‘the communities have lived together … for a very long time before they begin their formal negotiations’. They may have been thrown together under the rule of an empire, or perhaps in rebellion against the imperial regime. ‘These groups have talked and traded, fought and made peace at the most local levels – but always with an eye to the police or army of some foreign ruler. Now they must look only to each other’.80 Certain ‘united’ churches represent consociational agreements. The United Church of Christ, for instance, brings together a number of

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historically congregationalist churches, some from English separatist roots, others from German Reformed backgrounds, some grounded in strong confessional traditions, others extremely distrustful of confessionalism. The World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) represents another, looser form of consociation, as Reformed churches from various national and confessional backgrounds covenant together internationally, primarily for the sake of world mission, but also to confront ethical concerns. It may be that for some Presbyterians, especially, the kind of consociation one finds in the WARC offers a way for Reformed denominations to share identity and a common confessional heritage while also mutually recognizing the institutionalization of different forms of ministry (and requirements for ordination). Consociational groups of various kinds tend to permit a greater range of toleration than do the more voluntaristic Protestant denominations, though perhaps a lesser degree of tolerance than either international societies or purely national churches, such as the Church of Scotland, whose common identity is insured by bonds other than axiological and theological. In each of the three preceding regimes, the emphasis has been on the toleration of group differences. Walzer, like Berlin and Gray, recognizes the fundamental cruciality of groups being recognized and accepted in a larger society. The regime to which Walzer turns next, that of the ‘nation-state’, tends to focus, however, on the toleration of individuals in a society, ‘who are generally conceived stereotypically, first as citizens, then as members of this or that minority’.81 As Walzer describes the expectations for persons living in this regime, it is easy to discern ecclesiastical parallels between the nation-state and, especially, a Protestant denomination: As citizens, [individual participants in this kind of society] have the same rights and obligations as everyone else and are expected to engage positively with the political culture of the majority; as members [of a minority], they have the standard features of their ‘kind’ and are allowed to form voluntary associations, organizations for mutual aid, private schools, cultural societies, publishing houses, and so on. They are not allowed to organize autonomously and exercise legal jurisdiction over their fellows. Minority religion, culture, and history are matters for what might be called the private collective – about which the public collective, the nation-state, is always suspicious. Any claim to act out minority culture in public is likely to produce anxiety among the majority. … In principle, there is no coercion of individuals, but pressure to assimilate to the dominant nation, at least with regard to public practices, has been fairly common and, until recent times, fairly successful. … The politics of language is one key area where this norm is both enforced and challenged. For many nations, language is the key to unity.82

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 189 Protestant denominations, functioning in many ways like nation-states, tend to require a significant degree of conformity among their membership. But even here one finds the institutionalization of a fairly broad range of responses toward difference, from benign indifference toward it (e.g. in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), to a formal, legal recognition of the rights of others to be different (e.g. the Unitarian Universalist Church), to genuine, sometimes curious, openness to listen and learn from others (e.g. the United Church of Christ). There are also within some denominations formal quasi-political structures (caucuses, denominationally approved para-church organizations, and action groups) established to recognize, honor and preserve the concerns and ideals of minority constituencies, though these structures are put under considerable strain when controversies divide the denominations in ways that either pit some minorities against others, or when membership in minorities shifts unpredictably (that is, when denominations discover that the very term ‘minority’ is less definitive and significantly more fluid than they generally assume), or when a conflict causes members of a minority to call into question fundamental issues of belonging within the larger community. The integration of constituencies into the denomination, and their assumption of a more or less clearly discernible denominational identity, has become a matter of considerable concern for ecclesiastical officials, especially in Protestant communions. The issue of formation in a religious tradition, as a guarantor of denominational identity, has also, therefore, become a matter of increasing concern among many Protestant ecclesiastical officials, especially as laypersons (in contrast to ordained clergy) continue to demonstrate increasing mobility between denominations without regard to denominational ‘brand’ loyalty. Seminaries and divinity schools face sustained pressure to insure from denominations that their graduates ‘can speak the language’ of the particular denomination in which their candidates hope to be ordained, at the same time that an increasing proportion of church members are largely unaware of what it means to belong distinctively to a particular faith tradition, beyond identifying themselves as Catholic or generically Protestant. ‘There is less room for difference in nation-states, even liberal nationstates’, writes Walzer, ‘than in multinational empires or consociations – far less, obviously, than in international society’.83 And this is only further exacerbated by the fact that many churches (at the denominational level, as well as the level of local congregations) see themselves, sometimes almost wholly, as voluntary associations. Those members who are substantially different, it is commonly reasoned, should choose to go somewhere else where they will fit in better – with their own kind. The nation-state and the Protestant denomination both tend to manifest and guard their identity with threats (whether implicit or explicit) of exclusion. While neither is, or in some cases has been, as homogeneous as some of their constituents may fear (or their officials prefer to imagine), both represent a relatively low tolerance for difference.

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The final model of peaceful coexistence is that which Walzer describes as the ‘immigrant society’. Those people who have left their lands of birth, and have traveled not as colonists but as immigrants, ‘in waves’, seeking a better life, clustering where possible in small numbers, ‘always intermixed with other, similar groups in cities, states, and regions’, represent a different way of living together with a potential measure of tolerance. The new state to which they journey ‘claims exclusive jurisdictional rights regarding all its citizens as individuals rather than as members of groups’.84 Immigrants are generally encouraged to tolerate others as individuals – not as stereotypical representatives of a culture – and to cultivate their own versions of group culture as they accept other versions as individual interpretations.85 Group culture, according to Walzer, if it is to be sustained in the new context, must take on the character of a voluntary association, encouraging new generations of individuals to continue immigrant traditions and practices. But even when this approach succeeds in preserving certain aspects of the group’s immigrant identity from generation to generation, it does so largely by appealing to individuals to take up the mantle. And it is the individual that remains the locus of toleration, both within and beyond the immigrant group. ‘So toleration takes on a radically decentralized form: everyone has to tolerate everyone else’.86 In certain respects Walzer’s immigrant society model of toleration parallels the individualistic perspective of many contemporary Christians, especially in North America, what Robert Putnam has called ‘believer’s faith’, not necessarily ‘belonger’s’, that is a ‘highly individualized religious psychology without the benefits of strong supportive attachments to believing communities’.87 Distinctions between versions of a tradition emerge not so much as cultural constructs as individual, personal interpretations, perspectives on what it means to be ‘Christian’ or ‘Methodist’, ‘Catholic’ or ‘Protestant’. The uprootedness of immigrants lends itself to this increase in individualism, not only among the economic and political immigrants who flee their native countries in search of a better life, but also among the domestic immigrants who move from suburb to suburb following better opportunities among the transient professional, technical and clerical middle class. This ‘immigrant society’ of upwardly mobile, geographically mobile, middle-class people that provides many relatively affluent congregations, Protestant and Catholic, with a sizeable proportion of their membership, may prove the most pervasive and important factor with regard to the further development of toleration in contemporary North American society. That which is shared among this religious public is a general (if not generic) religious identity, which assumes that faith is individualistic, and, as we have said, that individual differences are to be tolerated. The fear that this perspective only contributes to the erosion of the identity of denominations as nation-states is widespread, and not unfounded, among denominational officials and some pastors. The fact that laity does largely not share this fear

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 191 is significant.88 It is possible that it is the immigrant society model of religious toleration that offers the greatest support for what Walzer describes as ‘a functional endorsement’ for openness to difference. This is, perhaps, not an unmixed blessing, even for those who are most committed to religious pluralism. According to some critics, it may be that tolerance for (and even openness toward) difference is growing in a soil in which real social differences, culturally grounded particularities, are being lost, or at least obscured.89 Yet perhaps even this observation is insufficiently subtle. Is it not more accurate to say that the mobility of the culture is simply producing another culture, distinguishable by its own particular signals, one which is a melding of traditions, values and even ends of life? This is certainly not new. All new cultures build on the ruins of older ones. And is it not also the case that the current confusion and anxiety over what all of this means is simply the predictable symptoms of those whose power and interests, future and identity, are being rendered somewhat uncertain? Again, according to Berlin, Gray, and Walzer, no single social or political arrangement is the best of all ways to live, nor even the best way to insure peaceful coexistence among communities of people that differ. According to the history of the church, a wide variety of ecclesiastical arrangements has proven faithful, and has made possible more or less peaceful coexistence in specific situations. Indeed, over the history of the Christian faith, a number of ways of living Christianly (from anchorites to political activists, monastic orders to middle-class families) have been recognized as worthwhile and, yet, incommensurable. Some Christians, some churches, may believe that there is one best way to live. The history of the church and the testimony of the sacred texts of Christian scripture, taken as a whole, argue against such monism. ‘Can we as Christians tolerate difference?’, I have asked. ‘Yes’, I would answer. ‘Toleration is a virtue many Christians admire and practice’. ‘Can we go beyond toleration, as Christians, as church, to something more radical than tolerance, to an openness and respect of the differences of others? Can we live with, recognize, learn from, and risk transformation through our encounters with the differences of others while we also are guided by the particular values, ideals, beliefs, and aspirations of our cultures and faiths?’. Again, I am compelled to answer ‘Yes, many Christians can and do’. In his essay, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Berlin explores what it means to belong, to be a member of a society. His comments underscore the limitations of tolerance as forbearance, and point to the quality of openness toward the other that is, in my view, especially consistent with at least some versions of Christian faith. He begins by reminding the reader that the individual self is not something one can detach from one’s relationship to a larger society. Nor can we divorce our self-consciousness from the attitude of others toward us.

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Is toleration a Christian virtue? Consequently, when I demand to be liberated from … the status of political or social dependence, what I demand is an alteration of the attitude towards me of those whose opinions and behavior help to determine my own image of myself. And what is true of the individual is true of groups, social, political, economic, religious, that is, of men [and women] conscious of needs and purposes which they have as members of such groups. What oppressed classes or nationalities, as a rule, demand is neither simply unhampered liberty of action for their members, nor, above everything, equality of social or economic opportunity, still less assignment of a place in a frictionless, organic state devised by the rational lawgiver. What they want, as often as not, is simply recognition (of their class or nation, or colour or race) as an independent source of human activity, as an entity with a will of its own, intending to act in accordance with it (whether it is good or legitimate, or not), and not to be ruled, educated, guided, with however light a hand, as being not quite fully human, and therefore not quite fully free. … This is the heart of the great cry for recognition on the part of both individuals and groups, and in our own day, of professions and classes, nations and races. … they understand me, as I understand them; and this understanding creates within me the sense of being somebody in the world.90

Frequently what is at stake in the debates over diversity and our inevitable conflicts over values, in other words, is not how we can (including those of us who are Christians) tolerate difference, but how we can go about respecting the other, recognizing the dignity and worth of their ways of life, their cultural, social and religious traditions, ethnicity, experience and history, the ends of life for which they live and the values they hold precious, in a way that demonstrates respect for their humanity – and for our own. We must also ask how we can go about constructing and maintaining those social institutions which permit the greatest degree possible of such openness to others, and which encourage mutuality of respect for groups and individuals within our society. We must and we may, as bearers of particular moral commitments, as members of particular religious communities, as participants in particular social and cultural, ethnic, racial and economic groups, wish to promote specific values and to oppose others. This is a given, and our social institutions are shaped by the confluence and conflict of these commitments, beliefs and values, as we negotiate our judgements in and through the interaction of our communities. But, in order for this ongoing axiological negotiation to have integrity, it must be conducted in a context that demonstrates openness to difference and insures respect for the other through reliable social institutions. As a Christian, I do not merely tolerate the opinions of the other. I seek to respect the other in his or her difference, in his or her otherness, as one

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 193 uniquely created by God the holy, as one whose cultural groundedness represents a way of being other than my own, whose respect is necessary if I am going to respect my own humanity created in the image of God. Part of this respect, this recognition of the God-created humanity of the other, entails taking seriously the difference of the other as irreducibly different (not simply as another version of the life I live, and not merely as an abrogation from the ‘norm’ of sameness), exploring critically that difference, probing, testing, even disagreeing with, perhaps contradicting, the difference so that the other may be better known in and for the sake of that communion for which we are created as imago Dei. To dissolve the difference between us is to lose the other. And to lose the other represents a loss of my self as an other, perhaps irrevocably, perhaps forever. For me, as a Christian, the loss of the otherness of the other represents also an erosion of the doctrine of God, an immanent lessening of the scandal of divine transcendence and mystery, a reduction of God’s holiness in the vain attempt to secure hegemony for me and for my church.

Speaking languages of faith among others: evangelism, apologetics, and interfaith conversation Recently thousands of people in the state of Texas (including me) received free copies of a religious video in their mailboxes. The video, titled simply ‘Jesus’, is a dramatic account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth according to the canonical gospels. It was distributed in an evangelistic effort. The mailing stirred up quite a controversy. The evangelical Christians who financed the effort were seen by some as violating the terms of the social pact against proselytizing their non-Christian neighbors by blurring the distinction between the public and private forums (since the video was sent through the mail to private homes). Those who sponsored the mailing were sometimes painted as intolerant and insensitive to the religious faith of others. I have no way to judge whether the intentions of those who sent the video was intolerant or insensitive, but the act itself represents, in my view, simply a legitimate use of public means for purposes of expressing a group’s religious faith. Tolerance, even openness to the faith or non-faith of another, does not necessarily require reticence regarding one’s own faith. But respectful openness toward another’s faith or non-faith, grounded in the kind of pluralism for which I have argued, does require a willingness to listen and to speak that respects the power of the other to speak and to listen to us – and sometimes not to listen. Such openness, like democracy, is frankly a lot of work. The church, according to some streams of Christian faith, is the ark where alone the people of the world can huddle against the raging flood of God’s judgement. All of those not on board will perish. From this monistic and exclusive perspective, other faiths represent deceptive and dangerous illusions, unreliable dinghies that cannot hope to survive God’s watery

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wrath. Tolerance may seem an unholy indulgence to people who share this form of Christian faith; and openness may represent to them a danger not only to those outside the safety of God’s rescue boat, but to those inside as well who might be tempted to dive overboard if they began to listen to the voices of outsiders.91 The church, according to some streams of Christian faith, is one road among many, all leading to the same destination. It matters little where the roads appear to lead because they are all ultimately bound for Godville. Choose a road, any road, and start walking. We will all get there eventually. The church, for other Christians, is one among many religious faiths, but it is not just one among many, it enjoys the privilege of being the highest, the best, the fullest expression of humanity’s longing for God. The other religions, more or less, express human religious faith. And there is some truth and some error in them all. But the Christian faith above all others manifests the truest conception of God and humanity’s obligations to God. We noted both of these perspectives in Chapter 2. The church for still others consists of those who know the secret that the redemptive act of God in Jesus Christ has achieved a universal salvation for all people, in all places, in all times, despite what their faith is. Christians alone among all the religions of the world know this secret, that the whole world of persons has been saved in Jesus Christ. People of faith and nonfaith are, perhaps, all walking on different roads, but neither their walking nor the roads on which they walk are relevant or pertinent to God’s accomplished work of redemption. The destination to which they are bound lies behind them, so to speak, in the incarnation, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. All humanity is headed toward a single destination, but our destination has nothing whatsoever to do with anything we may or may not experience on the road. Whatever we may believe, think, aspire to or value, whatever religions we practice or reject, the destination for which we are bound is Christian salvation.92 And, for some other Christians, the church represents the community of those who are called to follow Jesus of Nazareth, who believe him to be for them the authentic and true revelation of God’s character, who seek by the Spirit of God to serve in the world as disciples of this particular Lord. They recognize that there are people of other faiths who worship God in very different ways that may lead to very different ends, whose beliefs and values are not reducible or scalable in relation to some transhistorical, absolute and universal set of criteria. Rather than attempting to make judgements on the comparative validity of different faiths from a privileged position (above and beyond all faiths), Christians who recognize this kind of pluralism seek to extend respect to others, to listen to others openly, to bear witness to their own faith and to evaluate points of difference and similarity with others in the recognition that they can only make such judgements as persons grounded in their own particular faith. Some among these Christians may even believe that the astonishing variety of experiences of God reflected in

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 195 Christian scripture point, not only to a fundamental preference for plurality in God’s creative power, but to a corresponding plurality in the very life of God as God. Such an ecclesiology demonstrates a pluralism similar to that described by Berlin (as we have seen in the discussion of pluralisms 1 and 2 in Chapter 2).93 These are only a few of the ways in which Christian communities conceive of themselves and their relationships to people of other faiths, and have done so over the long history of the church. We have already reflected more thoroughly on these and other ecclesiological perspectives in relation to Christians’ attitudes toward diversity and conflict in previous chapters.94 When we speak of toleration, and, more, of openness and respect toward the other that allows for peaceful coexistence, however, these various understandings of church take on additional significance. What is the posture of Christians toward those people who do not share their faith at all? Avashai Margalit expands this question, addressing it to all three of the great monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. As he does so, his words evoke Berlin’s understanding of the need of groups and individuals for respect and recognition. Margalit writes: Can Judaism, Christianity, and Islam be pluralistic? The question is not whether they can tolerate one another, but whether they can accept the idea that the other religions have intrinsic religious value. Christians, said Goethe, want to be accepted, not tolerated. This is presumably true of Jews and Muslims as well. The question is whether each of these groups is willing to accept the others, that is, to ascribe value to the others’ life-style, so that, if they have the power, they will not only refrain from persecuting the others but will also encourage the flourishing of their way of life.95 Is it essential to Christian faith to assume that non-Christian ways of flourishing are necessarily and by definition inferior, erroneous, even evil, unworthy of human pursuit, intolerable, to the destruction of which Christians must be committed? For some Christians the answer to this question must remain unambiguously and resoundingly ‘yes’. If, for them, the Christian faith is indissolubly linked to the promotion of a particular monistic metaphysic, whether Platonic or Aristotelian, or to certain social agendas, especially certain utopian ideals, or to a soteriology that admits only one possible salvific path toward one possible redemptive end, they must see any divergence from ‘the Christian way’ (however that way is variously defined) as a dangerous abrogation. If, for them, Christian faith represents an entirely self-consistent set of beliefs and doctrines without contradiction, without countervalation, without irresolvable conflicts, which must be accepted as such, and in exclusion to other faith claims, in order to win God’s acceptance, then they must see any other faith, any other faith practices and ways of life, as pernicious

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and dangerous falsehoods.96 This is not to say that such Christians cannot be tolerant. They may indeed be able to muster tolerance toward nonChristian faiths and the persons who hold them, but it must be tolerance as forbearance, at best, i.e. tolerance laced with disrespect, perhaps with pity and sadness for ‘the fate of the lost’. Needless to say, many Christians, because of a variety of assumptions they make about the nature of reality and truth, the nature, purpose and authority of sacred scripture, the character of God and God’s creation, and the identity and mission of Jesus Christ, find it impossible to recognize other faiths and their ways of flourishing as worthwhile. They can find biblical texts and warrants enough in the history of the church to condone exclusion – if not intolerance (the story of the Hebrew prophet Elijah’s conflict with the prophets of Baal comes to mind as a justification for intolerance, for example). Their conception of evangelism, apologetics, and interfaith dialogue will inevitably reflect their monism and exclusivism. If, on the other hand, Christian faith is not necessarily linked to a particular monistic metaphysic, to the promotion of specific social agendas or of a singular redemptive scheme, if it is not utopian, and if its faith claims are not necessarily singular and exclusionary, then Christians may not only be tolerant of other faiths, but may, in Margalit’s words, ‘encourage the flourishing of their way of life’. Christians who believe that the diversity woven into creation is not a mistake, but expresses something essential to the life and character of God, and who suspect that the astonishing variety of faiths in the world is also not a mistake or merely evidence of falsehood’s proliferation and humanity’s frailty, but an expression of the multivalent grace of God, may in fact encourage the flourishing of ways of life belonging to other faiths, and may seek constructive conversation and coexistence with them. Certainly there must be boundaries to a Christian’s or a church’s openness – otherwise openness does not express grace at all, but only permissiveness and apathy – and even the most pluralistic Christian must stand against, for instance, the contemporary Afghani Taliban in their oppression of women and the German Christian movement of the Nazi era which found no contradiction between loving Jesus and persecuting Jews.97 But, as both a Christian and a pluralist, to respect others in and with their differences means taking extravagant risks in the name of the God we worship and adore, and there is no place else to pitch our tents than on this apparently slippery slope. Evangelism and apologetics, on this view, are not out of bounds, but they must be redefined for those Christians who are open to and respectful of the faith of other faith communities and the non-faith of those who do not believe. In particular, the assumption by many that the positive consequences or results of ‘evangelism’ and ‘apologetics’ (i.e. that the recipients of the Christian message must become adherents to the faith) are inevitably and ineluctably constituent to the meaning of these terms must be called

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 197 into question. The frequently cited definition of evangelism, for example, of England’s Commission on Evangelism (adopted in 1918 and reaffirmed in 1945) illustrates this issue. It reads: To evangelize is so to present Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit that (people) shall come to put their trust in God through him, to accept him as their Saviour, and serve him as their King in the fellowship of his Church.98 This definition assumes that those who hear the ‘good news of Jesus Christ’ must become Christians, or else evangelism has not taken place. According to this view, a sharing of the good news, in the power of God’s Spirit, must lead to the conversion of others, a recognition on their part that their way of living (non-Christianly) is false or inferior, and that they must become Christian in order to flourish truly. Obviously, for many Christians, this definition holds. But evangelism does not necessarily include a disposition of consequences. One might well argue, in fact, that evangelism is fundamentally and in the first instance simply bearing witness to the good news of Jesus Christ, of his life and death, the promise of resurrection in Christ, and the call he issues to follow him, and, in the second instance, to one’s experience of faith in Jesus Christ in the life and worship of a particular community of faith. In other words, evangelism does not, in and of itself, necessarily carry the burden of presenting a singular, exclusive world view (let alone monistic metaphysic) to which the witness-bearer and hearer must assent. The evangelist is a steward of the mystery of God in Jesus Christ. While many Christian communities have worked hard to harmonize and to make consistent the variety of witnesses as to the content of the evangel (the good news) so that Christian faith speaks with a single voice, their persistence only argues for the continuing and irreducible diversity within the biblical witness and Christian faith itself. Christians believe that in Christ there is life abundant, the power of transformation, the very Word and Spirit of God that God in Christ is closer to us than we are to ourselves, and that God does for us in Christ what we cannot do for ourselves. For Christians, Jesus Christ is Lord. Christ’s call to follow claims a priority on our allegiance above every other power in heaven and earth. But bearing witness to the lordship of Jesus Christ, even in terms that demonstrate the Christian’s and the Christian community’s public trust in this Lord over every other claim on our loyalty, is not necessarily synonymous with holding to an absolutist, exclusivist monism, much less a single metaphysic. Christians still recognize the potency of the claims of other powers over the lives of other persons. And for us to speak of the efficacy or relative truth of other faiths, as though we possess a transhistorical, universal position of privilege over all faith claims, is quite simply to say more than we

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know. Discipleship to Jesus Christ does not confer privileged transhistorical, universal knowledge. But we do believe that following Christ confers upon the disciple entry into a specific way of being human and of being faithful in the world, as we share by the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ’s trust in God the Father. D. T. Niles’ beautiful (and often evoked) description of evangelism as one beggar telling another where to find bread speaks with particular force to this understanding of bearing witness to the good news of Jesus Christ. Our task is not to convince our hearers that their way is false. It is merely to bear witness to the truth we have encountered in Jesus Christ. Apologetics might be construed, in a manner parallel to this description of evangelism, as our task of bearing witness to Jesus Christ in terms which are comprehensible to and defensible in a particular intellectual culture. The apologist bears the burden of demonstrating clearly whether Christian faith is feasible, not merely rational, but believable – understanding, of course, that it is the incredible in Christian faith which is most worthy of credibility (we do well not to forget Tertullian’s defiant ‘I believe because it is absurd’). The apologist need not convince, but she or he must be convincing. Indeed, one might suppose that the apologist must, if he is to remain true to the subject of Christian faith, demonstrate specifically how and where the Christian faith is both credible and incredible, in its own terms, because faith is for Christian communities both the ground of knowledge and the child of doubt. Apologetics also seeks to understand the faith of other communities in a manner consonant with – indeed in terms of – the faith borne by other communities, understanding as we do that our criticism of other faiths is grounded in the faith commitments of our own religious communities. In each and all of these attempts to speak the language of faith, we recognize the objective and public nature of the values and ends, the beliefs and aspirations of communities of faith, our own and those of others. Faith is not merely a private and subjective matter, nor is truth. What we believe, the ends for which we live, the values we hold, and the faith we treasure are as public and objective as they are plural.99

Closing reflections on the risk of interfaith conversation Isaiah Berlin once remarked Communication can only be brought about by systematic criticism intelligible to people who talk different languages. The most difficult task for philosophers from different camps is the task of translation. Perhaps it is a hopeless business. But I refuse to be pessimistic.100 I recall conversations in which I was involved twenty years ago with Jewish and Christian leaders. We were attempting to develop a relationship of trust on the basis of which we could work together to establish a yearly joint

Is toleration a Christian virtue? 199 Jewish-Christian observance of the Holocaust. We met regularly in various social contexts to get to know one another, to learn more about one another’s faiths, to discuss what we valued and what we wanted to accomplish through our common work. We attended worship with one another quite often. Over the course of two years we came to trust one another, to recognize and respect one another’s differences of faith, of loyalties, perspectives, concerns, of hopes, and fears. Had we attempted to rush to superficial agreement, rather than take the time to know one another in our differences, I am convinced that the effectiveness of our association, and the quality of the event we hoped to sponsor, would have suffered. The process of coming to know each other in a climate of respect and mutual trust was time-consuming. We spent hours translating the meaning of specific statements of faith so that we could be understood, and could understand. Stock phrases and familiar terms, instantly conveying meaning within our own communities of faith, had to be translated with care. For instance, we wrestled to understand what we meant when we said, ‘the peace of Christ be with you’, ‘shalom’, ‘the New Testament’, ‘Torah’, ‘the name of Jesus’, ‘Shabbat’, ‘Holy Spirit’, ‘the sanctity of the Mitzvah’, ‘eternal life’, ‘Menuha’, ‘the Great Commandment’, and ‘the Schema’. More often than not we could only approach understanding of a phrase by hearing it in a particular context of worship, or study, or fellowship: ‘the Lord be with you’ spoken at the beginning of the Eucharist, ‘good shabbes’ spoken with a handshake to a fellow worshiper at the close of a synagogue service. Respect for the other did not and could not (and should not) assume that the other would come to believe what I believed. Recognition of the other did not and could not (and should not) assume that I would be converted to the faith of another. Nor did openness assume we would gloss over our considerable differences, or set aside faith commitments, or contradictions, political disagreements or conflicts in the allegiances we held. And yet these conversations were risky at many levels. We opened ourselves to one another in a way that did not minimize our differences, but because we recognized our differences, we risked offending one another with our faith, as we risked hearing each other bear witness to that which contradicted exclusive claims on our own allegiances. We also risked our beliefs in conversation, risked being drawn into the faith of the other. The result, ironically, was that after two years of these conversations I had a deeper understanding of and appreciation for my faith in Jesus Christ precisely because of these conversations and the way in which we honored our differences – not because I felt any disrespect for the faith of another – but because I was able to hear nuances and subtleties in my own faith in light of the faith of others. The fundamental risk of conversation with those who do not share one’s language of faith (and it is the risk of anyone who lives the life of the translator) is that one may be transformed within one’s own faith, and forever speak the language of one’s faith with an accent that betrays foreign sojourns and experiences.

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As a consequence of my own life of faith in conversation with others, I have come to believe that while it is simply natural that any one of us must be ‘this’ and not ‘the other’ – it is often true that we cannot be both – we need not despise ‘the other’ simply because we are like ‘this’. One may respect the other unconditionally, with no assumption that the other should first become something else (should believe or behave as I do, for example) in order to be accepted by me. This quality of relational unconditionality I understand as essential to the Christian concept of divine love. In the midst of and not merely despite our differences, faith, hope and love are possible at the boundaries of our differences, within and between our religious communities; and, as St Paul said long ago, the greatest of these is love.

Epilogue in an ecclesiological key

Recently in a discussion I was leading on the psalms of lament, I asked the group to reflect on the meaning of the word ‘enemy’. Enemies frequently figure in the psalms of lament. The ancient Hebrew psalmists seem to have a fairly clear idea of who their enemies are, and how God should handle them. The presence of enemies, and the curses the psalmist pronounces on them, has bedeviled many pious readers for centuries. ‘What is an enemy?’, I asked the class. ‘Someone who disagrees with you’, answered a woman in the second row. ‘So, if you and I disagree, we’re enemies?’, I asked. ‘You are going to pray that I fall into open traps, and that God should do me harm?’. ‘No’, Another person said. ‘You are my enemy if our disagreement leads to violence. If you hurt me you are my enemy’. ‘So, if we disagree so strongly that I yell at you and you punch me in the nose we’re enemies then? In which case, I was enemies with most of the boys I played with when I was ten years old?’. Our conversation wove through a labyrinth of questions and answers. But again and again we returned to the problem that occupies the hearts and minds of many Christians today, and it is a problem suggested by the first answer I received to the question, ‘What is an enemy?’. Can people differ, can they disagree over important matters, can they have real conflicts over values, beliefs, aspirations, ways and ends of life, and remain in some sort of constructive social relationship? For Christians this question is heightened, and made both more provocative and poignant, when we consider that many of the people with whom we disagree most vigorously are also Christians. My own answer to this question has been shaped by an encounter with the thought of Isaiah Berlin, a growing appreciation that his conception of pluralism – of the incommensurability of values, of the irreducible reality of social diversity among communities, and the way in which axiological conflict can in many instances shape our societies for the better – offers Christians ways to rethink our relationships to one another and to those beyond our fellowships. I have attempted throughout this study to allow Berlin’s work to come into creative dialogue with that of other social and political theorists, philosophers and theologians. The fact that Berlin was

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himself an agnostic, and that he would have greeted a theological reappropriation of his thought with, at best, bemused skepticism, is, in my view, only an instance of the rich irony of intellectual history. Christian theology has historically enjoyed a relationship of indebtedness to a variety of nonChristian forms of thought, from its classical reliance on Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, to its more recent engagements with Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida. Berlin’s understanding of social diversity, in my view, provides important and original ways of reconceptualizing the legacy of Western thought, inviting us to rethink assumptions about what it means as Christians to think about truth, faith and valuing. From the perspective of Christian theology, I have argued that diversity is not primarily a social and historical phenomenon. Rather, it is fundamentally a theological reality with profound sociological and historical implications. As a trinitarian Christian informed by various Reformed traditions, I would affirm that the theological ground of the church’s unity is the free act of the triune God who through Word and Spirit draws humanity to live consciously and joyfully in the holy communion that is the image of God our Creator.1 In so doing, the church bears witness to the freedom and faithfulness of the triune Creator. This essentially ecclesiological affirmation is further grounded in a Christian conception of creation, understanding that the doctrine of the triune God is the chief way we take theological account of the irreducible otherness and plurality at the heart of existence. Humankind is created in the very image and likeness of the God who is in God’s own being communion. Humanity is blessed by God to flourish in communion, to multiply luxuriantly and extravagantly, to bless the world in its blessedness. Such a doctrine of creation starts and ends in a very different place from the various theologies that understand the image of God in individualistic or purely subjective terms, or that believe God to be a speechless monad forbidden by a thousand cold calculations to trespass the boundaries of history. To speak again of the ecclesiological implications of this doctrine of creation: The church in the image of the triune God is public church, church in and for, though not of, the world, church whose signs and wonders represent sacramentally the otherness of God, church that lives out of its encounter with the living Word who strives within and at times against the church as we seek to respond to God’s call. Indeed, the church in its common life, in its being with and for others, exegetes and exposes the pluriform reality of humanity created in the image of the triune God, a reality frequently ignored, denied, unacknowledged, or simply unrecognized. Ecclesiology constructed in light of God the truine Creator is the Christian way of speaking about our being with and for the other who remains irreducibly other. The church in its historical existence as a fact among other facts and a phenomenon among other social phenomena remains the very reflection of the triune God who pours out eternal life for

Epilogue in an ecclesiological key 203 the other, unreservedly, unconditionally, and who receives joyfully and obediently the life of God as the other.2 But there is another related and, perhaps, more radical side to an ecclesiology grounded in the communion of the triune God, and it relates directly to the issues of diversity and conflict both within the church and beyond it. The idea of the church so dominant in post-Enlightenment modernity, that of a religious society founded for the voluntary association of like-minded individuals, an idea which continues to dominate among many Christians today, and which tends to overshadow the more organic understanding of church as a body constituted unconditionally (as we saw in the previous chapter), is profoundly threatened by difference and conflict over values. Difference in such an ecclesiology means that someone must be wrong in their private opinions; and, even if these are private opinions (in the context of the larger public world), they may undo us as a voluntary association. Diversity is feared, conflict must be avoided, a measure of forbearance born of contempt is all we can tolerate. As we have seen, this entire way of thinking about community is required by the pervasive monism of what Berlin and others call the philosophia perennis. While it is historically accurate to say that the Christian faith has largely subscribed to this monism, it is not theologically necessary for it to do so. Indeed, the canon of scripture, and the experience of the church over twenty centuries, argues against the church’s persistent monistic assumptions. It has long been recognized that the Christian faith possesses no metaphysics of its own, but borrows from one philosophical age, then another. The fact that it has borrowed most from monism does not mean that the Christian faith is essentially and inevitably monistic. Indeed, the diversity of beliefs, aspirations, values, and even ends of life, the diversity of ways of flourishing that are socially recognizable as Christian, argue that the Christian faith is and has always been itself a plurality. Why should this surprise those who worship and adore a God whose being is act, who is that diverse and irreducible communion of coeternal modes of being that Christians believe we encounter as Father in the Word and by the Spirit of God – a triunity which assumes differentiation and mutuality and complementarity (because union is only a meaningful category in the context of real differentiation), a triunity which, in Karl Barth’s phrase, exhibits ‘different and fundamentally contradictory qualities’? Why should this surprise us if we believe that the world of humanity that the triune God creates and holds in creation analogically reflects God’s image and likeness? In light of the creative power of such a God of and in and through such a humanity for such community, is it not possible to imagine peoples of God that recognize as their strength (and as their bond of unity – not uniformity) the community’s God-imaged diversity and the irreducible otherness of those in such a community, because the need for agreement is relativized and the yearning for non-contradictory and nonconflicted community is judged by the creative power of the triune God whose very being lies in differentiated mutuality?

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Some time ago I was standing in the foyer of a shopping mall when a small boy tottered up to me. He was probably three years old; eyes popping in wonder at everything around him. He looked up at me and smiled. I smiled back. About that time his mother, alarmed that the boy had wandered off, ran up to us, took him by the arm, and led him away, saying, ‘Don’t go near the stranger’. I stood there for some time a little shocked, and feeling a little hurt. Her actions were completely understandable and appropriate, of course. She is probably a very responsible mother, and she was acting in a justifiable manner, given the dangers of this world. But it is a pity. I was left with a rather strange pain, an edge of uneasiness. ‘I am not “the stranger” ’, I said to myself. ‘I am just me. The others here are strangers, not me’. But I am the stranger, the other, even to myself, but especially to others. There is no need for the other inevitably to be considered the enemy; though, undoubtedly, some others will turn out to be enemies. But we do lose so much if we do not go near the other, and do so not only to discover how we are similar, but to explore how and where and why we are different. It is in difference that we are completed, made whole, liberated to live in the image of the God whose otherness lies precisely in God’s becoming in relationship. To cut ourselves off from the other, from the difference of the other, in an attempt to remain safe and same, unthreatened and uniform, is to cut ourselves off from that which God has placed at the heart of reality which can save us from ourselves. There is risk, of course, but all creation is risk. At least, so we are taught in those communities of faith that believe that the Creator God is revealed to us in the crucified Christ.

Notes

Preface 1 Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), xiv.

Introduction 1 James Hynes, Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror (New York: Picador Press, 1997), 212. 2 Correspondence from Henry Hardy to Michael Jinkins, 24 March 1999. 3 Michael Jinkins, The Church Faces Death: Ecclesiology in a Post-Modern Context (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 102. 4 Michael Jinkins, ‘Mutuality and Difference: Trinity, Creation and the Theological Ground of the Church’s Unity’, Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 56, no. 2 (2003), 148–171. 5 ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’ appeared originally as ‘Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism’, in Oxford Slavonic Papers 2 (1951). It was reprinted in an expanded version under the present title by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in London (1953), and appears now in Russian Thinkers, eds Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London: Penguin, 1978). ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ was Berlin’s Inaugural Lecture in the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University in 1958. Clarendon Press, Oxford, published the paper in the same year. It appeared subsequently in one of Berlin’s most celebrated collections of essays, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), which is incorporated, with additional essays, in the recently published collection, Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and in the omnibus anthology The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, eds Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997). 6 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Herzen and His Memoirs’, in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy, intro. Roger Hausheer (London: Hogarth Press, 1979; reprint London: Pimlico Press, 1997), 188 (hereafter cited as AC). 7 Ibid., 211. Berlin’s description of Herzen seems even more apt in relation to Berlin today as Henry Hardy labors at assembling the volumes of Berlin’s correspondence. 8 Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), 280. Ignatieff’s biography reflects Berlin’s voice to a remarkable degree, and provides an excellent starting point for those unfamiliar with Berlin’s thought. 9 In addition to the collections Four Essays on Liberty, already noted, The Age of Enlightenment: The Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956) and Vico and Herder (London: Hogarth Press, 1976) which predate Hardy’s editorial work, and Berlin’s first, and widely respected, book, Karl

206

10

11 12 13 14 15 16

Notes

Marx: His Life and Environment (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939; currently in its fourth edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), there are the following collections which have been published under Hardy’s hand: Russian Thinkers (previously noted); Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1978); AC; Personal Impressions (London: Hogarth Press, 1980); The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London: John Murray, 1990); The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (London: John Murray, 1993); The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996); The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (previously noted); and The Roots of Romanticism: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1965 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999). The extensive bibliography which Hardy assembled in AC has been supplemented and expanded, and is available online at http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/bibliography/bibliography10.html. Hardy is also developing a bibliography of writings on the subject of Berlin’s thought. Henry Hardy, Isaiah Berlin: A Personal Impression. This essay published on the home page of Wolfson College, Oxford, online at http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/writings_on_ib/hhonib/obituary1.html, is a slightly altered version of an obituary published in the Independent newspaper on 7 November 1997. Hausheer, ‘Introduction’, AC, xv–xvi. Hausheer, ‘Introduction’, AC, xvi. With characteristic humility Berlin once said that ‘[t]he only truth which I have ever found out for myself is, I think, this one: of the unavoidability of conflicting ends’. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, 246. John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 1. Gray’s study is valuable not only for the ways in which it illuminates Berlin’s thought, but as a compelling piece of constructive philosophical reflection in its own right. Ibid., 1. ‘Isaiah Berlin, Joyous Philosopher and Champion of Pluralism, Is Dead at 88’, The New York Times, 7 November 1997, A1. Henry Hardy writes: Berlin always ascribed his lifelong horror of violence, especially when ideologically inspired, to an episode he witnessed at the age of seven during the February Revolution in Petrograd in 1917: while out walking he watched a policeman loyal to the tsar, white-faced with terror, being dragged off by a lynch mob to his death. (Isaiah Berlin, The First and the Last, intro. Henry Hardy [New York: New York Review of Books, 1999], 8)

17 The extent of this diversity and the fact of the church’s ambivalence toward it has in recent years been the subject of considerable scholarly attention. See, for instance, the new collection of essays edited by Everett Ferguson, Doctrinal Diversity: Varieties of Early Christianity (New York/London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1999), and also edited by Ferguson, Forms of Devotion: Conversion, Worship, Spirituality, and Asceticism (New York/London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1999), vols 4 and 5 respectively in the series ‘Recent Studies in Early Christianity’. In the editorial introduction to volume 4, Ferguson writes: A principal theme characterizing recent study of early Christianity is the diversity in the Christian movement, present from its beginning and continuing even after orthodoxy was firmly institutionalized. … Diversity was already evident in the early history of the church in the differences between Jewish and Gentile believers. (ix, x)

Notes 207 Indeed, as Andrew Louth writes in the first essay in the volume, I think we need to remind ourselves just how diverse and disparate the communities of the fourth century – and not just the Christian communities – were. The basic unit was the city – polij, civitas – with its surrounding countryside. Except in the case of a few great cities, especially Rome and Constantinople, the city and its surroundings were a self-contained economic unity. … Their loyalties were primarily local, which found expression in the local religious cults that Christians were to call ‘pagan’. (3–4) Further, he notes: The local church, with its growing number of local saints, came to do at least as good a job of defining and expressing local loyalties and local identity as the local pagan cults had done, while at the same time expressing a sense of belonging that transcended the merely local. (7) Louth explores the texture of diversity in the first centuries of the church’s history, with special reference to the fourth century, and the struggle the church experienced in some cases affirming, in others denying, and, in still others, condemning its diversity. He explores the rhetorical devices, the ecclesiasticalpolitical instruments and the liturgical acts that attempted in various ways, with varying degrees of success, either to reinterpret the church’s diversity in terms of unity (if not uniformity) or to enforce unity of some sort (variously defined). While considerable attention has been given in recent years to the subject of diversity in the early church, Louth also reminds us that, especially since the Protestant Reformation, scholars have repeatedly explored patristic history, specifically exploring its doctrinal and liturgical diversity. A. Louth, ‘Unity and Diversity in the Church of the Fourth Century’, 1–17. This essay was previously published in Studies in Church History, vol. 32 (1996), 1–17. Other essays in the same volume explore diversity in the early Christian communities with reference to particular doctrines. 18 Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 38. 19 Ibid., 39. 20 Ibid., 151–152. Tanner, in a summary of her ‘new agenda for theology’, provides an especially helpful description of the meaning of Christian identity in light of a postmodern theory of culture. Though quotation of her remarks in the present context is a bit premature, they are enlightening with reference to the conflicted nature of Christianity’s social origins and its continuing development. She explains ‘that identity can no longer be determined by group specificity, sharp cultural boundaries, or homogeneity of practices’. If a postmodern cultural theory is correct, she says Christianity becomes a subculture in a world where cultures generally are more like subcultures than the cultures of modern anthropology, in that they are essentially dependent on relations with others. Bringing together postmodern theories of culture with the idea that the grace of Christ is universal in scope and able to find people in any circumstance no matter how apparently hostile or closed to it, I argued first that Christian communities are neither self-contained nor self-sufficient. … Second, I argued that, while there are boundaries between Christian and non-Christian ways of

208

Notes life, those boundaries are fluid and permeable. … Christian identity is therefore no longer a matter of unmixed purity, but a hybrid affair established through unusual uses of materials found elsewhere. … Third, I suggested that what Christians have in common, what unites them, is nothing internal to the practices themselves. What unites them is concern for true discipleship, proper reflection in human words and deeds of an object of worship that always exceeds by its greatness human efforts to do so. What Christians are all trying to be true to is not some element within or character of Christian practices themselves. As a result, Christian identity is not maintained by anxiously self-concerned effort to protect those elements of that character against corruption; nor does it depend upon the effectiveness of demands for conformity with them.

The only alteration I would make to Tanner’s assessment is to say (and I would assume she would agree) that Christianity constitutes a variety of subcultures in a world of subcultures; indeed, that these Christian subcultures in and among themselves (as well as in relationship to the world of non-Christian and secular subcultures) are in considerable flux and axiological conflict. Shirley Guthrie makes a similar argument in Diversity in Faith, Unity in Christ: Orthodoxy, Liberalism, Pietism, and Beyond (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 36. 21 As even a very small sample of scholarship demonstrates: Anthony J. Saldarini, Matthew’s Christian-Jewish Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), and Social History of the Matthean Community: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches, ed. David L. Balch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991); John Painter, Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999); Robert Eisenham, James the Brother of Jesus (New York: Viking/Penguin Press, 1997); E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1993); Raymond Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple (Ramsey: Paulist Press, 1979); Raymond Brown, ‘Not Jewish Christianity and Gentile Christianity but Types of Jewish/Gentile Christianity’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 45 (1983), 74–79; John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991); and Bart Ehrman’s popularly written Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

1 Isaiah Berlin: a critical description of his thought 1 Isaiah Berlin, Letter to Jean Floud (Nuffield College, Oxford) dated 5 July 1968. Among correspondence Henry Hardy is preparing for publication. 2 I. B., ‘My Intellectual Path’, The First and the Last (New York: New York Review of Books, 1999), 57. Originally published in the New York Review of Books, 14 May 1998. Hardy, in an editorial note published with the essay, explains that the article was written in response to a request from Ouyang Kang at Wuhan University in China, who wished to introduce Berlin’s thought to philosophers and students of philosophy in China in a volume edited by O. Kang and Steve Fuller: Contemporary British and American Philosophy and Philosophers (Beijing: The People’s Press). The essay was subsequently published in Isaiah Berlin’s The First and the Last. Hardy notes that when asked by editors of the Chinese volume for suggestions for who would like to study his work further, he recommended that they see his essays, ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’ (a version of the paper which he read as the first recipient of the Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize), and ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will’, both of which appear in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (hereafter cited as CTH).

Notes 209 3 Heidegger, for instance, opened a lecture on Aristotle – demonstrating his contempt for the historical contextuality for philosophical thought – by saying: ‘He was born, he worked, and he died’. Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1. 4 Perry Anderson, in his review of CTH, claims: Berlin believes that the specific arguments of a theorist are less important than their general outlook, and the origins of ideas less interesting than their echoes. As much as statement of a method, this is the expression of a temperament. Its fruit is an approach best suited to unsystematic, intuitive thinkers who do not require, and perhaps resist, close conceptual reconstruction. Anderson goes on to accuse Berlin of trimming his historical cloth (the thought of Machiavelli, Vico, de Maistre, and others) to fit his own designs. Anderson, ‘England’s Isaiah’, London Review of Books, vol. 12, no. 24 (20 December 1990), 3–7. The essay subsequently was published as a chapter, ‘The Pluralism of Isaiah Berlin’, in Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (London: Verso: 1992), 230–251. While Anderson’s criticism should not, of course, be taken lightly – every intellectual historian, as Berlin himself recognized, has a responsibility to treat his subjects with respect and sympathy, even courtesy, and this requires that one seek to hear the authentic voice and the ideas of the subject, and to reproduce that voice and those ideas as faithfully as possible – it seems clear from Berlin’s own responses to critics that he always sought to do precisely this; and in many cases his understanding of the figures he studied was considerably more subtle than the reading and interpretive skills of his critics. This certainly seems to be the case with respect to Anderson’s criticism. Roger Hausheer’s reply to Anderson refutes every substantive concern raised by Anderson. Hausheer, ‘Reply to Perry Anderson’s Review of CTH in the London Review of Books’, unpublished essay, undated, 3. There is, however, another related factor regarding Berlin’s approach to the history of ideas that deserves comment in the context of Anderson’s criticism. Berlin was not only an historian of ideas, and one who demonstrates extraordinary sensitivity to his subjects and concern for academic integrity. He was also a philosopher of history and culture whose method was to read, at least in part, for provocation and response. Henry Hardy observed recently that in Berlin’s writings what is frequently most remarkable is the creative response of Berlin’s eager, fertile mind responding to his reading of a Vico, or a Machiavelli, or a Herder, and not simply his reporting of their thought. In other words, in the strictest scientific sense of the word ‘catalyst’, the thought of Vico, Machiavelli, or Herder often served as a catalyst to Berlin’s own distinctive genius. As Leon Wieseltier writes, for Berlin ‘serendipity is a method, born of a conviction that one of the instruments of knowledge in a various world is the experience of surprise’. L. Wieseltier, ‘Two Concepts of Secularism’, Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration, eds Edna and Avishaie Margalit (London: Hogarth Press, 1991), 81–82. 5 I. B., ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History’, The Proper Study of Mankind, 436 (hereafter cited as PSM). 6 I. B., ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 2. 7 Ibid., 4. 8 According to Claude J. Galipeau, Berlin first mentions ‘the Ionian fallacy’ – the monistic fault line that runs through the entire philosophical ‘tradition from Plato to Kant, from Descartes to Marx and beyond’ that ‘holds that final and eternal answers to questions about the genuine ends of man can be discovered’ – in Berlin’s 1950 essay ‘Logical Translation’ (published subsequently in Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, 1978). As Galipeau observes, however, although Berlin writes on this subject in the 1950s, ‘the principles which he used to identify it were discovered by him much earlier’. Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin’s Liberalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 50–51.

210 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40

Notes

I. B., ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 5–6. Ibid., 6–7. I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 53. Berlin states this set of assumptions in a variety of contexts, with slightly different emphases. See for example I. B.: ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, 5–6; ‘The Decline of the Utopian Ideas of the West’, CTH, 24–25; ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, 53; and ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will: The Revolt Against the Myth of an Ideal World’ (1975), 209, all of which appear in CTH; ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ (1968–1973), 3–4, in AC; and The Roots of Romanticism (lectures presented in 1965), 21–22. I. B. ‘The Decline of the Utopian Ideas in the West’, CTH, 28–29. I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 52. I. B., ‘The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West’, CTH, 30. Also see Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Liberty, especially section V titled: ‘The Temple Sarastro’, 191–200. I. B., ‘Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century’, Liberty, 66. I. B., ‘The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West’, CTH, 25. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 25. Italics added. I. B. ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 15. I. B., ‘Herzen and his Memoirs’ (1968), AC, 196. Berlin quotes this line from Kant, ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’ (1784), Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8 (Berlin, 1912), 23, in ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 19, and ‘The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West’, 48, both in CTH, which bears the title drawn from its epigram, and in his essay on Montesquieu, AC, to mention only three instances. Berlin places his own distinctive interpretive stamp on Kant’s words used in these various contexts. I. B., ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 19. I. B. ‘The Decline of the Utopian Ideas in the West’, CTH, 20. Ibid., 22. While Huxley’s Brave New World is futuristic, Orwell’s 1984, of course, is not, and Miller’s Crucible warps time with extraordinary effectiveness, looking at the McCarthy era through the lens of the colonial New England ‘witch’ trials. I. B., ‘Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century’, Liberty, 77. Ibid., 28–30. We shall examine this more closely in another context with reference to John Gray’s reading of MacIntyre in contrast to Berlin. Gray, Isaiah Berlin, (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 40–41. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2nd edn, 1984), 157. Ibid., 157. I. B. ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Liberty, 194. Ibid., 149. MacCallum’s critique of Berlin’s pluralism, capable scholar though MacCallum undoubtedly was, unfortunately does not seem capable of seeing the forest for the trees. Gerald C. MacCallum, Jr, ‘Berlin on the Compatibility of Values, Ideals, and Ends’, Ethics, 77 (1966–1967), 139–145. I. B., ‘My Intellectual Path’, The First and the Last, 39. I. B., ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 8. Machiavelli: b. 3 May 1469; d. 21 June 1527. I. B., ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 7. Ibid., 7. I. B., ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, AC, 43–44.

Notes 211 41 Ibid., 44. 42 Ibid., 44–45. 43 Neither, according to Berlin, is the Machiavellian scandal merely that political leaders cannot operate according to the strict morality of personal life, nor that people may be compelled to act for the sake of their society in ways one might find callous or even immoral on an individual level (as one finds described ably in ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr’s classic analysis of individual and collective morality, or as is mistakenly attributed to Berlin by his colleague Noel Annan). Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932); see also Noel Annan’s otherwise perceptive foreword to I. B., PSM, xiii. 44 John Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 45. 45 I. B., ‘Originality of Machiavelli’, AC, 45. 46 Ibid., 45. 47 Ibid., 46. 48 Ibid., 46. 49 Ibid., 46. 50 Ibid., 46. 51 Ibid., 47. 52 Machiavelli, The Discourses, trans. Leslie J. Walker and Brian Richardson, ed. Bernard Crick (London: Penguin, 1970), II.2. 278. 53 Ibid., II.2. 278. 54 I. B., ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, AC, 47; also note the description of ozio, and an attempt to redefine virtue in pragmatic and public terms, in Michael Jinkins and Deborah Bradshaw Jinkins, The Character of Leadership: Political Realism and Public Virtue in Nonprofit Organizations (San Francisco: JosseyBass, 1998), 101–138; ozio in particular, 121. 55 I. B., ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, AC, 47–48. 56 Ibid., 50. 57 And, certainly, Machiavelli’s correspondence supports Berlin’s interpretation of Machiavelli. See, for example, The Letters of Machiavelli, Allan Gilbert, ed. and trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 58 I. B., ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, AC, 58. 59 Ibid., 67. 60 Ibid., 68. 61 Ibid., 69. 62 Ibid., 69–70. 63 Ibid., 71. 64 Ibid., 75. 65 In answer to my question as to whether I. B. makes explicit use of this aspect of Machiavelli’s thought (Discourses, I.4–6), where Machiavelli says that social conflict is contributory to the vigor, the strength, vitality, and political health of the state, Hardy says that Berlin ‘approves of variety, and accepts the resulting tensions between ideals etc., but wants always to manage this tension in such a way as to avoid conflict, as far as possible’. But, Hardy continues, this ‘depends what you mean by “conflict” of course’. Correspondence between H. H. and the author, 28 August 1999. Berlin, as we have already noted, had a horror of physical violence. While he found Romanticism laudable in many respects – and even among the ‘unbridled romantics’ he found much to respect – he feared the potentially conflictual and violent implications of their thought. See, for instance, the last two Mellon lectures, I. B., The Roots of Romanticism, 93–147. As Michael Ignatieff writes, reflecting Berlin’s thought: ‘When the Romantics exalted conflict, then storm and stress and finally violence, they provided the intellectual soil in which the seed of Nazism could take root’. Ignatieff, Berlin, 249. And yet

212

66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

Notes the conflicts of ideas, values, ends and interests also represent to Berlin social health and vigor, because it is a healthy and complex society that produces difference, and a pathological society that enforces uniformity in the name of peace. Bernard Crick, editorial introduction to Machiavelli, Discourses, 34. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.4. (115). Ibid., I.4. (115); also: Victor Anthony Rudowski, The Prince: A Historical Critique (New York: Twayne, 1992), 32. Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 48. Vico: b. 23 June 1668; d. 23 January 1744. I. B., ‘My Intellectual Path’, The First and the Last, 39–40. One of the most fascinating exchanges in Berlin’s writing career occurs over his account of Vico. Hans Aarsleff wrote a negative article, ‘Vico and Berlin’, for the London Review of Books [LRB], to which Berlin responded with courtesy, wit, and extraordinary scholarly acumen. LRB, 5–18 November 1981; Aarsleff’s essay appears on pages 6–7; Berlin’s response to Aarsleff is on pages 7–8. I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 65–66. I. B., ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 9. I. B. ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 65. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, trans. (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), NS 5 (5) (hereafter cited as NS with notations given by paragraph number, with page number of this edition in parentheses). NS 385 (121). Max Harold Fisch, ‘Introduction’, NS, xxxii. Ibid., xxxii. As Berlin observes, Vico’s thought changes considerably over the years. I. B., ‘Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’, AC, 113. NS 185 (71). NS 187 (71). NS 783 (302–303). NS 708 (267). I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 66. NS 829 (315). NS 827 (315). NS 828 (315). NS 831 (315). NS 821 (314). See Berlin’s discussion in I. B., ‘Vico and the Enlightenment’, AC, 126. NS 809 (310). Bernard Knox, in his introduction to Robert Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey, provides a superb brief survey of Homeric textual scholarship, including Vico’s cultural authorship theory, as well as criticism of Vico. Homer, The Odyssey (New York: Viking, 1996), 3–22. I. B., ‘Vico and the Enlightenment’, AC, 126. Ibid., 127; Berlin refers here to Vico, NS 808 (310), and NS 123 (60). NS 122–123 (60). I. B., ‘Vico and the Enlightenment’, AC, 127. I. B. ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 9. Ibid., 9. I. B., ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, AC, 5. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 5. I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 67.

Notes 213 104 105 106 107 108

109 110 111 112 113 114

115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142

I. B. ‘Vico and the Enlightenment’, AC, 127. I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 68. I. B., ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, AC, 6. Ibid., 4. I. B., ‘Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’, AC, 111. E. T.: ‘We demonstrate geometry because we make it; if we could demonstrate the propositions of physics, we should be making it’. Berlin cites: De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), chapter 4. Opere, ed. Roberto Parenti (Naples, 1972), vol. I, p. 83. Fisch, ‘Introduction’, NS, xxx. Ibid., xxx. NS 349 (105). I. B., ‘Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’, AC, 113. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 113. Berlin, indeed, recognizes that Vico, at this point, may also have been influenced by thinkers as far back as St Augustine. In response to an essay by Perez Zagorin (‘Vico’s Theory of Knowledge: A Critique’, in The Philosophical Quarterly [PQ], January 1984, 15–30) Berlin writes: ‘Z [Zagorin], like Croce, traces back anticipations of what he calls Vico’s “maker’s knowledge” to Aquinas and the Italian Renaissance; but surely it is older – at least as old as Augustine. It is repeated in the strong version given it by Vico in the writings of the physician and skeptic Francisco Sanchez (in the sixteenth century)’. I. B., ‘On Vico’, PQ, vol. 35, no. 140 (1985), 281. NS 331 (96). I. B., ‘Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’, AC, 112. Fisch, ‘Introduction’, NS, xxxi. I. B., ‘Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’, AC, 113. NS 349 (104–105). I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 60. I. B., ‘Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’, AC, 116. I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 60. I. B., ‘Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’, AC, 114. Ibid., 117. Fisch, ‘Introduction’, NS, xxxi. Ibid., xxxii–xxxiii. I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 62. I. B., ‘Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’, AC, 116. I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 62. Ibid., 62. I. B., ‘Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’, AC, 116. I. B., ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, AC, 4–5. I. B., ‘Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’, AC, 117. Ibid., 117. I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 64. Ibid., 63–64. Ibid., 64–65. I. B., ‘Vico’s Concept of Knowledge’, AC, 117. Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 80–81. Hamann: b. 27 August 1730; d. 21 June 1788. As even a cursory reading of selected texts in Hamann’s Schriften (Berlin, 1824) will reveal. Walter Leibrecht, God and Man in the Thought of Hamann, James H. Stam and Martin H. Bertram, trans. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 4. Hamann’s work as a theologian, and his relationship to predecessors and influence on successors in theology, the philosophy of religion, and theological hermeneutics,

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is explored in: W. M. Alexander, Johann Georg Hamann: Philosophy and Faith (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966); Walter Lowrie, Johann George Hamann, An Existentialist (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1950) attempts to make Hamann out to be an existentialist, or, at least, a protoexistentialist, a claim that seems rather far-fetched today, even granted Hamann’s undoubted influence on Kierkegaard; Fritz Blanke, Hamann-Studien (Zurich: ZwintliVerlag, 1956); Terence J. German, Hamann on Language and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Stephen N. Dunning, The Tongues of Men: Hegel and Hamann on Religious Language and History, American Academy of Religion Dissertation Series, H. Ganse Little Jr, ed. (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979); Harald Schnur, Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutik Und Ihre Vorgeschichte im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart/Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 1994). 143 I. B., The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (London: John Murray, 1993), recently published in a new edition, I. B., Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, Henry Hardy, ed. (London: Pimlico, 2000). 144 I. B., ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, AC, 6. In her excellent study of Hamann’s thought, Gwen Griffith Dickson maintains that the portrait painted of Hamann by Rudolf Unger, whose ‘monumental’ work, Hamanns Sprachtheorie in Zusammenhang seines Denkens. Grundlegung zu einer Würdigung der Geistesgeschichtlichen Stellung des Magus in Norden (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1905) and Hamann und die Aufklärung. Studien zur Vorgeschichte des romantiscen Geistes im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2nd edn, 1963), cast a long shadow over twentieth-century attempts to understand Hamann; in particular his interpretation of Hamann … as an ‘irrationalist’. Isaiah Berlin’s work on Hamann, undertaken in the 1960s under the inspiration of Unger, but published only recently … sets out Hamann in the context of an absolute rebellion against the Enlightenment and its principles. Dickson goes on to explain that ‘such an unnuanced portrait of Hamann’s reactions to his contemporaries’ as the one put forward by Berlin (she quotes from Magus of the North [MN], which she notes was published after her study was virtually finished, though MN certainly merits a more careful criticism than the one she gives it) is uncharacteristic of contemporary Hamann interpretation. ‘Attention nowadays’, she writes, ‘is focused on the rather more subtle and complicated relationship Hamann had to his times’. But, even if one grants, as Oswald Bayer’s argument does, that Hamann could be described as a ‘radikaler Aufklärer’, as Dickson notes, the character of Hamann’s writings is so different from the general movement of the Enlightenment, especially as represented by its French spokesmen, to deserve to be understood, as Berlin sees them, as counter-Enlightenment (even if Hamann stands within the larger flow of the Enlightenment, as Berlin himself says). While Hamann could be described as a product of the German Enlightenment, he was always above all else a Christian radical. If there is anything Berlin underestimates, it is the significant modification that the adjective ‘Christian’ conveys in relation to Hamann’s role in intellectual history, particularly in relation to pluralism. Dickson’s study provides, however, a carefully researched counterbalance to overstatement, especially of the sort, which interprets Hamann simply as an ‘irrationalist’, as well as a good brief selection of texts in translation. Gwen Griffith Dickson, Johann George Hamann’s Relational Metacriticism (Berlin/ New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 13–14; bibliographical references to Unger, 361. 145 Alexander, J. G. Hamann: Philosophy and Faith, 2–3. 146 Lowrie, J. G. Hamann: An Existentialist, 11.

Notes 215 147 Ibid., 12. 148 I. B., Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 2000), 264–266 (hereafter cited as Three Critics). 149 Ibid., 263–264. 150 Ibid., 264. 151 I. B., ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, AC, 7. 152 Ibid., 7. 153 I. B., The Roots of Romanticism, 34. 154 Ibid., 35. 155 Ibid., 38–39. 156 Ibid., 35. 157 Jacobi’s thought is explored in an excellent essay by B. A. Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation: Essays on Modern Religious Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 79–108. 158 Berlin notes Hamann’s influence on Romanticism in the Mellon lectures and in ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will: The Revolt against the Myth of an Ideal World’, CTH, 207–237; and the ‘Conclusion’ of Magus of the North, 122–128. 159 Berlin is not alone in discerning Kierkegaard’s indebtedness to Hamann. Berlin’s friend Patrick Gardiner notes that Kierkegaard first read Hamann’s writings as a student. Hamann’s ‘uncompromising attacks on rationalism – both in theology and elsewhere – seem to have struck him with the force of revelation’. Patrick Gardiner, Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 66. Walter Lowrie, in his biography of Kierkegaard, traces Kierkegaard’s respect for Hamann, and the influence of Hamann on Kierkegaard’s anti-rationalist theology. Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942), 108–109, 115–117. Which accounts, in part, for why Walter Lowrie, the Kierkegaard scholar, describes Hamann anachronistically as ‘an existentialist’. Lowrie, J. G. Hamann: An Existentialist (1950). Naomi Lebowitz, observes a related stream of thought which Kierkegaard inherited from Hamann. She writes: After his Christian humor and love for the ignorance of Socrates, perhaps what was most to be cherished in Hamann was the term Missverhältnis as a description of the gapped relationship between God and man that cannot be mediated by speculation. (Lebowitz, Kierkegaard: A Life of Allegory [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985], 122) It is precisely this aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought, reliant upon Hamann, that Karl Barth draws on in his epochal Der Römerbrief (1921, 2nd edn) in which Barth argued that God is ‘wholly other’, ‘beyond both this world and the Beyond’, that there is between humanity and God an ‘infinite qualitative difference’. K. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, trans. from 6th edn, 1933), i.e. 99, 117, 136–137. Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2nd revised edn 1976), 115–123. It was perhaps this aspect of Barth’s thought which Berlin had in mind when he spoke of the similarities in Hamann’s antirationalism and ‘existentialism in philosophy or Barthian anti-rationalism in religion’. I. B., Magus of the North, 39. 160 I. B., ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, AC, 7. 161 Lowrie quotes Hamann’s words at this point as he explains that Hamann exhibited a love for pagan wit and wisdom, adopting as his motto Homo sum, nihil humani a me alienum puto, and placing this passage from the comic poet beside

216

162 163 164

165 166

167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182

183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197

Notes St Paul’s words, ‘All things are yours’. Lowrie, J. G. Hamann: An Existentialist, 14–15. Terence J. German, Hamann on Language and Religion, 148. I. B., ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, AC, 8. Ibid., 8. Yet, as Berlin observes, ‘Blake differs from Hamann in regarding the external world as “Dirt upon my feet, No part of me”, and in his general antiempiricism’. Three Critics, 305. Berlin reflects on similarities and difference between the two in ‘Magus of the North’, in Three Critics, 304–307. I. B., Three Critics, 310–312. I. B., ‘Hume and German Anti-Rationalism’, 171 (and footnotes 1 and 2). Berlin cites in this context letters of 22 and 27 April 1787. And, in his comments on Hamann’s indebtedness to Hume’s understanding of belief, Berlin refers to Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1888), 183. I. B., ‘Hume and German Anti-Rationalism’, 172. Ibid., 173. I. B., Three Critics, 286. Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 127. Isaiah Berlin, introduction and interpretive commentary to The Age of Enlightenment, 273. J. G. Hamann, in I. B., The Age of Enlightenment, 274. I. B., Three Critics, 323. Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 129. Ibid., 129. I. B., Three Critics, 326. Ibid., 326. From Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973) to Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997). Herder: b. 25 August 1744; d. 18 December 1803. Karl Barth devotes a full chapter to Herder in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, trans. Brian Cozens and John Bowden, intro. Colin Gunton (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 302. I. B., ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 367. Johann Gottfried Herder, Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Language, and History, trans. and ed., with introduction, by Marcia Bunge (Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1993), ‘Introduction’, 6–7 (hereafter cited as APR). This valuable edition, primarily consisting of Herder’s theological writings, is characterized by a lively translation and excellent bibliographical materials. I. B., ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 413. Ibid., 384. Herder, ‘On Human Immortality’, APR, 58–59. Herder, ‘Yet Another Philosophy of History’, APR, 39. I. B., ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 405. Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin’s Liberalism, 61. I. B., ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 405. Peter Ackroyd, Blake (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 67. I. B., ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 413. Ibid., 414. I. B., The Roots of Romanticism, 61. Bunge, ‘Introduction’, Herder, APR, 8. I. B., ‘The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West’, CTH, 38–39. Italics added. I. B., ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 414–415. Ibid., 373.

Notes 217 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221

222 223 224 225 226 227 228

229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237

Herder, ‘Ideas Toward a Philosophy of History’, APR, 52. I. B., ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 373. Ibid., 374. Ibid., 412. Ibid., 376. Ibid., 377. Ibid., 378. Ibid., 378. Ibid., 379. Ibid., 367. Ibid., 367–368. Herder, ‘Ideas Toward a Philosophy of History’, APR, 84–85. I. B., ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 80–381. Ibid., 381. Ibid., 383. Ibid., 384. I. B., The Roots of Romanticism, 58. I. B., ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 419. Ibid., 389. Ibid., 394. Ibid., 367–368. Ibid., 424. Ibid., 424. Thus F. McEachran writes in his study of Herder: ‘Each level of civilization thus attained rests on a temporary balance (Beharrungszustand) achieved by the forces working at the time and differing, qualitatively, from any period before or after’. McEachran, The Life and Philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder, H. G. Fielder, general editor, ‘Oxford Studies in Modern Languages and Literature’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), 83. I. B., ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 428. Ibid., 429. I. B., ‘The Sense of Reality’, The Sense of Reality, 19. I. B., ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 10. I. B., ‘My Intellectual Path’, The First and the Last, 43. Herder, ‘Yet Another Philosophy of History’, APR, 42. I. B., ‘The Sciences and the Humanities’, AC, 108. Note also, for example, Herder’s scoffing at Hume, Voltaire and William Robertson for judging past centuries by the ‘one pattern of their time’. Herder, ‘Yet Another Philosophy of History’, APR, 42. I. B., ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, AC, 10. Herder, ‘Love and Selfhood (A Postscript to Mr. Hemsterhuis’s Letter About Desire)’, 111; and ‘Ideas Toward a Philosophy of History’, APR, 52–53. Herder, ‘Yet Another Philosophy of History’, APR, 42. Ibid., 42–43. Ibid., 43. Herder, ‘Yet Another Philosophy of History’, APR, 38–39; also Berlin, ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 403. I. B., ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 403. Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 95. In a fascinating essay, Charles Larmore distinguishes between what he calls ‘reasonable disagreement about the good’, which he understands as a hallmark of political liberalism, and the much more fundamentally radical ‘pluralism’ advanced by Berlin. Larmore maintains that while ‘reasonable people tend naturally to disagree about the comprehensive nature of the good life’, this is

218

238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255

Notes not the same as claiming that ‘life affords “a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate, above all equally objective”, that “there are many objective ends, ultimate values, some incompatible with others” ’ (62). The two viewpoints are very different indeed, although John Rawls (and others) mistakenly identifies ‘the expectable inability of reasonable people to agree upon a comprehensive conception of the good’ (of liberalism) as being itself ‘pluralism’ (62). To the contrary, liberalism can (and usually does) assume that there is a singularity of the good, the true and so forth, though it tolerates differences of opinion with regard to these questions for the sake of providing a politically neutral space within which people can live together. Larmore grasps the radicality of Berlin’s pluralism, writing: ‘Whether true or false, pluralism is an eminently controversial doctrine. It has been, as Berlin has emphasized, a peripheral view in the history of Western thought’ (63). Larmore goes on to say that pluralism is utterly incompatible with religious orthodoxy because, in his view, orthodoxy must seek ‘in God the single, ultimate harmonious source of good’ (63). What he does not seem to recognize is the understanding that lies at the heart of Christian orthodoxy, which has preserved the mystery of the Trinity (the plurality of God’s being) in relationship to the mystery of creaturely existence (the plurality of creation). But his distinction between ‘reasonable disagreement about the good’ and ‘pluralism’ is extremely helpful, and points to the fact that while Berlin was undoubtedly a political liberal, his liberalism was grounded in a pluralism (as opposed to a conventional liberal tolerance based on monism or mere relativism) that places it in rather a different category altogether. John Gray, of course, understands this well. Charles Larmore, ‘Pluralism and Reasonable Disagreement’, Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 11, no. 1 (1994), 61–79. See also Leon Wieseltier’s similar line of discussion in ‘Two Concepts of Secularism’, Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration, especially 81–83. Ibid., 407. Ibid., 409. Ibid., 410. Ibid., 429. A. Gillies, Herder (Oxford: Blackwell, 1945), 79. Ibid., 79–80. I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 57. Note, for instance, Herder’s critique of ‘the fiction of the “universal, progressive improvement of the world” which no one believed, at least not the true student of history and the human heart’. ‘Yet Another Philosophy of History’, APR, 44. I. B., ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 410. Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 84. Note, for example, Berlin’s discussion in ‘Historical Inevitability’, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 53–68 (hereafter cited as FEL). I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 57. I. B., ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, AC, 11. I. B. ‘My Intellectual Path’, The First and the Last, 43–44. Herder, ‘Yet Another Philosophy of History’, APR, 43. I. B., ‘Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 10. Ibid., 12. Berlin does not differentiate between cultural relativism, especially in a methodological sense, and cultural relativism as product of liberal ideology, or between ethical relativism and descriptive relativism, meta-ethical relativism and normative relativism. For a helpful brief discussion of relativism, see: Richard B.

Notes 219 Brandt, ‘Ethical Relativism’, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, vol. III (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 75–78. Indeed, in some of Berlin’s most influential essays, such as ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, published in 1964, he still refers to aspects of Herder’s thought as relativistic, though he makes the point that if one describes Herder as relativistic, one must also note that Herder is not a subjectivist. ‘He believes in objective standards of judgement that are derived from understanding the life and purposes of individual societies, and are themselves objective historical structures’. I. B., ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 430. See also Galipeau, who takes up specifically this question noting that although Berlin does not adequately distinguish between epistemological and moral relativism (and Galipeau’s point is debatable), Berlin’s fundamental point is not in jeopardy, ‘that moral pluralism does not amount to moral relativism, to a Babel of moral codes, without the possibility of comparative judgement’. Indeed, Galipeau later writes: Berlin’s stand is quite reasonable. His preference for moderation, prudence, and toleration lead him easily to claim that the best political order is one that accommodates numerous virtues, a plurality of values. … A pluralist can still make moral judgements. (Isaiah Berlin’s Liberalism, 62, 67) 256 Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 221. 257 Although Bellah credits Tocqueville with coining the word ‘individualism’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, L. T. Rede (1827) had used the term several years prior to H. Reeve’s translation of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (eds) The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn 1991) 839. 258 Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 37, where Tocqueville is quoted. See especially: Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1972), 3–5, 20–28, and his comparison of individualism with selfishness, 98–99. 259 Michael Jinkins, ‘John Cotton and the Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Profile of Experiential Individualism in American Puritanism’, Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 43, no. 3 (1990), 321–349. 260 One can discern this anxiety in the face of community, with particular reference to communities of faith, in Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1957), 22–29. 261 I. B., ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 11. 262 I. B., ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’, PSM, 431. 263 Ibid., 431. 264 Ibid., 431. 265 Herder, ‘Yet Another Philosophy of History’, APR, 46. 266 Ibid., 46. 267 A review of this new volume, written by Peter Gay for the Times Literary Supplement [TLS], raises the question as to whether the lectures should have been published at all, taking issue with what he calls Berlin’s ‘highly unreliable map of hilly terrain’. Graeme Garrard, of Cardiff University, answers the most important of Gay’s arguments. See: Peter Gay, ‘Intimations of Partiality’, TLS, 11 June 1999, 3–4. Garrard’s response appeared in a letter to the editor, TLS, 16 July 1999, 17. 268 I. B., ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will: The Revolt Against the Myth of an Ideal World’, CTH, 207–237.

220 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285

Notes I. B., ‘My Intellectual Path’, The First and the Last, 45. I. B., The Roots of Romanticism, 72. I. B., ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will’, CTH, 216. I. B., The Roots of Romanticism, 81. Ibid., 94. Also see Berlin’s essay on Fichte, in I. B., Freedom and Its Betrayal, Henry Hardy, ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, 2002). I. B., ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will’, CTH, 207. Ibid., 207–208. Ibid., 215. I. B., The Roots of Romanticism, 119. Ibid., 119–120. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 147. I. B., ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 19. Ibid., 19.

2 Can Christians be pluralists? 1 I. B., ‘Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century’, Liberty, 91–92. 2 William James, A Pluralistic Universe, Henry Samuel Levinson, intro. (Lincoln NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 303–331. 3 Henry Hardy, ‘Het ware pluralisme’, Nexus, no. 13 (1995), 74–86. This essay is a Dutch translation of an article, ‘Taking Pluralism Seriously’, which has not to date been published in English. Also see Hardy’s article ‘The Compatibility of Incompatibles’, The Independent, 20 February 1993. 4 Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters, ed. Tim Dolin (London: Penguin, 1996), 15. 5 Berlin himself observes the contribution the Protestant Reformation made, however, to the development of historicism and the engagement with pluralism. I. B., ‘The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West’ (32), and ‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought’ (83), both in CTH; also see ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ (3) in AC. 6 I. B., ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 11. 7 This quote, from John Hick’s essay, ‘Christ’s Uniqueness’, Reform (1974), 18, is cited in an essay by Carl Braaten, ‘The Problem of the Absoluteness of Christianity’, Interpretation, vol. 40, no. 4 (October 1986), 348–349, on which we shall reflect in much greater detail later. 8 I. B., ‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought’, CTH, 76–77. 9 Ibid., 78. 10 Ibid., 85. 11 Alan J. Torrance, ‘Theology and Political Correctness’, eds Lawrence Osborn and Andrew Walker, Harmful Religion: An Exploration of Religious Abuse (London: SPCK, 1997), 114. If pluralism can mean nothing more than that approach to religious diversity criticized by Torrance and D’Costa, then it is very difficult to see how many confessional and evangelical Christians could claim to be pluralists. 12 Ibid., 115. 13 Ibid., 115, citing Gavin D’Costa, ‘The Impossibility of a Pluralistic View of Religions’, Religious Studies, vol. 32 (1996) 224–225. Those familiar with D’Costa’s prior work in religious pluralism: Theology and Religious Pluralism

Notes 221

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

(Oxford/New York: 1986), John Hick’s Theology of Religions (Lanham MD/New York/London: 1987), and his widely read essay ‘Theology and Religious Diversity’, in David F. Ford (ed.) The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 274–290, will benefit from his more recent criticism of what he describes as ‘religious pluralism’. Also see D’Costa, The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2000). See D’Costa, The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity, 2–13, 19–52. Berlin struggled with just this issue himself prior to differentiating between relativism and pluralism. See ‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought’, CTH, 70–90. I. B., ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, AC, 9. Gwen Griffith Dickson, Johann Georg Hamann’s Relational Metacricism, 16. I. B., ‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought’, CTH, 76. I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History, CTH, 57. John Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 84. Judy Pearsall (ed.) The Concise Oxford Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 10th edn, 1999), 1486. N. H. G. Robinson, ‘Theodicy’, in Alan Richardson (ed.) Dictionary of Christian Theology (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969), 335. Pearsall, Oxford Dictionary, 1486. I. B., ‘Herzen and His Memoirs’, AC, 196. Herzen, in his essay, ‘From the Other Shore’, describes what Berlin calls ‘a new form of human sacrifice’, that is, ‘of living human beings on the altars of abstraction – nation, church, party, class, progress, the forces of history – these have all been invoked in his day and in ours: if these demand the slaughter of living human beings, they must be satisfied’. Berlin then goes on to quote Herzen at length: ‘If progress is the goal, for whom are we working? Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, draws back; and as a consolation to the exhausted and doomed multitudes, shouting “morituri te salutant”, can only give the … mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth. Do you truly wish to condemn the human beings alive today to the sad role … of wretched galley slaves who, up to their knees in mud, drag a barge … with … “progress in the future” upon its flag? … a goal which is infinitely remote is no goal, only … a deception; a goal must be closer – at the very least the labourer’s wage, or pleasure in work performed’. (I. B., ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 16)

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

I. B., ‘Herzen and His Memoirs’, AC, 211. I. B., ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 15–16. I. B., ‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought’, CTH, 79. I. B., ‘Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism’, CTH, 100. I. B., ‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteeth-Century European Thought’, CTH, 80. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 82. I. B., ‘My Intellectual Path’, First and Last, 50–51. I. B., ‘Giambattista Vico and Cultural History’, CTH, 57. I. B., ‘My Intellectual Path’, The First and the Last, 52. Ibid., 52–53. C. J. Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin’s Liberalism, 59.

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39 Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 34. Gray’s comments here represent a summary of Berlin’s argument in ‘From Hope and Fear Set Free’; see PSM, 91–118. 40 Reinhold Berhardt, Christianity Without Absolutes (London: SCM Press, 1994), 8. 41 In 1986 Carl Braaten published an essay on ‘The Problem of the Absoluteness of Christianity’, in the journal Interpretation. I have returned to this article time and again because it crystallizes many aspects of theology’s attempt to account for religious pluralism in relation to Christian communities of faith, their faithclaims, practices and discourse. In the following section, Braaten’s essay serves as the significant conversation partner, helping to sharpen our focus, to discern more clearly what is at stake theologically in our engagement with Berlin on the subject of pluralism, and bringing us into conversation with a variety of voices in philosophy, theology and religious studies. The full reference for the journal version of this essay, ‘The Problem of the Absoluteness of Christianity’, Interpretation, October 1986, was noted earlier in this chapter. The essay was subsequently published in Braaten, No Other Gospel! Christianity Among the World’s Religions (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), as chapter 2: ‘Absoluteness Is a Predicate of God’s Kingdom’, 29–48. 42 Braaten, ‘Problem of Absoluteness’, Interpretation, 341. 43 Ibid., 341. 44 Ibid., 341. 45 James L. Mays, The Lord Reigns: A Theological Handbook to the Psalms (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994), 5–11. 46 Braaten, 341. 47 Ibid., 342. 48 As Chadwick observes: ‘The focus of unity is the bishop. To forsake him is to forsake the Church, and ‘he cannot have God for his Father who has not the Church for his mother’. Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (London: Penguin Books, 1967), 118–120. 49 Peter Demetz, Introduction, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise, Minna Von Barnhelm, and Other Plays and Writings, Hannah Arendt, foreword, Peter Demetz, ed. (New York: Continuum, 1991), xxvi. 50 Lessing, Nathan the Wise, 231–232. 51 Ibid., 232. 52 Ibid., 233. 53 Braaten, 342. 54 Lessing, Nathan the Wise, 234–235. 55 See Henry Chadwick, ‘Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’, in Edward T. Oakes, German Essays on Religion, The German Library, vol. 54 (New York: Continuum, 1994), 18–20, 27–29, 30–32. 56 Franklin L. Baumer, Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas, 1600–1950 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1977), 200. Baumer made these comments on Lessing’s ‘The Education of the Human Race’, but his reflections are conspicuously appropriate also to Nathan the Wise. 57 Braaten, 342. Berlin uses this same passage as the epigram to chapter 5 in his study of Hamann. He translates Lessing as saying: ‘Historical, contingent truths can never be proofs of rational, necessary truths’. I.B., ‘Magus of the North’, in Three Critics, 280, citing Lessing, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Paul Rilla, vol. 8 (Berlin, 1956), 12. 58 Lessing, Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft (‘On the Proof of the Spirit and the Power’) in G. E. Lessing, Nathan the Wise, Demetz, ed., 311. 59 Braaten, 343. 60 Ibid., 343.

Notes 223 61 H. Richard Niebuhr, ‘Introduction to the Torchbook Edition’, Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, Olive Wyon, trans. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), vol. 1, 8. 62 Braaten, 343. 63 Ernst Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, trans. David Reid (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1971), 45–61, 85–106. Also see James C. Livingston’s discussion of Troeltsch and the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule in Modern Christian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Vatican II (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 304–307. 64 The English title, What is Christianity? (1901) of Harnack’s popular book Das Wesen des Christentums (1900), does not properly convey a sense of his thesis, nor of his singular monistic vision. 65 Ernst Troeltsch, ‘What Does “Essence of Christianity” Mean?’, eds and trans. Robert Morgan and Michael Pye, Ernst Troetsch: Writings on Theology and Religion (Atlanta GA: John Knox Press, 1977), 128–129. 66 Ibid., 133–135. 67 Ernst Troeltsch, ‘The Dogmatics of the History-of-Religions School’, in James Luther Adams and Walter F. Bense, trans. Ernst Troeltsch, Religion in History (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 97. 68 Ibid., 94–95. 69 In particular, see Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions and his ‘Religion and the Science of Religion’, in Writings on Theology and Religion, Morgan and Pye, eds, 82–123. 70 Note, in this context, Troeltsch, ‘The Dogmatics of the History-of-Religions School’, in Religion and History, 91–104; and Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity, 85–106. Also note: Sarah Coakley’s brilliant study Christ Without Absolutes: A Study of the Christology of Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), ‘The Nature of Troeltsch’s Relativism’, 5–44. Coakley traces the various ways in which Troeltsch’s mind changed, and his indecisiveness. Her comments on Troeltsch’s revisions to the article on Harnack, ‘Was heißt, “Wesen des Christentums”?’ are especially insightful in charting Troeltsch’s attempts to settle on either ‘a consistent espousal of epistemological relativism in the case of doctrinal truth, admitting that this might, in principle, lead to a range of disjunctive “truths” ’ or ‘a continued appeal to a unified teleological metaphysic’ (30–31). Bellah writes, approvingly, of Troeltsch that for him our own religion is our historical fate, but that it has no more claim to absoluteness or finality than any other. This is not to say that all religious symbol systems are of equal value and meaning, for clearly they are not, but rather that their relative meaning and value must be derived from their involvement in human existence, not from some transphysical fiat. (Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays in a Post-Traditionalist World [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991], originally published New York: Harper and Row, 1970, 205. 71 Braaten, 343. Welch’s assessment of Troeltsch is similar. Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Volume 2: 1870–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 266. 72 Braaten, 344. 73 Groll’s study Ernst Troeltsch und Karl Barth – Kontinuität im Widerspruch, Beiträge zur evangelischen Theologie, Band 72 (Munich: Christian Kaiser, 1976) served originally as his thesis in Munich, 1974, under the title ‘Der theologiegeschichtliche Zusammenhang von Ernst Troeltsch und Karl Barth’. See also: Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of the Word of God, G. W. Bromiley

224

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86

87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

99

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and T. F. Torrance, eds, G. W. Bromiley, trans., vol. I, no. 1 (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1975), 143–150. Braaten, 344. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, Edwyn C. Hoskyns, trans. (Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 29–30. Ibid., 204–205. Braaten, 344. Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 39. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 79. Braaten, 344. Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 77. Ironically it is in Bultmann’s 1950 essay, used to preface the fiftieth anniversary edition of Harnack’s Wesen issued by the Ehrenfried Klotz Verlag, Stuttgart, that Bultmann reminds us of just how much he and Barth shared, despite their obvious and significant differences. Rudolf Bultmann, ‘Introduction’, in Adolf von Harnack, What is Christianity?, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), ix–xviii. Braaten, 345. Ibid., 345. Perhaps this is nowhere more apparent than in Barth’s witty and iconoclastic conversation with Alfred Blatter on the subject of liberalism, originally for German Swiss radio. Karl Barth, Final Testimonies, Eberhard Busch, ed., Geoffrey W. Bromiley, trans. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 31–40. Also: Karl Barth, Letters: 1961–1968, ed. and trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 3–4, 8 n5, 237–242, 274, 343–345. To emphasize Barth’s enduring resistance to categorization in later years is not meant to imply that he came to it late. In many ways, his famous statements against the ‘strait-jacket’ of systematic theology (1931), noted in Busch’s biography, are characteristic of a person who defied the soul-stultifying rigidity of those who retreat from the messiness of reality – and this includes the messiness of history. E. Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, John Bowden, trans. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 211–212. Braaten, 347. Ibid., 347. Ibid., 347. Ibid., 348. John Hick, God and the Universe of Faith: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1973), 130–131. Ibid., 131; cf. Braaten, 348. Braaten, 348. William L. Rowe, ‘Religious Pluralism’, Religious Studies, vol. 35, no. 2 (June 1999), 141. John Hick, The Rainbow of Faiths: Critical Dialogue on Religious Pluralism (London: SCM Press, 1995), 28–29. Rowe, ‘Religious Pluralism’, Religious Studies, 141. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 141, citing George I. Mavrodes, ‘Polytheism’, in Thomas D. Senor (ed.) The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 261–286. Also see Hick’s An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Ibid., 142, quoting from George I. Mavrodes, ‘Response to Hick’, Faith and Philosophy, vol. 14 (1997), 289–294. Mavrodes asks several important questions relative to Hick’s statement that ‘the Real an sich’ is not ‘an item in our experi-

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100 101 102 103 104

ence’. What, then, is the epistemological status of ‘the Real’? asks Mavrodes. ‘How does it get into our discourse at all?’ (290–291). Ibid., 142, again quoting Mavrodes, ‘Response to Hick’, 290. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 143. Cited by Braaten, 348–349, from John Hick, ‘Christ’s Uniqueness’, Reform (1974), 18. In striking contrast to Hick’s relativism we can place Raimundo Pannikar’s religious pluralism, as his views are described in Rowan Williams’ fascinating essay, ‘Trinity and Pluralism’. Williams writes: To affirm the plurality of religions in the way Pannikar does is actually the opposite of being a relativist and holding that all religious positions are so conditioned by their context that they are equally valid and equally invalid. That would be to take up a position outside all historical standpoints and real traditions, and Pannikar in effect denies that this can be done. He is himself entirely committed to believing certain things about the way reality is – that is, he is committed to an ontology. And the heart of this ontology could be summarized by saying that differences matter. (Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology [Oxford: Blackwell, 2000], 169)

Williams is specifically in conversation with two essays by Pannikar: The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man: Icon – Person – Mystery (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 1973); and ‘The Jordan, the Tiber, and the Ganges: Three Kairological Moments of Christic Self-Consciousness’, in The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, eds John Hick and Paul Knitter (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 1987). Pannikar’s 1973 essay is an extended meditation on the plurality of God, and remains, some thirty years after its publication, profoundly moving and theologically challenging. Pannikar’s discussion of God the Father of the Son is particularly reminiscent of Barth’s Romans at this point. See also Timothy Gorringe’s Karl Barth Against Hegemony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 58. Gorringe is quoting Barth’s Epistle to the Romans (English Translation), 422, 357. 105 While Reinhold Bernhardt has portrayed Hick as a pluralist, and not a relativist, his analysis does not take into account the role monism plays in forcing us to choose between relativism and absolutism. Thus his critique of Hick, though careful and fair, fails at the crucial point to understand the problem of Hick’s position. Bernhardt’s own pluralism is promising, however, at least in its awareness that no one can stand outside of history to make comparative judgements with reference to the relative truthfulness or value or soteriological efficacy of various religious faiths. R. Bernhardt, Der Absolutheitsanspruch des Christentums. Von der Aufkärung bis zur Pluralistischen Religionstheologie (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gerd Mohn, 1990). The book represents the published version of his Heidelberg dissertation; with reference to Hick, note particularly 199–225. Also see Bernhardt’s study for a popular Christian audience, Zwischen Größenwahn, Fanatismus und Bekennermut. Für ohne Absolutheitsanspruch (Stuttgart, 1994), the English translation of which is Christianity Without Absolutes (London: SCM Press, 1994). In Christianity Without Absolutes, for instance, Bernhardt speaks of ‘a very different way: Christianity without a claim of absoluteness’, 115–142. 106 Again, as we have already observed, we should remember that any claim to a spiritual or theological hegemony would, for Barth, be idolatrous, i.e. the absolutizing of the relative. See Gorringe, Karl Barth Against Hegemony, 1–23, and especially 55–72.

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107 Robert Morgan, ‘Troeltsch and Christian Theology’, Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religions, eds and trans. Robert Morgan and Michael Pye (London: Duckworth Press, 1977), 212. Cited in Braaten, 349. 108 Ibid., 349. 109 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Ethics, Keith Crim, trans. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), 87. Cf. Braaten, 349. 110 Braaten, 349. 111 Ibid., 350, citing Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 109. 112 Ibid., 350. 113 Ibid., 350, again citing Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 110. See also: Pannenberg, Grundlagen der Ethik: Philosophischtheologische Perspektiven (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1996), 73–94. 114 Braaten, 351. One can discern a profound similarity between Herder and Troeltsch precisely at this point. In Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, McEachran explains, Herder ‘describes the rise and spread of Christianity and distinguishes between the original religion “of ” Jesus … and the religion “about” Jesus (an Jesu) into which the deadening asceticism of the medieval church transformed it’. McEachran, Life and Philosophy of Herder, 72. 115 I have already noted Williams and Pannikar. Daniel presents his trinitarian reflections in an incisive and provocative essay, ‘Postmodern Concepts of God and Edwards’s Trinitarian Ontology’, in Sang Hyun Lee and Allen C. Guelzo (eds) Edwards in Our Time: Jonathan Edwards and the Shaping of American Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 45–64; and Daniel’s The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in Divine Semiotics (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 102–129. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity, whether in these provocative formulations (Williams, Pannikar and Daniels), or in one of the social models (Alan Torrance, Persons in Communion: Trinitarian Description and Human Participation [Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1996]; Eberhard Jüngel, especially in his Gottes Sein Ist Im Werden: Verantwortliche Rede vom Sein Gottes bie Karl Barth, Eine Paraphrase [Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 4th edn, 1986], also deserves mention) recognizes and attempts to come to terms with the mystery of ‘the other’ not only as God, but within God. 116 This understanding of the gift of humanity given by God in Christ to the followers of Christ is expressed for Reformed Christians by John Calvin in his controversy with Andreas Osiander. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), III, xi, 5–12. 117 The phrase ‘perspectival horizons’ intentionally evokes Gadamer’s understanding: ‘The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point’. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, revised trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 2nd, revised edn, 1989), 302–303. 118 Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 1. 119 Ibid., 2–3. 120 Ibid., 30–40. 121 Ibid., 32. 122 ‘Theological Declaration of Barmen’, The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA): Part I: Book of Confessions (Louisville: Office of the General Assembly, 1996), 257. 123 Correspondence from Henry Hardy to Michael Jinkins, 2 February 2000, p. 4.

Notes 227 124 This phrase emerges from Karl Barth’s masterful analysis of federal Calvinism. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, eds G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1936), IV, 1, p. 65. 125 Colin Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 1. 126 At this point, particularly, Stephen Daniel’s thought (previously cited) offers a deepening of and extension beyond the recovery of the social trinity and takes us significantly further than the kind of doctrine of creation one finds in, for instance, Jürgen Moltmann’s 1984–1985 Gifford Lectures, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation, Margaret Kohl, trans. (London: SCM Press, 1985), 72–103. 127 In some sense, it may thus be argued, all analogy is analogia entis. To yearn for something safer is to court a denial of reality itself. 128 I. B., ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH. 17–18. 129 Ibid., 18.

3 The application of Isaiah Berlin’s understanding of social conflict to communities of faith 1 Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ‘Five Essays on Liberty: Introduction’, 43. Previously published in the introduction to FEL, li. 2 Virtually every church’s literature of piety and polity contains such examples, from the Sarum Breviary to the Book of Common Prayer, from St Benedict’s Rule to the polity statements of the Presbyterian Church (USA). 3 Again, I am borrowing Karl Barth’s language from his critique of federal Calvinism, in Church Dogmatics IV.1.65. For a particularly perceptive analysis of Barth’s understanding of the triune being of God, and an analysis of the Platonic theory of methexis and ‘the very different notion of participation identified by the New Testament as koinonia’, see Alan Torrance, Persons in Communion: Trinitarian Description and Human Participation (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1996), 251–262. 4 Nicholas Rescher, Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 2. 5 Ibid., 4. 6 Ibid., 4. 7 Ibid., 5. 8 Ibid., 7. 9 Ibid., 13. 10 Ibid., 193. 11 Ibid., 11. 12 Ibid., 192. 13 Ibid., 191–192. 14 Ibid., 193. 15 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr articulates this fear of ‘Balkanization’ precisely in The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1992), and sees multiculturalism as a force for social disintegration. Schlesinger reflects a surprising lack of understanding of history (especially for a historian) when he writes: The United States had a brilliant solution for the inherent fragility of a multiethnic society: the creation of a brand-new national identity, carried

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Notes forward by individuals who, in forsaking old loyalties and joining to make new lives, melted away ethnic differences. (13)

16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30 31 32 33

Schlesinger seems to equate a Western European hegemony in North America which, on the whole, disregarded or degraded the ethnicity of others, with ‘the forsaking’ of ‘old loyalties and joining to make new lives’, which ‘melted away ethnic differences’. His revisionist history is breathtaking. Western Europeans enjoyed the celebration of their ethnic and racial heritages and the institutionalization of their cultures in the New World, while the recognition and celebration of other ethnicities, for instance Asian and African, were seen as disruptive and divisive. An argument similar to Schlesinger’s is developed in other popular essays, for example in a report by John Powers, ‘Coming Apart’, Detroit Free Press, 10 December 1995, 13–16, which favorably cites Schlesinger. A far more compelling and convincing analysis of multiculturalism and its political implications is provided in Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the ‘Politics of Recognition’, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), a volume which includes the title essay by Taylor and commentary by Amy Gutmann (editor of the volume), Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer and Susan Wolf. Rescher, Pluralism, 194. Ibid., 194. Ibid., 191–192: in contrast to John Rawls’ ‘Ideal Social Contract Theory’, and the ‘Ideal Process Theory’ of Habermas, Rescher advances what he calls a ‘Pragmatic Optimization Theory’. See Rawls’ Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 1996), for his continuing development of his earlier ideas; note particularly his ‘Reply to Habermas’, 372–434. Ibid., 187–188. Rescher quotes from Berlin’s ‘Apotheosis of the Romantic Will’, CTH, 207–208. ‘There Must Be A Better World Somewhere’, written by Pomus and Rebennack. Bernard Levin, A World Elsewhere (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994), 5. Ibid., 5. John Carey (ed.) The Faber Book of Utopias (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), xi. Ibid., xi. I. B., CTH, 7; AC, 27–28; also I. B., Karl Marx, Alan Ryan, introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn, 1978/1996), 71–73. While George Orwell’s 1984 and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1871) represent clear challenges to utopian social thought, a recent novel for young adults, The Giver, provides a startling contemporary warning against the charms of a ‘perfect’ world. Lois Lowry, The Giver (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993). Lewis Coser, Men of Ideas: A Sociologist’s Vision (New York: Free Press, 1965, 1970), 100. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, Ephraim Fischoff, trans. (Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1963), 65. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, Olive Wyon, trans. (New York: Macmillan, 1931); note vol. 2, in particular. The parenthetical remark is quoted from the introduction by H. Richard Niebuhr to Troeltsch, Social Teaching, vol. 1, 10. Coser, Men of Ideas, 100. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 101. For a member of a religious group, to call for sanity and humanity, tolerance and respect for others in a time of high reactivity, paranoia and sectarian hatred, can be tantamount to subversion or open rebellion. M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1997), 6.

Notes 229 34 In a sense, then, the critique of sects and utopias for Berlin and Coser may go even further than Arendt’s perceptive critique of ‘totalitarian organization’. Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1951), 61–62. Berlin, in ‘Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century’, observes the totalitarian attempt to obliterate entire categories of questions by the use of social organization and propaganda. Berlin, FEL, 21–40. While many sects and utopias do not become totalitarian, there is a dangerous tendency toward totalitarianism woven into even the best sect or utopia. 35 Certainly the editorial essay, ‘Against an Immoral Tide’, by R. Albert Mohler Jr, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, resonates with sectarian, as opposed to churchly, sentiments, reminding one of the third century dispute involving Cyprian of Carthage, Novatian and Cornelius of Rome, when the church, in the words of Henry Chadwick, addressed the conflict in the early church ‘between the primitive conception of the Church as a society of saints and the now growing view (which Callistus had advocated) that it should be a school for sinners’. Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (London: Penguin, 1967), 119. New York Times, 19 June 2000, A23. In many ways the present battle in the Southern Baptist Church, and comparable dissension in the traditional mainline denominations, United Methodist and Presbyterian Church (USA) included, is an extension of the battle royal between fundamentalists and modernists in the 1920s and 1930s. See Joe Edward Barnhart, The Southern Baptist Holy War: The Self-Destructive Struggle for Power within the Largest Protestant Denomination in America (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1986), and Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 36 This is especially apparent when speaking of religious sectarian fundamentalism. There is not necessarily a sense of utopia expressed within the various Christian fundamentalist sects, but there is a consistent rejection of the outside world in the name of their God. Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (London: Vintage, 1998), 455–456. Also see: Martin E. Marty and R. S. Appleby, The Fundamentalism Project (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3 vols; George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), and James Barr, Fundamentalism (London: SCM Press, 1977), 2–10, 29–39. 37 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2nd edn, 1984), 157 (hereafter cited as AV). My discussion here parallels the more extensive treatment I have given to this subject contrasting the Aristotelian (in the ‘Nichomachean’ and ‘Eudemian Ethics’) and the Machiavellian concepts of virtue, and comparing both with the idea of righteousness in the Hebrew Psalms, in a monograph published as, ‘The Virtues of the Righteous in Psalm 37: An Exercise in Translation’, in Psalms and Practice, Stephen Breck Reid, ed. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2001), 164–201. 38 See, for example, Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture, 38–58. 39 MacIntyre, AV, 157. 40 Ibid., 157. 41 I refer the reader again to the more extensive discussion of Machiavelli in chapter 1. The reference here is to his Discourses, I.3.–I.6. Also note Crick’s comments in his introduction to the Discourses, 34. And see: M. I. Finley’s superb historical study, Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), which examines the causes of the breakdown of politics

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in classical Greece and Rome. Note particularly chapter 5: ‘Political Issues and Conflict’, 97–121. Finley also writes of the inconsistency between the theoretical and the historical among Greek political thinkers: ‘Greek political thinkers sought the ideal state in which conflict would be transcended in the interest of the good life for all, but they insisted that no actual states, past or present, attained or even approached that goal’ (2). 42 I.B., ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, AC, 25–79. 43 Lewis Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (New York: The Free Press, 1956) (hereafter cited as FSC). 44 Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (New York: William Morrow, Quill, 1987), 14. The ultimate effect of Sowell’s work, in relation to Berlin’s, is largely to make apparent the complexities of plurality at the most fundamental ‘pre-analytical cognitive’ level (to borrow Sowell’s term). It is perhaps worth noting also Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) in which Fish argues (in the words of Paul J. Griffiths, who reviewed the book for Christian Century) that [t]here are … no neutral principles, no standards not already inflected with substantive commitments about the way the world is – and thus no neutral tools for the resolution of disagreements between devotees of deeply different views of the world. (Paul J. Griffiths, ‘Nobody’s Neutral’, Christian Century, 24–31 May 2000) 45 Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 1–2, and especially 5–25. 46 MacIntyre, AV, 157. 47 For Dulles’ critique of Barth’s ecclesiology, ‘The Church as Herald’, see Models of the Church (New York: Image Books/Doubleday, expanded edn, 1987), 76–88. See also Robert S. Paul, The Church in Search of Its Self (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), 173–175, 200–201, 255–257. 48 Reinhold Hütter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 107–108; his remarks in this context continue through p. 110. 49 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, eds, G. W. Bromiley, trans., vol. II, no. 1 (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1957), 60–61. I am grateful to my colleague Cynthia Rigby for her reflections on Hütter’s comments in a compelling paper, ‘On Earth as It Is in Heaven: Toward a Reformed and Feminist Eschatology by Way of the Ascended Christ’, which she presented at ‘Eskatologi og den Teologiske Diskurs’ (‘Eschatology and Theological Discourse’), a conference sponsored by the Theological Faculties of the Universities of Copenhagen, Aarhus and Lundt, in Karrebæksminde, Denmark, 16–19 May 2000. 50 MacIntyre, AV, 158. 51 Ibid., 159. Note in this context MacIntyre’s observations regarding Aristotle’s service ‘of that Macedonian royal power which destroyed the city-state as a free society’. 52 Ibid., 159. 53 Ibid., 160. 54 The choice of phrase here is deliberately reminiscent of Jacques Derrida, ‘Tout autre est tout autre’, (‘Every other (one) is every (bit) other’), in his The Gift of Death, David Wills, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 82. For an extended examination of this idea, see my study, The Church Faces Death: Ecclesiology in a Post-Modern Context, 14–27.

Notes 231 55 Robert Bellah et al. raise the question of the relationship between pluralism and the good society in their 1991 study, affirming that ‘pluralism does not contradict the idea of a good society, for the latter would be one that would allow a wide scope of diversity and would draw on resources from its pluralistic communities in discerning those things that are necessarily matters of the good of all’ (9). However, the question of the plurality of ultimate goods, and the conflict between incommensurable values, is not dealt with, nor, perhaps, understood. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven M. Tipton, The Good Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). 56 I. B., ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Liberty, 214. 57 I. B., ‘Introduction’, Liberty, 43. 58 Martin E. Marty, ‘An Exercise in Civility’, Christian Century, vol. 116, no. 3, (27 January, 1999), 78. 59 Ibid., 78. 60 Rescher, Pluralism, 5. 61 Berlin, indeed, writes: ‘It is worth remarking … that the history of ideas offers few examples of so dramatic a change of outlook as the birth of the new belief not so much in the inevitability, as in the value and importance, of the singular and the unique, of variety as such’. I.B., CTH, 56. 62 This understanding of Christ is advanced, for instance, in Bonhoeffer’s lectures on Christology. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, John Bowden, trans. (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). Note the introductory essay, ‘Bonhoeffer’s Christology’, by Edwin H. Robinson, 15–17, and Bonhoeffer’s discussion of ‘The Christological Question’, 27–37. 63 Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God: The Doctrine of God, Margaret Kohl, trans. (London: SCM Press, 1981), 17, 19–20. 64 See, for example, John Macmurray, Persons in Relation: Volume II of the Form of the Personal (London: Faber and Faber, 1961) 15–43. 65 Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 1–2, 4–6. 66 Ibid., 39–42. 67 Ibid., 42. 68 Ibid., 42. 69 A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, LXII. 70 Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 42. 71 Ibid., 43. 72 The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn, 1991), 806. 73 Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 49. 74 Ibid., 49. 75 Ibid., 50. 76 Ibid., 50. 77 Ibid., 51. 78 Ibid., 50. 79 I. B., CTH, 67. 80 Ibid., 67. 81 Ibid., 67. 82 Note, e.g., Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, ed., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), especially Hobsbawm’s introduction, 1–14, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s essay, ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’, 15–41, and David Cannadine’s essay, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”, c. 1820–1977’, 101–164. 83 Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 52. 84 Ibid., 52.

232 85 86 87 88

89

90 91 92 93 94 95 96

97

Notes Ibid., 53. Ibid., 53. I. B., CTH, 68. Indeed Gray observes that ‘[w]hen practical and theoretical reason run out, as they must when we are confronted by incommensurables, we have no choice but to act. In this respect the very expression “radical choice” may be oxymoronic, for in the undecidable dilemmas marked in Berlinian pluralism, our option can only be to act, not to engage in further reflective deliberations, as the language of choice-making suggests. There is in Berlin’s idea of radical choice arising from conflict among incommensurables a decisionist, voluntarist, or existentialist element that distinguishes it from all, or virtually all, forms of liberal rationalism’. Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 71. Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 7–9. As Gray writes: ‘By rationalism is here meant the view that philosophical inquiry can not merely illuminate, but also provide solutions for, the dilemmas we confront in moral and political practice. This rationalist view Berlin has always resolutely rejected’ (7). I.B., ‘The Purpose of Philosophy’, in The Power of Ideas, Henry Hardy, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 33–35. Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 7. Ibid., 8. As his essay, ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, AC, 1–24, and his writings on Vico, Hamann and Herder, illustrate; for instance, in the new publication, Three Critics of the Enlightenment. Ibid., 10. I.B., ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’, Liberty, 234. I.B., ‘Vico and Herder: Introduction’, Three Critics, 8. Ibid., 8–9. A theological interpretation to the social formation of persons is well established, for instance, in C. Ellis Nelson’s recent essay, ‘Congregational Reorientation’, in Changing Churches: The Local Church and the Structures of Change, Michael Warren, ed., (Portland: Pastoral Press, 2000), under the heading of ‘Self-Formation’, 69–73. Robert Bellah remarks that religious symbols are the way man has related himself, from the beginning of his existence as a cultural being, to the conditions of his existence. Through religious symbols man has symbolized to himself his own identity and the order of existence in terms of which his identity makes sense. ‘These symbols’, he continues, are not ‘made up’ by the human ego or deduced by rational reflection. They are born out of the tragedy and the suffering, the joy and the victory of men struggling to make sense out of their world. … The symbols, though they come to each one of us as individuals from outside, are nevertheless always the product of specifically human experience. (Bellah, Beyond Belief, 195)

98 To some degree, at this point, Berlin’s anthropology parallels that of the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers. See Karl Jaspers, Philosophy and the World: Selected Essays and Lectures, E. B. Ashton, trans. (Washington DC: Regnery Gateway, 1963), 131–133. 99 Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 73. 100 I.B., ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, CTH, 11. 101 Ibid., 11. 102 Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 71–72.

Notes 233 103 104 105 106 107 108

Ibid., 72. I.B., CTH, 12–13. Ibid., 13–14. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 9. Donald W. Shriver Jr, in his fascinating study An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 65. Sociologists, and theologians, have cause to pause before speaking of the benefits of social conflict. 109 Coser, FSC, 8. Louis R. Pondy provides a more subtle and complex description of conflict, resisting the urge to define. He examines a variety of what he calls ‘models’ of conflict (‘bargaining’, ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘systems’) observing that conflict relationships are ordinarily made up of ‘a sequence of interlocking conflict episodes; each episode exhibits a sequence or pattern of development, and the conflict relationship can be characterized by stable patterns that appear across the sequence of episodes’ (347–348). It is this orientation that, in Pondy’s words, ‘forms the basis for a working definition of conflict’. Further, and of crucial importance for our analysis of social conflict, he writes: Conflict may be functional as well as dysfunctional for the individual and the organization; it may have its roots either within the individual or in the organizational context: therefore, the desirability of conflict resolution needs to be approached with caution. (348) The essentially hostile and violent sense of conflict in Coser’s definition is, therefore, unnecessary. Finally, for Pondy, Conflict is intimately tied up with the stability of the organization, not merely in the usual sense that conflict is a threat to stability, but in a much more complex fashion: that is, conflict is a key variable in the feedback loops that characterize organizational behavior. (348)

110

111 112 113 114

Pondy, ‘Organizational Conflict: Concepts and Models’, in Henri L. Tosi and W. Clay Hamner (eds) Organizational Behavior and Management: A Contingency Approach (Chicago: St Clair Press, 1977). Coser’s analysis of such figures as Talcott Parsons is especially insightful. Coser, FSC, 21. Coser refers to several studies by Parsons, including The Structure of Social Action (Glencoe IL: Free Press, 1949), and his essay, ‘Racial and Religious Differences as Factors in Group Tensions’, in L. Bryson, L. Finkelstein and R. M. MacIver (eds) Approaches to National Unity (New York: Harper Bros, 1945), and ‘Social Classes and Class Conflict’, American Economic Review, vol. XXXIX (1949), 16–26. Parsons’ medical analogy of conflict as a kind of social illness ‘in need of treatment’ coincides with the interpretation of conflict we have seen from Platonism and Aristotelianism onward. Coser, FSC, 19. The 1921 Introduction to the Science of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) by R. E. Park and E. W. Burgess devoted ‘no less than seventy pages’ to the ‘discussion of conflict’. Georg Simmel, Conflict, Kurt H. Wolff, trans. (Glencoe IL: Free Press, 1955). Coser, FSC, 19–20. Ibid., 18. Coser is quoting Charles Cooley, Social Process (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1918), 39. One version of this process is represented by dialectical materialism. See Berlin’s discussion in Karl Marx, 33–45.

234 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132

133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145

146 147 148

Notes Ibid., 20. I. B., ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will’, CTH, 225–226. Also see Berlin’s discussion in Roots of Romanticism, 94–97. Coser, FSC, 35. Ibid., 35–36. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 47. This is particularly well illustrated in part four, ‘Listening to the “Complaints of the People” ’, in Edward Schillebeeckx, The Church With a Human Face: A New and Expanded Theology of Ministry, John Bowden, trans. (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 209–258. Coser, FSC, 48. Ibid., 48–49. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 49, quoting John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Modern Library), 226. Ibid., 49–50. Ibid., 50. Bernard Crick, In Defense of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1972), 128. The Economist explores this issue specifically with reference to the coup against Fiji’s elected government in two articles, ‘Forlorn Fiji: Peace and Stability Will Not Return until the Country’s Ethnic Groups Agree to Share Power’ (23), which explores similarities between the crisis in Fiji and others in Yugoslavia, India and Ireland, and ‘Fiji: That Man Again’ (40–41), 22 July 2000. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 128. It is no accident that it was Crick who comprehended so clearly the wisdom of Machiavelli’s praise of political discord. Crick (ed.) ‘Introduction’, Machiavelli, Discourses, 34. Rescher, Pluralism, 5. See I.B., SR, ‘The Sense of Reality’, 37–39; ‘Political Judgement’, 40–53; and ‘Philosophy and Government Repression’, 72–76. Coser, FSC, 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 70. Thus the varying reactions among self-identified orthodox Christians to Don Cupitt’s infamous Taking Leave of God (New York: Crossroad, 1981), and to John A. T. Robinson’s (to many, heretical) reconceptualization of Christian faith in his Honest to God (London: SCM Press, 1963). The reactions were powerful to both, but they were quite different. Coser, FSC, 70–71. Coser himself makes much the same observation, 71. One only has to look at a handful of studies to see the ways in which the church’s conflicts with heresy, heterodoxy and over-syncretic influences have decisively shaped the church’s life, faith and practice. See for instance: Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);

Notes 235

149

150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168

Henri Crouzel, Origen, A. S. Worrall, trans. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989); Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979); David Christie-Murray, A History of Heresy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); G. L. Prestige, Fathers and Heretics (London: SPCK Press, 1940). An examination of the intense fourth-century controversy over the nature of the Trinity and the relationship between the humanity and divinity of Christ certainly bears witness to this fact. See for example J. N. D. Kelly’s fascinating discussion, Early Christian Doctrines (London: A&C Black, 5th, revised edn, 1977), 223–343; and St Basil, The Letters, Roy J. Deferrari, trans. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1926/1972), vol. I, xxv–xxxii. I. B., SR, 72. Ibid., 72. Note, for example, Roger Cohen’s report, ‘German Faults “Silence” about Attacks on Immigrants’, New York Times, 1 August 2000, A&E. Coser, FSC, 73. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 104. I. B., ‘Political Ideas in the 20th Century’, Liberty, 93. Coser, FSC, 118. Ibid., 118. I. B., ‘Historical Inevitability’, Liberty, 94–165. I. B., AC, 196. Coser, FSC, 128. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 148–149. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 149. I. B., CTH, 17. One of the most poignant and incisive studies of ministry in Christian congregations parallels Berlin’s understanding of social reality at this point, that of James E. Dittes, When the People Say No: Conflict and the Call to Ministry (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). He writes on p. 19: Indeed, most ministry is probably in this chaotic, interim mode. Seldom in stable balance, the ecology is more often in a state of disruption, which means it is always evolving. Most of us live by the light-at-the-end-of-thetunnel myth that points to a time when all will be stable, and one can settle down to ministry with partners responding as expected. In fact, a yes response, an apparently stable partnership [between minister and congregation], may be the most resistive and denying of all; it may well represent a sophisticated encapsulation of the minister by really shackling ministry, keeping it in a box, keeping it from reaching out effectively into disruption. Ministry is not in answering questions or in having questions answered. Ministry is precisely in the creative process of continually reshaping questions and reshaping answers. Ministry is in the process of re-calling, reforming, revisioning, ever peeling off what is partial and encrusted in human resignation and contentment with forms so as to leave room for the boiling vitality of God’s creative, redemptive spirit.

4 Is toleration a Christian virtue? 1 Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (London: Vintage, 1994), 261–262.

236

Notes

2 Bernard Williams, ‘Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?’, in David Heyd (ed.) Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 18. 3 ‘As Voltaire put it: “What is toleration? It is the appurtenance of humanity. We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other for our follies” ’. John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (London: Polity Press, 2000), 3 (hereafter cited as Two Faces). 4 While it is not uncommon to make a distinction between toleration and tolerance, as Glenn Tinder has in his study, Tolerance and Community (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), to understand toleration primarily in terms of religious freedom or freedom of the conscience, and tolerance as the more general term, I make no such distinction in this essay, but use the terms interchangeably. 5 There were, of course, philosophers influenced by other aspects of the Enlightenment, whose monism predicated against tolerance. For instance, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), whose positivism is also grounded in the Enlightenment, saw no reason why freedom of opinion should be allowed in morality and politics any more than it is permitted in mathematics. See I. B., ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will’, CTH, 208. 6 I. B., ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’, Liberty, 228. 7 Ibid., 229. 8 John Locke, Political Essays, Mark Goldie, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ‘An Essay on Toleration’, 144. Also see Mario Montuori, John Locke: On Toleration and the Unity of God (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1983). 9 Ibid., 137; also see ‘Toleration B’, 247–248. 10 Cf. J. B. Schneewind, ‘Bayle, Locke, and the Concept of Toleration’, in Mehdi Amin Razavi and David Ambuel (eds) Philosophy, Religion, and the Question of Intolerance (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 8–10. 11 Tracy Strong, in a perceptive essay, analyzes the privatization of religious faith in liberalism, especially criticising Locke’s conception of toleration, based as it is on a dichotomy of private and public spheres. She writes: Religion is thus for liberalism something that should be private and if it is not, difficulties for the social union will result. It is important to note here that the public/private distinction is a political solution to a problem and not an epistemological or moral one. (1152) However, for the religious the values they hold cannot be merely private. Within Christian faith itself (in its variety of forms) there is a demand to live as citizens whose faith guides their public commitments. While Christianity does not require you to wear your heart on your sleeve, nor to preach on street-corners, it does require that we be – or if actual it makes us – as Luther wrote ‘bold and free’ … and to go out, as Luther continues, to challenge what we find oppressive in the world. (1155) Thus: It is the case … that the argument between ‘pro-life’ liberals and religionbased anti-abortionists cannot be successfully conducted on the grounds of what constitutes reasonable public discourse, for the very definition of public made by liberals is something that must be rejected by their opponents. (1155)

Notes 237 And ‘The assumption that religious questions can be sloughed off or for those who remain believers relegated to the private realm seems to me simply wrong’ (1160). Having said this, Strong asserts: ‘Christians have no problem with pluralism, or at least a certain pluralism’ (1156). Tracy B. Strong, ‘Setting One’s Heart on Honesty: The Tensions of Liberalism and Religion’, Social Research, vol. 66, no. 4 (winter 1999), 1143–1165. Her arguments undercut, to some extent, or at very least critically supplement, Stephen Carter’s familiar analysis of the trivialization of religious devotion in American civil life. Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Basic Books, 1993), see 3–66 in particular. 12 Ibid., ‘An Essay on Toleration’, 151–153. 13 Nora Carlin explores the tensions in seventeenth-century English writings on toleration, including Milton’s Areopagitica, observing the distinction that many Protestants in England drew between the advocacy of ‘liberty of conscience’ and ‘toleration’, the latter of which they often ‘saw as dangerous license rather than liberty’ (216). Even among radicals like Roger Williams, who (in contrast to Milton, Cromwell and Owen) believed in extending tolerance to Roman Catholics, their inspiration was more ‘the Book of Revelation’ than ‘the Petition of Rights’ (218). Carlin goes on to observe that the central political idea of all … radical tolerationists, one which gave coherence and ideological meaning to their efforts to reconcile public and private spheres, inner and outer persons, secular and spiritual roles, was the separation of church and state. This was not only a matter of mutual non-interference, but a question of assigning very different natures and functions to the two types of institutions. (225) This is, as she also notes, essentially the same kind of distinction Locke was to make forty years later – that should come as no surprise given Locke’s religious upbringing. N. Carlin, ‘Toleration for Catholics in the Puritan Revolution’, in Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (eds) Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 216–230. The role of Locke’s own religious upbringing in his intellectual formation is explored in my essay, ‘Elements of Federal Theology in the Religious Thought of John Locke’, The Evangelical Quarterly: An International Review of Bible and Theology, vol. LXVI, no. 2 (April 1994), 123–141. 14 Whether Berlin understood the value of pluralism primarily as producing the conditions that further personal liberty, or the worth of personal freedom as that which makes social diversity sustainable, is a matter of some debate. He seems to say both, depending on context. See George Kateb, ‘Can Cultures be Judged? Two Defenses of Cultural Pluralism in Isaiah Berlin’s Work’, Social Research: An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences, vol. 66, no. 4 (winter 1999), 1009. Kateb’s own view ‘is that the best case for cultural pluralism is that which sees it as the inevitable, if often not very admirable, outcome of personal freedom, which is the highest value’ (1009). Also see Bernard Williams’ ‘Introduction’, to I. B., Concepts and Categories, Henry Hardy, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), especially xix–xx, where Williams discusses the relationship between Berlin’s pluralism and his liberalism. 15 Chin Liew Ten explores this family resemblance in his essay ‘Liberal Toleration’, Social Research: An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences, vol. 66, no. 4 (winter 1999), 1167–1189, where he writes:

238

Notes [T]he conception of toleration used by Locke and Mill involves some negative feeling toward that which is tolerated, but this negative attitude is combined with not interfering in any coercive manner. We tolerate when we do not attempt to suppress that which we dislike or disapprove. (1168) Locke’s conception of toleration allowed for attempts to persuade others to change their beliefs and practices, ‘but it is one thing to persuade, another to command; one thing to press with arguments, another with penalties’. Similarly, Mill did not seek to avoid, but instead encouraged, the passing of judgements on conduct that should be tolerated. ‘Human beings owe to each other help to distinguish the better from the worse’. (1170) And: The real issue is whether, in the absence of other considerations, the adverse judgements made should be translated into coercive interference. It is the nature and limits of legal and other forms of coercive social intervention that divides liberals from others. (1171)

16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

There is also considerable similarity at this point between Mill and Rescher, Pluralism, who (as we have already seen) explores ways to make the world safe for dissensus. Locke, ‘Toleration B’, 247. I. B., FEL, 184. Gordon Graham explores Mill’s justification for the toleration of error as ‘a necessary accompaniment to the possibility of achieving truth’, in his essay, ‘Tolerance, Pluralism, and Relativism’, in Heyd (ed.) Toleration: An Illusive Virtue, 18. I. B., ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will’, CTH, 208. Ibid., 208. Ibid., 227. Ibid., 228–229 Ibid., 207–208. I. B., ‘Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power’, AC, 333. See particularly Michael Ignatieff’s discussion of Berlin’s liberalism in this context, Isaiah Berlin, 244–258. Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 10–11. Ibid., 11. I. B., ‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought’, CTH, 79. Walzer, On Toleration, 11. Ibid., 11. Berlin’s pluralism, ‘at its best’, according to Amy Gutmann, represents a specifically liberal version of pluralism, that is a pluralism suffused with substantive liberal values. True, Berlin values social diversity as an end in itself, and he frequently argues that there are admirable qualities in societies that many of us would not want to live in. But, his pluralism ‘is morally informed and constrained by two sets of values: individual liberty and the avoidance of human suffering’, the presence of which distinguish a society as decent. Berlin does not hesitate to make moral judgements even of a comparative nature, as when he weighs the evil of the Stalinist Soviet Union against Hitler’s Reich. And yet, his

Notes 239 liberalism notwithstanding, Berlin holds tenaciously to a respect for diversity that is all the more striking for the conflicting implications it holds. Amy Gutmann, ‘Liberty and Pluralism in Pursuit of the Non-Ideal’, Social Research: An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences, vol. 66, no. 4 (winter 1999), 1049. Berlin himself says: Pluralism and liberalism are not the same or even overlapping concepts. There are liberal theories which are not pluralistic. I believe in both liberalism and pluralism, but they are not logically connected. Pluralism entails that, since it is possible that no final answers can be given to moral and political questions, or indeed any questions about value, and more than that, that some answers that people give, an are entitled to give, are not compatible with each other, room must be made for a life in which some values may turn out to be incompatible, so that if destructive conflict is to be avoided compromises have to be effected, and a minimum degree of toleration, however reluctant, becomes indispensable. (Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations With Isaiah Berlin [London: Phoenix Press, 2000], 44) 31 Reflection on the history of Christian doctrine might be especially enlightening, in this context, remembering the ways in which our theological understandings have been enriched (sometimes fundamentally) by very different religious cultures. Where would Christian eschatology be without the influences of Zoroastrianism, for instance, many of whose complex concepts of afterlife (heaven, hell, resurrection) emerged in Judaism during the Babylonian captivity? At some level all faith involves syncretism. Fourth-century Christian orthodoxy, for example, borrowed from a number of strains of Greek philosophy the metaphysics that made sense, in its particular historical context, of the doctrines of Christ and Trinity. 32 Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Amy Gutmann (ed.) Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 72–73. 33 Ibid., 72. 34 Volf’s sometimes anguished, though always thought-provoking and evocative, exploration of these themes runs through the book he coauthored with Judith M. Gundry-Volf, A Spacious Heart: Essays on Identity and Belonging (Harrisburg PA: Trinity Press International, 1997) and his own Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville TN: Abingdon Press, 1996). Volf communicates the anguish of our condition as Christians, perhaps most profoundly, in speaking of ‘the risk of embrace’. ‘The risk’, he writes, follows both from nonsymmetricity and systematic underdetermination. I open my arms, make a movement of the self toward the other, the enemy, and do not know whether I will be misunderstood, despised, even violated or whether my action will be appreciated, supported, and reciprocated. I can become a savior or a victim – possibly both. Embrace is grace, and ‘grace is gamble, always’. (Exclusion and Embrace, 147) 35 36 37 38

John Gray, Two Faces, 1. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 1–2. Ibid., 2.

240 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

Notes Ibid., 2. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 5. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, R. W. Burchfield, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn, 1991), 1102. Gray, Two Faces, 5. Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 6. See also Gregor McLennan’s historical remarks, Pluralism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 25–39. Gray, Two Faces, 12. Ibid., 10. Gilbert Meilaender, ‘The Conditions and Limits of Tolerance’, Christian Century, vol. 115, no. 12 (15 April 1998), 402, a review of Michael Walzer, On Toleration. Gray, Two Faces, 31. In Presbyterian polity, there is considerable resistance to making a distinction between clergy and laity. Our church officers are ordained as Ministers of Word and Sacrament (what most denominations consider clergy) and Elders (what most denominations consider laity). It is the former of these ecclesiological perspectives that is most frequently misunderstood – or missed altogether – by social scientists writing on the church. Observing the variety of forms of Christian faith and church that goes under the name ‘Christian’, (enumerating, for example, Roman Catholicism, Greek and Russian Orthodoxy, various Protestant denominations, and the Coptic and South Indian Churches, as well as the Church founded by Yan Hsiu-ch’ing as the Christian Church of China) Strong writes: For all of them Christianity is a faith that is chosen; one only becomes a Christian by a conscious and individual act. It was, in fact, this quality that made Christianity so threatening to the Roman Empire, as it gave rise to the possibility of a multi-sited organization not subject to central control. For such choice to be possible … all Christian religions must share what David Little has called ‘conscientious individualism’. … No one is born a Christian. (Tracy Strong, ‘Setting One’s Heart on Honesty’, 1144)

In fact, within Christianity, despite its strong strains of voluntarism, there is a corresponding and equally strong counterview which says, to the contrary, that one may be born into Christian faith, and that this faith is given and received (by and through the community of faith) before it is claimed. Just such an understanding is communicated in and through the sacrament of baptism. 55 ‘A Brief Statement of Faith’, The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Part I. The Book of Confessions (Louisville KY: The Office of the General Assembly), 268. 56 Austin Flannery (ed.) Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ‘Lumen Gentium’, (Northport NY: Costello Publishing Company, new revised edn, 1992), 350–356. 57 David Rhoads explores the complexity and diversity of belief and practices in the early Christian communities in his study, The Challenge of Diversity: The Witness of Paul and the Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), a resource of particular value for general readers and Christian lay persons.

Notes 241 58 Bryan Wilson traces this aspect of the history of Christian communities in his essay, ‘Religious Toleration, Pluralism, and Privatization’, in Pål Repstad (ed.) Religion and Modernity: Modes of Co-existence (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1996), in which he writes: The self-chosen, voluntaristic nature of the Christian community itself became a basis for exclusivity: those who excluded themselves from the service of the Christian god were thereby also excluded from the privileges or even denied recognition in those societies that Christianity came to dominate. … Christians argued, quite paradoxically, that freedom was service – God’s service. Thus the principle of voluntarism in Christianity was compromised by the assumption that, although there was choice, there was indeed only one right choice; although there was freedom, it was only freedom to serve. Such considerations later opened the way for choice to succumb to coercion. (12)

59 60

61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73

Isaiah Berlin also observes the irony (and the problematic nature of) the phrase ‘Whose service is perfect freedom’ when used to describe a kind of ‘positive liberty’. I. B., ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, FEL, 160–161. Jane Rogers explores the character of sectarian thought from the inside out in her compelling and disturbing novel, Mr. Wroe’s Virgins (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991). A particularly interesting example of how various factions lay claim to ‘the tradition’ can be seen in Bradley J. Longfield’s study of the conflict between fundamentalists, modernists and moderates in the Presbyterian Church from 1922 to 1936. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). For an example of this principle at work in another Protestant denomination, see Joe Edward Barnhart, The Southern Baptist Holy War: The Self-Destructive Struggle for Power Within the Largest Protestant Denomination in America (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1986). Walzer, On Toleration, 2. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 6. Ibid., xi. Mark Nathan Cohen, in fact, argues not only that tolerance is historically rare, but that it is fragile and under enormous pressure in contemporary American society (1). Culture of Intolerance: Chauvinism, Class, and Racism in the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Ibid., 10. These ideas are explored from the perspective of social conflict in the previous chapter. Walzer, On Toleration, 14. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 15. Note Avery Dulles’ discussion of ‘The Church as Institution’ in this context: Models of the Church (New York: Doubleday, expanded edn, 1987), 34–46. In the debate over embryonic stem-cell research, for instance, it was not uncommon to hear heated conversations on television among theologians and activists of the Roman Catholic Church, and of evangelical churches, some of which descended into arguments over whether one could be a real ‘Catholic’, or even a ‘Christian’, if one held a particular position. Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Robert D. Putnam,

242

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87

88 89 90 91 92

93

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Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); and Donald E. Miller, Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) all explore these issues, though from different perspectives: Fogel is primarily concerned with the economic; Putnam with the development of ‘social capital’; and Miller with an apologetic agenda in favor of the so called ‘new paradigm churches’. Walzer, On Toleration, 19. Ibid., 20. David L. Bartlett, Ministry in the New Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); also see Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper no. 111 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982). Walzer, On Toleration, 19. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 22–23. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 25–26. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 31. Walzer’s analysis of immigrant cultures does not claim to be universally valid. He notes that there are a number of important exceptions, for instance, the experiences of African Americans, of Quebecois, and Aboriginal peoples. He deals with these remarkably different experiences, and the related issues of race, ethnicity and class, in chapters 3 and 4 of his study. He also observes how the official ‘tolerance’ of other cultures in the United States frequently masked an underlying hegemony of a particular Western European cultural outlook at the expense of a number of immigrant perspectives on history. Ibid., 31–32. Ibid., 32. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 73–74. Putnam is citing Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney in summarizing American religious behavior. See Timothy Lincoln’s perceptive essay, ‘Mobile Sheep and Stable Shepherds: The Ecumenical Challenge of Porous North American Denominational Boundaries’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, vol 35, nos. 3–4 (summer/fall 1998). Gilbert Meilaender, ‘The Conditions and Limits of Tolerance’, Christian Century, vol. 115, no. 12 (15 April 1998), 403, a review of Michael Walzer, On Toleration. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Liberty, 202–203. An evangelical perspective is argued in William V. Crockett and James G. Sigountos, Through No Fault of Their Own? The Fate of Those Who Have Never Heard (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1991). A fascinating Roman Catholic reflection on this perspective is provided by Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Dare We Hope ‘That All Men Be Saved’?, David Kipp and Lothar Kruath, trans. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988). Vatican II Catholics and many Protestants, especially those influenced by Karl Barth’s thought, share this perspective. See Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, eds (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1956), IV.1.157–283, 528–608. Also Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 394. The fact that these Christians believe that they cannot crawl outside of history and culture to render moral or religious judgements does not mean that they hold their convictions any less devoutly, though they may hold them more lightly.

Notes 243 In a recent popular essay on Stanley Fish, Larissa MacFarquhar contrasts Fish’s thought with that of Richard Rorty. According to Fish, people do not have much trouble at all identifying what they believe is right or wrong, intelligent or foolish. This is because they belong to interpretive communities – subcultures within which the criteria for judgment are implicitly or explicitly understood. Literary critics know how to interpret because they’ve been trained by other literary critics to value certain intellectual moves over others; judges know how to interpret because they’ve gone to law school and been taught what it is that judges do. In fact, Fish argues, it’s not just beliefs about right and wrong ways to read a text that are local to particular communities; beliefs in general are limited and limiting in the same way. But just because they are local doesn’t mean we believe them any less strongly. Quite the reverse: beliefs are not objects that we may take up, examine, and discard – they are the eyes through which we see. Realizing that we lack a godlike perspective on the world doesn’t leave us without beliefs or principles of judgment; it leaves us exactly where we were before. … Rorty, like Fish, thinks that attaining an objective view of one’s beliefs is impossible; but Rorty considers that realizing this – being a pragmatist, in other words – enables a person, if not to step outside his beliefs altogether, then to inhabit them more loosely, which in turn enables him to be more understanding of the beliefs of others. (MacFarquhar, ‘The Dean’s List’, The New Yorker, 11 June 2001, 62–71, at 68) 94 William O’Meara, in his essay, ‘Beyond Toleration’, rehearses Richard McBrien’s examination of the history of the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude toward other faiths, before providing four interpretations of contemporary inter-faith dialogue. See Mehdi Amin Razavi and David Ambuel (eds) Philosophy, Religion, and the Question of Intolerance (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 94–96, 96–98. 95 Avishai Margalit, ‘The Ring: On Religious Pluralism’, in David Heyd (ed.) Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 147. 96 In his article, ‘Christianity’, John Hick, after observing that ‘Christian belief’ ‘does not constitute a philosophy’, makes a helpful distinction between the fact that Christianity does not represent ‘a metaphysical system comparable … to Platonism or the systems of Aristotle and Spinoza’ and the fact that ‘Christian doctrine does consist largely of metaphysical beliefs, in the sense that they are beliefs whose scope transcends the empirical world’. He continues: Such systems as Platonism begin with the philosophical concepts and principles and seek by means of these to construct a comprehensive mental picture of the universe. Christianity, on the other hand, begins with particular, nonrecurrent historical events that are regarded as revelatory and on the basis of which Christian faith makes certain limited statements about the ultimate nature and structure of reality. (John Hick, ‘Christianity’, in Paul Edwards (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Philosophy [New York: Macmillan/The Free Press, 1967], vol. II, 105) 97 Rawls explores this issue critically, from the perspective of political liberalism, when he examines the conditions necessary for the ‘encouraging or discouraging of comprehensive doctrines’ in a society shaped by democratic liberalism. Though Rawls is mistaken, in my view, in arguing that a society’s conception of justice is somehow more fundamental than its conception of the good (in fact, in

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his examples, the reason that certain conceptions of the good are in conflict with ‘justice’, is that the justice of which he speaks is grounded in a conflicting conception of the good: see Gray’s critique of Rawls and other ‘liberal legalists’, Two Faces, 16–20), he is correct in understanding that even a society that values pluralism may tolerate to some degree, but cannot open itself to, ‘a particular religion, and the conception of the good belonging to it’ which ‘can survive only if it controls the machinery of state and is able to practice effective intolerance. This religion will cease to exist in the well-ordered society of political liberalism’ (196–197). It may not, in fact, cease to exist, but if its understanding of the good is such that it jeopardizes the good of a society which allows for what Rawls calls ‘reasonable pluralism’, its pursuit of its ends will be curtailed legally or politically, or both. He goes on, in this context, to reflect on Berlin’s view that ‘there is no social world without loss; that is, no social world that does not exclude some ways of life that realize in special ways certain fundamental values’ (197). John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 98 Richard Stoll Armstrong, ‘Evangelism’, in Alan Richardson and John Bowden (eds) The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), 192. 99 One of the most stimulating explorations of apologetics in recent years is offered in Reason for the Hope Within, Michael J. Murray, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999). Also see Gavin D’Costa, The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2000). 100 Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, 49.

Epilogue 1

2

I have in mind, of course, John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminiary Press, 1985/1997), and Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). These marvelous studies, the first emerging from an Orthodox, the second from a Free Church, offer cogent attempts to bring the doctrine of the Trinity to center stage in ecclesiological reflection. Note specifically Edward Schillebeeckx’s perceptive analysis of the church with reference to its historical and social existence and the theological language in which we apprehend it. He writes: We are always concerned with one and the same reality; the form which has grown up through history and which can be explained sociologically or historically … is precisely what the believer experiences and expresses in the language of faith as a specific manifestation of grace: a successful, less successful or improper response of the believing community to God’s grace. (The Church with a Human Face: A New and Expanded Theology of Ministry, John Bowden, trans. [New York: Crossroad, 1990], 5)

Index

Aarsleff, H. 212 absolutism 2, 75–6, 78–9, 91, 93–106, 111–15 Achilles 34–5 Addison, J. 37 Aeschylus 143–4 agonistic liberalism 133, 150–1, 171 All Souls College, Oxford 7 Anderson, P. 209 Anselm 18 antiqua virtus vs Christian morality 24–31 apologetics 193–8 Aquinas, T. 18, 75 Archilochus 16 Archimedean point 86–7, 110 Arendt, H. 229 Aristotle 13, 18, 21–2, 25, 33–4, 37, 75, 131–4, 136, 144–5, 148–9 Aristotelianism 4, 73, 131–8, 141, 195, 229 Arius 13 Athanasius 13, 75 Augustine 18, 30–1, 75 authenticity, and sincerity, as ideals of Romanticism 57–8, 70–1, 170 Bach, J. S. 89 Bacon, F. 38 Balkanization 1–2, 125, 227–8 Balthasar, H. U. v. 242 Barnhart, E. 241 Barth, K. xi, 4, 28, 50, 100–7, 110–11, 113–14, 134–5, 215, 224, 227, 230, 242 Baumer, F. 96, 222 Beethoven, L. 90 Bellah, Robert 65, 223, 231–2 belonging, in Herder 51–5; to church 182 Bernhardt, R. 93, 225

biblical canon, as ground for ecclesial diversity 7–14, 203 Biddle, J. 141 Black Johnston, S. 127 Blake, W. 46, 216 Blumhardt, V. 101 Bolshevik revolution, Bolshevism 7, 87 Bonhoeffer, D. 4, 28, 93, 105, 231 Bowra, M. 5 Braaten, C. xi, 93, 95–100, 102, 104–7, 109, 111–13, 222 Buckle, H. T. 60 Buffon, D. d. 45 Bultmann, R. 58, 224 Bunge, M. 50 Burgess, E. W. 152 Burke, E. 68 Busch, E. 224 Butler, S. 228 Butterfield, H. 167 Byron, G. G., Lord 69, 72 Calvin, J. 19, 28, 226 Carey, J.127 Carlin, N. 237 Carter, S. 237 Cartesian thought 37–9, 47 Chadwick, H. 222, 229 Chateaubriand, F. R. de 98 Christian communities of faith 1–5, 15; historical survey of 7–14 Cicero 30 Cohen, M. N. 241 Communism 21–2 Comte, A. 68, 236 Condorcet 19, 45 conflict xi, 1–5, 151–64, 169; in the Church, historically 7–14, 154, 157–9; in the contemporary Church 122–65,

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179–204; Herder’s understanding of 50, 53, 64; Machiavelli’s understanding of 24–31; realistic vs. nonrealistic conflict 155; Romanticism on 71–2 consensus 124–6, 183 Copernican revolution 107 Cornelius of Rome 229 coscienza and scienza, in Vico, 38–41 Coser, L. xii, 129–30, 132, 151–7, 160–4, 229 Crick, B. 30–1, 155–6, 229, 234 Cupitt, D. 234 Cyprian of Carthage 95, 229 Damm, C. T. 46 Daniel, S. H. 115, 226–7 Dante 37, 144 D’Costa, G. 79, 220–1 Demetz, P. 95 Derrida, J. 4, 202, 230 Descartes, R. 18, 37–9, 76 Dewey, J. 155 Dickson, G. G. 80, 214 Dittes, J. 235 diversity x–xii; among Christian faith communities 7–14, 73–5, 119–21, 122–65, 179–204; in creation 63, 81–5, 120–1, 123–4, 139–141, 126, 174, 193, 201–4; cultural and social 50, 124–6, 139–65, 169–79, 179–93, 201–4 Dostoevsky, F. 100 Dulles, A. 134, 230, 241 ecclesiology x–xii, 7–14, 123–4, 129–31, 133–8, 168, 178–204 Eigenheit 52–3 Einfuhlung 41, 60–1 Elgar, E. 89 Enlightenment xii, 2, 16–20, 77, 80, 93–106, 109, 123, 139, 146–7, 167–79; Hamann’s critique of 43–50; Herder’s critique of 50–67; and Romantic movement 67–72; Vico’s critique of 35–43 entrare 64, 84 Epictetus 18 epistemology, Aristotle’s 133–4, 141; dialectical 133–5; Vico’s 37–42, 64; as Einfuhlung 41; as fantasia 41–2; as Verstehen 41 Epistle to the Romans (Barth) 100–2, 104–5, 107, 111

Erasmus, D. 39 Euripides 143 evangelism 193–8 existentialism 58 expressionism, Herder’s historical 50, 55–8 Falwell, J. 161 Fascism 21–2 Ferguson, E. 205 Fichte, J. G. 68, 97, 152, 167, 170 Finley, M. I. 229–30 Fisch, M. H. 33, 39, 40 Fish, S. 230, 243 Flaschsland, K. 54 Flynt, L. 161 Fortgang 62–3 Freud, S. 78, 108–9 Gadamer, H.-G. 226 Galileo 20, 144 Galipeau, C. J. 52–3, 88–9, 209, 219 Gardiner, P. 215 Garrard, G. 219 Gay, P. 219 Gerrish, B.A. 215 Glaube, in Hamann 45–8 Gleim, J. W. L. 53 Goethe, J. W. v. 67, 69, 72 good society 128–38 Gorringe, T. 225 Graham, G. 238 Gray, J. xii, 6, 25, 31, 42, 49, 61, 63, 82, 133, 140–7, 149, 175–9, 183–4, 188, 191, 210, 232, 244 Griffiths, P. J. 230 Groll, W. 100, 223 Gunton, C. 119 Guthrie, S. 208 Gutierrez, G. 28 Gutmann, A. 238–9 Habermas, J. 76, 124–5, 228 Hamann, J. G. xi, 3, 42, 43–50, 56, 58, 60, 63, 67–8, 72, 79–86, 104, 114, 213–16 Hardy, H. xiii, 5, 16, 30, 74, 118, 175, 208–9, 211, 220 Hardy, T. 75 Harnack, A. 98–9, 223–4 Hausheer, R. 6, 206, 209 Hayek, F. A. 176 “h”, controversy over 46

Index 247 Hegel, G. W. F. 18, 33, 63, 93, 97, 99, 202 Heidegger, M. 58, 202, 209 Helvétius, C.-A. 19, 45, 47, 60 Hemingway, E. 90 Herder, J. G. xi, 3, 42, 45, 48–68, 72, 77, 79–86, 98, 103, 114, 167, 169–70, 172, 174, 217, 219 heretics and heresies 157–8, 170 Herzen, A. 5, 21, 50, 55, 82–3, 128, 221 Hick, J. xi, 77, 100, 106, 107–10, 225, 243 Hirsch, E. 50 History, and historicism 32–7, 40–3, 49–50, 51–67, 77, 79–85, 110, 173, 178–9, 191–2, 202 history, problem of, in relation to eternity 93, 95–106, 112 historical theodicy 82–3 Hitler, A. 21, 83, 118, 128, 155 Hobbes, T. 38, 176 Holbach, P. H. D. d’ 47 Homer, and Homeric Greece 33–7, 39, 59, 81, 88, 133, 144–5, 148 homosexuals, ordination of 179–80, 182–3 Housman, A. E. 141 humanity and human society, as selftransforming 146–51, 170 Hume, D. 46, 47, 176, 216 Hütter, R. 134–5, 230 Huxley, A. 22, 210 Hynes, J. 1 Ignatieff, M. 205–6, 211, 238 incommensurability among competing and conflicting values, goods, beliefs and ends 1–7, 18–19, 77, 87–93, 122–4, 132–4, 136–51, 170–9, 201; and Herder’s pluralism 58–67; Machiavelli’s contribution to 24–31; and Romanticism 71–2 individualism 65 interfaith conversation 193–200 Jacobi, F. H. 45, 46, 67–8, 215 Jaspers, K. 232 Jesus ethic 28 Jüngel, E. 226 Kant, I. 21, 43–4, 46, 68, 72, 76, 97–8, 108, 176, 202, 210 kata (according to) 7–8 Kelly, J. N. D. 235

Kierkegaard, S. 4, 43, 45, 97, 100–1, 215 King, B. B. 126 King, M. L., Jr. 127 Knox, B. 212 language, in Hamann 48–50; in Herder 51–8, 62–3; pluralism 80–5; in Vico 39–43 Larmore, C. 217–18 Larson, S. 65 Lebowitz, N. 215 Leibniz, G. W. 82 Lenin, V. 83 Lessing, G. E. 95–7, 99 Levin, B. 127 Levinas, E. 76 liberty 6–7 Lincoln, T. 242 Locke, J. 18, 76, 99, 167–9, 175–6, 178, 181, 236–8 Lodge, D. x Longfield, B. J. 241 Louth, A. 207 Lovejoy, A. 78 Lowrie, W. 43–4, 214 Lowry, L. 228 Luther, M. 11, 28, 92, 95 MacCallum, G. Jr. 210 MacFarquhar, L. 243 Machiavelli, N. xi, 23, 24–31, 32, 52, 54, 58, 67–8, 72, 88, 132, 151, 153, 229, 234 MacIntyre, A. 22–3, 131–4, 136, 210, 229 Macmillan, H. 5 Maistre, J. de 84 Mandeville, B. 33 Mao Ze-dong 83 Margalit, A. 195–6 Marty, Martin 138 Marx, K. 18, 61, 63, 78, 128, 151; Marxism 22, 152 Mavrodes, G. 108–9 McBrien, R. 243 McEachran, F. 217 Meilaender, G. 178 Mill, J. S. 147, 160–1, 167–9, 238 Miller, A. 22, 210 Milosevic, S. 155 Milton, J. 37, 237 Modernism 2, 4, 7, 10, 203 modus vivendi 176–7 Mohler, R. A., Jr. 229

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Moloch 21, 82–3, 128 Moltmann, J. 140 Momigliano, A. 64 monism xi, 2–3, 6–7, 16–23, 75–6, 86, 91, 113–14, 141, 171, 177, 184, 195, 203; and “abstract universals” 35; and Herder 63–4; and Machiavelli 24–31; and utopianism 123–6, 128–38 Montesquieu 45, 68 More, T. 127 Morgan, R. 111, 113 Mozart, W. A. 89 Nathan the Wise 95–6, 107 Nazism 87, 118 Nelson, C. E. 232 Neoplatonism 3–4 Newton, Isaac 16, 20 Niebuhr, H. R. 28, 97 Niebuhr, R. 211 Niles, D. T. 198 Novatian, 229 Oakeshott, M. 176 O’Meara, W. 243 Orwell, G. 22, 228 Osiander, A. 226 Overbeck, F. 100–1 Pannenberg, W. 111–13 Pannikar, R. 114, 225 paradise, mythical golden age 17, 22, 127–8, 151, 164 Park, R. E. 152 Particularity, vs abstract universals 35–6, 81–85; particularity and “essence of Christianity” 98–100; particularity in Hamann 45–9; in Herder 50–5; as ground for Herder’s pluralism 59–67; and monism 76; and Romanticism 68–72 Pascal, B. 43 perfect or ideal society 30, 37, 128–38, 176 Pfleiderer, O. 50 philosophia perennis 3–4, 16–23, 30–1, 68–9, 71, 73, 96, 137, 148, 203 Plath, S. 90 Plato 13, 16, 18, 20, 22–3, 33, 37, 66, 68, 75, 97, 132, 144 Platonism 3–4, 17, 39, 73, 131, 195, 243 pluralism x–xii, 1–5, 79; among Christians, 7–14, 73–121,

116–21;“objective” pluralism 6–7, 15, 74, 78, 86–93, 107–15, 177–8; Hamann’s 45–50; Herder’s 50, 58–67; Machiavelli’s pluralism 24–31; participatory vs descriptive pluralism 118–19; Pluralism 1 (Hamann, Vico, Herder) 79–85; Pluralism 2 (Berlin) 86–93; Rescher’s 124–6; religious pluralism 193–8; in Romanticism 68–72 ; Vico’s “cultural pluralism” 32–7, 40–3 Pondy, L. R. 233 Pol Pot 83, 128 polis 23, 27, 30, 131, 133, 136 populism, in Herder 50–5, 56, 58 post-modernism 4, 7, 10, 174 Powers, J. 228 Putnam, R. 242 Racine, J. 36–7, 144 Rawls, J. 125, 176, 218, 228, 243–4 Raz, J. 142–3, 145 relativism 2–3, 15, 50, 64–5, 76–9, 85, 107–15 renegades, traitors and apostates 157 Rescher, N. xii, 124–6, 138, 228 Rhoads, D. 240 Rigby, C. 230 Robinson, J. A. T. 234 Robinson, N. H. G. 82 Rogers, J. 241 Romantics and Romanticism xi, 44–5, 50, 57–8, 67–72, 147, 152, 167, 170–2, 177 Rorty, R. 243 Rousseau, J. J.19 Rowe, W. 107–11 Savonarola, G. 26, 131 Schillebeeckx, E. 234, 244 schism, threat of 180–93 Screech, M.A. 228–9 sects, and sectarianism 129–38, 183–4 Schelling, F. 93 Schiller, J. C. F. v. 68 Schleiermacher, F. 99 Schlesinger, A. M., Jr. 227–8 Schopenhauer, A. 78 Schultz, F. A. 43 Schweitzer, A. 112 Schwerpunkt, cultural 64 Shakespeare, W. 37, 89, 143–4 Sheilaism 65

Index 249 Shriver, D. W. 233 Simmel, G. 152, 159, 161 sincerity, and authenticity, as ideals of Romanticism 57–8, 70–1, 170 Smith, A. 33 Socrates 16, 20 Sophocles 36 Sowell, T. 230 Speight, G. 155 Spengler, O. 39, 66 Spinoza, B. 18 Stalin, J. 83, 128 Stoics and Stoicism 3–4, 16, 73, 202 Strong, T. 236–7, 240 Sturm und Drang 58 Tanner, K. 10, 207–8 Taylor, C. 174, 228 Taylor, M. C. 4 teleology 23, 40–2, 62–4, 81–3, 91–3, 98, 104, 114, 133, 136–8 Ten, C. L. 237 Tertullian 198 theodicy 82–3 “Theological Declaration of Barmen” 117–18 theology, communicative x-xi thinking (reason) and language 48–50 Thomism 30 Thurneysen, E. 104 Tillich, P. 116–17, 219 Tinder, G. 236 Tocqueville, A. de 65, 219 tolerance and toleration xii, 1–2, 64, 72, 96, 139, 166–200; liberal tolerance 175–6, 178; radical tolerance 175 Tolstoy, L. 16 Torrance, A. 79, 220, 226–7

totalitarianism 31 Troeltsch, E. xi, 97–104, 106–7, 111–13, 129–30 uniformitarianism 78, 124–5 utopias and utopianism xii, 3, 7, 17, 20–3, 37, 122–4, 126–38, 147, 155–6, 165, 195 Van Gogh, V. 90 Verstehen 41 Vico, G. xi, 3, 31, 32–43, 49, 51–2, 58–60, 63–4, 67–8, 72, 77, 79–86, 103, 114, 144, 213 Virgil 36, 144 Volf, M. 175, 239, 244 Voltaire 19, 36, 45, 60–1, 144, 236 voluntarism, ecclesial 179–93, 203 Walzer, M. 171–3, 177–9, 183–191, 242 Weber, M. 129–30 Weiss, J. 112 Westermarck, E. A. 39 Whitehead, A. N. 151 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. v. 42 Will, exercise of, in Romanticism 68–70 Williams, B. 166 Williams, Roger 237 Williams, Rowan x, xi, 114, 225 Wilson, B. 241 Wittgenstein, L. 4, 149, 202 Woolf, V. 90 Wundt, W. M. 33 Zagorin, P. 213 Zeldin, T. 166, 229 Zizioulas, J. D. 244