The Church and Secularity: Two Stories of Liberal Society (Moral Traditions)

The Church and Secularity

SELECTED TITLES FROM THE MORAL TRADITIONS SERIES James F. Keenan, SJ, series editor American Protestant Ethics and the Legacy of H. Richard Niebuhr William Werpehowski

The Context of Casuistry James F. Keenan, SJ, and Thomas A. Shannon, Editors

Aquinas, Feminism, and the Common Good Susanne M. DeCrane

The Christian Case for Virtue Ethics Joseph J. Kotva Jr.

The Banality of Good and Evil: Moral Lessons from the Shoah and Jewish Tradition David R. Blumenthal A Call to Fidelity: On the Moral Theology of Charles E. Curran James J. Walter, Thomas A. Shannon, and Timothy E. O’Connell, Editors Catholic Moral Theology in the United States: A History Charles E. Curran The Catholic Moral Tradition Today: A Synthesis Charles E. Curran Catholic Social Teaching, 1891–Present: A Historical, Theological, and Ethical Analysis Charles E. Curran

The Critical Calling: Reflections on Moral Dilemmas since Vatican II Richard A. McCormick, SJ Defending Probabilism: The Moral Theology of Juan Caramuel Julia Fleming Democracy on Purpose: Justice and the Reality of God Franklin I. Gamwell The Ethics of Aquinas Stephen J. Pope, Editor Ethics and Economics of Assisted Reproduction: The Cost of Longing Maura A. Ryan

The Church and Secularity Two Stories of Liberal Society

8 Robert Gascoigne

georgetown university press Washington, D.C.

Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C. www.press.georgetown.edu © 2009 by Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. This volume draws on material Robert Gascoigne previously published in the following publications: “The Eucharist and Ethics,” in Eucharist: Experience and Testimony, ed. T. Knowles, pp. 104–14. Melbourne: David Lovell, 2001. “The Two Stories of Liberalism: Reconciling Autonomy and Community,” Colloquium: Australian and New Zealand Theological Review, 33/2 (2001): 109–20; “Christian Identity and Social Commitment,” in Ecumenics from the Rim: Explorations in Honour of John D’Arcy May, ed. J. O’Grady and Peter Scherle, pp. 71–78. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2007; “Church, Kingdom and the Moral Concerns of Modernity,” in Christianity in the Post-Secular West, eds. J. Stenhouse and B. Knowles, pp. 257–74. ATF Press, Adelaide, 2007; “Human Dignity within Secularity, in the Light of a Theology of Church and Kingdom” in Responsibility and Commitment: Eighteen Essays in Honor of Gerhold K. Becker, ed. Tze-Wan Kwan, pp. 59–74. Waldkirch: Edition Gorz 2008; “Christian Hope and Public Reason,” in Religious Voices in Public Places, ed. N. Biggar, Oxford University Press, in press, 2009. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gascoigne, Robert. â•… The church and secularity : two stories of liberal society / Robert Gascoigne. p. cm. — (Moral traditions series) â•… Includes bibliographical references and index. â•… isbn 978-1-58901-490-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Liberty—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Liberalism—Religious aspects—Christianity. 3. Church and the world. 4. Vatican Council (2nd : 1962–1965). Constitutio pastoralis de ecclesia in mundo huius temporis. 5. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. De civitate Dei. I. Title. â•… bt810.3.g37 2009 â•… 261.7—dc22â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… 2008054428 This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. 15â•… 14â•… 13â•… 12â•… 11â•… 10â•… 09â•…â•…â•… 9â•… 8â•… 7â•… 6â•… 5â•… 4â•… 3â•… 2 First printing Printed in the United States of America

To my friends and colleagues in the Australian Catholic Theological Association

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Contents

Acknowledgments╇╇ ix



Introduction╇ ╇ 1

o n e

Two Stories of Liberal Society╇ ╇ 7

t w o

Church, Kingdom, and Secularity╇ ╇ 37

three

The Virtues of Noninstrumental Relationships╇╇ 76

f o u r

Christian Hope and the Eucharist: Witness and Service╇ ╇ 112

f i v e

Two Stories of Liberal Society and Contemporary Catholic Identity╇ ╇ 143 Index╇

╇ 169

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Acknowledgments

It is a great pleasure to record my thanks to those who have assisted me in the development of this book. The book includes some previously published material, and I would like to thank the respective editors and publishers for their permission to republish this material. The articles and chapters gave me a valuable opportunity to develop the ideas presented in this book, and I am grateful for the various invitations and occasions that gave rise to them. My particular thanks and appreciation go to Jim Keenan, editor of the Moral Traditions series, and Richard Brown, director of Georgetown University Press, for their encouragement of this project and their acceptance of this book in the series. I would like to thank all the staff of Georgetown University Press for their courteous and timely help. I am very grateful to James McEvoy for his advice and encouragement during the writing of this book, as well as to Raymond Canning for his assistance with some aspects of Augustine scholarship. Any errors that remain are naturally my own. Two conferences convened by Nigel Biggar, on “Religious Voices in Public Places” and “The Christian Foundations of Liberal Society,” were very stimulating and instructive in the field of ideas that this book is concerned with. I would like to record my thanks to the Australian Catholic University for the periods of study leave and teaching release that have made this book possible. Patrick McArdle and Gail Crossley, my head of department and dean at the time, gave me invaluable support in obtaining this leave. The attempt to live as a Christian in a liberal society brings many challenges, joys, and surprises. I would like to thank my wife, Yvonne, for her companionship on this journey and all that it has meant in our ix╇

x╇╇ Acknowledgments

family and parish life. The parish of St. Brigid, Marrickville (Sydney), together with the Passionist community that ministers to it, has been for us a true community of word and sacrament. Our particular thanks go to Tom McDonough CP, who now shares his special gifts with the parish of St. Joseph, Boroko, Port Moresby.

8 Introduction

This book is concerned with the relationship of the Catholic Church to contemporary liberal societies. It seeks to explore the meaning of secularity as a shared space for all citizens and to ask how the Church can contribute to sensitivity to and respect for human dignity within liberal societies. In particular, it considers the ambivalence of human freedom in those societies and explores how the Church can assist in the expression of freedom as the wellspring of the common good rather than as a self-assertion that degrades communal and social relationships. In a liberal society, all individuals are accorded certain rights, but the laws and institutions of society are agnostic about the transcendental foundations of those rights. They are simply an ethical given—the ethical premise of laws and political procedures, without any shared transcendental foundation of their own. There are good reasons for this, since liberal societies are secular and pluralist societies. To give such shared transcendental foundations a politically established status might privilege a particular religious tradition and threaten the religious freedom that is essential to a liberal society. It would also be harmful to the Church itself, since such privileges undermine the free appeal that evangelization makes to conscience. Yet it is also true that this “givenness” is limited and fragile. The claim that every human being has worth and dignity is controversial in a host of ways: in its scope, in its limits, and in its application. In particular, the freedom that is at the core of human dignity is interpreted in crucially different ways, especially in terms of the tension between conceptions of individual autonomy and a willingness to support the common good. Its sheer “givenness”—its lack of transcendental

1╇

2╇╇ Introduction

content—can also affect the motivation of members of society to defend human dignity and their hope that this defense, this commitment, will not be in vain. The lack of a transcendental context can isolate the appeal to human dignity: it makes a transcendental claim without being able to link this claim to a comprehensive vision of reality. This can render it vulnerable to the force of more palpable and pragmatically demonstrable claims, which sacrifice human dignity in favor of economic, ethnic, class, power, and other imperatives. The aim of this book is to consider how the Christian church can serve the cause of human dignity in this social and political context. While retaining its own prophetic freedom from state authority, how can it help to support the claims of human dignity: to respond to its force, to strengthen and broaden its content, to reinforce commitment, and to inspire hope that this commitment is not in vain? The freedom that is fundamental to liberal societies can be the source and guarantee of the love, solidarity, and respect that make authentic community possible. Liberal society, refraining from imposed traditions of meaning and social hierarchies, has the potential to encourage the free development of communities based on mutual respect and affinity, without the intrusion of rank and the temptations of hypocrisy. Yet it is also true that the disengagement of individual freedom from socially reinforced traditions of meaning and the expectations of social custom can become the rejection of any meaning and value outside the ego, the mere assertion of the desire to dominate, control, and consume, the destruction of the ethical substance that enables individuals to develop and express themselves in a social milieu. In this sense, liberal society can and does tell two stories: a positive story of freedom of conscience and the development of unconstrained community, as well as a negative story of self-centeredness, vacuity, and the commodification of human values. A key part of the Church’s service to liberal societies is in the assistance it can give in strengthening the first, positive story of liberal society, in developing understandings of human freedom as the fundamental potential for community and creativity, rather than as destructive self-assertion. The Christian faith’s own understanding of freedom, as the response to God’s gift of life and love, can serve and

Introduction╇╇ 3

nourish all expressions of freedom in liberal society that are oriented to mutual respect and just relationships. Within the culture of liberal societies, the Christian faith’s vision of the meaning and purpose of human existence can help limit the destructive potential of freedom, its rejection of anything but the self-aggrandizement and self-abasement of the ego. Two texts are of particular importance for the argument of this book: Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes; and Augustine’s City of God. It is guided by the vision of the Church and its role in the world that is articulated in Gaudium et spes, finding in this document an inspiring and illuminating perspective on the Church as a witness to Christ and servant of humanity. It interprets Augustine’s City of God as a classic resource for the illumination of the ambivalent character of freedom and for living in the shared space of secularity, taking issue with those readings that interpret this text as essentially a rejection of the legitimacy of secularity in favor of ecclesial existence. It argues that the central concern of the City of God is not a contrast between Church and state, but rather a fundamental contrast between two meanings of freedom, based in two different loves: the love of God and neighbor, and the love of self. Because the City of God reflects on the meaning of freedom as expressed in these two radically different loves, it has much to say to our contemporary experience of the ambivalence of freedom in liberal societies. It will be evident that this book is not a work of Augustine scholarship: rather, it seeks to learn from a number of Augustine scholars in order to benefit from the insights of the City of God, most explicitly in the first and third chapters of the book. It is important to note that this book does not set out to be a discussion of different philosophies of liberalism, but rather seeks to reflect on the essential features of liberal societies themselves, namely, the foundational importance of individual freedom and of human rights, whether articulated in normative statements of rights or protected by convention and common law. Clearly, these essential features of liberal societies have a number of historical sources, including philosophical sources, which, in turn, have complex and controversial relationships to Christian tradition and the churches. This book does not seek

4╇╇ Introduction

substantially to engage in the important debates about this complex history. It focuses rather on the character of liberal societies, as a form of political life, with the perspective that societies based in personal freedom and human rights are a precious historical heritage. Encouraged by the endorsement of liberal societies in the documents of Vatican II, especially because of their transcendental roots in freedom of conscience, it seeks to explore the fundamental challenges they face and the ways in which the Church can serve humanity and bear witness to Jesus of Nazareth by helping to maintain and strengthen the ethical project of a society that respects human rights. This book is written in the context of Catholic theology, and, especially in the final chapter, is particularly concerned with the relationship of the Catholic Church to liberal societies. The argument does, however, engage with, and has—I hope—greatly benefited from, many writers of other Christian traditions, and it is concerned with questions that affect the role and significance in the contemporary world of Christian faith as a whole. The first chapter begins by considering the ambivalence of freedom in liberal society. It argues that a key characteristic of liberal society is the disestablishment of tradition as a constraint on individual action. This freedom from tradition-as-constraint can enable the deployment of tradition-as-resource: the free development of patterns of life and community through a social dialogue that benefits from the insights and practices embodied in traditions. Tradition-as-resource can be the source of an “ontology of the human” that is crucial to the ethical life of liberal societies. Yet the disestablishment of tradition-as-constraint can also lead to the rejection of all tradition as an imposition on individual freedom, so that freedom is understood as the denial of any ontology of the human and is exercised purely as unconstrained and self-assertive choice. The argument of this chapter then considers two key works that reflect on the origins of this situation in the demise of Christendom: Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations and Charles Taylor’s A Catholic Modernity?1 While both of these authors emphasize the ambivalence of freedom in modern societies, they have very different appraisals of Christendom and the reasons for its demise. The chapter concludes by considering the light that the City of

Introduction╇╇ 5

God can shed on this ambivalence of freedom and on secularity as a shared social and political space. In particular, it seeks to interpret the “two cities,” inspired by two loves—the love of God and neighbor, and the love of self—as a means of understanding the “two stories” of liberal societies. Chapter two argues that it is an essential aspect of the Church’s identity to commit itself to supporting human dignity and human rights in liberal, secular society. The tension between Christian identity and a commitment to universal ethical ideals is explored through a theological reflection on the relationship between Church and Kingdom and Christ and the Spirit in human history, against the backdrop of Joachim da Fiore’s theology of history, and in critical debate with the work of Andrew Shanks and William Cavanaugh. The chapter argues for a conception of the Church that retains both its identity as discipleship of Jesus Christ and its mission of solidarity with all human beings, based in a theology of the anonymous presence of Christ in every human person, as articulated in Gaudium et spes. Chapter three argues that the two stories of freedom in liberal societies can be summed up in terms of the contrast between instrumental and noninstrumental relationships. It seeks to learn from the insights of the City of God to develop a theology of the virtues of noninstrumental relationships in a Christological perspective. It explores the ways in which the virtues of humility, reverence, and self-giving at the risk of self-loss are crucial to the expression of freedom in community, and argues that the Church’s proclamation of Christ as the definitive embodiment of these virtues is a fundamental service to liberal societies. A liberal society is essentially an ethical project that must be strengthened and inspired by hope in order to flourish and survive. Chapter four reflects on the ways in which Christian hope can serve this project for the sake of human community. In dialogue with John Rawls’s essay “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” it considers the possibilities for the communication of Christian hope in the “public political forum” and the “background culture” of liberal societies. Christian hope has its most powerful source and focus in the Eucharist; yet for many in liberal societies, religious ritual is irrelevant to the

6╇╇ Introduction

ethical project of respect for human dignity. The chapter concludes by arguing that the Christian Eucharist, the memory and celebration of Christ’s paschal mystery, can communicate hope in the face of the temptation to despair at the gulf between universal ethical ideals and the frightening evidence of their failure. The earlier chapters of this book are concerned with the ways in which the Christian Church can both bear witness to Christ and serve liberal societies. The fifth and final chapter is concerned with how, in the post-1960s age, this relationship to liberal societies is also critical to the Catholic Church’s own processes of identity-formation. From the French Revolution to the mid-twentieth century, the Catholic Church was characterized by processes of demarcation and mobilization in response to the dominance of liberal anticlerical elites in many European countries and Protestant hegemony in the British Empire and the United States. Vatican II gave the sanction of the Church’s highest authority to a new stance in relation to liberal societies, one expressed in particular in the documents Dignitatis humanae and Gaudium et spes. This stance—of witness to Christ in solidarity with universal humanity—has extraordinary evangelical and ethical promise. Yet it also makes great challenges, both in maintaining a communal and universalist perspective despite the individualist economic dynamics of liberal societies, and in avoiding forms of identity that give highest priority to demarcation from some secular interpretations of personal autonomy in sexual and life ethics. The book concludes with the argument that the Church’s own social identity, rooted in Eucharist communities, should be bound up with the struggle for human rights and the resistance to commodification of the human in all its forms. Note 1. Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); James L. Heft, ed., A Catholic Modernity? Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture, with Responses by William M. Shea, Rosemary Luling Haughton, George Marsden, and Jean Bethke Elshtain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

8 chapter one

Two Stories of Liberal Society

The Ambivalence of Freedom in Liberal Society A key characteristic of a liberal society is its ambivalence, its propensity to tell two stories. The first of these stories is of individual freedom as the source of creativity and diversity, as the warrant of critical reason to constantly reform social institutions for the sake of the common good; this story proclaims the right of even the most apparently insignificant to make their voices heard in the debates that concern their destiny. The other story is of freedom as a voluntarism that destroys the ethical and cultural substance of tradition, leaving only the emptiness of self-indulgent whim; it is a story of a society with astonishingly sophisticated means of communication but with little more than trivia and sensationalism to communicate. This ambivalence about freedom suggests a particular role for the Christian church in the context of liberal societies: to assist those societies in telling their positive story of freedom by illuminating the sources of freedom in human dignity and by acting in solidarity with all those who commit themselves to enhancing our consciousness of this dignity and to giving it practical effect. By a liberal society, I mean a society in which the invocation of tradition is not sufficient to constrain or limit individual freedom. I understand the contrast between liberal and traditional societies to be the contrast between a society that gives priority to individual freedom and one that gives priority to certain forms of behavior that express a society’s past and give it social unity. In a traditional society, these forms of behavior are not merely options or recommendations, but practices that are associated with strong expectations, constraints, and sanctions, such that if an individual were to ignore them they would experience, to varying degrees, social exclusion or anomie. A 7╇

8╇╇ Chapter One

liberal society is one in which, in principle, all limitations on individual behavior need to be justified by social argument, rather than by the invocation of tradition. A fundamental aspect of social tradition is religion, so a liberal society is a secular society insofar as it does not establish any religion or impose any religious test on public office. In this sense, the secular character of society consists above all in freedom of conscience in religious matters, in the elimination of any link between state power and religious affiliation. A liberal society is one kind of modern society. A hallmark of modernity is the weakening or abolition of tradition as a constraint: A liberal society is that kind of modern society in which tradition can be freely adopted by individuals, in contrast to those societies in which the abolition of tradition has left a vacuum to be filled by various kinds of authoritarianism or totalitarianism, some of which may include elements of tradition—such as religion or the nation—taken out of their traditional context and transformed into instruments of total control. A liberal society is also by its nature a democratic society, although not all democratic societies have been liberal societies to the same degree, since in many of them social traditions have continued to exercise very strong constraints or modernizing political forms have abrogated traditional freedoms.1 A liberal society is one in which individual freedom has priority over social unity, whether that unity be imposed by tradition or by modernizing institutions and ideologies. In a liberal society, the dwindling force of tradition leaves the individual free to act in ways that were impossible in traditional societies. In the first place, individuals can form freely chosen communities, without the constraints of ethnic or class identity. They can choose life-goals that go beyond the boundaries of traditional expectations and norms. They can fashion diverse forms of life that express individual creativity and aspiration. They can choose from a range of possibilities that may have been denied them by a traditionally prescribed social order. Yet, in order to fashion forms of life, to attempt human fulfillment, they will also be informed by the content of tradition—no longer as constraint and taboo, but as a historically formed portrait of human possibilities, a lived and tested set of practices that enable personal

Two Stories of Liberal Society╇╇ 9

development. In a liberal society, tradition becomes available as resource rather than as constraint, as a guide to the task of becoming an individual. Tradition as resource is a social argument, which, in a liberal society, is conducted in a pluralist context, making various traditions of human fulfillment available for admiration, scrutiny, and mutual critique marked by civil discourse. The abolition of tradition as an assertive and stifling constraint, and the availability of tradition as a dialogic social resource, characterizes the best features of liberal society. In this sense a liberal society is characterized by both negative and positive freedom. Negative freedom, or freedom from constraint, allows individuals to make a range of choices concerning their self-fulfillment and life-goals. Positive freedom, or the freedom to fulfill certain purposes of human existence, is grounded in the willingness to accept certain constraints—such as various forms of moral discipline or commitments to communal and personal fidelity—in order to achieve these purposes. The awareness of these purposes of human existence, and their potential for human fulfillment, are embodied in tradition as a social resource. Tradition as social resource mediates a range of conceptions of human fulfillment, or the human good, that can be freely chosen by individuals. These various traditions of the human good offer resources for an “ontology of the human,” a conception of human nature and potential that understands freedom as fulfilled in a variety of complementary relationships based in the virtues. Through the virtues of respect for others, fidelity in relationships, solidarity with those in need, and care for nonhuman nature, human beings are able to fulfill their personal moral potential. This ontology of the human is grounded in the human person him- or herself, in the human dignity of each human being, which makes a moral claim on all others.2 Because positive freedom always depends on tradition-as-resource, on a social argument, it is constantly contested. In particular, the meaningfulness of any ontology of the human, beyond the assertion of individual freedom itself, is the subject of constant debate, argument, and negotiation. Should equality in the exercise of freedom, essential to a liberal society, also extend to substantial forms of socioeconomic equality? What kinds of legal respect should various kinds

10╇╇ Chapter One

of interpersonal commitment, such as marriage, enjoy? How much of their economic resources should individuals relinquish in order to support the disabled and marginalized? Should members of society have the right to end the lives of other human beings under certain conditions? The answers to these questions can only be given through civil discourse among the members of liberal societies. This discourse will draw constantly on the resources of traditions, and religious traditions have played and will continue to play a very significant part in this. Yet for many members of liberal societies, tradition-as-resource can look suspiciously like tradition-as-constraint. Beyond the claim to individual freedom, any notion of an ontology of the human is experienced—in different ways by different people—as groundless and intolerable. Claims to socioeconomic equality are rejected as unwarranted restrictions on individual economic power, and the commitments of interpersonal and communal bonds are deemed secondary to individual self-expression and self-disposition. The freedom of a liberal society can be interpreted not as the overcoming of tradition-as-constraint by tradition as a freely adopted resource, but rather as the overcoming of tradition as such, when traditions are experienced as sources of a spurious and restrictive ontology of the human. Even tradition as a socially continuous debate is rejected, since such a notion of tradition is linked to a sense of positive freedom, to a sense that we can identify certain purposes of human fulfillment. From this perspective, freedom is interpreted purely and exclusively as absence of constraint, as freedom of choice, since anything else is an imposition on the possibilities of individual freedom. Freedom is no longer the possibility of personally appropriating tradition in order to fulfill human potential, but rather it is the rejection of all tradition in order to exercise choice itself. In this case, freedom becomes its own object and justification: Its meaning lies purely in the experience of unrestricted choice, which is, as much as possible, the experience of unrestricted power. Choice becomes its own justification, without any need to appeal to a traditional wisdom of human fulfillment. Communal or faithful choices are no better than selfish or solipsistic preferences. Choices that lead

Two Stories of Liberal Society╇╇ 11

individuals to a higher or deeper form of life are no better than those that are about instinctual gratification. At its worst, this becomes simply an experience of the ego itself—the dominant, restless, consuming ego—since everything in the world is experienced as restraint on the ego. This can oscillate between self-assertion of the ego—and the experience of power that accompanies it—and the ego’s terror at itself, in the realization that it has no content and no meaning other than the experience of arbitrary choice. When freedom takes this guise, we witness the denial and evacuation of any ontology of the human, resulting in individualism instead of solidarity in community, and in depersonalization rather than fidelity and commitment in sexual and other interpersonal relationships. Thus we experience a conflict between two notions of freedom in liberal societies: freedom as the creative, personal appropriation of tradition, expressing an ontology of the human as the outcome of a process of social debate; and freedom purely as freedom of choice, where all choices are equal because there is no ontology of the human, no realm of meaning to inform them, and where the ego relates to the world around it only through domination or consumption, or else cripples itself through various forms of addiction. Because both of these options are possibilities of freedom, we constantly witness both of them in liberal societies, where the scope of freedom has been made all the greater by modernity’s disestablishment of tradition and by its technological power. In this sense, liberal societies do tell two stories. Because both of these stories are so evident in our experience, and because the difference between them is so great, both anecdotal and more reflective responses to liberal society vary markedly. Evidence justifying both the essentially humane and positive as well as the essentially narcissistic and shallow character of liberal society can easily be presented. The reality of both of these possibilities, and the stark differences between them, make clear how demanding the project of a liberal society is. Such a society faces the constant challenge of re-appropriating tradition, in the face of changing circumstances and experiences, in order to shape a moral consensus concerning the meaning and purpose of human freedom. Parts of this task must be faced by government,

12╇╇ Chapter One

insofar as some dimensions of an ontology of the human, especially those concerned with the balance of freedom and equality, must have a legal expression. Much of the task must be taken up by society as a cultural forum in continuous conversation about what expressions of human freedom will enable civilization to continue as a truly humane project. In whatever context it is pursued, the project of a liberal society requires constant dedication and discernment.3 The Demise of Christendom and the Ambivalence of Freedom We can understand the nature of this task better by considering the roots of contemporary liberal societies in that earlier relationship between Christianity and European society usually called Christendom. This can help us understand what liberal societies owe to Christendom, why Christendom ended, and why the development of liberal societies from Christendom has been marked by this profound ambivalence of freedom. Two important works can assist us in this reflection: Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology and Charles Taylor’s A Catholic Modernity?4 These books consider the disparities between Christendom and liberal societies in significantly different ways, and both address the ambivalence of liberal modernity. For O’Donovan, the legitimacy of all political authority after the resurrection and exaltation of Christ derives from Christ himself: “Christ’s victory . . . is the same victory that was promised to Israel over the nations, the victory of a God-filled and humanised social order over bestial and God-denying empires, a victory won for Israel on behalf of all mankind.”5 The reign of Christ means that the only political authority left to secular power is the power of making just judgments, since other governmental rights are “overwhelmed by the immediate claim of the Kingdom.”6 O’Donovan makes the striking claim that the concept of the “state” itself derives from Christ’s victory. He argues that it was a concept “unknown to the ancient world because it describes something new, a form of political authority which has come to understand itself differently as a result of Christ’s triumph.”7 Only

Two Stories of Liberal Society╇╇ 13

after Christ was a distinction necessary between the limited authority of the organs of government, subject to Christ, and another source of authority, the Church. According to O’Donovan, this conception of the limited role of the state—as the steward of justice subjected to the rule of Christ—was the most valuable feature of Christendom. Although Christendom was prone to the dangers of “negative collusion, the pretence that there was now no further challenge to be issued to the rulers in the name of the ruling Christ,” it was able to foster the ancient prophetic ideal of nations subject to God’s Law.8 In the early modern world—in what O’Donovan describes as “the last and greatest of the legal accomplishments of Christendom”—this was expressed as an “international law, dependent on no regime and no statute, but on the Natural Law implanted in human minds by God, and given effect by international custom and convention.”9 For O’Donovan, the First Amendment to the American Constitution can be taken as an indication of the end of Christendom, since it explicitly ruled out the establishment of any religion. Although it was enacted by Christians, in order to prevent government interference in the life of the church, it “ended up promoting a concept of the state’s role from which Christology was excluded, that of a state of freedom from all responsibility to recognise God’s self-disclosure in history.”10 It was in fact heretical, since it denied the Creed’s affirmation that Christ’s reign will have no end.11 The effect of this was to “exclude government from evangelical obedience,” with “repercussions for the way society itself is conceived.”12 The resulting idea of society “dissolves the unity and coherence” of the idea of justice “by replacing it with a plurality of rights.”13 According to O’Donovan, the key problem with this notion of rights is that they are conceived of subjectively and taken to be original rather than derived: “The right is a primitive endowment of power with which the subject first engages in society, not an enhancement which accrues to the subject from an ordered and politically formed society.”14 Despite liberal society’s rejection of the reign of Christ, it can embody some of the best features of Christendom, and O’Donovan believes that a Christian theologian can “venture to characterise a normative

14╇╇ Chapter One

political culture broadly in continuity with the Western liberal tradition.”15 Liberal society bears the marks of Christ’s rule in so far as it is marked by freedom of individual decision, by mercy in judgment, by equality, and by the “openness to speech” that has its key embodiment in representative parliaments. However, according to O’Donovan, this positive narrative of liberal society as expressive of the reign of Christ must be accompanied by a negative description of it as Antichrist, as “a parodic and corrupt development of Christian social order.”16 Once society has been formed by the reign of Christ, it cannot simply regress to “naive malevolence”: rather, its possibilities of evil now have a demonic, Antichristic character.17 With its point of departure as “free choice,” liberal society as Antichrist destroys the objectivity of natural right, substituting the assertion of individual rights and wants, which in turn corrode and undermine community and render justice and punishment an arbitrary imposition on an individual’s “will for life and freedom.”18 These two “counter-interpretations of modernity,” expressing the reign of Christ and Antichrist, describe a crossroads, a moment of decision that is “what all civilizational description must aspire to in the era between Ascension and Parousia, the era mapped out from its beginnings by the seer of Patmos.”19 The point of departure for O’Donovan’s powerful account of the relationship between Christendom and modernity is the question of the legitimacy of political authority. Charles Taylor’s A Catholic Modernity? is marked by many similar concerns, but it is principally motivated by the question of the sources of moral commitment in liberal societies. Taking up the concluding theme of his Sources of the Self, Taylor’s concern is to reflect on the problem of motivation for the demanding moral commitments that have become characteristic of the “rights culture” of liberal societies.20 Whereas O’Donovan regards the birth of liberal societies out of Christendom as originating in a heretical act of denial of Christ’s Lordship, Taylor argues that Christendom had to die in order to make the full universalization of the Gospel’s ethical meaning possible. Since Christendom was the attempt to incarnate the Gospel in particular societies, it inevitably cast the Gospel in ways that disadvantaged those of other faiths or of unacceptable morals. Because society involves

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coercion, the attempt to embody any creed—including Christianity— in social forms will involve coercion.21 The end of Christendom made possible the full development of an ethical creed that had its principal source in the Gospel itself, the development of a “rights culture” that, “for all its drawbacks, had produced something quite remarkable, the attempt to call political power to book against a yardstick of fundamental human requirements, universally applied.”22 According to Taylor, while the rights culture of modern liberalism owes so much to the Christian Gospel, it was also accompanied by the rise of “exclusive humanisms” that regard religion as harmful to those rights. For these “exclusive humanisms,” what is important is the flourishing of human life: Any claim that there is something beyond life, in this human, terrestrial sense, is perceived as a threat to this flourishing. Taylor sees this emphasis on the value of “ordinary life” as originating in the Reformation’s critique of Catholicism’s distinction between a higher, spiritual life, marked by celibacy and religious vows, and ordinary, secular married life, with its involvement in economic activity. Later, various forms of secular humanism applied this critique against Christianity itself, rejecting any appeal to higher, religious value in favor of an exclusive focus on human flourishing in a secular context. Taylor expresses this worldview in propositional terms: “1. that for us life, flourishing and driving back the frontiers of death and suffering are of supreme value; 2. that this wasn’t always so; it wasn’t so for our ancestors, or for people in other earlier civilizations; 3. that one of the things that stopped it from being so in the past was precisely a sense, inculcated by religion, that there were higher goals; and 4. that we have arrived at 1. by a critique and overcoming of (this kind of) religion”.23 Liberal societies, deeply influenced by “exclusive humanisms,” still have some of the characteristics of a postÂ�revolutionary order, a suspicion of anything that “smacks of the ancien régime,” that is, of any subordination of secular human flourishing to any purportedly higher or transcendental claims.24 Therefore, the society that has resulted from this development has mingled within it “both authentic developments of the gospel, of an incarnational mode of life, and also a closing off to God that negates the gospel.”25 Its greatest moral strength is the development of a

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universalist ethic that expresses an extension of moral concern without parallel in earlier times—an ethic expressed in such extraordinary examples of moral commitment as Amnesty International and Médecins sans Frontières. Yet this universal commitment, which seeks to include strangers across the globe in a community of moral concern, faces the question of its own moral sources: How can such a commitment be sustained? For Taylor, the most powerful secular source of such commitment is the sense of self-worth we derive from helping others out of a recognition of their human dignity.26 Secular humanism emphasises the worth and potential of humanity and the value of philanthropy in making human flourishing possible. Yet such philanthropy has a “Janus face”: if those who are being helped do not live up to our image of the human, we can come to despise them and, ultimately, to coerce them as passive material that must be forced into the form of our own ideals.27 Likewise, in our passion for justice we can come to hate those we identify as the enemies of moral progress.28 In this way, the horrors that the Enlightenment critique saw in the perversion of religious ideals through religious war became evident in secular humanism, in some cases with far worse effects. If “action for high ideals is not tempered, controlled and ultimately engulfed in an unconditional love of the beneficiaries, this ugly dialectic risks repetition.”29 Just as O’Donovan recognizes both the Christic and Antichristic potential of modernity, Taylor sees a certain logic in the fact that the century of Amnesty International and Médecins sans Frontières is also the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, that the “history of the twentieth century can be read either in a perspective of progress or in one of mounting horror.”30 Although Christendom also gave ample demonstration of this “ugly dialectic” of human ennoblement and annihilation, Christian faith can offer a vision of the love of God that can heal it. This can be described in two ways, which have in fact the same meaning: “either as a love or compassion that is unconditional—that is, not based on what you the recipient have made of yourself—or as one based on what you are most profoundly, a being in the image of God.”31 This vision of human worth based on the love of God, and thus independent of the demand to live up to a high ideal, is linked to

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the profound commonality of the sense that “our being in the image of God is also our standing among others in the stream of love, which is that facet of God’s life we try to grasp, very inadequately, in speaking of the Trinity.”32 For Taylor, then, the challenge facing liberal society is to be open to the Gospel of the love of God as a sustaining source of moral concern. This can provide an inspiration for a culture of universal human rights. Although he shares with O’Donovan an interpretation of modernity as the conjunction of high ideals and totalitarian atrocity, corruptio optimi pessima, Taylor does not direct his criticism at the notion of human rights itself, but rather at the attempt to sunder them from a vision of humanity created in the image of God. For O’Donovan, who focuses on the question of authority as the political act “which can give moral form to a community by defining its commitment to the good,” the notion of subjective rights threatens to fragment the ethical substance of natural law, the greatest heritage of Christendom.33 Subjective rights as “a primitive endowment of power” jeopardize the objective justice made possible for all nations by Christ’s reign. How, then, can a Christian be faithful to Christ’s reign in this time that is irrevocably post-Christendom? In my judgment, the greatest strength of The Desire of the Nations is its insistence on the ways in which Christ’s triumph, as the anticipation of the Kingdom, must be understood not only as the legitimation of Christendom but also as the ultimate legitimation of political authority in liberal society. Daniel’s prophecy of the one “like a Son of Man” (Daniel 7:13) who would triumph over bestial empires has an uncanny contemporary relevance, calling to mind the United Nations’s recognition of human dignity as the wellspring for international peace and justice after the catastrophe of World War II and the yearning of oppressed peoples for rule “with a human face.”34 Yet I do not share O’Donovan’s view of the opposition between subjective rights and natural law. If it is one “like a Son of Man” who is the source of divine justice, cannot the true meaning of “natural law” be found in the dignity of the human person, understood as a unique subject? If Christ’s rule is the rule of what is humane and the abolition of what is bestial, should we not find its touchstone in the dignity of the human person? If it is the human face of the one

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“like a Son of Man” who brings justice, cannot a philosophy of the dignity of the human subject be seen, not as the rejection of Christology that O’Donovan finds in the American Constitution, but rather as a sign of the elevation of the human person that God made possible in Christ? In this sense, it is possible to see a polity based on human rights as an implicit recognition of the reign of Christ. Such a polity has, indeed, a stronger link to Christology than one based on less personalist conceptions of natural law, since it is based on the transcendence of the human person, rather than on the structures of law. It is open to an understanding of individual human dignity as grounded in a union with Christ, the Word-become-human. It recognizes that it is the human person, transformed in Christ, who is the touchstone of all law. A key difficulty in O’Donovan’s account lies in the link between the end of Christendom and the development of liberal society. For O’Donovan, Christendom ended in a heretical act, when churchmen denied their own allegiance to Christ in a misconceived attempt to free the church from civil control. Yet the First Amendment was not a denial of the reign of Christ, but simply a denial of the political prerogatives of the established Church and of the British monarch within that Church. Because of the contradictions of an established church, Christ’s reign must now be understood and expressed in a different, implicit way, and that way was through the affirmation of the dignity of the human person. Catholic tradition has had to struggle with a similar process, moving from the nineteenth-century Papal insistence on state support for the Catholic Church, and the condemnation of religious freedom, to the recognition, in Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis humanae), that the dignity of the person demands respect for the subjective rights of conscience and that political privileges for the Church undermine this respect. O’Donovan does, of course, value individual freedom in his positive narrative of liberal society, but he sees the dangers of arbitrary voluntarism in its negative twin. Yet a statement of natural law in terms of universal human rights need not lead to arbitrary voluntarism: the subjectivity of human rights can be interpreted as the fundamental right to freedom and self-expression of the individual person. In a

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crucial sense, the subjective dignity of the human person is prior to the objective right of the state. This subjective dignity is indeed a “primitive endowment of power” in the sense that it is a dignity that the individual has prior to and independent of any political authority. Yet its “primitive” character can be understood in the ultimate sense of being in the “image of God,” prior to any and all human civilization. The dignity of the human subject gives the objective order of political institutions the character of intersubjectivity: Their laws and procedures are justified in terms of their ability to respect the freedom and equality of all. Human dignity gives such societies their moral foundation. At the same time, I share O’Donovan’s insistence that a social order faithful to Christ’s reign is not based on “subjective will” in the sense that the arbitrary will of the majority could abolish the human dignity of others. Rather, the inalienable dignity of the person must be enshrined—at least implicitly—as the basis of constitutional order, so that its abolition would mean the self-destruction of a free society. This is explicitly the case in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in the American and German constitutions.35 If this is the case, a Christian can see a liberal society as faithful to Christ’s reign in so far as it respects the dignity of the human person as expressed in human rights. The extent to which such a society is compatible with an attenuated form of Christendom is interesting and complex, and the world provides many examples of varying constitutional roles for religion and churches in liberal societies, notably the contemporary British monarchy and its prerogatives and responsibilities in relation to the Church of England. The profound moral ambivalence of liberal modernity that O’Donovan and Taylor eloquently describe is, in one sense, no more and no less than the ambivalence of human freedom itself, whose potential for good and ill has become dramatically clear in societies that give maximum scope to that freedom against a backdrop of accelerating technological power. Yet, as O’Donovan points out, it is not simply a matter of the moral ambiguity of human freedom at any stage of human history, but rather the ambiguity of a freedom elevated by the passion, resurrection, and exaltation of Christ. If, as Taylor emphasizes, the universal meaning of this freedom of the Gospel has become

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clear and effective with the end of Christendom, then the moral ambiguity of modernity has a particularly intense and challenging character—something exemplified in the “culture wars” and moral anxiety that are familiar aspects of our cultural condition. The Augustinian Heritage: The “Two Cities” as Two Loves To come to terms with this moral ambiguity in the post-Christendom era, we now turn to the greatest classic of Christian reflection on civilization, Augustine’s City of God. Augustine wrote at the beginning of the epoch we call Christendom, but his conception of the relationship between Church and society was not marked by an expectation that any such fusion of Church, culture, and society would occur: part of his relevance for our situation is that he does not speak from the perspective of Christendom. In considering how the Church can help liberal society tell its better story in this post-Christendom age, it is illuminating to consider Augustine’s seminal analysis of the two stories of freedom: his conception of human, and indeed cosmic, history as a dramatic narrative of the conflict between two cities—the heavenly and the earthly. I want to argue that a key aspect of the continuing relevance of Augustine’s City of God lies in its portrayal of this ambivalence of freedom—freedom as the potential to choose a social ontology of love, or freedom as the libido dominandi, the “lust for domination.” Some contemporary writers find support in the City of God for their rejection of the secular liberal state as a site for positive Christian action. According to this perspective, the state is equated with Augustine’s reprobate “earthly City”: It is only in the Church that a peaceful, Christian politics can be found.36 Yet an equivalence of the visible Church with Augustine’s “heavenly city,” and of the state with his “earthly city,” is fundamentally flawed. Augustine noted that his use of the term “city” had an allegorical character, referring to moral rather than political entities: “I classify the human race into two branches: the one consists of those who live by human standards, the other of those who live according to God’s will. I also call these two classes the two cities, speaking allegorically.”37 As R. W. Dyson has argued,

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the “two cities” are not cities at all in the ordinary sense, but moral categories: cosmic communities united by what their members love. The two cities “are the two all-embracing categories into which God’s rational creation is divided throughout history. . . . The City of God is the society of grace: the entire community, past and present, of those who unfeignedly love God. It is the Church, but it is the Church in the broadest sense of the term.”38 Nor can the state be identified with the reprobate “earthly City.” It is true that, for Augustine, the state exists because of sin; yet it also has the positive task of rectifying the damage caused by sin, and it is understood as a means of discipline.39 In Christianity and the Secular, Robert Markus argues that the City of God is not a rejection of the legitimacy of the secular, but on the contrary a powerful argument for the acknowledgment of the secular as the earthly context for the Church’s existence as it awaits the eschaton.40 The secular, for Augustine, is the “present age” (saeculum), in which the members of the heavenly and earthly cities live in an “inextricably intertwined state” in this temporal life.41 Markus notes that there have been two types of modern political thought that claim support in Augustine. One is secular liberalism, severing the direct relation between religion and the public realm; the other is “the tradition which would see the public sphere as founded or tied in one way or another to Christianity.”42 At the heart of this second perspective is the “radical equation of the secular with sin.”43 Markus rightly takes John Milbank as a leading exponent of this view. For Milbank, the civitas terrena is not regarded by Augustine “as a ‘state’ in the modern sense of a sphere of sovereignty, preoccupied with the business of government. Instead, this civitas, as Augustine finds it in the present, is the vestigial remains of an entire pagan mode of practice, stretching back to Babylon.” The ends sought by this earthly city “are not merely limited, finite goods, they are those finite goods regarded without ‘referral’ to the infinite good, and, in consequence, they are unconditionally bad ends. The realm of the merely practical cut off from the ecclesial, is quite simply a realm of sin.”44 Markus sums up Milbank’s interpretation of Augustine as the claim that there is “no neutral public sphere in which people can act politically without reference to ultimate ends.”45 Markus acknowledges

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that Augustine would have rejected any notion that individuals can perform morally indifferent actions, since all actions must be carried out with some reference to our ultimate ends, whether for salvation or damnation. But he denies that this rejection of “morally indifferent” or “neutral” action implies that Augustine rejected the possibility and legitimacy of a neutral public sphere, that is, practices, customs, and institutions that could constitute a shared context for action for members of both cities.46 Within these shared institutions, members of the heavenly city could act in ways that referred “limited finite goods” to the infinite good: “it is absolutely clear that Augustine envisaged a possibility of acting morally, with God’s grace, within the framework of earthly political order.”47 A striking example of this is Augustine’s praise for the Christian Roman emperor Theodosius I.48 What is crucial, Markus argues, is to distinguish the two different senses of the “earthly City,” the civitas terrena, as this term is used in the City of God: first, the broader sense of the term, denoting the society on earth that comprises both virtuous and wicked members; and second, the narrower sense—which it usually has when Augustine defines it explicitly—of the mass of the reprobates. According to Markus, “a great deal of the confusion and the controversy over the ‘secular’ realm in Augustine’s thought arises from failure to distinguish the two senses that the ‘earthly City’ can bear in Augustine’s language.”49 Those, like Milbank, who argue that Augustine rejected the legitimacy of the secular fail to make this distinction. For Markus, Augustine recognized that the Church lived within a “secular framework” that “demanded acknowledgement of its function and value, while at the same time it needed to be critically distanced and assessed within a Christian perspective.”50 Dyson’s and Markus’s studies provide good grounds for rejecting any interpretation of the City of God as a denial of the legitimacy of the secular, as a shared space in which Christians can cooperate with others for the common good. Augustine’s polarity of the “heavenly” and “earthly” cities cannot be used to set up a dichotomy between a peaceful Church and an intrinsically sinful secular realm. How, then, can the City of God shed light on the contemporary situation of Christians in liberal societies? I want to argue that the great value of the

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City of God for understanding our contemporary situation is not in an alleged tale of the contrasts between a peaceful Church and a irredeemably violent liberal state, but in its reflections on human freedom in relation to two loves: the love of God and neighbor, in contrast to the love of self.51 These two differing loves characterize human beings, and they differentiate the two cities.52 I want to illuminate the “two stories” of liberal societies with Augustine’s account of the “two cities”—and the two loves that energize them—as fundamental possibilities of human freedom. This understanding of the heritage of the City of God must, of course, reinterpret Augustine’s understanding of grace and salvation in light of contemporary Christian understandings.53 According to Vatican II, the grace of salvation is not limited to the baptized, but rather it is offered to all humanity. All human beings, whether they know and acknowledge Christ explicitly or respond to the grace of God in conscience through the awareness of ultimate values given in their own cultures, can belong to the civitas Dei.54 All human beings, gifted with the grace of salvation, can exercise their freedom to the extent of refusing or responding to the love of God. In this sense, the “two cities” can be interpreted as fundamental options of human freedom: the “heavenly city” is the community of those, Christian or otherwise, who respond to the gift of grace with love of God and neighbor; the “earthly city” is comprised of those who are enslaved by self-love. I began this chapter by reflecting on liberal society as a space in which the potential of human freedom for community and dignity or for selfishness and degradation is constantly in play. In this light, Augustine’s reflections on human freedom in the City of God are of extraordinary value, as a key aspect of a seminal Christian text expounding the meaning and consequences of fundamental human choices with dramatic intensity and analytical power. Augustine sets out the meaning of the two loves in a key passage: We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self. In fact, the earthly city glories in itself, the

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Heavenly City glories in the Lord. The former looks for glory from men, the latter finds its highest glory in God, the witness of a good conscience. The earthly lifts up its head in its own glory, the Heavenly City says to its God: “My glory, you lift up my head.” (Ps 3, 3) In the former, the lust for domination lords it over its princes as over the nations it subjugates; in the other both those put in authority and those subject to them serve one another in love, the rulers by their counsel, the subjects by obedience. The one city loves its own strength shown in its powerful leaders; the other says to its God, “I will love you, my Lord, my strength” (Psalm 18,1).55 The two loves have their outcomes in different expressions of freedom. The love of God and neighbor seeks its glory not in itself but in God and expresses itself in “the witness of a good conscience,” in a humility and trust that recognizes God’s Lordship, and in community between those who are entrusted with government and those who are governed. The love of self is expressed in contempt for God, by an obsession with its own glory and power, and by the libido dominandi, a lust that binds not only the ruled but also the rulers themselves who are captive to it. Citing Romans 1:21, Augustine argues in the same passage that this false love also leads to the self-degradation of idolatry. The degradation of human sexuality through idolatry and its associated obscene practices is pursued in detail by Augustine in relation to pagan Rome in the early books of the City of God.56 Since all evil is the perversion of something good, this difference between the two cities is not from nature, but rather a perversion of nature.57 In the city of God, freedom is characterized by humility, most of all in the example of Christ himself: “Thus, in a surprising way, there is something in humility to exalt the mind, and something in exaltation to abase it. . . . That is why humility is highly prized in the City of God . . . and it receives particular emphasis in the character of Christ, the king of that City.”58 Humility “exalts the mind by making it subject to God.”59 A freedom that deems itself to be self-sufficient diminishes a human being: “This then is the original evil: man regards himself as his own light, and turns away from that light which would make man

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himself a light if he would set his heart on it.”60 Freedom should not trust its own will, but should “hope to call upon the name of the Lord God.”61 Although we are created free, subjection to sin enslaves our freedom, and only openness to the grace of God can restore it.62 The exercise of human freedom is not once for all, but rather it is characterized by constant struggle.63 Augustine emphasizes that we cannot achieve the elimination of the desires of the flesh in this life, cannot think we have achieved victory. The virtues, “which are certainly the best and most useful of man’s endowments here below,” are of inestimable assistance in this struggle.64 The “membership” of either city is not irrevocable but depends on freedom’s response to the gift of grace. For Augustine, a society or “people” is a group that is bound together by shared values—by its “common objects of love”—and the character of any society can be discovered from these shared values.65 The citizens of the heavenly city are oriented towards community: they resist the spell of the libido dominandi and “form a community where there is no love of a will that is personal and, as we may say, private, but a love that rejoices in a good that is at once shared by all and unchanging—a love that makes ‘one heart’ out of many, a love that is the whole-hearted and harmonious obedience of mutual affection.”66 The highest value for the life of a community is peace, “than which nothing better can be found.” This is the supreme desire and includes a “mutual fellowship in God.”67 Peace is well-ordered concord, characterized by mutual service. In the peaceful household, “even those who give orders are the servants of those whom they appear to command. For they do not give orders because of a lust for domination but from a dutiful concern for the interests of others, not with pride in taking precedence over others, but with compassion in taking care of others.”68 In the heavenly city, all good acts are directed towards peace, both “in relation to God, and in relation to a neighbor, since the life of a city is inevitably a social life.”69 In the earthly city, by contrast, peace is only the temporary absence of war, the result of conquest that reverts once again to war once the resentment of the vanquished bursts out in revenge:

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If any section of that city has risen up in war against another part, it seeks to be victorious over other nations, though it itself is the slave of base passions; and if, when victorious, it is exalted in its arrogance, that victory brings death in its train. Whereas if it consider the human condition and the changes and chances common to mankind, and is more tormented by possible misfortunes than puffed up by its present success, then its victory is only doomed to death. For it will not be able to lord it permanently over those whom it has been able to subdue victoriously.70 Augustine’s reflections on the different effects of the two loves focus on the contrast between humility and self-aggrandizement. Humble people know that our powers and capacities come from God, and that they will only find fulfillment in worship of God and in love of neighbor. Love of neighbor is expressed in peaceful service, the effort to form a community where some may have higher office, but where no one lives by domination or in servitude. Self-aggrandizement, in contrast, leads to a cycle of violence, domination, and the counterviolence of the defeated, where peace is merely another way of saying that there is no one left to fight. The choices of these two loves, in their different expressions, determine the character of a community, whether large or small. Peaceful communities are bonded by the ties of mutual respect and service; warring communities by the power of the libido dominandi, which enslaves both the victors and the vanquished.71 The continuing power of Augustine’s reflections, and their profound relevance to liberal societies, lies in their insight into the radical social and political implications of our loves. These loves are the expression of our freedom; but for Augustine there are loves that intensify and multiply freedom, and others that in fact bind and choke it, spiraling downwards into various forms of destruction, addiction, and selfdegradation. As shared values, the character of our loves shapes the kind of society we live in. Augustine is passionate about the potential of communities, especially families and groups of friends, to live a common life of peace and mutual service. Clearly, he did not share the conviction of pre-Christian Graeco-Roman philosophers that the polis, the state itself, could be a school of virtue in the higher sense.

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Thomas Aquinas was to have a more positive view of the political realm and its capacity for moral education.72 However, Augustine did recognize the worth of political and social institutions for the common life of Christian and pagan alike, and he acknowledged the Christian value of virtuous commitment within these institutions. Augustine’s contrast of the two loves intensifies our awareness of the fateful consequences of the abuse of freedom, especially in the context of modernity, in which individual will is so often unconstrained by tradition and has so much technological power at its disposal. At the same time, he constantly reminds us of the power of grace to lead freedom towards peaceful community—that it is possible for human beings to live in mutual respect, consideration, and service. Augustine’s account of freedom, written before the development of Christendom, continues to illuminate the circumstances of liberal societies that have emerged from the demise of Christendom; most of all, it highlights the challenges they face. These challenges are shared by the Christian church, which is committed to helping liberal society tell the better story of freedom, so that the church can live freely within it, but also—and most of all—for the sake of all the human beings that are members of liberal societies, and for the whole world that is so deeply affected by the multifaceted powers of liberal modernity.73 Augustine reminds us that the task of virtue is never completed, that none can ever say that they have mastered their vices. In the same way, liberal societies are constantly faced with the choice between the two loves—the two meanings of freedom—sometimes in more everyday ways, sometimes in ways that may determine the future of civilization. The Christian tradition is profoundly aware of the radical character of human freedom—of its power for good and ill—and Augustine’s City of God is a classic expression of that awareness. It is this understanding that the Church brings to secularity, the shared space of social debate, in order to serve the common good. Notes 1. For example, De Valera’s Irish Republic and the early twentieth-century French Third Republic at the time of the expulsion of Catholic religious orders were both democratic but hardly liberal.

28╇╇ Chapter One 2. As Charles Taylor argues in Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2004), “a moral order is more than just a set of norms; it also contains what we might call an ‘ontic’ component, identifying features of the world that make the norms realizable.” In the “modern social imaginary,” this “ontic” order has not disappeared, but is now “a feature about us humans” (10–11). This imaginary is a secular imaginary in the sense that it involves the “freeing of politics from its ontic dependence on religion” (187). 3. This becomes particularly clear when societies are freed from oppression and can embrace freedom once again, as was the case in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism in 1989. During the initial years of democratization in Eastern Europe, freedom as sheer voluntarism was very evident, with the widespread prominence of “carpetbagger” capitalism, pornography, and organized crime; this was followed more slowly and gradually by freedom as a complex articulation of tradition and the development of more stable democratic institutions and community groups. 4. Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); James L. Heft, ed., A Catholic Modernity? Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture, with Responses by William M. Shea, Rosemary Luling Haughton, George Marsden, and Jean Bethke Elshtain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 5. O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 147. 6. Ibid., 151. 7. Ibid., 231. 8. Ibid., 213. 9. Ibid., 236. 10. Ibid., 245. 11. Ibid., 246. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 247. 14. Ibid., 248. O’Donovan draws a strong distinction between the natural law doctrines of early modernity and the doctrines of subjective human rights that were influential in the eighteenth century and afterwards. However, in Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 2005), Jean Porter argues, drawing on the work of Brian Tierney (The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997]), that we in fact owe “the first explicit claims for the existence of subjective

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5. 1 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

2. 2 23. 24. 25.

natural rights to medieval canon lawyers” (344), who, in their development of the idea of natural law from Scripture and other sources, formulated “a concept of the natural law which regards an interior power or capacity for moral discernment as natural law in the primary and paradigmatic sense, in terms of which other kinds of appeals to the natural law are to be understood.” This gave “them a way to justify and safeguard claims to autonomy and self-direction” (348), which led in turn to the “idea of a right as a subjective power of the individual” (350), giving rise to a distinctive claim and existing prior to particular social arrangements. The key scriptural influence on this was the doctrine of the imago Dei, which was linked to the capacity for moral discernment that belongs to every human being. O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 230. Ibid., 274. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 277Â�–78. Ibid., 284. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). For James McEvoy, O’Donovan’s judgment is that “citizens of liberal societies today have an implicit distrust of the idea of Christendom and therefore raise the question about coercion because they see society in terms of minimum formal conditions. And they think about society in this way, he continues, because they have lost confidence in the search for shared convictions.” James McEvoy, “A Dialogue with Oliver O’Donovan about Church and Government,” The Heythrop Journal 48 (November 2007): 957. Yet as McEvoy rightly notes, “O’Donovan’s argument does not directly respond to the question of whether Christendom is implicitly coercive. That question remains unanswered. Neither does O’Donovan’s response here acknowledge that the question about Christendom and coercion could be raised by someone not at all committed to or influenced by the contemporary subjectivist climate” (960). McEvoy argues that Taylor’s work recognizes the inevitably coercive effects of Christendom and at the same time offers a thorough critical analysis of contemporary subjectivism. Taylor, A Catholic Modernity? 18. Ibid., 23–24. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 16.

30╇╇ Chapter One Ibid., 32. Ibid. Ibid., 33. Ibid. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 35. Ibid. O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 249. Recall, for example, the plea of the Prague Spring of 1968 for “socialism with a human face.” 35. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) begins with the words, “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all the members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Diane Ravitch and Abigail Thernstrom, eds., The Democracy Reader (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992), 202. Article I of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany affirms that “The dignity of the human person is inviolable. To respect and protect it is the duty of all state authority. 2. Therefore the German people affirms the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person as the foundation of all human community, peace and justice in the world” (author’s translation). See www.datenschutzberlin.de/recht/de/gg/gg1_de.htm#art1. Cf. the discussion of this article in Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematische Theologie, Vol. 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1991), where the sources of contemporary conceptions of human rights in a theological vision of the human person are emphasized (205). For the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” See Vincent Wilson Jr., ed., The Book of Great American Documents (Brookeville, MD: American History Research Associates, 1987), 15. 6. See, for example, William Cavanaugh, “Discerning: Politics and Recon3 ciliation,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, 196–208 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). For Cavanaugh, “Rather than forcing a choice between acceptance of or withdrawal from the one public reality, Augustine’s metaphor of the two cities is a far more fruitful model, for it helps us to see that there are two rival performances, the City of God and the earthly city, contending for the status of ‘public.’” In Cavanaugh’s discussion these two “rival performances” are identified with the difference between the church and the 6. 2 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Two Stories of Liberal Society╇╇ 31

37. 38.

39.

40. 1. 4 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

modern “nation-state,” and Augustine’s analysis of the libido dominandi in the Roman empire “carries over—mutatis mutandis—to the tragic politics of the liberal state” (206). Augustine, City of God, trans. H. Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1984) XV:1, 595. All subsequent references are to this edition. R. W. Dyson, The Pilgrim City: Social and Political Ideas in the Writings of St. Augustine of Hippo (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2001), 10–11. See also Dyson’s St. Augustine of Hippo: The Christian Transformation of Political Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2005) 32–33. According to Dyson’s reading of Augustine, “the state has arisen . . . first as a consequence and expression of sin; second, as a mechanism for ameliorating the material damage arising from sin; and third, as an instrument of discipline, whereby sinful men are punished and virtuous men tested and proved” (The Pilgrim City, 47). Robert Markus, Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). Ibid., 39. Cf. City of God I:35. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 43. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 406. Markus, Christianity and the Secular, 44. Markus’s formulation of Milbank’s reading of Augustine is cited from M. J. Hollerich, “John Milbank, Augustine and the ‘Secular,’” in History, Apocalypse and the Secular Imagination, ed. Mark Vessey, Karla Pollmann, and Allan D. Fitzgerald, 315 (Bowling Green, OH: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999). Markus, Christianity and the Secular, 44. Markus notes that in his earlier work, De doctrina Christiana, Augustine had acknowledged the value of classical culture for Christians; in a similar way, the City of God acknowledges the value of “acting within the framework of existing social and political institutions”: “As with the curriculum of the established education system, and, generally, with established practices, customs, and institutions, members of the two Cities make use of the same finite goods, although for different ends, with a ‘different faith, a different hope, a different love’” (XVIII:54, 45). In Living in Two Cities: Augustinian Trajectories in Political Thought (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 1998), Eugene Te Selle argues that “it is true that Augustine detached himself from ‘sacral politics’. But this does not mean that he posited anything as neat as a ‘neutral’ sphere; his thought is more dialectical than

32╇╇ Chapter One that. He saw the two cities intertwined throughout human history. We are all born children of Cain and the earthly city; but the very fact that we can be reborn into the city of God highlights the potentialities for good that remain in all human reality.” Although rejecting the notion of a “neutral” earthly city, Te Selle does, however, affirm its “ambivalence” in a way that also allows for its legitimacy as a site of moral action for Christians: “it is precisely the earthly city then, not some tertium quid, that is affirmed because of its positive achievements and its potentialities for future good. It remains ambivalent, usable by both cities, both sets of motivations” (42–43). 47. Ibid., 46. 8. Augustine, City of God V:26. Rowan Williams, in “Politics and the Soul: 4 A Reading of the City of God,” Milltown Studies 19/20 (1987): 55–72, notes that Augustine praised Theodosius because he was not subject to the libido dominandi; he was capable of sharing power and accepting humiliation (65). For Williams, Augustine emphasizes “consulere,” spiritual nurturing, within the context of both small and large communities, which are “essentially purposive, existing so as to nurture a particular kind of human life” (63). So “the member of the City of God is committed ex professo to exercising power when called upon to do so, and, in responding to such a call, does not move from a ‘church’ to a ‘state’ sphere of activity, but continues in a practice of nurturing souls already learned in more limited settings” (68). For Gerard O’Daly, in Augustine’s City of God: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), the City of God is “not a discussion of the relations between church and state: rather, it gives an account of how Christians may, and why they must, be good citizens of the empire, by defining the limited but significant area where the aims and interests of the two cities, in their historical form, coincide” (209). 49. Markus, Christianity and the Secular, 47. It is noteworthy that Gaudium et spes uses the term “earthly city” in its “secular” rather than “reprobate” sense; e.g., “the Church has a saving and an eschatological purpose which can be fully attained only in the future world. But she is already present in this world, and is composed of men, that is, of members of the earthly city [civitas terrestris] who have a call to form the family of God’s children during the present history of the human race, and to keep increasing it until the Lord returns” (40); “Laymen should also know that it is generally the function of their well-formed Christian conscience to see that the divine law is inscribed in the life of the earthly city [civitas ter-

Two Stories of Liberal Society╇╇ 33 rena]; from priests they may look for spiritual light and nourishment” (43). As these extracts demonstrate, in Gaudium et spes, members of the Church are also members of the “earthly city,” which itself can bear the impress of divine law. English translation from Vatican Website edition: www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/ vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html. 50. Markus, Christianity and the Secular, 45. As Christopher Insole argues in The Politics of Human Frailty: A Theological Defence of Political Liberalism (London: SCM Press, 2004), the weakness of the “radical orthodox” approach is in its “genealogical reduction” of secular society to an “ontology of violence”: it opens up an “assertive transcendental space” by an erroneous and unnecessarily alarmist description of the secular world, whereas we are in fact left with a “broken middle,” neither nihilism nor the City of God, in which “the wheat and the chaff are thoroughly mixed until the coming of the Son of Man” (141). 1. Robert Kraynak, in Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and 5 Politics in the Fallen World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), understands Augustine’s “earthly city” essentially as the state, rather than as a moral allegory of self-love. However, in contrast to Milbank and Cavanaugh, Kraynak does not interpret Augustine as condemning the “earthly City” in this sense (as secular order) and rightly notes that Augustine’s “political teaching is thus a kind of moderate authoritarianism that respects the limited boundaries of the earthly city” (94). However, Kraynak builds on this to develop an Augustinian theory of contemporary politics and a critique of the “Kantian Christianity” of democracy based on human rights (152–54), arguing that the contemporary import of Augustine’s work is that it “gives sanction to all constitutionally limited governments under God, even those that are not based on human rights or social contract theory” (191). Yet the City of God is not principally interesting because it can be interpreted to justify constitutionally limited government in ways that are critical of democratic human rights theory—such an approach is both utopian (because it does not recognize why such undemocratic constitutional governments are intrinsically unstable) and runs counter to Catholic social teaching, as expressed, for example, in Joseph Ratzinger’s somewhat Kantian formulation: “Since all collaborate in the genesis of law, it is common to all. As such, all can and must respect it. And as a matter of fact, democracy’s guarantee that all can work together to shape the law and the just distribution of power is the fundamental reason why democracy is the most appropriate of all

34╇╇ Chapter One political models.” Values in a Time of Upheaval (New York: Ignatius Press, 2006), 33. For my own argument, the contemporary importance and relevance of the City of God is less in transposing Augustine’s sense of the limitations of government (which, as TeSelle notes, was “overwhelmed with the fleeting character of life and the lack of opportunities to make much of a difference”; Living in Two Cities, 156) to our own very different age than in its analysis of the two loves and their fateful importance for moral and political choices. 52. It is significant that one of Catholic tradition’s most influential spiritual texts, the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, was probably influenced by Augustine’s reflections on the two loves as fundamental options of human freedom, which were expressed by Ignatius in “A Meditation on Two Standards”: the “standard of Christ” and the “standard of Satan” (Fourth Day, Second Week. The Spiritual Exercises, ed. L. Puhl SJ, 60 [Chicago: Loyola Press, 1951]). In The Spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1953), Hugo Rahner argues that this fundamental theme of the City of God influenced Ignatius through his reading of the story of Augustine in the Golden Legend during his convalescence after the siege of Pamplona (27–28). The Golden Legend relates of Augustine’s great work, “that his book is concerned with the story of two cities, with the Kings of these two cities, Jerusalem and Babylon. For Christ is king over Jerusalem, Satan over Babylon. Two contrary loves gave birth to these cities.” Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. W. G. Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), II:126. 3. In the history of salvation before Christ, the “City of God” could also 5 include non-Jews who were pleasing to God, such as Job, of whom Augustine writes: “I have no doubt that it was the design of God’s providence that from this one instance we should know that there could also be those among other nations who lived by God’s standards and were pleasing to God, as belonging to the spiritual Jerusalem” (XVIII:47; 829) or even the Erythraean Sybil, because of her prophecies of Christ (XVIII:23). After the coming of Christ, of course, Augustine believed that membership of the eternal City could only be possible through baptism and incorporation into the visible Church. However, even this may need to be nuanced; as T. Johannes van Bavel OSA argues in “What Kind of Church Do You Want? The Breadth of Augustine’s Ecclesiology” (Louvain Studies 7/3 (Spring 1979): 147–71), although Augustine adopted Cyprian’s view that “outside the Church there is no salvation,” “we must,

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54.

5. 5 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

3. 6 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

however, be on our guard against a too simplistic interpretation of this principle,” since, in Augustine’s conception, “church” “generally means more than the empirical church” (153), and this has implications for his conception of the breadth of the church both before and even after the coming of Christ (154–55). “Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience—these too may achieve eternal salvation.” Lumen gentium, 16. Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. A. Flannery O.P. (New York: Costello Publishing, 1987), 367. XIV:28, 593. E.g., VII:26, 27. XII:1, 3. XIV:13, 572–73. XIV:13, 572. XIV:13, 573. XV:21, 635. “The choice of the will, then, is genuinely free only when it is not subservient to faults and sins. God gave it that true freedom, and now that it has been lost, through its own fault, it can be restored only by him who had the power to give it at the beginning. Hence the Truth says ‘if the Son sets you free, then you will be truly free’” (John 8.36) XIV:11, 569. XIX:4, 853–54. XIX:4, 857. XIX:24. XV:3, 599. XIX:13, 870. XIX:14, 874. XIX:17, 879. XV:4, 599. As Raymond Canning notes in his article “Common Good,” in Augustine through the Ages: An Encylopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), for Augustine, pride is “the enemy of the common good,” and is “paralleled by a ruinous self-love which, in turning from the pursuit of the common good to its own exclusive good—whether that be money or power—finds itself not in a state of possessing more but in confinement and destitution (in angustias egestatemque)” (220).

36╇╇ Chapter One 72. For Paul E. Sigmund, in “Law and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. N. Kretzmann and E. Stump (Cambridge University Press, 1993), in the De regimine principum, Aquinas conceives of the political community as “a union of free men under the direction of a ruler who aims at the promotion of the common good. Government then has positive role and justification” (218). In contrast to Augustine, Aquinas believed that the state is part of God’s original intention for creation, rather than the result of the fall: for Aquinas, whereas “servitude” is the result of sin, “subjection” “could have existed before sin” in a hierarchy oriented to the common good. See Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250–1450 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 23. For Robert Markus, the trajectory of Augustine’s thought is not simply towards a “night watchman” state: he would have wanted to maximize social and cultural consensus, and thus to extend the public realm accordingly; yet he would not have welcomed the idea of a shared religion being a purpose of the state, in the sense of a “Christendom,” since this would threaten the eschatological character of the City of God (Christianity and the Secular, 64–65). 73. “In pursuing its own salvific purpose not only does the Church communicate divine life to men but in a certain sense it casts the reflected light of that divine life over all the earth, notably in the way it heals and elevates the dignity of the human person, in the way it consolidates society, and endows the daily activity of men with a deeper sense and meaning. The Church, then, believes it can contribute much to humanizing the family of man and its history through each of its members and its community as a whole.” Vatican II, Gaudium et spes, 40. Flannery, 940.

8 chapter two

Church, Kingdom, and Secularity

Christian Identity and Secular Moral Ideals I ended the last chapter by arguing that it is part of the Church’s mission in the contemporary world to assist liberal secular societies to tell their “better story.” In this chapter, I would like to consider the implications of this task for the Church itself and its own identity. How can this task of encouraging liberal society’s better story be at the same time an expression of the Church’s own identity? To what extent will the Church find its own concerns within the concerns of the liberal secular world, so that support for the best ideals of liberal modernity will also be an expression of its own mission? In this relationship, the Church runs the risk of identifying its own mission and goals with the aspirations and best principles of liberal secular civilization; there is also the equally grave temptation for the Church to conceive its own distinctiveness in a way that renders it less able to live in solidarity with all human beings. The relationship of the Church to secular moral ideals is profoundly contested in contemporary theology and in the contemporary experience of Christians. Two fundamental concerns loom large: If the Church is committed to supporting and encouraging the dissemination of universal ideals of freedom, justice, and dignity, why does it insist on its own uniqueness and the uniqueness of the Gospel it proclaims? Does not this very insistence inhibit the development of a universal moral consciousness based on mutual respect? From a very different perspective, many point to the malign story of liberal societies and contend that secular modernity is so fundamentally degraded by the libido dominandi and its offspring that it is essentially alien 37╇

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to the Church’s mission, which is to live as an alternative society to secularity. One understanding of the Church’s contemporary task might be to identify certain moral concerns as the meaning of Christianity, and to give these concerns its full commitment. Yet if these moral concerns are themselves not seen as founded in Christian identity, then an overriding commitment to them can gradually render the distinctive stance of Christian faith secondary and inessential, so that Christian religious consciousness is no longer integrated with moral consciousness, but rather is replaced by it. If the content of Christianity is primarily understood as a moral imperative, as distinct from a faith in Jesus Christ as the risen promise of God’s gift of salvation, then the Christian tradition can seem to be one, ultimately inessential, way to express a common, universally human commitment to this moral imperative. A very different reaction—which has both traditional forms as well as strong recent expressions in postliberal theology—is to argue that the Church’s identity and future are not bound up with the moral problems of “the world.” According to this point of view, the future of the Church lies in a strong communal identity and an acute sense of differentiation from the secular world. From this perspective, the moral ideals of secular modernity are unconvincing and illusory, since they are about changing a world that cannot be changed: The world of the secular state is of its nature a place of violence and discord, a place where relationships of solidarity are impossible. The Church’s role is not to support universalist movements of human dignity and human rights, since these notions are vain and ineffectual abstractions, but to be itself a body that displays a particular kind of politics and morality, an alternative society to the state. Neither of these perspectives recognizes an intrinsic relationship between Christianity and the better story of liberal society: the first because these moral ideals are conceived to be independent of Christianity, so that Christian faith can be of great assistance to their realization but is not constitutively linked to them; the second because the realization of such ideals is conceived to be illusory and not the task of the Church as a distinct community. In both cases we see a bifurcation between the highest moral ideals of liberal society and the Church

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as a community of faith. It may lose its identity by giving more and more attention to these ideals, coming to see its own religious beliefs and identity as subordinate; or it may pay less attention to these ideals and focus on its own internal life. In essence, these alternatives are a dissolution of identity or a withdrawal from the moral challenges and potential of the secular world. The purpose of this chapter is to advocate a way of relating to liberal societies that respects and encourages universal moral values, but that at the same time grounds the Church’s support for these values in Christian identity itself. Our understanding of the relationship between the Church and liberal secularity is deeply affected by our conception of the relationship between Church and Kingdom. If the best values of liberal societies—respect for human dignity and the quest for human rights—are an intimation of the values of the Kingdom, how should the Church relate to them? Can it support these values in a way that does not compromise its own sense of identity? Can it insist on its own unique role while affirming its solidarity with all those groups and movements that strive to defend and enact human dignity? This chapter develops a theological perspective to respond to this challenge in terms of the relationship between Church and Kingdom, between the community of Christian faith and the Kingdom that offers hope for a world of peace and justice. The key criterion for this relationship is Christological, since the Church is witness to Christ as the proclaimer of the Kingdom and the one in whom and through whom it has come and will be fulfilled. As part of this discussion, I would like to consider two distinctive and high-quality contributions to the debate that are, to my mind, informed by the two very different perspectives I have sketched above. The first is expressed in Andrew Shanks’s God and Modernity: A New and Better Way to Do Theology.1 The second is found in the work of William Cavanaugh. Before discussing Shanks’s contribution, it is important to recall the significance of the “Joachite” thread in Christian theology and history, stemming from the twelfth-century Calabrian abbott, Joachim da Fiore. Joachim’s ideas, which are vitally concerned with the relationship between Church and Kingdom, have been extraordinarily

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influential in Western religious and political history, and Shanks’s book can be read as a creative contemporary interpretation of the Joachite tradition.2 Joachim da Fiore attempted to interpret the doctrine of the trinity in explicitly social and historical terms. His ideas raise a number of issues in the understanding of the relationship between trinitarian faith and our expectations of social community within human history that remain important to this day. Joachim’s deepest concern was to link the trinity to history in a fundamentally apocalyptic perspective. In his various meditations and symbolic interpretations of scripture, Joachim sought to do this by interpreting the two testaments through the notion of three ages of history, each age associated with a person of the trinity.3 The first age, the age of the Father, was the age of the Law, the Old Testament; the second age, of the Son, is the age of the Church; the third age will be the age of the Spirit, characterized by an immediate knowledge of God, by worship “in spirit and truth.” On the basis of this historical doctrine of the trinity, Joachim accused Peter Lombard of speaking of a “quaternity” in the definition of the trinity in his famous Sentences, since he spoke of a common nature notionally distinct from the three persons: “the blasphemy of Peter, who by dividing the unity from the trinity introduced quaternity.”4 In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council defended Peter against Joachim’s criticism and condemned Joachim’s own conception of the trinity as deficient in the divine unity, which he “conceives not as true and proper, but, so to say, as collective and by similitude, just as many people are called one nation, and many faithful one Church.”5 The Lateran Council’s concern focused on Joachim’s “collective” doctrine of the trinity. Later in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas’s critique of Joachim’s teachings focused rather on his association of the three persons with three “ages” of salvation history. Article 4 of Question 106 of the Prima secundae of the Summa is devoted to the question, “Whether the New Law will last until the end of the world?” Thomas emphasized the centrality of Christ for salvation until the end of time, rejecting the notion of a third age of the Spirit. The point particularly criticized by Aquinas was that Joachim’s notion of the third age of the Spirit posited a differentiation in the history of the

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world, and of the Church, between Pentecost and Parousia, a differentiation that appeared to relativize the definitive character of Christ for all time. For Aquinas, “the New Law too does not belong only to Christ but also to the Holy Spirit: ‘the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus’ etc. (Romans 8:2) So we are not to look forward to some further law proper to the Holy Spirit. Since Christ began his preaching of the Gospel by saying ‘The Kingdom of heaven is at hand’ (Matthew 4:17), it is absurd to say that the gospel of Christ is not the gospel of the Kingdom.”6 Therefore, the principal theological questions that arise from Joachim’s work today are as follows: Can we speak meaningfully of an “age of the Spirit” that is in some sense distinguishable from the “age of Christ”? Does this mean, in turn, that we can speak of an “age of the Kingdom” that is distinguishable from the “age of the Church”? If not, what stimulus can Joachim’s ideas give to our sense of the relationship between Christ and the Spirit in the understanding of this saeculum, of history between Pentecost and Parousia—in particular our understanding of the possibilities of social community within that history? A reading of Shanks’s God and Modernity provokes a similar field of questions. God and Modernity begins with an evocation of the notion of the “solidarity of the shaken,” coined by the late Czech philosopher Jan Patocˇka. The “solidarity of the shaken” is a sense of fragile human value and moral transcendence shared by all those who dare to confront the horror of destructive violence in modern totalitarianism and technological annihilation. For Shanks, the “solidarity of the shaken” has its most effective expression in the “new social movements,” such as Amnesty International, which do not seek political power but are oriented to a whole range of social, political, and environmental concerns. These movements have an “underlying common identity: an ethically principled commitment to trans-confessional solidarity-building within a civil-society context—plus a radically shaken sense of danger to inspire it.”7 In Shanks’s God and Modernity, the “solidarity of the shaken” has a methodological priority, since for him the key question is “what might it mean to do theology, quite directly, on the basis of the solidarity of

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the shaken?”8 His aim is to help develop a “trans-confessional ethos of civil-society movements,” and he sees religion as “the ideal solidarity-reinforcing ritual expression—and transmission process—of shakenness.”9 This new theology will contribute to a “third modernity”: while the first modernity was the universalism of the biblical vision, and the second modernity that of the Enlightenment, the third modernity is not about any universal political narrative but rather about the “solidarity of the shaken,” especially in response to the trauma of “second modernity” in twentieth-century totalitarianism and violence. Part of the “trans-confessional ethos” of third modernity will be civil-religious experimentation, “sacramental celebrations of the very purest solidarity of the shaken,” involving a religious “calendar reform” that might, for example, give Hiroshima Day a particular status.10 This new Christian theology will be postmetaphysical and unequivocally pluralist. Shanks’s interpretation of pluralism is as “a radical openness to the thought of other cultures plus a passionate affirmation of difference, both within and between cultures, as a positive good in itself,” building up the solidarity of the shaken through the eyes of different religious cultures.11 Thus, “for the Christian theologian of third modernity, the loyalty of church-members to their church is primarily to be affirmed as a unique potential contribution to the larger solidarity of the shaken.”12 In contrast to Christian fundamentalism, as well as to more mainstream Church life that, for Shanks, tends to a “pastoral monoculture,” the dynamic role of Christians in third modernity will be as subgroups in new transconfessional social movements.13 Shanks recognizes that his theological vision is in the Joachite tradition, and that the notion of a “third modernity” is a reinterpretation of Joachim’s third age of the Spirit. He does not, however, subscribe to Joachim’s identification of three successive ages with the persons of the trinity—his interpretation is synchronic rather than diachronic. A postmetaphysical interpretation of the trinity “would need to get back behind the pattern of three ages, to encounter the three Persons rather as three perennially re-emergent agencies of cultural shake-up.”14 In this light, “Third Person theology” is “all about reading the signs of the times,” entailing “all manner of revisionary reinterpretation of the

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past.”15 On this basis, Christianity can offer third modernity “a. a vigorous spiritual community of intellectuals with non-intellectuals; and b. a thought-provoking spiritual communion of the progressivelyminded with the past.”16 It will also help the new social movements to overcome sectarian impulses, for the sake of “ideal communitarian structuring of public ethical debate in the just society.”17 The sacred, as Spirit, will be present in third modernity as “ideal communicativeness as such,” constantly providing a voice for those who are silenced and marginalized.18 Unlike Joachim, Shanks does not envision the “third age” in a utopian manner: he gives eloquent testimony to the horrors of the contemporary age. The best hope of third modernity, through the new social movements, is in a solidarity constantly reengendered by the experience of human tragedy, by a sense of the precious fragility of the humanum. In his view, Christian claims to absolute meaning diminish this potential solidarity, encouraging fundamentalism and authoritarianism. For Shanks, Christianity’s propensity to make absolute claims is the long-term result of its own original trauma of martyrdom and persecution: like an abused child, it becomes itself an abuser, constantly asserting its absolute and definitive character in ways that spill over into intolerance and the persecution of others. For this reason, Christianity’s recollection of its own past needs a “complete reframing” to free it from the limitations of the first modernity. This should include a liturgical reframing, since the Church’s liturgical year is too bound up with its own memories.19 A Christian identity formed in the age of martyrs must be overcome in favor of one that is merged with the martyrs to suffering humanity as such, the “solidarity of the shaken.” For Shanks, then, the identity of Christianity is to become one strand in a future transconfessional movement affirming the “solidarity of the shaken.” The specific character of Christianity will remain, in the sense that particularity is to be valued in this multifarious movement, but it should not be associated with any universal or absolute claims. Awareness of the “solidarity of the shaken” is part of a continuing revelation, open to new defining moments of human meaning in the tragedies of the modern world. The Christian tradition is part of this universal process of the “three modernities,” conceived in the

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Joachite tradition. The uniqueness of the incarnation, as the hinge of salvation history, has no place in this pluralist interpretation of world religious history. Because of this, the Church—the community that bears witness to the incarnation—has no unique role either, but instead it becomes part of a universal, transconfessional movement. My difficulty with Shanks’s account is not his starting point in the solidarity of the shaken, since contemporary moral experience, especially of such urgency, is certainly a powerful and legitimate starting point for Christian theology. Nor is it with his argument that the Church should be part of, and give its energies to, a transconfessional moral movement to affirm such solidarity. Rather, it is the relativizing of Christian revelation and of the meaning of the Church, so that they become only one of the sources and alliance partners in realizing this solidarity—and this not only in a practical sense, which is evidently the case, but also from the point of view of theological truth. For the Christian tradition, the love of Christ portrayed in the Gospel narrative is the ultimate criterion for spiritual experience, so there can be no “age of the Spirit” that is not also an “age of Christ” and of the Church that bears witness to him. Spiritual experience finds its form and touchstone in the person of Christ. In Shanks’s Joachite reading of religious history, the “third modernity,” or age of the Spirit as “ideal communication,” supersedes both the first modernity of exclusivist religious universalism and the second modernity of the secular Enlightenment. Its spiritual content and character is free of the claims to ultimacy of any one religious tradition and is to be found in transconfessional experiences of solidarity. Yet this vision is open to the same objections as Joachim’s notion of the age of the Spirit, even though it is understood synchronically rather than diachronically. Within the history of the Church, between Pentecost and Parousia, how can there be an “age of the Spirit” that is no longer grounded in the ultimate character of the age of Christ? What is the meaning of Christian spiritual experience unless its criterion is Christ? If an age of the Spirit, or a third modernity, transcends the age of Christ and of the Church, what is its spiritual content? Like any pluralist theology of religions, Shanks’s approach has to confront the question of content and criterion for authentic spiritual

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experience. On pluralist grounds, the tradition of any one religion cannot be the criterion. Nor, if religions are to retain their particularity and avoid any kind of religious Esperanto, can these criteria be framed by a fictive meta-insight, a higher interpreter who would claim to be independent of all faith traditions and thus able to distil their common essence. Does the content of this experience then remain only the immediate experience of solidarity in the face of horror? But if this is true, what will speak a word of hope to this experience, what religious vision will dare to speak of salvation in the midst of this horror? Can any religious tradition, denied its claims to ultimacy, preserve the confidence to speak of salvation in the midst of violence and cruelty, or does it become just one more human gesture in the face of tragedy? Shanks’s account of the third modernity avoids any Joachite utopianism, yet it threatens to leave the experience of human solidarity without an ultimate word of hope. His plea for an inclusion of commemoration of the Holocaust and Hiroshima in the liturgical calendar is a serious challenge to the churches to confront the nightmares of the twentieth century in their life of worship. However, if such commemorations are not embraced by the ultimacy of eucharistic hope, how can they overcome sheer grief at the enormity of human cruelty and human suffering? An age of the Spirit can respond to the “solidarity of the shaken” with the image of the Suffering Servant, but this image can retain its saving power only if we live, at the same time, in the age of Christ, whose paschal mystery is the ultimate and universal meaning of human history, and whose Church has the mission of proclaiming Christ crucified and risen. While Shanks argues for the distorting effects of the commemoration of martyrdom in Christian liturgy, William Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ focuses on martyrdom as central to a eucharistic Christian identity.20 Cavanaugh’s work, like Shanks’s God and Modernity, is a coming-to-terms with the horrors of twentieth-century history, specifically, the practice of torture in Chile under the Pinochet regime. Yet while Shanks’s focus is on a transconfessional “solidarity of the shaken,” Cavanaugh’s emphasis is on the solidarity of Christians as the Body of Christ. On the basis of detailed research into the Chilean tragedy, Cavanaugh argues

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that the effect of torture was to destroy human bonds of solidarity, to make citizens “into isolated monads easily made to serve the regime’s purposes.”21 Torture becomes, in fact, a perverse antiliturgy, with the bodies of the victims as the site: an antiliturgy oriented to the glorification of the state and the degradation of human beings.22 Cavanaugh notes how important it was to the regime to avoid creating martyrs: By using torture and disappearance it produced victims, not martyrs, even by using doctors as assistants to torture to ensure the victims would not die.23 For Cavanaugh, this should not be conceived of in terms of the denial of human rights of the victims, but rather as the destruction of the Church as the visible Body of Christ, “fragmenting the church body while depriving the church of martyrs, visible witnesses to the conflict between the church and the powers of the world.”24 Much of Cavanaugh’s work is concerned with the ecclesiology and sociopolitical ethics of the Chilean church. He notes that the Chilean bishops tended to speak of their constituencies in terms of the borders of the nation-state.25 They also employed a “distinction of planes” ecclesiology, derived from the “New Christendom” approach of Jacques Maritain, which made crucial distinctions between clerical and lay roles. This approach saw the authority of the Gospel—and of the hierarchy—in terms of fundamental evangelical values, rather than specific political programs. On this basis, the hierarchy encouraged the laity to be involved as Christians in democratic society on their own initiative, inspired by evangelical values; they did not see their role as encouraging clerical control of political parties, or a partisan involvement of the Church in the political process. For this reason, for example, the hierarchy forbad priests to be involved in the “Christians for Socialism” movement.26 Although the intention of the “New Christendom” approach was to avoid the abuses of the “Old Christendom’s” throne-and-altar alliances, Cavanaugh is critical of it since “the church’s ecclesiology inherited from Maritain involved the constant denial that the church itself constitutes a type of ‘politics’, that is, a way of inscribing bodies into certain visible communal practices.”27 Likewise, the notion that the task of the laity was to “incarnate” the values of the Gospel in democratic politics on their own initiative contains, for Cavanaugh,

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“the implication that the church itself is somehow not incarnate in the temporal realm, not a body but rather the soul of society.”28 Maritain had argued for a conception of natural law that was the basis of human rights. This natural law had its ultimate source and highest affirmation in the Christian Gospel, but could also be universally known through human reason. For Maritain the Church seeks to impregnate society with a Christian spirit, but it respects the independence of the state, which is concerned with the common good and rights of the person. A central concern of his philosophy was to emphasize the influence of the Gospel on democratic values, while avoiding any form of theocracy or clerical politics, for the sake of the mutual independence of Church and state at the institutional level, and of the independence of lay Catholics from clerical control in their democratic political activities.29 Cavanaugh gives a clear and fair exposition of Maritain’s approach, but he is strongly critical of it since he contends that it fails to recognize that the Church is a “contrast society” to the state, a social body in its own right. Because of this, Maritain’s philosophy does not allow the Gospel to have its own “politics” and set of social practices “which are neither purely otherworldly nor reducible to some ‘purely temporal’ discourse.”30 For Cavanaugh, Maritain’s notion of the influence of Christianity on an ethos of human rights is “maddeningly vague” about the specifics of what the impact of the Gospel on culture is supposed to be.31 He argues that to conceive the meaning of the Gospel for society in terms of human rights would mean that Christianity would wither, since it would be banished from public discourse.32 The concept of human rights is, for Cavanaugh, an empty one since it is predicated on a “thin” conception of the human being, without implications for specific practices. For Cavanaugh the Eucharist is the true opposite of torture, since it is the Body of Christ, both as community and as sacrament. While the secular state imagines itself to be eternal, the Eucharist is truly eschatological: “The Christian wanders among the earthly nations on the way to her eternal patria, the Kingdom of God.”33 The Eucharist conforms Christians to the Body of Christ, so that they can resist the state: it is a performance with disciplined practices, “an assimilation to

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Christ’s self-sacrifice.”34 Thus it is critical that the Church have a “visibility in history,” something achieved in the Chilean Church’s street liturgies with litanies against torture, which made torture visible in order to condemn it, creating spaces of resistance.35 Cavanaugh focuses in particular on excommunication as a Church practice: In the Chilean context, this made the church visible against the invisibility of torture, a discipline marking out the boundaries of the church as the Body of Christ, to be conceived of as “an invitation to rejoin the flock.”36 Cavanaugh’s conception of church and state is not directed only against dictatorial and terrorist states, such as Pinochet’s Chile, but rather it is a general thesis. In “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies,” he argues that the modern “impersonal and centralized state accompanied the invention of the autonomous individual,” seeing individuals purely as bearers of individual rights, without participation in God or each other, who, in the absence of shared ends “relate to each other by means of contract, which assumes a guarantee by force.”37 It is a simulacrum, a false copy of the Body of Christ, subjecting individuals to its power, while the Eucharist transgresses national boundaries and “re-defines who our fellow citizens are.”38 The state is in fact an “alternative soteriology,” using war as its only true means of union.39 There is, for Cavanaugh, an “inherent conflict between state practices and those practices, such as the Eucharist, that Christians take for granted. True peace depends not on the subsumption of this conflict, but on a recovered sense of its urgency.”40 In Cavanaugh’s perspective, since the state is an illegitimate “alternative soteriology” based on the threat or reality of violence, church and state cannot be seen as coexisting in the same space with different legitimation, goals, and methods. Of their nature, they are in mortal combat. This perspective shapes Cavanaugh’s interpretation of the Chilean situation and, especially, of Maritain’s political philosophy. Cavanaugh’s critique contends that Maritain’s philosophy emasculated the Church’s response by encouraging lay independence and the language of human rights, and by discouraging action by the Church as a political body in its own right. While I am not competent to judge the Chilean situation in any detail, my own interpretation of the data that Cavanaugh presents is that the real culprit in the early stages of the Church’s response to

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Pinochet was the “Old Christendom” rather than the “New Christendom”: a sense of close identity between church and nation that weakened the hierarchy’s response to a dictatorial military regime. When a more vigorous response did come—for example, in Cardinal Silva’s establishment of the Vicariate of Solidarity—this was on explicit grounds of support for human rights, as Cardinal Silva emphasized in his encounter with Pinochet.41 It was Vatican II’s and Paul VI’s development of the Church’s role as a defender of human rights, deeply influenced by Maritain, that provided support for such a stance.42 In subsequent writings, Cavanaugh has made clear that his view of secularity is influenced by a particular reading of the City of God, that is, the identification of the liberal secular state with Augustine’s reprobate “earthly city.”43 This identification means that, since it is essentially about the libido dominandi, the secular state cannot be a positive site for Christian action. Further, his conception of the Church and its evangelizing mission is an exclusively communal and practical one: There can be no communication of the Gospel as a vision of human existence, or as implying a group of moral principles, that can inspire Christians to act in certain virtuous ways within the secular public forum, or that can be communicated to other fellow citizens of whatever religious creed or none. For these reasons, there can be no Christian conception of cooperation in secular space based on values that are both formed by the Gospel and communicable to fellow citizens of other faiths or worldviews. This rejection of the secular as a common space in which certain practices and values of freedom, justice, and tolerance can be lived out goes together with a portrait of the Church that emphasizes “bodily practices” that involve as much as possible of our daily lives. In “The Church as Public Space,” Cavanaugh argues that “the assembly on Mount Sinai” is a model for the Church, in the sense that the life of the Church should include a range of bodily performances that is as inclusive as possible: “What makes these practices ‘public’ is that no aspect of life is excluded from them.”44 Yet there are many aspects of life in which the particular form of bodily practice is not prescribed by Christian tradition but is left open to different cultures and to personal self-expression. All Christian practices must be informed by love

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and justice, but these virtues do not necessarily differentiate Christians from others and can find many different forms of expression among Christians themselves. The number of specifically Christian “bodily performances” is relatively small compared to those of Judaism and other world faiths, since, apart from the sacraments, Christian tradition prescribes relatively few ritual practices. Moreover, its ethical traditions are not conceived of as uniquely Christian in their practical implications, but rather as in principle communicable to all human beings and expressing the fullness of human existence. This particular relationship between Christian faith and ethics provides a broad basis for developing some shared values in the common space of secularity. Since, for Cavanaugh, the secular space is intrinsically corrupted by power, it is only within the space of the ecclesia that human life can be truly lived. This begs the question of how well the Church is equipped to fulfill a range of roles to do with the enhancement of human wellbeing in contemporary circumstances. Clearly, in earlier historical periods, when state and society were unable or unwilling to support social welfare or even education, these tasks largely fell to the Church. In more recent times, many of these tasks have devolved to the state. It is a matter for detailed public debate (both within the Church and in the secular forum) as to which of those tasks should remain the responsibility of the Church, and which should be undertaken by the state. There is no general theory of “the secular” that can answer that question, and an identification of the secular state with the reprobate “earthly city” fails to recognize the positive achievements of the secular liberal and social democratic state in many dimensions of human welfare.45 Because Cavanaugh portrays the state in this manner, he rejects the value of Catholic social philosophies that advocate the development of communicable moral arguments and solutions that can influence public policy.46 He rightly raises many critical questions about the emasculation or eradication of intermediate and communal groupings by state action, or by the actions of globalizing capitalism. Yet even on the plane of civil society, he is critical of Church cooperation with citizenship programs that use secular language, since he perceives such cooperation as the Church’s acquiescence in its own marginalization,

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in the inculcation of national citizenship rather than a Christian’s true citizenship in heaven.47 Since moral practices and ideals cannot be communicated in secular space, the only influence of the Church on other citizens can be through immediate example on a local, communal basis.48 This is clearly a very important part of the life of the Church, but it by no means exhausts the Church’s capacity to communicate its beliefs and practices to fellow citizens for the sake of the common good. Cavanaugh rightly emphasizes the need for the Church to be present in the world as a “body” in its own right, and to live by its own distinctive practices, but this need not rule out other forms of communication within a shared secular space—the space Christians share with others in statu viatoris. Furthermore, because of its fundamental premises, Cavanaugh’s perspective has no room for the possibility of the Church learning from liberal secularity, whether this learning be a matter of enhancing the possibilities for open debate in the Church in light of the practices of liberal polities, or by being open to secular leadership in moral questions, for example, in ecological awareness, which was pioneered in secular circles and has only subsequently been espoused by the Church. Cavanaugh’s work lays bare the malign story of the liberal state, but it is strangely unwilling to recognize the liberal state’s positive achievements and what the state offers to all those who have suffered from the stifling constraints of local, communal, and, sometimes, religious traditions.49 Church, Kingdom, and Secularity I now return to the question that began this chapter, that is, the relationship between Christian identity and the better story of liberal society—what Shanks commends as the “solidarity of the shaken,” and Cavanaugh criticizes as human rights thinking. We have seen that neither of these writers sees any constitutive relationship between Christian identity and this better story. While Shanks argues for an understanding of Christian identity as one strand in a coalition of groups dedicated to maintaining the solidarity of the shaken, Cavanaugh’s conception of the Church is as the only genuine form

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of human community beyond small-scale, face-to-face groupings. Extra ecclesiam nulla communitas, since the state reduces human beings to individuals who can relate to each other only through enforceable contracts. The contributions of these two theologians alert us to the challenges—and the strong disagreements—inherent in this field of questions. In its most fundamental form, the question we face concerns the character of the relationship between Church and Kingdom. For Christian tradition, the Kingdom, proclaimed by Jesus Christ, extends beyond the Church: It is universal and expresses God’s presence to humanity in terms of a realm of peace, freedom, justice, and reconciliation. The Kingdom can never be realized in this world by human effort: It is the gift of God, which is fulfilled only in the life of the resurrection; but, through the power of the Spirit, we can find signs and foretastes of the Kingdom in this world. At their best, the universalist moral ideals of liberal society are a secular attempt to express some of the values of the Kingdom: the dignity and rights of the person, of personal freedom in just societies, of liberation from social and economic disability and discrimination. These ideals are by no means simply an expression of individualist freedom of contract in an impersonal and atomized society, even though that is a depressingly large part of modern Western experience. They also include elements that are in harmony with a witness to the Kingdom. Nor are they simply abstractions: They can provide a concrete reference point for those who protest against their governments’ flouting of the very rights that these governments have usually committed themselves to respect. In this way, they can become part of a specific program of liberating political action. How can the Church-Kingdom relationship illuminate the way the Church should relate to these ideals and attempt to realize them as signs and foretastes of the Kingdom? In the first place, the Kingdom cannot be divorced from the Church that bears witness to it. While the Church is not itself the Kingdom, it does have a unique role as witness to it. The Kingdom was proclaimed by Jesus Christ and anticipated in his resurrection. It is the Church, as the Body of Christ, that bears witness to that proclamation and that resurrection. It is a part of the Church’s witness that Christ and the Kingdom have an essential

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relationship: The eschatological character of Christ’s proclamation, and of his resurrection as an anticipation of the Kingdom, means that the Kingdom cannot be understood apart from Christ. Since it is in Christ that God’s Kingdom is already present in sign and in Christ’s Parousia that the Kingdom will be present in its fullness, the Kingdom cannot be abstracted from witness to Christ. Christian commitment to the realization of universalist moral ideals, as an attempt to bear witness to the Kingdom, has its identity and root in Christ, since it is through God’s work in Christ that we can have faith that the Kingdom is not mere illusion and projection, but rather a promised and anticipated reality. For this reason, Christian moral commitment can never be divorced from Christian religious identity. It is religious identity in Christ that gives the Christian both the hope that can strengthen commitment to moral ideals, and the faith that their defeat is never final and irrevocable. Yet the relationship between Church and Kingdom also reminds us that the Kingdom is always wider than the Church that bears witness to it. An awareness that it was the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed always calls the Church away from introspection to action in the world, since it is in the world as a whole that the Kingdom will be fulfilled and is already present in hints and fragments. This means that much of the Church’s moral commitment to the Kingdom must be enacted outside its own visible confines. It must seek to do the work of the Kingdom in the world. It also recognizes that, although it is in Christ that hope for the Kingdom has its final assurance, the values of the Kingdom can be present through traditions and institutions that have no explicit relationship to the Church (although they may have been influenced by ideals that stem from Christian influence on Western civilization). The values of the Kingdom can also, of course, be present in religious traditions whose origins were quite independent of Christianity. The medieval—and modern—controversy over Joachim da Fiore’s notion of the “age of the Spirit” can help to focus our reflection on the relationship between Church and Kingdom. Thomas’s insistence that the “New Law will last to the end of the world,” and Augustine’s emphasis that there will be no differentiation within the “final

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age”—the saeculum, the age of the Church, which extends from Pentecost to Parousia—express the fundamental Christian conviction that there can be no “age” in human history that in any sense transcends the time when the Church witnesses to Christ in patient hope for the coming of the Kingdom. There can be no “age of the Spirit” that can be distinguished from the “age of Christ”: within this saeculum, this present age of pilgrimage, the power of the Spirit is to make Christ present to all people in all times and places. An “age of the Spirit” cannot, therefore, be one that relativizes the role of Christ in the salvation of the world or the role of the Church in witnessing to him. From the perspective of Christian orthodoxy, this is the essential flaw in any religious or philosophical project that envisions a spiritual content in which Jesus Christ no longer plays a definitive role. This is true of a pluralist theology of religions. It is also true, in a different way, of all those philosophical humanist projects since the Enlightenment— perhaps influenced by Joachim’s vision—that have acknowledged the contribution of Christian faith to the “education of humanity,” to use Lessing’s phrase, but consider it now to be transcended by selfconscious humanity. Any understanding of the secular that sees itself as “transcending” Christianity in this sense becomes part of a philosophy of secularism, rather than simply the acknowledgment that we live in a common space characterized by freedom of conscience. Sharing this common space, the Christian Church respects whatever is genuinely humane in these philosophical commitments; most of all, it respects the varying paths to wisdom and holiness of the other great faiths. Yet, at the same time, part of its insistence that the “age of Christ” will never be superseded or relativized is a critical challenge to any humanist or spiritual vision that ceases to put concrete human suffering at its center. The urgent need constantly to recollect this imperative has always been a challenge for the Church itself. Christian faith has at its center the suffering of the Word-made-flesh in a concrete individual, Jesus of Nazareth. It makes the claim that all spiritual visions are judged and tested by this event, the reconciling presence of Godwith-us and one of us amidst the absurdity of human suffering. The “age of Christ,” which will encompass all of human history until the end of time, is the age in which no spiritual vision can claim validity

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unless it keeps before its gaze the suffering of the human person in his or her concrete individuality. Part of the power and attractiveness of Shanks’s proposal is to do precisely this, as expressed in the phrase the “solidarity of the shaken.” Yet, I would contend, an “age of the Spirit” conceived of as a “third modernity” cannot speak an ultimate word of hope unless it is grounded in the crucified and risen Christ. The positive meaning of the “age of the Spirit,” which is also and at the same time the “age of Christ,” is in its affirmation of the boundlessness of the Kingdom, its discernible presence in all human contexts and cultures.50 In this “age of the Spirit,” understood synchronically, the Church recognizes that the Kingdom exceeds its own boundaries, and that it waits together with all humanity for the “liberty and splendor of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).51 It can recognize the work of the Spirit in all human actions and institutions that seek to respect and embody values that are in harmony with the Gospel. The presence of the Spirit in all times and cultures means that the Church can be challenged to deepen and enrich its own response to Christ through the stimulus, and even provocation, that it receives from the most unexpected quarters. For an understanding of secularity, what is vitally relevant in a theology of the relationship between Christ and the Spirit in history is the relationship between the experience of moral and spiritual value and its ultimate ground and meaning. The presence of the Spirit within all history means that values in harmony with the Gospel can be experienced in many different contexts, inside or outside the Church. Because of this, the common space of secularity can share these values, regardless of their origins. In many cases, they will spring from the historical influence of the Christian heritage, the positive fruits of Christendom. In others, they may have a more explicitly philosophical origin, or be part of the wisdom of other religious traditions. These values, the fruits of the Spirit, can be experienced through their own self-evidence, their sheer power to enrich and enlighten, to liberate and encourage. In this “age of the Spirit,” the values of human dignity and human solidarity can be a part of the common space of followers of different creeds, without a shared background of belief. Yet, because this is at the same time the “age of Christ,” the question of the source

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and ground of these values cannot be avoided. Within our human history, so marred by sin and suffering, who can give us hope that these values are not illusory, that they will not succumb to our brokenness, but rather that they are formed and tempered by the reconciling embrace of that brokenness?52 During this saeculum, when the Kingdom is present in sign but not yet in its fullness, the goods of creation must be protected and cultivated despite the constant urge of human sinfulness to distort and degrade. Consequently, a theology of Church and Kingdom must have a constructive role for the state as the guardian of the goods of creation. It is a hard-won historical experience of the Christian churches that attempts to assert political power are intrinsically corrupting in the life of the Church, since they militate against the voluntary character of membership in the Body of Christ. The state must have ultimate recourse to the means of force, in order to protect the goods of creation, but it can also, to a limited but real extent, exemplify and encourage varying levels of moral community. In this sense, a just state, which seeks to enact commonly held principles of justice, can give the Church the freedom to be the Church, a voluntary community, because the state accepts the role of enacting and enforcing laws for the common good. Conversely, the Church, with its explicit witness to the Kingdom, always reminds the state that it has no ultimate spiritual or moral sovereignty over its citizens.53 The justice of the modern state, since it is institutionally independent of the Church and of clerical power, cannot be enacted through language and symbols that are specifically Christian, since this would deprive the state’s laws of their secular legitimacy. As Maritain rightly argued, Christian faith can be the source and inspiration of universalist moral ideals, but they need to have secular legitimacy in their appeal to general human experience and their expression in philosophical terms.54 In their solidarity with contemporary universalist moral ideals, Christians can both express one aspect of their own identity and respect the secular character of such moral contexts; this is expressed, for example, through contemporary expressions of the ancient ideal of natural law in terms of human rights.55

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Reflection on the relationship between Church and Kingdom can assist us in interpreting the challenges of the Church’s relationship to contemporary secular moral aspirations and movements. It can remind us that Christian identity is always bound up with the person of Christ as the proclaimer and risen sign of the Kingdom, and that the Church’s role is to bear witness to a Kingdom that is wider than itself and can only be brought about by the God who is the creator of all humanity and whose Spirit is in every human heart. Christian identity conceived of in this way can affirm moral ideals shared in secular space without in any sense acquiescing in a divorce between morality and religion, individual spiritual witness and communal religious tradition. It can bear witness to Jesus Christ as the source of our hope for the Kingdom, which finds partial expression in the attempt to realize universal moral ideals, and at the same time affirm the moral community of Christians with “all people of good will,” who express these ideals in secular forms and seek to embody them in secular institutions of justice and freedom. Because of this, the Church can play a role in liberal societies that always retains—in fidelity to God’s Kingdom—a critical distance from any particular political form, and yet never remains aloof from the “solidarity of the shaken,” from all those whose experience of evil inspires them to struggle for justice. Service and Witness: A Christological Perspective This understanding of the relationship between Christ and the Kingdom can give us a foundation for understanding the relationship between service to others and Christian witness in secular society. When Jesus is asked by the disciples of John, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to expect some other?” he responds: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me” (Luke 7:22–23). Jesus’s response, harking back to Luke 4:18–19, and in turn to Isaiah 61, presents the “program” of the Kingdom, the ways in which the in-breaking of the Kingdom can

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be palpably experienced in the healing of human beings, in liberation, and the restoration of dignity. But at the same time it is a statement about Jesus himself, it is the answer to the disciples of John: “blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.” The good news of the Kingdom can be stated in terms of the fullness of human life, but it cannot be divorced from the one who proclaims the Kingdom, who makes a particular challenge to personal discipleship.56 This passage highlights for us some key themes in the relationship between Church and Kingdom. The Kingdom, the eschatological fullness of creation, transcends the Church and is the destiny of all humanity. The Kingdom can be experienced here and now in all those graced acts and events in our lives that communicate something of the fullness of human destiny. In this sense, it can be described in ethical, human terms—even, in a sense, “secular” terms, as Jesus does so describe it: The signs of the Kingdom are that “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk and the lepers are cleansed.” In contemporary terms, this understanding of the Kingdom as sensed and anticipated in works of healing and the restoration of dignity is quite compatible with a secular commitment to human welfare, in the sense of a commitment that is focused simply on the needs of human beings in ethical terms. Service to human beings is, in and of itself, a work for the Kingdom. In whatever contemporary context, secular or religious, we can presume that service to human beings—especially the radical care summed up by the phrase “the lepers are cleansed”—is motivated by love. We have no need to question that. Yet we can and should ask a question concerning hope: the meaning of the Kingdom is that the signs and anticipations that we witness in these works of healing will find their fullness in a life beyond death, a life “in which every tear is wiped away” (Revelation 21:4). In this hope, we transcend a secular ethical perspective, daring to affirm that the sorrows of this life can be transformed into joy in the next. Are our works of service and healing a commitment to other human beings in the face of death, beyond which no human mutual service can pass, or a response to intimations of a future fullness that only God can bring about? In this sense, the

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Kingdom is present in ethical service, but the meaning of that service is obscure without faith in the Kingdom as radically future. This means that, for Christians, witness must go hand in hand with service. Service has its own integrity in ethical, human terms. In itself, service is quite compatible with secularity, in the sense of a commitment to other human beings that is agnostic about the religious or transcendent meaning of human existence. Yet service must be accompanied by witness if the ultimate meaning and direction of that service is to be understood. While service has its own self-evident goodness, it can be radically nourished and strengthened by the hope that witness can inspire. This witness is given primordially by the Church, which bears witness that the signs of the Kingdom we experience in acts of loving service will be fulfilled in the eschatological Kingdom. Furthermore, since the Church remembers and makes present the selfoffering of the risen Christ, it already experiences that fullness in a sacramental way, celebrating in the midst of humanity for the sake of all humanity. Through faith, the Church confidently proclaims the eternal destiny of the human person, despite the obscurity of that destiny in this world. Yet this faith does not insulate members of the Church from all that threatens human dignity in this life. Faith can give consolation in suffering but does not lessen its force, which is shared with all as part of the human condition. In suffering, all human beings, whether agnostic or believing, experience absurdity, the absence of meaning, especially as suffering so often destroys works of loving service or goes beyond the limits of our capacity to respond. The experience of suffering brings home to us the radical difference between religious faith and other kinds of knowledge. Faith is a seeing in darkness, a hope in a love and goodness that is so often belied in experience (Hebrews 11:1). In the midst of suffering, Christian witness focuses more and more on Christ, the suffering servant, on the paradox of the crucified Son of God. The challenge of this witness was summed up by Jesus himself: “blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me” (Luke 7:23). The meaning of accepting Jesus—and of not finding him an “offence”—is expressed in the character of our response to all those

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whose needs call for the ministry of the Kingdom. It is this response that is, in fact, our decision about Jesus himself. This is nowhere emphasized in scripture more than in Matthew 25:31–46. This passage, unique to Matthew, is often called “The Parable of the Last Judgement.” However, it is not presented in the form of a parable but rather as the conclusion of an eschatological discourse, “the unveiling of the truth that lay behind all the parables in chapters 24–25.”57 It has the character of a solemn assertion about our ultimate destiny. As it makes clear, the criterion of our salvation lies in our acts of mercy towards those we encounter in need within the circumstances of ordinary, historical existence. It is those specific acts that will testify to the genuineness of our response to the love of God. Each of them, in the descriptive detail of the narrative, concerns service to the need of our neighbor in conditions of poverty, hunger, and distress. In that encounter with our neighbor in distress, we encounter Christ: our salvation is realized in these acts because they are a response to Christ in the person of our neighbor. The incarnation of the Word has its anonymous manifestation in the real presence of Christ in those in need of our service. The text of Matthew 25 affirms the eternal significance of historical acts of solidarity, through which we acknowledge the love of the Word-made-flesh. The key Christological passages of Gaudium et spes argue that this identification of Christ with every human being is a truth implied by the incarnation itself. In paragraph 22, which affirms that Christ reveals to us the mystery of our own humanity, the union of Christ with humanity is interpreted in both universal and highly individual terms: “Human nature, by the very fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare. For, by his incarnation, he, the son of God, has in a certain way united himself with each man.” The implications of the paschal mystery are understood in a similar way in the same paragraph: “For, since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery.”58 In its final paragraph (93), the Pastoral Constitution

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reaffirms that “the Father wills that in all men we recognize Christ our brother and love him effectively, in word and in deed.”59 This mystical union of Christ with, and presence in, every human being is clearly given considerable theological weight in Gaudium et spes. This presence is both universal and particular, and at the same time anonymous. As Matthew 25:37 makes clear, those who served Christ through service to the hungry, thirsty, and imprisoned did not know that they had done so. The needy and bereft are described in Matthew 25:35–36 in the same straightforward human terms as the program of the Kingdom in Luke 4 and 7. Service to them is service to a fellow human being and can be authentically understood in those terms. Yet, without doing violence to the humanity and individuality of each person, service to that person is also service to Christ—and not merely figuratively, but as a matter of theological truth. The anonymity of Christ in the person in need gives us a guide for a Christian attitude to secularity. Service to that person is in itself a service to Christ, without any need for interpretations that in any way distance this service from the concrete humanity of the one before us. Their humanity requires no interpretation in other terms or contexts of meaning: Matthew emphasizes that those who served Christ had no idea that they were doing so. Service to that person, in his or her concrete need, would be rendered less attentive and less respectful if it was coupled with an insistence on Christian witness.60 It demands respect for the conscience and beliefs of that person: Any imposition of religious or other meaning that has nothing to do with service threatens to replace service with manipulation or indoctrination. The ethical task of service must retain its own integrity. Yet, in its own proper context, Christian witness to Christ’s identification with that person can be a unique form of service. What do these Christological themes, linking Church and Kingdom, witness and service, indicate for the contemporary relationship between the Church and secular society?61 Since the Church affirms the values of human dignity, freedom, and justice as values that anticipate the Kingdom, then it can affirm much of the project of secular liberal society, understood as the attempt to form a common life based

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in freedom of conscience. It can respect the liberal state’s agnosticism about the transcendent sources of meaning, since that affirms freedom of individual conscience in religious matters. The secular character of the state, in this sense, also frees the Church from the temptations of wielding civil power. The secular character of modern liberalism, at its best, implies a belief in human dignity and human rights that is an ethical “given”: of its nature, the modern liberal state can make no publicly shared appeal to transcendent foundations or destiny. The force of an appeal to human dignity comes from its self-evidence: This self-evidence can be and is reinforced by many human stories of suffering, compassion, and sacrifice that are publicly shared through the national media or local experience. Yet the way we interpret and respond to these stories and events is also formed by wider and deeper narratives, which, thankfully, tend to give such acts of compassion and self-giving a special, respected place in liberal culture. We are also painfully aware of how that compassion can be conspicuously absent for certain minority groups, and how often it is superficial, short-lived, and unsupported by practical assistance. In his “In Search of Humanity: Human Dignity as a Basic Moral Attitude,” Gerhold Becker draws attention to the divergence between the low opinion of the concept of human dignity held by many professional ethicists and its prevalence and importance in the constitutions and foundational legal documents of many nations, as well as of the United Nations Organization.62 As Becker argues, this “astonishing asymmetry” needs explaining.63 Many moral philosophers see the concept of human dignity as an empty formula and a “useless relic of the moral past” that vainly attempts to preserve an echo of Christian theology.64 Yet many nations—most of all, the Federal Republic of Germany—see it as the foundation of their common ethical life.65 Becker notes that a number of moral philosophers contend that members of their profession should be given preeminence in ethics committees because of their expertise, yet he rejects this argument in favor of an emphasis on the practical and intuitive nature of morality.66 This applies particularly to the concept of human dignity. What for some professional ethicists is merely an “empty formula” remains, to judge

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by its prevalence in key documents, a crucially important affirmation for those who seek to defend and preserve human rights and ethical decency: “Human dignity draws its moral force not from a particular and well-defined philosophical conception but from the intuitive appeal of the ordinary language of respect for the human person and her inherent worth. . . . Though the idea was originally derived from a particular religious world view and humanistic tradition, it may still be worth defending even and particularly within the conditions of secular society.”67 The reality of our shared ethical recognition of human dignity and human poignancy, as well as of its often restricted scope and its fickleness and fragility, give us some indications of the task of the Church in bearing witness to the Kingdom in a way that serves all members of society. Yet part of that task is careful reflection on the mode of communication itself. How can the Church communicate its support for human dignity in ways that respect the secular character of society? For John Rawls, in “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” the essence of a concern for “public reason” is a matter of respect for others, for civility or “civic friendship”: Public reason demands that the reasons we give in public political life, that is, reasons that can justify coercive laws and public political institutions, are reasons that are, at least in principle, both intelligible and acceptable to others, so that the normative status of these laws and institutions can be justified to all citizens in relation to the common good, and in terms that they might reasonably accept.68 Laws and institutions should not be based directly on the beliefs and imperatives of “comprehensive doctrines,” including religious doctrines, but rather on some shared basis of public reason. From a Catholic perspective, this requirement is an important expression of freedom of conscience: Citizens should not be forced to obey laws or conform to institutions that are directly mandated by a particular religion. Civil institutions must be based on a shareable conception of the common good, rather than on the beliefs of any particular religion.69 On this basis, if Christians seek to contribute to public political life, they must do so in ways that show a willingness to express the implications of their faith in publicly shareable terms. They have the

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task of discerning the ethical and political meaning of their religious faith, and of articulating that meaning in particular contexts, without seeking to impose the content of their religious faith on others. Such are the constraints of civility in liberal and pluralist societies, the constraints of public reason. Acceptance of this constraint can be the expression of a positive desire to serve others, to respect their freedom of conscience by confining advocacy to forms of expression that appeal to whatever can be evoked as common human experience. A sensitivity to the religious freedom of others includes an awareness that an insistence on particular religious doctrine may be heard simply as an appeal to a particular group identity, or a recounting of opaque claims to authority, rather than as an invitation to reflect on our common human situation. At the same time, Christians, by nature of their discipleship of Jesus Christ, are called to be faithful to the identity of the Christian Gospel: In seeking to serve their fellow citizens, they must also bear witness to the Gospel and its proclamation of eternal life, which infinitely transcends the priorities of any human society. A Christian contribution to public life must therefore be characterized by both a sense of service and a sense of identity, both a desire to evoke and share the common ethical truths that ground a society of mutually recognized rights and a fidelity to the particular truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The debate concerning the relationship between Christian faith and public reason includes the questions: How can Christian belief be compatible with and contribute to public political reason? And how can it remain faithful to its own identity in doing so? In the same essay, Rawls argues that religious “comprehensive doctrines” appropriately play a role in the “background culture” of a society, and that they can act as sources of motivation for individual citizens’ allegiance to democratic values and practices, as part of the “overlapping consensus” that undergirds those values and practices. They do not normally have a place in the language of the judiciary or of public political institutions—in particular of elected officials or those seeking public office. Yet, taking a “wide view of public political culture,” Rawls does accept the validity of their contribution in the public political forum subject to an important “proviso”: “reasonable

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comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time, provided that in due course proper political reasons—and not reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines—are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support. This injunction to present proper political reasons I refer to as the proviso, and it specifies public political culture as distinct from the background culture.”70 How to satisfy this proviso, Rawls argues, “must be worked out in practice and cannot feasibly be governed by a clear family of rules given in advance. How they work out is determined by the nature of the public political culture and calls for good sense and understanding.”71 In my view, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” particularly through its deployment of its proviso, does present a fair and balanced view of the appropriate use of religious language in the different contexts of contemporary liberal society.72 The interpretation of the meaning and relevance of this proviso will be the subject of more detailed consideration in chapter four. If the secular character of society means that reference to the Christian sources of human dignity in the “public political forum” needs to be subject to this proviso, there is every reason why the Church, in the background culture, has the task of situating the sheer givenness of human dignity in a grounding and sustaining narrative, in theological reflection and communication, in communal ethical life, and in sacramental practice. By an active presence in the culture of liberal societies, the Church can bear witness to the source and destiny of human dignity in creation and Kingdom, can prophetically challenge any denial of compassion and dignity to out-groups (including the unborn and the terminally ill), and can encourage fellow citizens in their understanding of our common lives as held together by acts of sympathy and self-giving. In these ways, the Church can make a fundamental service to secular society by helping to preserve individual freedom as essentially a freedom of conscience in a context of human dignity, rather than as a voluntarist evacuation of meaning filled only by the lust for domination or consumption. There are, nevertheless, those who contend that

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the self-evidence of ethics and human dignity can only be harmed by any kind of religious reference: the Church’s witness to the transcendent destiny of human beings is still seen by many as a superfluous, and even offensive, intervention in public debate. This serves to remind us that, even when affirming the best of liberal society’s own values, the Church will be resented as well as appreciated, that the witness to the Kingdom will never be free of the cost of scandal. Notes 1. Andrew Shanks, God and Modernity: A New and Better Way to Do The-

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

ology (London: Routledge, 2000). God and Modernity develops the perspective on these questions that Shanks presented in his Civil Society, Civil Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). I have attempted a response to some of the key arguments in this latter book in my The Public Forum and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 153–60. For an important assessment of the influence of Joachim’s ideas, see Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium (London: Paladin, 1970), especially 108–13. Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 16–20. Bernard McGinn, The Calabrian Abbott: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 164. “Chapter II: The Error of Abbott Joachim” (Fourth Lateran Council), The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church, ed. Joseph Neuner and Jacques Dupuis (London: Collins, 1983), paras. 317, 107. However, “the condemnation was carefully phrased so as to avoid branding Joachim himself as a heretic and to safeguard his reputation.” In 1220 Pope Honorius III ordered a public declaration throughout Calabria that Joachim was not a heretic and that “eum virum Catholicum reputamus.” See Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy, 32. Joachim was to be praised in Dante’s Paradiso as “Calabria’s abbott . . . Joachim, spiritfired and prophet true” (XII, 141). The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Cantica III: Paradise, trans. Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 161. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Vol. 30: 1a2ae 106–14, ed. Cornelius Ernst (Blackfriars, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, and New York:

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

McGraw Hill, 1972), 19. Joachim’s notion of the “age of the Spirit” has continued to provoke debate in contemporary theology. Jürgen Moltmann, in “Christian Hope—Messianic or Transcendent? A Theological Conversation with Joachim of Fiore and Thomas Aquinas,” in his History and the Triune God: Contributions to Trinitarian Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1992), argues that Joachim’s notion of the “age of the Spirit” does justice both to the Christological and the eschatological dimension of the Spirit. “Thomas Aquinas failed to recognize that when he ecclesiasticized the Spirit in his argument and declared that the Church itself was part of the time and state of the Holy Spirit” (101–2). I am more inclined to accept the judgment of Yves Congar and Walter Kasper that talk of the “age of the Spirit” runs the risk of weakening the bond between Christ and the Spirit in the time between Pentecost and Parousia. As Kasper argues in The God of Jesus Christ (London: SCM, 1984), “The new thing which the Spirit brings is that he constantly makes Jesus Christ present anew in his eschatological newness. . . . This means that we are continually linked to the humanity of Jesus and that the tension between letter and spirit cannot be overcome through historical progress” (209). See also Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit (New York: Seabury Press, and London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1983), 1:128. A rejection of any distinction of “ages” in the time between Pentecost and Parousia is implicit in the affirmation of Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, para. 4: “The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Tim. 6:14 and Tit. 2:13).” Shanks, God and Modernity, 13. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 107. While retaining an emphasis on the three persons, Leonardo Boff, in Trinity and Society (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), and Jürgen Moltmann, in The Trinity and the Kingdom of God (London: SCM, 1981), share Shanks’s general approach of a synchronic interpretation of Joachim’s three ages, representing “trinitarian possibilities” rather than successive ages. For Boff, each age contains the other in a perichoretic inclusiveness

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5. 1 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 1. 2 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

0. 3 31. 32. 33. 34.

(228–29), while for Moltmann the three ages are “continually present strata and transitions in the kingdom’s history” (209). Shanks, God and Modernity, 128. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 108–9. William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Ibid., 45. Ibid., 30–31. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 70–71. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 79. See, for example, Jacques Maritain’s discussion of these principles in The Rights of Man (London: Geoffrey Bles: Centenary Press, 1944), chapter 1, “A Society of Human Persons,” especially the section “A Vitally Christian Society” ( 16–19). For a positive assessment of Maritain’s thought as a “communal liberalism” that can overcome the conflict between liberals and communitarians in contemporary political theory, see Brian Stiltner, Religion and the Common Good: Catholic Contributions to Building Community in a Liberal Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), in particular 135–36. Stiltner argues that Maritain’s conception of the contribution of the Catholic Church to the common good can be summed up under three headings: “1. Catholicism’s intellectual resources for a public philosophy include its moral anthropology, its communal orientation of human rights, and its account of mediating institutions; 2. The Christian church and its members foster conditions for social harmony through their expressions of neighbor-love and actions for justice; 3. Christians give voice to neglected human goods through a prophetic critique of society in fidelity to Jesus’ option for the poor” (114). Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 181. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 187. Ibid., 224. Ibid., 234.

Church, Kingdom, and Secularity╇╇ 69 5. Ibid., 244, 274–75. 3 36. Ibid., 259. 37. Cavanaugh, “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies,” in Radical Orthodoxy, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, 194 (London: Routledge, 1999). 38. Ibid., 196. 39. Ibid., 193. 40. Ibid., 198. 41. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 103. 42. For Paul VI and Maritain, see Thomas Bokenkotter, Church and Revolution: Catholics in the Struggle for Democracy and Social Justice (New York: Image, 1998), 372, and Peter Hebblethwaite, Paul VI: The First Modern Pope (London: HarperCollins, 1993), esp. 122. 43. See chapter 1, note 36, of this book. See also William Cavanaugh, “From One City to Two: Christian Reimagining of Political Space” Political Theology 7.3 (2006): 299–321, where, in criticizing John Courtney Murray’s political philosophy, Cavanaugh argues that “the earthly city is not a neutral, common space, bounded by ‘articles of peace’, where the various ‘conspiracies’ meet, as in Murray’s scheme. For Augustine, the earthly city is not religiously neutral, but its members share a common end, ‘the love of self, even to the contempt of God’” (310). 44. William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 2002), 87. 45. It also fails to recognize the moral value of citizenship in the liberal secular state, and, in some circumstances, the willingness to defend it—values denied in Cavanaugh’s use of Alasdair Macintyre’s reduction of such defense to “being asked to die for the telephone company.” William Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State Is not the Keeper of the Common Good,” Modern Theology 20:2 (April 2004): 243–74 . Macintyre’s own formulation, cited in Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Telephone Company,” 263 (from Alasdair Macintyre, “A Partial Response to My Critics,” in After Macintyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair Macintyre, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994], 303) has been significantly altered in Cavanaugh’s title. In “The Politics of Radical Orthodoxy: A Catholic Critique,” Theological Studies 68 (June 2007), Mary Doak argues that Cavanaugh’s radical criticism of the state’s authority, which she identifies as an “anarchic oppositionalism,” “evinces an extraordinary optimism about the ease of achieving a peaceful justice among

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6. 4 47.

48.

49.

human groups of various sizes and strengths, and so it would leave the less powerful within and among communities especially vulnerable and without legal rights or defense” (392). As Doak rightly argues, the need of contemporary Christian political thought is not for a condemnation of the liberal secular state, but rather a “religious critique of society such as that envisioned by Gaudium et spes, a social criticism informed by faith as well as by a thorough and adequate grasp of the relation-in-difference between reason and revelation, between church and state.” (393). Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 63. His commendation of school-based citizenship programs in Minnesota is tempered by his sense that they are vulnerable to being coopted by the “democratic capitalist order,” and that their use in Catholic schools implies a “self-discipline of Christian speech at the bar of public reason.” Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 79–80. See Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Telephone Company,” 268, and Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 94. In the latter work, he argues that the best way to dialogue with those outside the Church is “through concrete practices that do not need translation . . . creating spaces in which alternative stories about material goods are told.” As James Mackey argues in Power and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), it is important not to exaggerate the difference between the exercise of power by the secular state and by the Church. He emphasizes the great power for good that churches can have in secular societies, but also that their attempts to enforce morals can have very negative effects and show them to be very similar to secular groups: “Certainly, nothing shows better than their occasional moral ineptitude when they seek to act as powers in society, the extent to which churches are also on all fours with the more admittedly secular powers which engage in the perennial task of seeking to create, according to their lights, the moral values by which human life can be enhanced, and occasionally also of seeking to define or influence the formal legislation by which a necessary minimum of value must be imposed” (141). For a recent study of a number of official church interventions in political campaigns and legal debates in the United States and Australia, and of the issues they raise for the meaning of acting according to an informed conscience in Catholic life, see Frank Brennan, Acting on Conscience: How Can We Responsibly Mix Law, Religion and Politics? (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2007).

Church, Kingdom, and Secularity╇╇ 71 50. This universal presence of the Kingdom and the need to relate it to the kingdom of Christ are both emphasized in John Paul II’s Redemptoris missio: “It is true that the inchoate reality of the kingdom can also be found beyond the confines of the Church among peoples everywhere, to the extent that they live ‘gospel values’ and are open to the working of the Spirit who breathes when and where he wills (cf. Jn 3:8). But it must immediately be added that this temporal dimension of the kingdom remains incomplete unless it is related to the kingdom of Christ present in the Church and straining towards eschatological fullness” (20). www.vatican .va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc _07121990_redemptoris-missio_en.html. 51. In Church: Community for the Kingdom (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis 2002), John Fuellenbach notes that Vatican II’s Lumen gentium clearly emphasized the distinction between the Kingdom of God in human history and the coming Kingdom in its eschatological fullness (e.g. Lumen gentium 5: The Church “receives the mission of proclaiming and establishing among all peoples the kingdom of Christ and of God, and she is, on earth, the seed and the beginning of that kingdom. While she slowly grows to maturity, the Church longs for the completed kingdom and, with all her strength, hopes and desires to be united in glory with her king”). Yet, in Fuellenbach’s judgment, it is arguable whether Vatican II really made the distinction between the Kingdom in history and the pilgrim Church itself, and that this distinction was only clearly made in later documents, in particular Redemptoris missio, as noted above. Those who argue that Vatican II did distinguish between the pilgrim Church and the Kingdom in history emphasize Lumen gentium’s characterization of the Church as a sign or sacrament of the Kingdom: “Hence that messianic people, although it does not actually include all men [sic], and at times may appear as a small flock, is, however, a most sure seed of unity, hope and salvation for the whole human race. . . . All those, who in faith look towards Jesus, the author of salvation and the principle of unity and peace, God has gathered together and established as the Church, that it may be for each and everyone the visible sacrament of this saving unity” (Lumen gentium, 9). For Fuellenbach, a “theological fruit of non-identity” of Church and Kingdom in history is that “it shows how the work for justice and liberation inside and outside the church is intrinsically linked with the kingdom present now, since the ultimate goal of the kingdom of God is the transformation of all reality” (82).

72╇╇ Chapter Two 52. For David Hollenbach, in “Social Ethics under the Sign of the Cross,” in The Global Face of Public Faith: Politics, Human Rights, and Christian Ethics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003), an ethics that goes beyond mere self-defensive survival must seek the ultimate reality; thus, the ultimate question, vital for all who seek a social ethic, is as follows: is ultimate reality God as Enemy or as Friend? Drawing on Aquinas’s theology of the cross as a sign of God’s compassionate friendship with humanity, Hollenbach interprets the sign of the cross as “an invitation to interpret the ultimate mystery surrounding the fragments and pieces of human history as the reality of compassionate friendship” (64). 53. In “Church and Political Order in the Horizon of the Kingdom of God,” in Systematische Theologie, Vol. 3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1993), Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that all forms of the state stand in some relationship to the Kingdom of God, since they have the task of bringing about justice and peace in the human community (62), while the Church in its celebration of the Eucharist anticipates the perfect shape of human community, denying the claims to ultimacy of any political order (65). 54. See, for example, Jacques Maritain’s Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), chapter V, “The Democratic Charter,” especially section I: “The Democratic Secular Faith” (108–14). 55. As Jean Porter argues, in Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 2005), the concept of human rights did emerge from Christian theology but “the general idea of human rights has indeed proven to be persuasive to men and women within a wide range of social contexts” (370) and has “become part of the shared patrimony of the race” (371). For Porter, to the extent that concepts of human rights have become part of the life of secular societies, Christianity has a stake in supporting them, since they owe so much to Christian theological commitments. 56. For Francois Bovon, in Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1– 9:50 (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002), Jesus’s words in these Lucan passages emphasize the present palpability of the Kingdom: they “should not be understood purely metaphorically for spiritual benefits, after death or the parousia. Jesus’ speeches and miracles will show that salvation reaches the entire person even now” (154). At the same time, his healing of others is also a sign of his own Messianic role: in both of these passages Jesus’s interpretation of his works of healing is as an “actualization of prophecy through the schema of prophecy and fulfillment” (282),

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57.

58.

9. 5 60.

a prophecy of the Messiah as bearer of the Spirit (154). L. T. Johnson also emphasizes that Luke 7:23 “asks that the works of healing and preaching be accepted as signs of the prophetic Messiah through whom God is visiting the people.” L. T. Johnson, The Gospel of Luke (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 122. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. VII, ed. Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 1971), in its article σκa′νδαλον (“offence”), emphasizes the eschatological character of Jesus’s response to John’s disciples in this verse: it is a challenge to make a decision about Jesus, since “every beatitude and every woe (cf. Matthew 18:7) on the lips of Jesus is an eschatological judgment. . . . The macarism here is closely connected with the depiction (on the basis of Isaiah 35:5 and 61:1) of salvation that has already come. The present age of salvation is also an age of decision” (350). John P. Meier, Matthew, New Testament Message 3 (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1980), 302. I find Meier’s argument persuasive here, since the narrative focuses directly on our encounter with the Son of Man; for an argument that this text is, nevertheless, a parable, see Warren Carter and John Paul Heil, Matthew’s Parables: Audience-Oriented Perspectives, Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1998), 208. Donald Senior, in Matthew (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), argues that the works of love referred to may describe the love with which the Gentiles are to receive Christian missionaries, rather than love of neighbor in a universal context; but in both the more universal interpretation and his own, “fidelity to the love command . . . becomes the decisive criterion of divine judgement” (285). Flannery, Vatican II, 923, 924. In his commentary on chapter one of the document, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” the then Joseph Ratzinger notes that “we are probably justified in saying that here for the first time in an official document of the magisterium, a new type of completely Christocentric theology appears,” which “dares to present theology as anthropology” (159); Christ taking to himself human nature means that the human nature of all human beings is Christologically characterized (160). Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II. Herbert Vorgrimler, ed., Volume 5: Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969). Flannery, Vatican II, 1001. In the words of Benedict XVI’s Deus caritas est, 31: “Those who practice charity in the Church’s name will never seek to impose the Church’s faith upon others. They realize that a pure and generous love is the best witness

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61.

62.

3. 6 64.

65.

66.

to the God in whom we believe and by whom we are driven to love. A Christian knows when it is time to speak of God and when it is better to say nothing and to let love alone speak. He knows that God is love (cf. 1 Jn 4:8) and that God’s presence is felt at the very time when the only thing we do is to love.” www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/ documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est_en.html. In Christ and Human Rights: The Transformative Engagement (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), George Newlands notes that very little has been written on the relationship between Christology and human rights: “there are, however, important areas of reflection and practice which overlap with both Christology and human rights. These include humanity before God, righteousness and justice, mercy, reconciliation, and hospitality. Christ is often seen in the Christian tradition as the centre of forgiveness and generosity, of commitment to marginality, to specific sorts of strangers” (8). He argues, however, that the relevance of Christology to human rights is strongly contested in contemporary society because of the “extremely ambiguous record of Christianity in relation to human rights through the centuries” (11). In particular, he points out that the relationship of Christology to human rights has varied in the tradition according to the influence of different images of Christ, for example, the contrast between Christ as implacable judge and as fellow sufferer (63). Gerhold Becker, “In Search of Humanity: Human Dignity as a Basic Moral Attitude,” in The Future of Value Inquiry, ed. M. Häyry and T. Takala, 7:53–65 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001). Ibid., 56. For example, see Peter Singer, who argues that “‘ideas of dignity, respect and worth’ are simply an indication that philosophers ‘have run out of arguments.’” Quoted in Becker, “In Search of Humanity,” 53. Singer’s statement appears in “All Animals Are Equal,” in Applied Ethics, ed. Peter Singer, 215–28 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). As Becker notes, citing Haim H. Cohn, of the Supreme Court of Israel (“On the Meaning of Human Dignity,” Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, 234) the Constitutional Court of the German Federal Republic does not give the concept of human dignity a merely declamatory value, but affirms it as an “actually binding constitutional norm of the highest rank.” Becker, “In Search of Humanity,” 54. Ibid., 57. Becker affirms the expertise of ethicists in clarifying complex technical and scientific issues, but not in terms of a “higher wisdom” than the general public in their sensitivity to ethical values.

Church, Kingdom, and Secularity╇╇ 75 7. Ibid., 60. 6 68. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples with “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 137–38. By the term “public political life,” Rawls refers specifically to the realm of law and political institutions. 69. I share the view of Patrick Riordan in “Permission to Speak: Religious Arguments in Public Reason,” Heythrop Journal XLV (2004):178–96, when he argues that Rawls’s conception of public reason is in harmony with Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Freedom), insofar as basing public political life on the religious beliefs of a particular group would amount to a violation of the freedom of conscience of citizens who do not share those beliefs. 70. Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” 152. 71. Ibid., 153. 72. As Christopher Insole argues in The Politics of Human Frailty: A Theological Defence of Political Liberalism (London: SCM Press, 2004), Rawls’s proviso expresses a pragmatic approach that does not stipulate rules in advance (46). For Insole, the only claim that cannot be accommodated by the later Rawls is “the claim that a religious believer should not, in any circumstances—even in a pluralistic culture when discussing the use of public power in the case of a stand-off—be required to introduce nonreligious reasons when communicating with citizens who do not share those reasons” (62). While I accept Rawls’s general argument in “The Idea of Public Reason,” it is crucial that references to the background culture are not construed as limiting the public relevance of religion in a broader sense than the formal exercise of political power and legal judgment. As David Hollenbach notes, “to be sure, reciprocal reasonableness constrains what can be done in the name of religion. But it is also the case that serious religious discourse in civil society and the background culture can have significant impact on what citizens at large judge that they can reasonably affirm.” David Hollenbach, The Common Good and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 167.

8 chapter three

The Virtues of Noninstrumental Relationships

In the previous chapter, I considered the mode of relationship of the Church to liberal society. I now want to return to the question of the character of liberal society, especially its propensity to tell two stories. As I argued at the beginning of chapter one, the difference between these two stories reflects two fundamentally different approaches to the nature of freedom. For one understanding, freedom is the rejection of tradition as inevitably a constraint on self-expression and self-assertion. For the other, tradition can be a resource that informs freedom and gives it content, allowing the development and expression of an ontology of the human embodied in various kinds of relationships. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the difference between these two stories by considering the kinds of relationships between human beings that are possible in contemporary liberal societies. It will focus in particular on the character of noninstrumental relationships, considering what virtues are important to giving life to these relationships, and the contrast between them and instrumental relationships, which have a dominative, exploitative, or gratificatory character. As foreshadowed in chapter one, a reading of the City of God as an interpretation of human freedom will play an important role in this reflection. A fundamental service that the Church can give to liberal societies is to exemplify and communicate those virtues in ways that enhance noninstrumental relationships. I will argue that the key virtues exemplified in noninstrumental relationships are humility, reverence for others, and self-giving with the risk of self-loss. For the Church, these virtues are definitively embodied in the life and passion of Jesus Christ. By proclaiming Christ and meditating on the virtues 76╇╇

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that his life expressed, the Church hopes to be able to serve all members of society in their attempts to live their lives in ways that recognize the intrinsic worth of their community with others, rather than to see others purely as means to achieve their own goals. Instrumental and Noninstrumental Relationships For Augustine, the fundamental difference between the two cities resides in the sources of motivation and action: the earthly city is built on self-love, the heavenly city on love of God and neighbor. In this light, we can understand instrumental relationships as those that literally use other persons in order to achieve the self’s goals, refusing any sharing or mediating of those goals with the goals of others. The “self,” in this case, could also be a particular group of people who act like a selfish individual in relation to other groups—their “common objects of love” consist of the gains that can be made by the exploitation of other groups. The self conceives itself as self-sufficient: it neither seeks the meaning and source of its own life beyond itself, having no love of God, nor seeks its own fulfillment in constitutive relationships with others, spurning the love of neighbor. As self-sufficient, it can only enlarge itself by reducing other persons to objects of use, seeking to satisfy desires that cannot, in fact, be satisfied and that become addictive and self-destructive. Noninstrumental relationships, in contrast, are grounded in the love of God, whether explicitly or implicitly, since they express the self’s humility, the recognition that our lives are not of our own doing and making, that the meaning of our lives lies beyond ourselves. Further, they seek the love of neighbor, since it is only this love that can fulfill the self and rescue it from the downward spiral of addictive and self-destructive forms of desire. Noninstrumental relationships are relationships that are entered into not exclusively for the sake of the self’s individual goals, extrinsic to the relationship itself, but rather for the sake of the shared life that commitment to the relationship makes possible, forming, in Augustine’s words, “a community where there is no love of a will that is personal and, as we may say, private, but a love that rejoices in a good that is at once shared by all and

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unchanging—a love that makes ‘one heart’ out of many, a love that is the whole-hearted and harmonious obedience of mutual affection.”1 Noninstrumental relationships are therefore the essential basis for any community, although because of the great range of noninstrumental relationships (from international political relations to the most intimate personal relationships) the degree and kind of community involved can vary enormously. I give priority to the term noninstrumental rather than communal relationships because it has a more inclusive scope: not all noninstrumental relationships are necessarily close or mutual enough to have a communal character. Noninstrumental relationships are those that, at the least, manifest respect for others and consideration of their needs. This respect can be displayed in many contexts that are “social” rather than “communal,” that is, contexts that have a primarily economic or exchange character or that involve administrative systems rather than relationships of friendship. It is clear that a very large proportion of our everyday relationships are to some degree instrumental in the sense that we engage in many transactions of an economic, technical, or administrative character in which we relate to another member of society without seeking with them any personal relationship, in the fuller sense of that word. Yet these everyday transactions do depend on a subtext of courtesy, trust, and recognition in order to give them a character that is not simply the reduction of one party in the exchange to the instrument of the other; rather, they depend on a mutually respectful exchange marked by some mode of acknowledgment of the service provided. The fact that the development of a communal relationship is not the purpose of these transactions does not mean that they lack an essential noninstrumental dimension: this dimension must be manifest in the appropriate markers of respect for another human being who performs a task for monetary exchange or as part of a social system of roles and duties.2 Dominative or reductive relationships dispense with this subtext of recognition (or use it purely in manipulatively strategic ways) in order to assert the goals of the self. The difference between society and community is not, therefore, in the contrast between instrumental and noninstrumental relationships, since all human relationships should manifest respect for others

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and refrain from using others purely as instruments. This difference is rather in the degree to which these noninstrumental relationships take on the character of mutuality, of shared affection.3 A persevering commitment to noninstrumental respect, whether or not it is reciprocated by others, is a sign of a person’s commitment to a good society. Commitment to community, since it is predicated on a degree of mutuality, can only thrive when it receives signs of reciprocal commitment from others. Both a commitment to a good society and a commitment to community are forms of love of neighbor: the former has more of the character of charity, the latter more of friendship. Yet the difference between society and community is ultimately one of degree rather than of kind: some mutuality, some shared commitment to “common objects of love,” is, as Augustine argued, essential to any society or “people.” A mutual commitment to democracy and some sense of human rights is essential to a liberal society. This may manifest itself as an experience of community at particular times of threat, hope, solidarity, or celebration. Noninstrumental relationships—whether in more social or more communal contexts—can be distinguished from ways of relating to others that are truly instrumental in the sense of using others for the purposes of the self without any degree of personal respect. For Augustine, writing in a context so marked by obsession with military glory and imperial domination, the most pernicious expression of self-love was the libido dominandi. In liberal societies, the desire to assert the self by reducing others to objects of use cannot often be as unashamedly dominative as in the ancient world: the essence of domination is more often expressed by economic exploitation and commodification, by psychological and emotional manipulation, or by the use and discarding of others as objects of sexual gratification. In varied spheres of life, these dominative and exploitative relationships tell the negative story of liberal society, in which individual freedom becomes a license to use others. In this story, politics is purely about interests and the negotiation of interests. There is no sense of the common good or reflection on common ends, because political life is no more than the competitive interactions of selfish interests. Politics has a purely instrumental purpose in this story: the mechanisms

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of democracy are used to advance the interests of those who can use them to best advantage. Democratic safeguards are erected essentially because of fear of others—specifically, in order to prevent the accumulation of power. The work of the political representative is not a vocation to seek the common good through a deliberative process, but rather the advancement of particular interests to the maximum degree compatible with the law. In economic life the self pursues its goals with the single-minded exclusion of “externalities” such as the common good or the environment. Since liberal society, even in its negative story, demands a much higher burden of justification for going to war than did the potentates Augustine wrote of, the libido dominandi has acquired more of an economic than a military form in our time. The economic self brushes aside all other values in order to expand its control of markets and resources to the greatest extent possible, in terms memorably described by Marx: “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”4 Further, the libido dominandi becomes—to adapt Augustine’s phrase—a libido consumendi, the self as consumer, provoked by ceaseless and compulsive desire that seeks to fill the vacuum of interpersonal meaning by the accumulation of objects.5 This libido consumendi is impatient with any limits to what can be bought and sold, so more and more elements of communal, personal, erotic, and aesthetic life are commodified in order to satisfy what is pathologically insatiable.6 As many commentators have remarked, the economic system favors the bifurcation of the individual into expressivist and utilitarian personae.7 The utilitarian engages in means-ends rationality in the increasingly long working day, while the expressivist satisfies individual life-goals in private time. What the system actively discourages is any attempt to unify the two in a communal project of meaning, a project that might threaten to affirm a rationality of the common good during working hours and seek to transcend a private expressivism of individual materialist gratification through the attraction of a path of spiritual wisdom nourished by the well-springs of communal tradition.

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In personal relationships this negative story is one of gratification and provisionality. Interpersonal commitments are limited to the extent that they satisfy the self’s needs and desires. These needs and desires are not transformed through the experience of an intimate relationship into a shared search that could itself become an interpersonal bond, but remain unrepentantly individual, constantly testing and assessing the partner to judge whether or not he or she is capable of giving satisfaction according to the criteria dictated by individual desire.8 The common denominator of this story is the refusal to recognize any possibility of self-interest being subordinated to, or transformed into, a relationship of mutual recognition and respect. Because selfinterest will always have priority over mutual relationships, there is no basis for common reflection on what can fulfill our personal and interpersonal lives, or on some set of shared goods. This story of liberal society resists any limitations on individual freedom based in a claimed insight into the purposes of life other than satisfying individual desire. The response to any attempt to agree on a common good, on limits to the marketplace, or on personal relationships that go beyond provisionality and gratification is that these are unwarranted limitations on individual freedom, an appeal to goods that are not shared, or an imposition of tradition-as-constraint. Yet the positive story of liberal societies can tell of a wide variety of noninstrumental relationships, ranging from the broadest political communities to the most intimate relationships of interpersonal love. Their common thread is that they are not relations of domination and consumption, and that the relationship itself, rather than goals extrinsic to the relationship, is the most important motivation for personal commitment. Politically, both at an international and a national level, liberal societies are capable of embodying relationships that express respect for other human beings, rather than any goals extrinsic to that respect. Statements of human rights express relationships of mutual recognition: the recognition of all human beings as making a moral claim on us, limiting the assertiveness of the self and calling us to wider fields of concern. The goal of these statements is founded in this relationship

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of recognition: to enable all human beings to live in a global human community of freedom, justice, and peace. At the level of national politics, political procedures and mechanisms can be employed not only with the negative goal of limiting the power of selves who would otherwise exploit that power, but also to further the common good. The deployment of democratic procedures can be the enactment of political rights, guarantees that the concerns of the electorate are effectively voiced. Those who are involved in parliamentary politics can experience those procedures as the means of forming a relationship with each other as representatives of the nation who have a common responsibility to seek the common good. While democratic politics is necessarily adversarial to a considerable degree, it can also be motivated, at a deeper level, by a sense of shared responsibility and mutual respect. Although a market economy has, notoriously, a strongly instrumental dimension, economic activity generates a host of relationships that have a noninstrumental character. Business relationships can sometimes become relationships of mutual respect and trust. Workplaces are focused on the delivery of goods and services, but can also become sites for relationships of cooperation, solidarity, and friendship, especially when the goals of production and delivery are restrained by codes and practices that allow space for the noninstrumental aspects of economic activity to emerge and flourish. Processes of technological innovation and development can also be the catalyst for relationships that are initiated by common commitment to a project: They can develop their own noninstrumental character through the experience of collaboration and shared intellectual engagement. At a social level, liberal societies are characterized by a huge range of voluntary communities. Many of these communities are focused on the shared relationship itself—based in various forms of common identity, whether ethnic, cultural, or simply in friendship. To this extent, their goals transcend the self but not necessarily the bounds of a specific community. Others are founded in various kinds of commitment to society, or even humanity, at large. In such cases, these relationships are oriented to enhancing the welfare and human dignity

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of others, rather than to the immediate benefit of the self or of any specific community. In addition to this, their orientation to the welfare of others can enable a very high degree of cooperation and shared commitment among their members. In contrast to most economic activity, such organizations are noninstrumental both in their goal—which is the welfare of others rather than the self—and in the character of the relationships that commitment to these goals can engender. Among these voluntary social organizations, religious organizations deserve special mention because of their size, scope, and contribution to society. As Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the first to observe, voluntary religious organizations can thrive in liberal societies, free of the constraints and counterforces engendered by religious establishment.9 While marriage and family are threatened by the negative story of gratification and provisionality, it is also true that they have become steadily more independent of social and economic imperatives during the course of modern history, and in this sense more and more noninstrumental. While earlier forms of marriage and family were heavily dependent on questions of property and social alliance, and were often oriented to small-scale economic production, both marital and family relationships are increasingly valued for the sake of the quality of the relationship itself. Relations between parents and children are understood much more in terms of mentoring and friendship than in economic or sociostructural terms. Similarly, the ideal of marriage is much more than formerly an intense and lifelong form of erotic friendship and companionship than a commitment to fulfill certain socially prescribed expectations.10 In all these ways, liberal societies are capable of enabling and fostering noninstrumental relationships. In contrast to dominative or gratificatory relationships, these noninstrumental relationships enable the development of an ontology of the human, that is, an understanding of the human person as fulfilled in relationships based on free commitment. This has an ontological character in the sense that the true meaning and purpose of personal being is fulfilled in these relationships. In contrast to dominative or gratificatory relationships, which isolate individual selves from each other, noninstrumental relationships enable

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human community, to varying degrees of intimacy and intensity, and thereby the emergence and development of the personal character of human existence in the fullest sense of the word. These brief reflections on the negative and positive potential of individual freedom in liberal societies—on the contrasting trajectories of dominative and gratificatory, as opposed to noninstrumental, relationships—illustrate the constant need to develop understandings of noninstrumental relationships that can motivate and form individual freedom. They seek to emphasize that the difference between the two “stories” is in the understanding of the self: one as an individual self seeking its own goals, so that relationships have a purely instrumental character; the other as a self willing to allow its own goals to be transformed through a commitment to a relationship that is distinct from those individual goals. Yet for individuals to sacrifice the immediate pursuit of their own goals for the sake of commitment to personal relationships, they need to be convinced that this relationship will be fulfilling, that it will not become simply a loss of self, a sacrifice of individuality that runs the risk of being exploited by others. This concern is especially relevant in contemporary experience, since, in historical terms, many are still influenced by memories—some inherited rather than directly experienced—of exhortations to sacrifice and to commitments to relationships that were experienced as a radical and unjustified loss of self: whether of patriotic sacrifice in time of war, submission to Church authority, or suffering caused by an unhappy marriage or oppressive family relationships. The concern that various kinds of communal relationships threaten individual freedom reminds us that the affirmation of the priority of individual goals, and the accompanying critique of communal relationships, has to be carefully interpreted. In some contexts, the invocation of philosophies of individual freedom is purely an ideological fig-leaf for the maximization of self-interest, for self-love in its dominative and exploitative sense. In others, it may reflect interpretations of individual freedom that resist different forms of community that they fear will be stifling and repressive of personal initiative and selfexpression—that talk of community often masks the oppressive hand of tradition-as-constraint. Any attempt to strengthen and support the

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positive, noninstrumental potential of liberal society must be attentive to these fears and concerns. In attempting to encourage and enhance noninstrumental relationships in liberal societies, the work of the Church is at least twofold. One aspect of this task is to contribute to the development of strong and convincing philosophies of the common good, so that members of liberal societies can be shown that there are real alternatives to philosophies of individualism. This is a specifically intellectual task, which draws from the philosophical and theological traditions that support and affirm an ontology of the human, the fulfillment of human beings in different forms of cooperation and community. The principal focus of the present work, however, is on the meaning of the virtues, specifically on the social meanings of love of neighbor and the malign effects of self-love. Because of this, the remainder of this chapter will focus on another fundamental aspect of the Church’s task in liberal society: to communicate the virtues that can make possible a commitment to noninstrumental relationships, that can enable freedom to be expressed in ways oriented to community rather than domination or gratification. The Church’s task of communication is particularly oriented to showing that commitment to community is not about the stifling of individual freedom but about the fulfillment of the self in interpersonal relationships. In the most profound sense, this task of communication has a Christological character, since the Christian church proclaims the life and passion of Christ not as a story of destructive self-immolation but one of love, of joy and peace in community. The Virtues of Noninstrumental Relationships Augustine argues that the virtues “are certainly the best and most useful of man’s endowments here below,” and that they are of inestimable assistance in the struggle to live by the love of God and neighbor, rather than for self-love.11 In liberal societies, this struggle takes the form of constantly resisting the reduction of personal liberty to an individualism of self-gratification. Of their nature, the market and commercial media agencies of liberal society are oriented to stimulating

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and satisfying material need. To varying degrees, liberal societies are pluralist, without very strong shared communal, religious, and ethnic symbols, festivities, and other activities that claim public space and attention.12 Communal activities, or activities associated with higher culture, do not have high levels of profitability and so attract relatively little market and media attention. Furthermore, media technology has given marketing activities far more attractive and penetrative power than they had even in recent decades. For all these reasons and others, the individualist, gratificatory face of liberal society is constantly prominent. To some degree this can be resisted by reasoned argument, based in the common good, that media penetration must be limited in certain specific cases, for example, in the advertising of unhealthy food to children, the restriction of pornographic and violent content, or the protection of the human and natural environment from disfigurement by commercial media. Yet whatever consensus can be developed in support of these restrictions, the nature of the market economy and the sophistication of media technology mean that liberal societies will be characterized by a (probably increasingly) strong and intrusive public presence of individualist and gratificatory messages and imagery. Because of this—and despite the fact that liberal societies have many powerful resources for noninstrumental relationships in many areas of life—education in the virtues at the heart of those relationships is constantly challenged by the public prominence of instrumental attitudes and stimuli. The commitment to the positive, noninstrumental possibilities of liberal society is at constant risk of distortion and destabilization by the reduction of freedom to self-assertion and gratification. This means that this education in the virtues requires sustained commitment and support, a commitment that is able to assist in discerning the positive potential of liberal society and empowering forms of life that resist the reductive effects of the market-media symbiosis. If our freedom can only be guided towards noninstrumental relationships, rather than coerced into them, then the role of the state in this education is clearly a limited one. The maintenance of stable political institutions that articulate the free self-expression of citizens, the promulgation of just and justly enforced laws, and the provision of decent standards of social welfare are all essential prerequisites for

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community and can play an educative role in the development of community sentiments. The formulation and establishment of these features of a liberal society can also express a profound commitment to the common good on the part of those involved in public life, just as the experience of giving and receiving just judgment or welfare assistance can be the occasion for a strong and authentic sense of shared citizenship, of membership of a commonwealth. There is a healthy and important sense in which the institutions of state and society can evoke the emotions of loyalty and community, the sense of living in a society that gives effective public recognition to the dignity of the human person. Yet the state is also, and of its nature, the wielder of instruments of coercion. Its laws are experienced not only as justice but also as mere frustrations to individual will, which can often, with ingenuity and financial resources, be circumvented or rendered impotent. Many experience them simply as the expressions of economic power and interest, the will of those who have much enforcing the poverty of those who have little. Because of their inherently coercive dimension, and because of the inevitable gap between the objectivity of even the best laws and interior assent to community, state institutions cannot of themselves be the means of resolving liberal society’s fundamental ambiguities through an education in the virtues. Many individuals and families are committed to giving this education to the young people in their care, but without the sustaining life of a community it is even more difficult than otherwise to do so. It is communities, forms of ethical life sustained by tradition, whether secular or religious, that are best placed to engage in the sustained and disciplined communication of the good of personal freedom as oriented to mutual respect and the common good. These communities draw on tradition as a resource for the development of personal freedom. It is part of the mission of the Church in liberal, secular societies to share in this task for the sake of its own life and for that of all members of society.13 What are the virtues that can form freedom for communal, noninstrumental relationships rather than relationships of gratification and domination? I want to argue that there are three virtues at the heart of these relationships: humility, reverence, and self-giving at the risk of

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self-loss. These virtues are themselves inspired by love: humility by the love of God, the recognition that our lives are in God’s hands; reverence and self-giving by the love of neighbor. For Augustine, the virtue of humility is at the heart of the contrast between the heavenly and earthly cities: “The one city loves its own strength shown in its powerful leaders; the other says to its God, ‘I will love you, my Lord, my strength.’” (Psalm 18:1).14 The virtue of humility is the recognition that my life is based in God’s strength rather than my own. To live humbly is to recognize that my worth and the meaning of my life do not depend on my own achievements: the effort, love, and commitment given to worthwhile goals is itself an expression of virtue, but the value of this commitment does not finally depend on perceived success. It is also to recognize that I cannot draw the meaning of my life from myself alone, that my life would be frustrated if I were to use others as the means to my own goals, without seeking to enter into community with them. The humble person recognizes that a world shaped in the image of his or her individual goals, with others subordinated to merely instrumental value, would be a sinister and joyless world: that the self becomes empty if it relates to others purely through the modes of domination and gratification. Humility recognizes that we draw strength from beyond ourselves when we engage in life-giving relationships with others. Humility is not self-abasement, but rather a peaceful and joyful awareness of my own need for life-giving relationships with God and others. It involves a recognition of sinfulness—that assertions of my own self in dominative and exploitative ways are both self-destructive and destructive of relationships. Indeed, humility can begin in the chastened acknowledgment of the harm done by self-assertion or selfindulgence at the expense of others. It may also begin in an honesty born of suffering, the recognition of my inadequacy without strength from beyond myself.15 Through humility, the self is turned outwards, recognizing that its own meaning depends on relationships with others. In this sense, humility prepares us for reverence for others—a reverence that is incompatible with treating others in an instrumental way. Reverence for the worth and dignity of others is made possible by ridding ourselves of

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anxiety about our own worth, and of the behavior that stems from that anxiety. We are free to be open to the value of others, since we know that our own value is given to us, rather than something we must achieve. Reverence for others is at the root of statements of human dignity and human rights, which draw on the experience that all human beings have an ontological uniqueness and value that calls forth from us a response of reverence. We cannot dominate or consume what we revere: the virtue of reverence responds to human dignity in ways that mark its preciousness, fragility, and uniqueness. Reverence is powerfully evoked by the poignancy of loss and destruction of the human: the experience of desecration brings home to us most powerfully the irreplaceable worth of human beings.16 It is expressed in care for others, which has a normative form in statements of human rights that articulate and safeguard the worth of the human person. Reverence is also expressed in protest against the commodification and degradation of human values in liberal societies, including the constant pressure from the market/media economy to reduce the human body to a marketing tool and to reinforce self-congratulatory and stereotypical self-images of society. Humility leads the self to look beyond itself, enabling it to give due reverence to the human dignity of others. The experience of the value of others illuminates the potential of community, the fulfillment of the self through living in relationships of mutual recognition, friendship, or intimacy. Yet commitment to noninstrumental relationships inevitably involves some risk of self-diminution or even of self-loss. This is, of course, a matter of degree, depending on the particular character of the relationships I am entering into. Participation in some forms of relationship, workplaces for example, usually involves a combination of instrumental and noninstrumental goals to varying degrees depending on the nature of the workplace. In these kinds of context, my willingness to suffer self-diminution (such as lack of promotion or a low salary) will depend on the degree to which the overall goals of the workplace coincide with my own most cherished values. In other forms of relationship, such as friendship, the relationship has no goal extrinsic to itself: it is essentially inimical to friendship to imply that I enter into it in order to achieve personal goals that are distinct from

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the friendship itself. A strong friendship may be grounds for generous self-giving, in the sense of a sustained commitment to aid and sustain, but not grounds for self-loss by compromising or denying personal beliefs that are at the core of one’s own identity. Although noninstrumental relationships vary greatly in the extent to which they may also include an instrumental dimension, all noninstrumental relationships intrinsically involve a risk of at least selfdiminution in the act of self-giving. A common life entails the risk of loss, since the development of a shared relationship requires that participants commit themselves, trusting that others will do so equally. Notoriously, those who make this act of trust leave themselves vulnerable to exploitation and even betrayal by others. Yet if no one is prepared to take this risk, noninstrumental relationships cannot flourish. The risk of self-diminution is not a good or desirable thing in itself, but communities are impossible without it.17 How vulnerable should someone become for the sake of a communal relationship? Much will depend on how important that relationship is to one’s own life and identity. If a person is genuinely committed to a relationship, the decision to end this relationship is not simply a matter of removing something extrinsic to one’s own identity. If the self is deeply committed to life in community, to noninstrumental relationships, then these will in turn form the self, so that the question, “Should I pursue this relationship?” is not one that can be simply separated from the self’s life-goals and identity. Noninstrumental relationships can have the power to transform a person’s individual goals, so that there is less and less distinction between those goals and the relationship itself. Some forms of community may not be at the core of personal identity, and therefore they are not worth the renunciation of important individual goals. Other kinds of relationship, such as marriage or a parental relationship, because they are so fundamental to the constitution of our own sense of self and our ethical identity, may involve very considerable sacrifices of individual goals and projects. Our willingness to be committed to communal relationships depends on our own self-identity, the correspondence between those relationships and our sense of self-fulfillment. Yet that sense of self-

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fulfillment itself depends on the things we value, the things that we think are worth dedicating our lives to. In Augustine’s terms, the sorts of communities that we are willing to commit ourselves to, and to risk self-loss for, will depend on their “common objects of love.” These common objects of love may be intimate relationships themselves, for which we will make ourselves vulnerable, or they may be transcendent ethical and religious ideals, which give the communities dedicated to their realization a particularly high value in our eyes. For common objects of love of moderate value, such as the enhancement of a local neighborhood’s quality of life, we may be prepared to make a commitment that leaves us vulnerable to our energies being exploited by the complacency of others. For those of transcendent value, such as the dignity of the human person in situations that truly threaten that dignity, or the continued credibility and public resonance of fundamental ethical and religious values, we may risk serious self-loss. Once a person’s identity is so closely bound up with such relationships, its vulnerability radically deepens. To dedicate oneself to such relationships may mean not only self-diminution, but even self-loss, if identity is so deeply enfolded in them. Yet when is self-loss for the sake of the highest objects of love in fact self-immolation? When does mutual commitment to the highest ideals become a betrayal of one’s own personal worth? Contemporary liberal societies are marked by a strong antipathy to anything that smacks of self-loss for the sake of communal relationships. In Western memory, the First World War may be the most powerful single cause of this in a political context. There is also a revulsion against the exploitation of communal—particularly youthful—idealism that was a marked feature of Communism and Nazism, and which can still be witnessed in many authoritarian societies around the world. At a social level, the reaction of women against notions of self-loss and self-abnegation for the sake of family relationships was articulated in many outstanding works of literature since the early nineteenth century and became part of a major sociopolitical movement during the 1960s. In Catholic spirituality, notions of self-offering characteristic of the Tridentine era have been challenged, especially since Vatican II, as prone to psychological distortion and manipulation by authority.

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Since the 1960s, the notion of investing personal identity in a communal or institutional project with the risk of self-loss has become deeply suspect.18 This suspicion rightly fears the ways in which such commitments can be subject to exploitation and manipulation: what relationships can be so life-giving and so free of self-seeking by at least some participants that they could warrant taking such a risk with an individual’s own destiny and happiness? Clearly, all people must protect their own integrity against manipulation, exploitation, and betrayal by those to whom and with whom they commit themselves in various kinds of social or communal relationships. Yet it is also true that the willingness to make a commitment to these relationships is crucial to the health not only of liberal societies, but also of all those persons who wish to live a life that transcends a strategy of individual cost-benefit. It is evident that achieving a balance between commitment to noninstrumental relationships and self-preservation is far more than a simple matter of risk-assessment, especially because some of the most constitutive communal relationships, such as marriage, depend on a commitment to face together whatever the future might hold. While all people should have a healthy sense of their own integrity, which is not to be sacrificed to the whims of others, a calculative strategy, which seeks to protect the self from as much risk as possible, undermines the commitments characteristic of marriage and friendship, as well as of involvement in many voluntary communities and in social institutions oriented to the common good. This tension between individual self-possession and risking noninstrumental relationships is one of the most fundamental challenges to the vitality of liberal societies. Much of the impetus behind the development of such societies was in the liberation of the individual from enforced structures of social order; the development of communal relationships on the basis of free commitment is one of liberal society’s highest ethical characteristics. At the same time, the scope and degree of this commitment is constantly subject to doubt because of the power of individualist ideologies and because of the fear of self-loss. This poses both a particular challenge and a crucial opportunity in the Church’s relationship to liberal societies. It is a challenge because much of the resistance to ideals of commitment with the risk

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of self-loss is a reaction to the real or perceived role of the Church in inculcating these ideals in ways that were detrimental to healthy personal development. Yet it is also an opportunity, because this fundamental tension in liberal societies is one that has profound resonances with the Church’s own Christological proclamation. The challenge to fulfill the self through commitment to others with the risk of self-loss is deeply Christological in character. A Christological Understanding of Noninstrumental Relationships In response to this challenge, the Church is called to communicate a Christology that can both redress the harm caused by distorted theologies of self-abnegation and make a radical challenge to members of liberal societies to allow noninstrumental relationships to flourish through personal commitment. In the first place, this Christology is Kingdom-oriented. It emphasizes that the meaning of Christ’s mission is the proclamation of the Kingdom, which is made up of relationships sustained by mutual respect and love and marked by joy and peace. It is most of all in these communal, noninstrumental relationships with others that we have foretastes of the Kingdom in this life. In the Kingdom, these relationships are an occasion of thanksgiving and are celebrated as the gift of God. Christ’s dedication to the proclamation of the Kingdom is based on his humility (Philippians 2:5–11). The humility of Christ is expressed particularly as the emphasis that he has received everything from the Father: that his whole life and purpose is that of the Father (Luke 10:22, John 17). He is completely identified with the proclamation of the Kingdom, which itself embodies the Father’s loving purpose. Resisting the temptation to self-preoccupation and self-projection (Luke 4:1–13), Jesus opens himself to the will of the Father. This openness means that he is completely identified with the proclamation of the Kingdom to everyone he encounters. Self-preoccupation does not distort his relationship to others: he is freed to give them the good news of the Kingdom. Yet this self-emptying in openness to the Kingdom makes Jesus all the more himself, a person-in-relationship, peacefully

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assured of the Father’s love and therefore able to reach out to and heal the anxieties and vulnerabilities of others. Since Jesus lacks all self-preoccupation, he can give his full attention to others in their concrete individuality and need. This attention is reverence, the gaze that loves and heals, the speech that calls forth the image of God in those he encounters, whether this be a wretched man in anguish or a woman terrified of going out in public (Mark 5:9, 34). This reverence knows no bounds—it is extended beyond the people of Israel to a Canaanite woman and a Roman centurion (Matthew 15:21–28; Luke 7:1–10), and to the limits of Jesus’s strength as the crowds press in upon him (Mark 3:7–9). Like the prophets before him, Jesus’s reverence is also expressed as a protest against those who lack concern for the needy and afflicted, a “daughter of Abraham” kept prisoner “by the bonds of Satan” (Luke 13:15–17), and as a castigation of those who make the house of God a “den of thieves” (Matthew 21:13). His reverence for the sacred traditions of the Law and the Temple motivates stern rebuke for those who exploit them to oppress the weak or preserve their own power. In his humility—his self-emptiness before the love of the Father— Jesus is completely identified with the proclamation of the Kingdom; therefore, he cannot abandon this proclamation, whatever the cost. He has no self other than a self-in-relationship to the Father whose Kingdom he proclaims. Because this proclamation threatened some elements in his people’s religious leadership as well as Roman power itself, his identification with the Kingdom led to Jesus’s death. He did not seek this death as a means of ushering in the Kingdom: it was imposed on him by the cruelty of the libido dominandi. Nor did he avoid it by abandoning or modifying his proclamation of the Kingdom, or by avoiding confrontation with the powerful. Jesus made it clear to his disciples that fidelity to the Kingdom, in the conditions of this world, would mean taking up the cross in discipleship (Mark 8:34), but this was not because suffering is an essential part of the Kingdom itself. It was simply and solely because fidelity to the Kingdom would bring violence and rejection down upon those who proclaimed it.19 What of sacrifice? Did Jesus understand his own death as a sacrifice, and if so, how was that sacrifice different from those ritual acts

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that, as he and the teachers of Israel had agreed, were inferior to the love of God and neighbor (Mark 12:32–33)? Ethically speaking, how should a Christian understand self-sacrifice in imitation of Christ in a way that rejects the group’s unholy demand for the self-immolation of the individual? Let us turn to Louis-Marie Chauvet’s reflection on Jesus’s sacrifice in his Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence.20 For Chauvet, “the sacrifice of his life consisted in his refusal to use God to his own advantage.”21 In doing so, he reversed the fundamental sin of Israel, which is also the paradigmatic sin of humankind: “to live its relation to God according to a pattern of force and competition.” Jesus’s life is essentially about “de-mastery.” “We do not come to ourselves if we do not renounce ourselves and thus abandon the attempt to found ourselves on ourselves. This ‘sacrificial’ letting-be seems to us to open a way to express theologically the significance of the life and death of Jesus ‘for all humankind’, a way at least as fruitful as that of ritual sacrifice or of feudal justice exacting compensation.”22 For Chauvet this allows us to read the sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’s death in a nonritualist manner. Responding to René Girard’s critique of any use of the term “sacrifice” as implying scapegoating and the abandonment of responsibility, Chauvet argues that we cannot have the perfect reciprocity of “non-sacrifice” in this in-betweentime of mortal existence.23 Instead, he favors the term “anti-sacrifice”: “The anti-sacrificial regimen to which the gospel calls us rests upon the sacrificial, but it does so to turn it around and thereby to redirect ritual practice, the symbolic point of passage that structures Christian identity, back toward ethical practice, the place where the ritual practice is verified.”24 The Eucharist is an “anti-sacrifice” because it is contrary to all scapegoating: it calls for ethical commitment and responsibility, and it finds its premier place in the “ethical practice of reconciliation between human beings.”25 These Christological reflections can help shed light on the meaning of self-giving. For Christian faith, the uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth, his union with the Father, which has been classically interpreted through the dogmas of Nicea and Chalcedon, can be expressed in terms of his complete self-emptying and identification with the proclamation

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of the Kingdom. This identification with the Kingdom implied the risk of self-loss in confrontation with the powerful. Yet this form of selfloss, in the sense of religious disgrace as a blasphemer and a cruel death at the hands of an oppressor, was, for Jesus, a cost of fidelity to the Kingdom, which he could not abandon without self-loss in the truest sense of loss of identity, the loss of his openness to the Father. What relevance does this have for the challenge of self-giving at the risk of self-loss in liberal societies? In the first place, it emphasizes that all self-giving that might resonate with the image of Christ must be oriented to the joy and peace of community, motivated by reverence for the uniqueness of others. The risk that this self-giving does incur is not taken because suffering is itself a good thing, but because the formation and preservation of community depend on a willingness to risk hurt and betrayal from those we seek to support, and the violence of those whose own grip on power over others is thereby threatened. Should we use the term “sacrifice” to describe this self-giving? Chauvet and Girard agree that sacrifice understood as the scapegoating of victims to propitiate divine forces, or any bearers of power, is utterly foreign to the true meaning of the Gospels, and that Jesus’s death abolished the stranglehold of this form of sacrifice once and for all. Where they disagree is on the legitimacy of using the term “sacrifice” to describe the ethical gift of freely risking self-loss for the sake of relationships of love and fidelity. For Girard this is a confusion of two quite different things, while for Chauvet this term must be used with care in pastoral contexts but is ineradicable: from an ethical point of view, it allows believers to make a liturgical reading of their practice of justice and mercy.26 One danger of using this term is that, given the continuing seductive power of the notion of propitiatory sacrifice, the gift of self-loss in fidelity made by a community’s moral heroes will be exploited by others to absolve themselves of active responsibility—rather than responded to as a source of moral inspiration. Another danger inherent in the term is the tendency, particularly in connection with a nation’s military history, to use the deaths of its citizens as a means of giving ethically dubious or reprehensible events a sacral character and thereby rendering them immune from criticism. Nevertheless, I agree

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with Chauvet that the word sacrifice can be a fruitful means of describing the gift of self for the sake of relationships of love and fidelity. Although it bears such a heavy burden of negative meaning in terms of victimhood and propitiation, it can also convey a positive sense of self-offering. Since such self-offering for the sake of others is so crucial to the life of communities, we cannot dispense with this ancient term, so fraught with meaning though it is. In addition, a Christological perspective invites us to consider the kind and degree of identification with the cause of community that a particular individual can make. Jesus’s union with the Father, a union that the Church professes through the proclamation of his Lordship, meant that his own self was completely given to the cause of the Kingdom. Yet an aspect of his own reverence for each person that he encountered was to offer them a calling suited to their own gifts and capacities—sometimes challenging to a discipleship that would accompany him in poverty and loneliness (Matthew 19:16–22), sometimes gently resisting those who wanted to become his faithful attendants by restoring them to their own place and people (Mark 5:18–19). The uniquely personal character of vocation—and of the ways in which the cross is taken up—is illustrated through the range of these encounters. The call to commit oneself to the cause of community is not an abstract and general imperative, but an invitation for each person to reflect on what they are able to give. The capacity to give, in turn, is affected by the deepest sense of one’s own identity, and of what would lead to loss of that identity. For Christian faith, self-fulfillment is only possible at the risk of self-loss, but the character and context of that risk is different for every individual. Our sense of identity depends on our personal formation, including the influences to which we willingly expose ourselves. The Gospels make clear how much Jesus’s own freedom from self-preoccupation stems from an openness to the Father in the Spirit through prayer and immersion in sacred scripture. This freedom from self-preoccupation is also a self-confidence that enabled him to resist those who sought to stifle his message by threats and accusations of blasphemy. This brings home to us how much the ability to give oneself to community—and to resist the claims of exploitative communities—depends on each

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person’s sense of their own worth, founded in their relationship to God. The virtue of humility, in its openness to God, can be in fact the foundation of a sense of self-worth that realizes that the threats and blandishments of communities based in superficial and tawdry “common objects of love” can be resisted. It can also be a foundation for critically recognizing those communities that are truly worthy of the gift of self. As Augustine argues, “Thus, in a surprising way, there is something in humility to exalt the mind, and something in exaltation to abase it. . . . That is why humility is highly prized in the City of God . . . and it receives particular emphasis in the character of Christ, the king of that City.”27 We have considered how some of the key virtues for a positive story of liberal society have a profoundly Christological reference. We should also ask whether the negative story can be interpreted in Antichristic terms. Is this scriptural motif a useful tool for interpreting the negative phenomena of liberal society? For O’Donovan, since Christendom expressed the rule of Christ over the nations, it had Antichristic potential as well, expressed particularly in the conflation of the two kingdoms (secular and eternal) and the convergence of claims for universal political sovereignty and heavenly mediation, expressing the tension between true and false messianism.28 In modernity, however, the Antichristic character of civilization is expressed most of all as arbitrary will: “Faith in creation means accepting the world downstream of the Arbitrary Original, justified to us in being, goodness and order. Voluntarism, on the other hand, situates the agent at the source; it offers a mystical access to the moment of origination, and leads the spirit to the rapture of pure terror before the arbitrariness of its own choice.”29 Although liberal society can express the reign of Christ, this voluntarism can also give it an Antichristic character. This face of liberal society has “free choice” as its point of departure, emphasizing voluntary communities rather than those founded in “blood-ties or local contiguities,” preferring “compassion” to sympathy and seeing suffering always as a “waste,” which deprives punishment of any rationale, using the principles of individual rights and equality to eliminate any “differentiation within communities of affinity” and abusing

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parliamentary expression by adversarial and sectional politics rather than the pursuit of the common good.30 O’Donovan sums up the essence of the negative aspects of liberal society very effectively and expressively as a voluntarism that rejects the fulfillment that can be found in “being, goodness and order.” Whether the emphasis on voluntary communities, compassion, and equality in fact reflects the sheer arbitrariness of choice, an essentially nihilistic voluntarism, or, much more positively, an emphasis on personal freedom in relation to historically given social structures is quite a different question. To see these phenomena as symptoms of an Antichristic tendency of liberalism is misplaced. There will always be debate within liberal societies about the respective emphasis that should be placed on cultural traditions and historically given social differentiation as against a general principle of equality and individual rights. But this debate is not one about Christic and Antichristic interpretations of freedom. As I argued in chapter one, the emphasis on the human person as the bearer of subjective rights is not a denial of the reign of Christ, even though it was usually associated in earlier historical contexts with the disestablishment and even persecution of the Church. On the contrary, it can be seen as an implicit recognition of Christ’s Lordship, anonymously present in every human person. Liberal society, in its negative expressions, all too clearly manifests what is non-Christian. Yet to call it Antichristic does not do justice to the fact that it is based in freedom, a freedom that—for all its abuse— does allow space for human flourishing and Christian worship. Even in the fragile liberal society of the Weimar Republic—home to both democratic heroism and artistic creativity, as well as to political violence and cultural nihilism—the dignity of the human person could still be defended, its violation still protested against.31 It was what destroyed this society that was Antichristic. The scriptural theme of the “Antichrist” is indeed an apposite one for some aspects of modernity, but for totalitarianism rather than for liberal society.32 Contemplating the staggering excesses of Stalin’s and Mao Tse Tung’s personality cults, the monstrosities of the Holocaust and the Thousand Year Reich, and the nihilistic primitivism of the Khmer Rouge’s “Year

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Zero,” we cannot but draw on the New Testament’s image of the Antichrist. What sums this up is a perverted messianism that destroys freedom and justice in the name of freedom and justice, that focuses all its adulation on one who claims to bring salvation but who in fact deals in mass death, and that even seeks to redefine and capture time by projecting itself into a limitless future or by bringing the era back to zero, thereby usurping the place of the one born in Bethlehem.33 I have argued in this chapter that the key difference between the two stories of liberal society lies in the virtues that inspire and inform noninstrumental relationships, enabling persons to live in different forms of community rather than in the emptiness of self-assertion. Of their nature, virtues require embodiment in a way of life, and they are most effectively communicated and handed on by sustaining communities of virtue. This is particularly true in liberal societies, which are so deeply marked by sophisticated and virtually ubiquitous marketing that appeals to and encourages acquisitive and gratificatory desire. There are many such communities of virtue, with both secular and religious origins and character. However, in Western societies the most important and influential is the Christian church in its various denominations and expressions. I have argued that the virtues of humility, reverence, and self-giving are vital to forming freedom in liberal societies, and that these virtues are definitively embodied in Jesus Christ. In this sense, it is the mission of the church, the Christian community, to communicate these virtues for the sake of all members of liberal, secular societies. Yet this thesis raises some important critical questions to do with the character of communities as bearers and communicators of virtue. If Christians are formed in these virtues through the Christian way of life and Christian narrative, how can they be communicated to other members of secular society who are not formed by this way of life or narrative?34 In the first place, it is very important to note that the Christian presence in secular society is far from being only a matter of Christians communicating something to other “secular” fellow citizens. Christians themselves have a secular identity as well as their identity as members of the church: that is, they are citizens of secular societies and seek to contribute to those societies on the basis of their formation

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as Christians. Formed by the Christian community, they seek to acknowledge the anonymous Christ in every human being and to uphold and apply the human rights that are the basis of liberal secular society. In Rawls’s terms, the Christian community and its beliefs are part of the “background culture” of a liberal society, the basis on which those citizens who are Christians commit themselves to uphold fundamental democratic values. Yet how can Christian virtue influence those who are not formed by Christian communities? An adequate answer to this question should both recognize the profound links between communities and formation in the virtues as well as the real influence the church can have beyond those who are active participants in its life. Since regular Christian church attendance is declining in virtually all liberal societies, it is clear that a significant proportion of them is made up of people who have been exposed in some way to Christian teaching or Christian formation, at least through the influence of parents or grandparents, but who are no longer practicing members of Christian communities. There is good evidence that those who have been exposed to Christian formation in early life remain receptive to fundamental Christian teachings and values, even though they cease to be practicing members of Christian communities. In his Churchgoing and Christian Ethics, Robin Gill argues for a “cultural theory of churchgoing” that recognizes the influence of churchgoing on the inculcation of values: for this approach, it is “churchgoing more than religious belief which is the independent variable, that is to say, it is churchgoing which fosters and sustains a distinctive culture of beliefs and values.”35 In this light, beliefs and values can be maintained by those who had an early experience of churchgoing although they later cease attending church. However, the theory also emphasizes that “the culture of churchgoing fosters and sustains beliefs/values, so a decline in churchgoing will over time result in their demise unless they are sustained by an alternative moral community.”36 Gill also notes that research findings indicate that there are real links between church attendance and such practices as voluntary service, although the “distinctiveness of churchgoers is relative rather than absolute.”37 His research encourages us to believe that there are many

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members of liberal societies who are not churchgoers, but who are nevertheless influenced by Christian beliefs and Christian formation in virtue. The influence of the Christian community is a good deal wider than the group of active churchgoers. However, Gill also emphasizes that these beliefs and virtues cannot be indefinitely sustained without renewal through new groups or generations actively participating in church communities. Gill’s research gives some empirical credibility to a conception of the Christian church as a community of virtue that is essential to sustaining the positive ethical life of a liberal society, but that can also have an influence beyond its own membership. At the end of the previous chapter, I spoke of the experience of human dignity in secular society as an ethical “givenness” that seeks a transcendental foundation that the public institutions of liberal society cannot provide. This indicates a particular role and service for the Church: to be a community of interpretation that is able to draw attention to and sustain these experiences of human dignity, to give them reverence, and to show how they inform what is truly valuable in liberal societies, especially those virtues and relationships through which the human ontology of interpersonal life is manifest. Whether, and to what degree, this task of interpretation will have a religious dimension, or invoke Christian narrative, will depend on particular contexts and circumstances. What is certain is that the Church will only be capable of this service if, in its own life, it is gathered around the table of the Lord and hears the word that tells of the divine person who became human to share in our condition. Notes 1. Augustine, City of God, XV:3, 599. 2. This emphasis clearly owes a great deal to Kant’s principle, “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.” The Moral Law, Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. and ed. H. J. Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1948), 91. Social transactions can have a legitimately instrumental character, but

The Virtues of Noninstrumental Relationships╇╇ 103 only if they are predicated on noninstrumental respect. As Oliver O’Donovan notes in Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 2005), there is no such thing as a purely commercial transaction: “Every engagement in which exchange takes place implies a social context of things held in common; our exchange-transaction either upholds the justice of that community, or flouts it” (249). For John Milbank, in Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), “if community is not enshrined in exchange itself—and capitalism is precisely the exclusion of community from exchange—there is no other social site, no family site, no local site, no national site, in which community can take refuge” (166). He sees the most effective alternative to capitalism in terms of syndicalist socialism, with an emphasis on the professional ethos of producers with “some sense that that which is produced is primarily a gift to the community, which will relate to community values in crucially important ways” (185). I share Milbank’s desire to understand economic activity—like other social activities—as a contribution to society that can be enhanced by a professional ethos. However, I do not think that socialism, or social democracy, is usefully understood as conceiving of exchange relationships themselves as community relationships. A just society, in which the market economy is oriented towards social inclusion and prevented from commodification of the human, is still one in which, for most transactions, there is a distinction between gift relationships and relationships of exchange, just as not all social relationships can become community relationships. 3. As Frank Kirkpatrick argues in The Ethics of Community (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), “societies cannot provide in and of themselves the substance of mutuality that constitutes the heart of authentic communities. Built as they are on indirect relations between persons, societies are only ‘potentially’ communities” (76). However, Kirkpatrick emphasizes that if we are aware of the moral conditions for community, then this can become a critical spur for the development of societies in the direction of community: “an absolute dividing line between society and community is impossible. They mutually condition and inform each other, especially around the issue of justice” (77). In my own understanding of the difference between society and community, the communal “potential” of society can be realized when noninstrumental relationships develop from relationships of respect and recognition to relationships characterized by some degree of mutual esteem or affection.

104╇╇ Chapter Three 4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Karl Marx: The Revolutions of 1848, ed. by David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973) 70–71. 5. In his essay “Living in a Post-Traditional Society,” in In Defence of Sociology: Essays, Interpretations and Rejoinders (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), Anthony Giddens argues that the Protestant ethic of capitalism, deprived of its original theological motivations, becomes simply obsessive: “The past lives on, but rather than being actively reconstructed in the mode of tradition it tends to dominate action almost in a quasi-casual fashion. Compulsiveness, when socially generalized, is in effect tradition without traditionalism: repetition which stands in the way of autonomy rather than fostering it” (23). Giddens also sees addiction as a negative sign of the detraditionalization of society, a “repetition which has lost its connection to the ‘truth’ of tradition” (24). 6. A degradation of human values trenchantly criticized in John Paul II’s Centesimus annus, 40: “There are goods which by their very nature cannot and must not be bought or sold. Certainly the mechanisms of the market offer secure advantages: they help to utilize resources better; they promote the exchange of products; above all they give central place to the person’s desires and preferences, which, in a contract, meet the desires and preferences of another person. Nevertheless, these mechanisms carry the risk of an ‘idolatry’ of the market, an idolatry which ignores the existence of goods which by their nature are not and cannot be mere commodities.” www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii _enc_01051991_centesimus-annus_en.html. As Raymond Plant notes in Politics, Theology and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), “some claim that markets should be extended to more and more areas of life because we lack the moral resources to legitimize collective judgments about the nature of common values, common obligations and common views about the nature of fundamental relationships.” For Plant, “only a sense of the transcendent,” expressed perhaps through some conception of natural law, “can, in fact, provide a secure basis for the argument that there are definite limits to the sphere of commodities and to the sphere of rational self-interest” (194). 7. See, for example, the discussion in Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 8. In his Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 2000), Rowan Williams illustrates the radical contrast between

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9.

10.

1. 1 12.

these attitudes and interpersonal love. For Williams, love is the recognition that “I can be the cause of joy to another in virtue of something more or other than the capacity to meet their needs . . . to be other, to be distinctive, is more than being someone else’s other, being what fits into another’s stipulated lack” (159). This capacity to love another, rather than to see them essentially as answering my needs, depends on a particular sense of self: “For any self to be free to enable another’s freedom means that it must be in some way aware of the actuality, not only the possibility, of a regard beyond desire—and so of its own being as a proper cause of joy, as a gift” (161). For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, this sense of self is grounded in the worship of God, whose “creative activity is pure gratuity” (162). “On my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country. My desire to discover the causes of this phenomenon increased from day to day. In order to satisfy it I questioned the members of all the different sects; I sought especially the society of the clergy, who are the depositaries of the different creeds and are especially interested in their duration. . . . I found that they differed upon matters of detail alone, and that they all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage, 1981), 1:319. In her Sex, Gender and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Lisa Cahill emphasizes how contemporary marriage can “nourish the human capacity for compassion and solidarity . . . which was once much more easily embodied in a renunciation of kin ties” by a vow of celibacy. She cautions, however, that the distancing of marriage and family from economic and political factors does not mean that they “should or even can be ‘freed’ from their complex lines of connection to all levels of communal life. Individualism in the family is as unbalanced and pernicious as tyrannical social control” (182). Augustine, City of God, XIX:4, 857. In some cases, these festivals or public displays of religious or communal identity are socially divisive or even prone to provoke violence. Their decline is therefore not always a social loss. The challenge for pluralist

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13.

4. 1 15.

16.

societies is to develop festivities that can give public space something more than a commercial or exchange character while enhancing rather than weakening the bonds of social respect and solidarity. Timothy O’Connell’s Making Disciples: A Handbook of Christian Moral Formation (New York: Crossroad, 1998) draws on the insights of the social sciences to link Christian moral formation with the general dynamics of group experience (see especially 76–85). On this basis, O’Connell concludes that, since groups are so important to the formation of personal values, then making disciples is fundamentally about making communities of discipleship (85). In his Go and Do Likewise: Jesus and Ethics (New York: Continuum, 1999), William Spohn emphasizes a threefold approach in moral formation in the Christian community, drawing together the New Testament story of Jesus, the ethics of virtue and character, and practices of Christian spirituality (12). For Spohn, “spiritual practices are the core of authentic spirituality and provide the link between the New Testament and virtue ethics” (37): “Baptism and Eucharist, intercessory prayer, Biblical meditation and discernment, forgiveness and solidarity are the ordinary paths by which Christians connect with the person of Jesus Christ” (186). Spohn emphasizes that the Christian identity formed through these spiritual practices is oriented to solidarity, since “over against all parochial enclaves stands the reconciled totality that Jesus called ‘the reign of God’, that is, the world according to God” (180). Augustine, City of God, XIV:28, 593. A very important example of this form of humility is the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and related organizations, a practical form of contemporary spirituality that is communicable in secular contexts. See, for example, the discussion of the Twelve Steps in Michael H. Crosby’s article “Addiction,” in The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality, ed. Michael Downey (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier/Liturgical Press, 1993), 5–10. Crosby’s article argues that “the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous found in the Twelve Steps a pattern of spirituality for recovering addicts,” and that “the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions offer a contemporary spirituality for North Americans” that “contain[s] the best of principles in ascetical spirituality” (5). A truth manifest in the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed

The Virtues of Noninstrumental Relationships╇╇ 107 as the highest aspiration of the common people.” For Jack Mahoney, in his The Challenge of Human Rights: Origin, Development and Significance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), the UN Charter “reaffirms faith in human rights, that is, a faith in human rights which was previously held but which now needs reaffirming because of, or better, in spite of, the dispiriting events of recent history. It expresses a human act of joint faith, a shared conviction of their indispensable importance for the future of humanity if history is not tragically to repeat itself” (124). This act of faith and commitment to reverence goes together with the gift of forgiveness for those who have desecrated human dignity. In his chapter “The Logic of Superabundance: An Ethic of Forgiving Love,” in Concepts of Person and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Stanley Rudman emphasizes the role of forgiveness in preparing the ground for such statements as the UN Declaration: “Perhaps the most telling initiatives to re-establish peace come from those who have experienced conflict and have realized that without forgiveness there can be no renewal of community” (285). 17. In his How Are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest (Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 1993), Peter Singer, citing research by Robert Axelrod on the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, argues that “Tit for Tat” is the best strategy for social relationships and claims that this “amounts to nothing less than an experimental refutation of Jesus’ celebrated teaching about turning the other cheek,” since such a teaching would help to create a society in which cheats thrive: “There is not much attraction in an ethic of turning the other cheek if the resulting hardship falls not only on those who allow themselves to be struck, but on everyone else as a whole” (139–40). Yet Singer also notes that “it is true that between lovers, in a family, or with close personal friends, where each genuinely cares for the well-being of the other, the question of reciprocity scarcely arises. To put it more technically, in Prisoner’s Dilemma games, caring about the welfare of the other player changes the way in which we assess the outcomes. . . . Genuine concern for others is, then, the complete solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma; it dissolves the dilemma altogether” (147). Since Singer’s understanding of the teaching of Jesus is limited to portraying him as advocating a morality of self-interest in connection with heavenly reward (180–81), he shows no awareness that Jesus’s teaching about not returning harm for harm was an expression of love of neighbor rooted in the love of God, a love that dissolves the dilemmas that characterize an understanding of social relations based purely on calculative self-interest.

108╇╇ Chapter Three 18. For Charles Taylor, in his A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 2007), the 1960s were a “hinge moment, at least symbolically,” of a “cultural revolution” in North Atlantic civilization. Taylor argues that democratic societies were characterized by an “Age of Mobilization” from 1800 to 1950, in which new political and religious forms were developed after the overthrow of the ancien régime. In the Age of Mobilization, political and religious identities were formed by recruiting the allegiance of broad sections of the population to the nation and the institutional churches. The Catholic Church, in various national contexts, felt itself to be beleaguered, and felt that it “offered the only possible bulwark of civilizational order” (470). This in turn meant that the church “became the focus of often intense loyalty, a sentiment akin to nationalism” (471–72). This Age of Mobilization wove four strands together—“spirituality, discipline, political identity, and an image of civilizational order”—in a mass phenomenon that became a mutually strengthening whole (472). Taylor argues, however, that from the 1960s there has been the steady spread of a culture of “authenticity,” an understanding of life “that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.” Taylor notes that this culture had its origin in the “Romantic expressivism of the late-eighteenth century . . . but it is only in the era after the Second World War that this ethic of authenticity begins to shape the outlook of society in general” (475). 19. As James Alison argues in Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1996), a truly Christian understanding of sacrifice is not of God demanding a sacrifice from human beings, but rather of a God who so loved the world that he offered a sacrifice to us: “it is God’s handing over of Jesus to us which defines what ‘the wrath’ is: the wrath is the type of world in which Jesus was borne to death by sinful humans who could not receive the truth” (47). Jesus gave up his life for his friends not to perpetuate the belief that it is only one’s death that can show one’s love, but rather to “make possible a model of creative practice which is not governed by death,” opening up new possibilities that should not be “subverted by myths of sacred renunciation” (71). 20. Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995).

The Virtues of Noninstrumental Relationships╇╇ 109 1. Ibid., 299. 2 22. Ibid., 301. 23. For Girard, the death of Christ is nonsacrificial and abolishes this mythological form of group violence directed against a victim. In his judgment, a mistaken sacrificial reading of the Gospels has made it possible “for what we call Christendom to exist for fifteen or twenty centuries; that is to say, a culture has existed that is based, like all cultures (at least up to a certain point) on the mythological forms engendered by the founding mechanism. Paradoxically, in the sacrificial reading the Christian text itself provides the basis.” The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 179. For Girard, Christ’s abolition of sacrifice is a sign of his divinity: “To say that Jesus dies, not as a sacrifice, but in order that there may be no more sacrifices, is to recognize in him the Word of God” (184). (This discussion is in chapter 11 of The Girard Reader, “The Nonsacrificial Death of Christ,” which is itself drawn from the chapter “A Non-Sacrificial Reading of the Gospel Text” in René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987].) 24. Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 307. 25. Ibid., 311. As William Crockett writes in Eucharist: Symbol of Transformation (New York: Pueblo, 1989): “When a relationship is broken, it requires an act of costly love in order to reestablish communication and communion. There is no language more adequate than sacrifice to express this. The gift that creates the profoundest communion also involves the profoundest cost” (259). 26. Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 316. 27. Augustine, City of God, XIV:13, 572–73. 28. O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 214. 29. Ibid., 274. 30. Ibid., 276–82. 31. This is perhaps most notably present in the last free parliamentary act of the Weimar Republic, the speech in rejection of Hitler’s Enabling Act by Otto Wels, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party, on March 23, 1933: “The Weimar constitution is not a socialist constitution. But we stand firm with the principles of a state based on laws, of equality, of social justice that are established in it. We German Social Democrats formally commit ourselves, in this historical moment, to the foundations of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. No Enabling Act gives

110╇╇ Chapter Three you the power to annihilate ideas that are eternal and indestructible.” www.dhm.de/lemo/html/doku mente/wels/index.html, accessed July 3, 2008 (author’s translation). 32. For his part, O’Donovan sees a drift towards totalitarianism in any narrative that aims at “the progressive realization of ‘truths of evangelical origin’ about the dignity of the human person”; he finds this, for example, in the writings of Jacques Maritain in and after the Second World War. For O’Donovan, the special task of government is “defending against wrong.” The Ways of Judgment, 171–72: “political judgments do not limit freedom in order to realize it, but in order to defend it. Public freedom is not a project, like private action, that requires realizing; it is an ensemble which gives coherence to private undertakings. And so political authority has no special mandate to pursue a public goal, ‘the common good’ conceived of as a giant millennium dome.” (57) This view of the role of government flows from O’Donovan’s premise that the rule of Christ means that the powers of government have been limited to just judgment, whereas the Christological perspective I have been advocating—in a way akin to Maritain—is that the pursuit of the common good through democratic government can be an institutional expression of respect for the dignity of the human person, which has its theological foundations in Christ. 3. This note of false messianism in modern totalitarianism was noted by Pius 3 XI in his encyclical Divini redemptoris, written in condemnation of Communism in 1937: “The Communism of today, more emphatically than similar movements in the past, conceals in itself a false messianic idea. A pseudo-ideal of justice, of equality and fraternity in labor impregnates all its doctrine and activity with a deceptive mysticism, which communicates a zealous and contagious enthusiasm to the multitudes entrapped by delusive promises. This is especially true in an age like ours, when unusual misery has resulted from the unequal distribution of the goods of this world. This pseudo-ideal is even boastfully advanced as if it were responsible for a certain economic progress. As a matter of fact, when such progress is at all real, its true causes are quite different, as for instance the intensification of industrialism in countries which were formerly almost without it, the exploitation of immense natural resources, and the use of the most brutal methods to ensure the achievement of gigantic projects with a minimum of expense” (8). English translation, Vatican website, at www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encycli cals/documents/hf_p-xi

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34.

35. 6. 3 37.

_enc_19031937_divini-redemptoris_en.html. According to Glenn Tinder, in The Political Meaning of Christianity: An Interpretation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), “although mass society is a less terrible spectacle than Marxist totalitarianism, it is in one way more disturbing. The latter demonstrates the dangers of proud and sweeping action. The former shows that even cautious and piecemeal action, action as guarded and gradual as the long series of measures that led to the emergence of the egalitarian republic that Tocqueville observed in the Jacksonian era, can have results that are both unanticipated and highly undesirable” (191). Tinder rightly notes some of the degraded results of the abuse of freedom in liberal democracies—results that were indeed unexpected by many proponents of democracy—but these are precisely abuses of a freedom that has been preserved by the “guarded and gradual” history of a republic: they are a good deal less disturbing than the terrifying results of abolishing that freedom and replacing it with a state based on fear and lies, or the paralyzing cynicism and apathy of the last decaying years of Communism in Eastern Europe. I have attempted a more extensive discussion of this field of questions in chapter four of The Public Forum and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Robin Gill, Churchgoing and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 64. Ibid., 66. Gill notes that “there are broad patterns of Christian beliefs, teleology and altruism which distinguish churchgoers as a whole from nonchurchgoers. It has been seen that churchgoers have, in addition to their distinctive theistic and christocentric beliefs, a strong sense of moral order and concern for other people. They are, for example, more likely than others to be involved in voluntary service and to see overseas charitable giving as important. They are more hesitant about euthanasia and capital punishment and more concerned about the family and civic order than other people. None of these differences is absolute. The values, virtues, moral attitudes and behaviour of churchgoers are shared by many other people as well. The distinctiveness of churchgoers is real but relative” (Churchgoing and Christian Ethics, 197).

8 chapter four

Christian Hope and the Eucharist: Witness and Service

In the previous chapter, I reflected on the virtues that enable a realization of the ethically positive potential of liberal societies, and on the ways in which these virtues are definitively embodied in Jesus Christ. The crucial role of these virtues emphasizes the fact that liberal society is an ethical project. Modernity in general is not necessarily an ethical project and may simply be the outcome of a number of “disembedding” social processes, accelerated by the development of technology.1 Nonetheless, liberal society is a distinctive form of modernity that is based on the dignity of the human person, expressed in normative statements of human rights or in laws and practices that embody those rights. Since liberal society is an ethical project, it depends essentially on hope: only hope can sustain the ethical commitment required to give life to this project, constantly renewing it despite the strength of the negative dynamics of domination that threaten to reduce it to some other, illiberal, form of modernity. Because human desire can take the path of self-love or love of neighbor, the future of liberal societies can never be taken for granted. Their character as an ethical project means that they must be constantly open to conversion, to the renewal of their commitment to love of neighbor over dominative self-love. Hope is a fundamental aspect of this conversion: To live by hope is to live in willing readiness for commitment to noninstrumental relationships, overcoming the fear and cynicism that tempts societies to revert to selfishness and guarded exclusion. For Christian hope, “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (Romans 5.20). Christian hope affirms that the story of 112╇╇

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humanity will, through the gratuitous love of God, reach its destiny in the Kingdom of God. For Christian hope, the story of humanity is ultimately one story that has Jesus Christ at its center. The story of liberal societies is a different matter: It is not part of Christian faith to affirm that societies that respect human rights will ultimately embrace all humanity and have a sustained and stable future in the continuing history of the human race. The development of modernity may be quite different—after all, the twentieth century was dominated by appalling conflict and geopolitical tensions in which the global influence, if not the survival, of liberal society was in grave doubt. Yet this does not mean that the Church is indifferent to the future of liberal societies, to the circumstances of human life within this saeculum. As John Paul II emphasized in his Redemptor hominis (1979), even as the Church lives by faith in the life of the resurrection, “by the truth about the human person, which enables us to go beyond the bounds of temporariness,” it thinks at the same time “with particular love and solicitude of everything within the bounds of this temporariness that affects man’s life and the life of the human spirit.”2 Expressing the spirit of Gaudium et spes, John Paul constantly emphasized that what most fittingly respects the image of God in the human person in this earthly pilgrimage is a society based on human rights. Insofar as liberal society is an ethical project that embodies respect for human rights, the Church seeks to support it, since it does thereby bear witness to the Kingdom, in however partial and imperfect a way. The most powerful expression of Christian hope is the celebration of the Eucharist. The Eucharist recalls Jesus’s commitment to proclaiming and enacting the Kingdom of God within human history, and the rejection of that proclamation, the apparent failure of his ministry, in his execution. It celebrates his resurrection as the “first fruits of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:20), which promises hope beyond the failure of the fruits of our striving. It affirms that Jesus’s commitment to humanity in its history was not in vain: that all acts of love will be enshrined in the Kingdom that God will bring to fulfillment. It empowers Christians to live in the hope of the Spirit of Jesus—a hope that gives itself for human need in history, in the confidence that even

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the most shattering defeats can be borne through the power of Christ’s cross and resurrection. This chapter will focus on the relevance of Christian hope and the celebration of the Eucharist to the ethical project of a liberal society. It will consider them especially from the perspective of service and witness. The principal concern of chapter two was how Christian service to liberal society could be inspired by Christian identity and manifest itself through Christian witness. It concluded with a consideration of the significance of Rawls’s “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” especially its “proviso.” This chapter will explore how Christian hope can be communicated as a service to liberal societies and as a witness to the Kingdom of God. It will engage with Rawls’s argument in order to examine in some detail how hope can be communicated in the public political forum and in the “background culture” of liberal societies in ways that respect public reason. The previous chapter spoke of Jesus Christ as the definitive embodiment of the self-giving that is at the heart of noninstrumental relationships. For Christians, it is primordially the Eucharist that commemorates and makes present Christ’s self-giving. Yet, for many members of liberal societies, all religious rituals, including the Christian Eucharist, are irrelevant to the ethical task and challenges of a liberal society that is conceived of as a purely secular and self-sufficient commitment to human dignity. This tension between the ethical and the ritual is in fact deep within biblical tradition itself. The second part of this chapter will focus on the tension between the ethical and the ritual, and it will argue that Christian celebration of the Eucharist can bear witness to hope in the midst of ethical failure. Christian Hope and Public Reason In what ways can Christian hope serve the citizens, laws, and public political institutions of a liberal society? How can it be communicated in ways that express the civility of public reason and at the same time faithfully maintain its own transcendent witness? This chapter will firstly argue that Christian hope is characterized by a tension between an inspiration to solidarity within history and an independence from

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the course and outcomes of history, and that living in and with this tension can be a great gift to liberal societies. Secondly, it will reflect on the meaning of hope for the public life of those societies, arguing that a public, political hope expresses itself in three key ways: a discernment of human capacities that evokes moral virtue, a conviction of the openness of the future to human striving, and a certain detachment from the fruits of that striving. Finally, it will consider the ways in which Christians can communicate their own hope to others in liberal societies, in ways that both respect the canons of public reason and are faithful to Christian religious identity. The source and ground of Christian hope is the gift of God, and its symbolic summation is the Kingdom of God, a realm in which human beings live in the inheritance of eternal life. The hopes of Christians go beyond history and cannot be satisfied by anything in human history. Whatever the outcome of human history or the fate of particular historical communities, Christian hope in the Kingdom cannot be destroyed. Human history cannot fulfill that hope, nor can it abolish it. Yet at the same time, Christians are called to solidarity in history, to a bond with their fellow human beings that is forged and strengthened within history. It is within history, through their ethical commitment, their love of neighbor, that Christians respond to the gift of the Kingdom and help to make it present. If they ignore the historical plight of their fellow human beings, then they ignore the image of God in their midst. It is in the historical circumstances of their lives that they come to know God through his image in their neighbor and use their freedom to help make God’s Kingdom visible in sign and anticipation. The tension between a hope that goes beyond history and a love that is realized within it is a crucial characteristic of Christian life. The products, or “outcomes,” of history are not the focus of Christian hope—they can neither fulfill nor destroy it. History may end in nuclear or ecological disaster, or in some other conclusion that destroys all the works of human civilization. Much of the labor of past generations was denied fruition by conflict and unforeseen contingency, and history gave no solace to those whose lives were cut short by war and famine. Yet it is within history, through our attempt to respond in freedom and love to God and neighbor, that we are saved. Through

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our efforts to respond to the goodness of creation, to perform works of love, we help to prepare for the Kingdom, since those works of love develop moral character: persons—and communities of persons— formed by love. It is those persons who will become members of the Kingdom of God. We cannot respond to the Kingdom in our own lives unless our dedication to others and to the historical world that is the arena of our shared lives is real and genuine and demonstrated in solidarity. Our salvation is not determined by the course and consequences of human history, yet our hopes are for human history, the history that the Word of God shares by becoming human. It is the object of our care and concern, and within it we witness and strive to have empathy for our fellow human beings. This empathy may be expressed in what William Wordsworth called “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love” or in larger, politically organized schemes for human welfare: Whatever their scale, such acts of service can respond to the teaching of Matthew 25 when performed with love and with acknowledgment that their fruits are beyond our control. One of the crucial ways in which Christians can serve others is to respond to Christian faith’s gift of hope by bringing hope to other human beings. Historical societies, in a very real and palpable sense, live in hope and through hope. My concern is for the ways in which Christian communities can communicate hope to the broader societies of which they are a part and in ways that express the “civic friendship” of public reason. Its particular focus will be on the ways in which the specific character of Christian hope, which is not founded in history but is a hope for history, will shape the ways in which Christians seek to offer hope to the societies in which they share their lives with people of many and varied religious and nonreligious perspectives. Christian hope is characterized by a tension between its inspiration to solidarity within history and its independence from the course and outcomes of history. What I want to argue is that this tension, if lived out and communicated with faith and love, can be a great gift to liberal societies: that awareness of this tension, and of the light it throws on the meaning of human action, can be a crucial form of service to society in its attempt to face the future in hope. Of course, the

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historical record shows that this tension has often been interpreted as a severe dichotomy, leading to a Christian withdrawal from engagement with history and to the charge that Christians were unconcerned about the historical plight of their fellow human beings. Christian withdrawal of this sort has sometimes taken the form of simply ignoring the importance of human society as a field within which freedom and love could find an expression that might shape our response to salvation. Sometimes, perhaps even more destructively, it has been expressed in the conviction that the injustices of history are permanent and unchangeable, that they can not be abolished or even ameliorated by human action, and therefore that they are merely to be suffered by those who are their victims for the sake of eternal salvation. Thus, Christian eschatology has illegitimately become a source of ideological indifference to human suffering, and the devastation of the Church— either through mass atheism or acts of violent revenge—has been the harrowing result. This dichotomy can only be abolished by an emphasis on history as a field of salvation through solidarity: that it is in and through our acts of service in history that we respond to God’s gift of salvation. It is in history that God has saved us by becoming human, by becoming part of our history. It is in history that our own salvation is realized by our response to God’s gift of love in our love for our neighbor. There is no dichotomy between our hope for salvation and our historical existence. Yet there is a real tension, a tension between our hopes for human well-being in history and our knowledge that such hopes have been dashed over and over again, that our true and lasting hope lies in God alone and the Kingdom that is his free gift. How much of our hopes should we invest in historical action, without risking despair? What kind of detachment should we practice, so that, while being committed to historical action and striving for justice, we remain grounded only in hope in God and for a future beyond all human conflict and failure? What is the constitution of a historical hope that genuinely offers our “blood, toil, tears and sweat” for our fellow human beings and yet is able to come to terms with the destruction of all the visible fruits of that passionate striving, putting its desolation and emptiness before the infinite healing power of God?

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By wrestling with these questions, Christians seek both to bear authentic witness to the God of hope and to serve their fellow human beings in the societies of which they are part. I want now to consider how Christians can contribute to the different dimensions of a public, political hope and how this contribution might relate to the distinctions that Rawls makes between the background culture and the public political forum. In particular, when Christians who are government officials or who are seeking elected office aim to inspire their fellow citizens with the language of Christian hope, can this be positively understood in terms of Rawls’s proviso? I will argue that one dimension of political hope—the discernment of moral capacities—can meet this proviso with relative ease, since it does not essentially require an intrinsically metaphysical affirmation about the future. The same cannot be said of the other dimensions: Of its nature, political hope that affirms the openness of the future to human striving and equips us to face that future with both determination and detachment implies metaphysical convictions about the character of that future. Can Christians who hold or seek public office both use the language of their faith to make these affirmations and offer an alternative language in publicly shareable terms? What are the implications both for their own Christian identity and for the health of public life if they seek to do so? What, then, is the character of public, political hope in a liberal society, and how can Christians contribute to that hope? If a society’s hope is to remain hope, and not give way to despair, then it—like Christian hope—will also be marked by the tension between striving for a certain outcome, for certain consequences or “states of affairs,” and the acceptance that these efforts may well be in vain. Its striving will not be lessened by the knowledge that it may fail, and its acceptance of defeat will not succumb to despair. A hopeful society—and political leadership that communicates hope—can live with this tension, constantly overcoming failure by a renewed hope for a better world. A public political hope is not grounded in the predictability of particular outcomes, since it is in essence the gift of being able to come to terms with the lack of this predictability. Yet it also has nothing to do with irresponsibility: It is sustained by the real achievability of those outcomes. A demagogic conjuring with political fantasies has

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nothing to do with hope, and everything to do with the manipulation of fear and anxiety. Reflection on the character of hopeful social and political action suggests three key traits: a discernment of human capacities that evokes moral virtue, a conviction of the openness of the future to human striving, and a certain detachment from the fruits of that striving. The discernment of human capacities in hopeful political action involves interpreting the circumstances of human societies in ways that successfully appeal to human virtue—and that “bring out the best in people.” It is a matter of common experience that most political situations are subject to a variety of interpretations, including cynicism, scapegoating, “buck-passing,” fanciful optimism, as well as—in fortunate circumstances—hopeful and truthful assessments of a society’s potential to overcome particular obstacles and achieve certain goals. It is the mark of hopeful political leadership to be able to interpret situations in ways that encourage the best ethical responses from fellow-citizens, to be able to tap the sources of courage, dedication, and solidarity. In large-scale societies the potential for solidarity, as a transcendence of individual concerns for the sake of the concerns of others, although real and extremely valuable, is inevitably limited.3 The surest sign of hopeful political leadership is its ability to draw out that solidarity in ways that can be directed towards the common good. The link between hope and solidarity is particularly close. Part of the character of hope is to empower perspectives and attitudes that go beyond immediate interests. Human beings are more likely to engage in acts of solidarity if they are hopeful, more ready to devote some attention to the needs of others if they are less fearful about their own interests. The power of hope is to evoke human capacities for giving beyond our own immediate circle of interest, to risk solidarity with those whom we would otherwise ignore or even despise. Fear, in contrast, throws us back into ever-decreasing circles of defensiveness and mistrust, throttling the capacity for imaginative concern for the needs of others. While a selfish optimism is a regrettable but not necessarily self-contradictory attitude to life, a selfish hope is a contradiction in terms: it is in the nature of hope to be inclusive, to seek the common good.

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This appeal to the best of human characteristics is essentially an act of imagination, motivated by hope. The hopeful social or political leader is one who is able to imagine our better natures in ways that are both realistic and visionary, whose leadership encourages individual actors to contribute to the common good in ways that realize their own interests but that also, to some extent, transcend them through an appreciation of the needs and aspirations of others. The discernment of human nature and moral capacities is a task that can be attempted from a great range of sources of meaning, both secular and religious, drawing on the resources of art, literature, philosophy, religious tradition, and national tradition, as well as on the various commonplaces of received wisdom. Since the evocation of moral virtue for the sake of a public politics of the common good does not, of its essence, require a religious ground, religious understandings of human nature take their place beside other sources of insight, rather than having any essential claim to priority. The role—and the opportunities—for religious language in communicating the meaning of moral virtue will also, of course, be dependent on the degree to which religious language is a matter of cultural consensus in a particular context. The value of any particular source of meaning for this task lies in its power to shed light on a shared question: how can political leadership—and all those social agents that attempt to form and encourage political participation—evoke moral virtue for the sake of the common good? In particular, how can it foster a sense of social solidarity that will reject a politics of fear and resentment in favor of a reasoned appreciation of the implications for a particular society of the different forms of justice? Perhaps the most critical aspect of this challenge is in achieving some kind of equilibrium between vigilance and trust in democratic electorates. Much of the wariness and distrust for authority—whether in politics, the institutions of justice, the economy, the professions, or the churches—stems from a widely held perception of the fallibility and weakness of those in positions of trust and authority, which often leads in turn to deep-seated cynicism about the very institutions that are essential to the maintenance of the common good. A utopian conviction of the perfectibility of human institutions

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is now rarely encountered, although populist politicians are sometimes successful in protecting some favored institutions (usually those associated with national pride) from criticism through the stratagem of scapegoating others. The many examples of weakness and corruptibility that have become public knowledge give ample reason for a keen sense of vigilance, for the maintenance of procedures of oversight and accountability that monitor the exercise of authority and public trust. Yet this vigilance is self-defeating if it is not accompanied by a sense that its purpose is to maintain and enhance trust in institutions that are essential for the complex mediation of power and responsibility in a democratic society.4 The difficulty of maintaining some sense of trust in complex institutions is naturally heightened by the process of globalization, through which vigilance for the sake of trust becomes not only a task within a particular society, but an endeavor calling for new forms of global cooperation. From a Christian perspective, what is at stake here is our sense of each other’s sinfulness. A thoroughgoing cynicism about the conduct of public institutions expresses a sense of the all-pervading and inescapable power of sin, corrupting all who are exposed to the temptations of wealth and power. Such cynicism, since it seeks to convey a sense of aloof judgment, is usually not accompanied by a chastened sense that the cynic himself is equally corruptible. For Christian communities, the primary response to this challenge is, clearly, to provide as little as possible reason for cynicism about the conduct of their own affairs and internal relationships. Yet they also have an extraordinarily important role to play in terms of communicating a vision of the human person and human society that acknowledges the universal power of sin but at the same time recognizes the far greater power of forgiveness and grace. This vision will engage and compete with other perspectives—both sublime and ridiculous—on human behavior in the welter of cultural images, and its communication will continue to be a complex and exciting challenge for a range of Christian ministries. There is every reason to hope that a Christian vision of the human person as sinful, redeemed, and capable of virtue will continue to have a broad and profound influence on democratic societies, both through

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the direct efforts of the churches and its long-term influence on a great range of cultural expressions. The communication of this vision is, in general, the task of members of the Church in the background culture. Can it also be employed by elected officials or those seeking political office? Here it seems that Rawls’s proviso is relatively easy to meet. This conception of the human person informed by Christian theology has a particular power and resonance in and through its distinctive language and symbols, but it is open to alternative forms of expression and appeals to common experience. This will clearly deprive it of its unique resonances, but the need for the proviso stems from the fact that such resonances can alienate some as much as they inspire others. Thus a Christian politician may use such theological language and the loci classici of scripture to illustrate the weakness and potential of human beings; that same politician must also be ready to illustrate this weakness and potential in more secular language and in terms of our common human experience, addressing both the human capacity for cooperation and solidarity and our proneness to exclude and exploit others unless appropriate structures and sanctions are enshrined in law and in public institutions.5 In moving from theological language to a secular description of our human condition, the Christian politician will always be aware of the tension between fidelity to the Word of God and the desire to communicate its meaning in ways that can be shared with followers of other creeds. The Christian Gospel can evoke and inspire insights into our common condition that can be communicated, to some degree, in ways that do not require assent to Christian faith, yet it can never be reduced to any other form of discourse. Those dispositions of political hope that convey assurance about the character of the future pose a much more difficult and interesting set of questions. An appeal to the best human capacities would be fruitless unless hope was also marked by a conviction of the openness of the future. This is the conviction that, whatever happens, there is always a point to human action, that the future is always open to the efforts of human beings to make a better world. What can ground such a conviction? Of its nature, it cannot be firmly grounded in experience, since the future may be very different from the past, and—for

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all we know—hold challenges that we are inadequate to face. It could, of course, be argued that hope is simply a reasonable, empirically based prediction that future challenges can be dealt with in some way, since past challenges have always been surmounted in some way and to some degree. Yet such language, first, is recognizable as the selfcongratulatory perspective of the victors and survivors of history, forgetful of the fate of those whom historical catastrophes wiped from the face of the earth, and, second, takes no account of the radical differences in kind, fuelled especially by technological change, between past and future challenges. We need only remember the invention of the hydrogen bomb in our own era or the virtual extinction of many native peoples by the totally unexpected incursions of European diseases to remind ourselves that the challenges of the future are utterly unpredictable in character and magnitude. No confidence based on an empirical assessment of human capacities in light of “past performance” is adequate to meet them. It is in the nature of hope to be able to face the future, despite the possibility of such horrors, as an open future, a future in which human beings can persevere in their historical existence and pass on their hope to succeeding generations. A part of this openness to the future is a sense that whatever happens, the fate of humanity is not sealed: that the meaning of human existence, and of human history, is not exhausted by one set of events nor reduced to nothingness by a particular experience of defeat. Thus, this openness is accompanied by a certain detachment, which can preserve human integrity in the face of loss: not out of indifference, but out of hope for that better future that remains the birthright of the human spirit. This detachment is the sense that history is important, that life and death are at stake in it, and that the meaning of human existence remains inviolate despite its failures. With the true detachment of hope, human beings—or particular societies—do not so identify themselves with the course of a particular project, or particular striving, that they see no hope for themselves after its failure.6 I have argued that these dispositions cannot be justified by past human experience nor by any kind of prediction of future human experience. In the most basic sense, they are essential for survival, since without them we would be fatally prone to despair. Yet there are many

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different ways of surviving: some characterized by fatalistic immobility, others by frantic competition and consumption of limited ecological resources. Both of these imperfect forms of survival are prone to radical insecurity: one from the exposure to alien influences that can have a disastrously destabilizing character (as in the case of the conquest of the Aztecs by a tiny party of Spaniards), the other, in our own case, from the knowledge that its technological powers, if unchecked, are capable of destroying human life and the life of most other species.7 The fact that these dispositions are essential to survival, and may in the most elemental sense have an evolutionary explanation, does not mean that they are simply givens. On the contrary, their character is profoundly subject to interpretation by metaphysical worldviews and religious traditions, and these interpretations are radically influential in the history of civilization.8 We need only to recall the role that conceptions of fate played in ancient cultures to exemplify this point. A belief in the openness of the future to human striving—that there is a point to the sustained effort to build a civilization that seeks to go beyond mere survival, despite the knowledge that it may be destroyed by forces of unpredictable violence—implies a confidence that the future will, in some way, be hospitable to human aspirations. The sense of an open future implies that there is a real point to the work of civilization, since in it human beings develop a world of value that expresses their own economic, technological, cultural, and moral creativity. This creativity expresses human confidence that our works will have some lasting value despite the chance that they will perish in fact and in memory. At the same time, a detachment from these works, a sense that they are not the ultimate word about ourselves, is essential to our sense of independence from history, our sense that we can transcend past failures and begin anew, that our own essence has not been exhaustively poured out in one fragile historical project. Hope affirms the confidence that our works in history are valuable, and it frees us from a dependence on those works that would seal our fate along with theirs. Such a vision is at home in a religious conception of human existence, in a sense that the future is in God’s hands, and that our own worth will not be measured by the success of our projects but by the

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virtue that informed our effort to undertake them, virtue that is itself a response to gifts received. In Christian terms the sense of the openness of the future has its ultimate source and meaning in the Kingdom of God, and the independence of our personal worth from historical vicissitude is given an eternal foundation in the proclamation of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Human effort has a point, since all that is good in it prepares in some way for the Kingdom of God, yet our own destiny is never determined by the success or failure of our efforts to build the earthly city.9 Christian “comprehensive doctrine” has played, and continues to play, a crucial role in communicating and sustaining such a vision in Western culture. For Rawls, this has its legitimate place both in the debates of the background culture and among citizens’ sources of motivation for allegiance to democratic ideals. In what ways could it also be expressed by elected officials or those seeking office, subject to the proviso? This tension between creative aspiration and detachment can, of course, be maintained by those without any religious convictions, since it is, in and of itself, a confident and yet realistic attitude to life and a means of preserving self-worth in the face of failure. Yet, as I have already argued, these dimensions of political hope have an intrinsically metaphysical reference since they affirm something about the character of futurity as such. Although an atheist can have political hope, as a positive and fruitful disposition, this hope—as a radical conviction about the character of the future—cannot be justified within an atheistic worldview. As a result, these dimensions of hope are much more profoundly and inextricably linked to religious comprehensive doctrines and to the language and symbols of such doctrines, and meeting the proviso is a much more complex and diverse challenge in a pluralist society. To what extent can the language and symbols of religious hope have a place in public political discourse? The degree of pluralism that characterizes a society is one evident factor in assessing this question. Abraham Lincoln’s profound and explicitly theistic reflections on hope and divine justice were made in a society whose enfranchised members were overwhelmingly Protestant Christians in religious and cultural background. On the basis of this shared scriptural heritage, he was able to develop an interpretation of

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traumatic political events that linked divine justice with the fateful historical consequences of slavery in civil war—a scriptural hermeneutic of common experience that was part of a tradition of public reason.10 In more pluralist contemporary societies, images of hope are often much more reduced in symbolic richness and religious associations. In Australian political history a noteworthy example is the reference to “the light on the hill” by the leader of the Australian Labor Party and Prime Minister, Joseph Benedict Chifley, in a speech to a party conference in 1949.11 Significantly, although this image may possibly owe some of its resonances to Matthew 5:14–16, its expression is very simple and free of any explicitly Christian references: its intention is also immediately spelled out in highly practical language. In a political party that included both militant atheists and daily-communicant Catholics, this image was remembered and evoked by later party leaders in ways that indicated that it had met Rawls’s proviso and was accepted as a shareable symbol of practical political hopes. Perhaps the difficulty in conveying political hope while avoiding any divisive use of the language of a particular religious tradition is demonstrated by the relatively frequent use of the image of dream applied to any bold political project or aspiration. This image, although used in both testaments of the Bible as a means of receiving private revelations, is not associated with Jesus himself and has only rare associations with a biblical vision of hope.12 Due to its lack of any strong association with particular traditions, the language of dream can be communicative in more pluralist societies, and has been put to inspiring rhetorical use in some political contexts.13 Yet, perhaps since it can suggest a passive and inchoate state of experience, with hints of daydream, rather than dynamic symbolic expression, it is prone to lapsing into political cliché. This is one indication that the language of hope, stripped of all traditional religious imagery, is confined to a somewhat scant and austere vocabulary in the public political forum. The challenge of the proviso for any Christian politician is to be able to use Christian religious language in ways that can evoke shareable human experience as a hermeneutical stimulus to exploring the signs of hope in a particular political context, so that the use of such language will not exclude but rather invite the citizens of a pluralist

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society to reflect on their common human situation. The most critical implication of the proviso in this context is its exclusion of theologies of doom: theologies, that is, that conceive hope as reward for some and judgment for others, and that seek to exploit this form of futurity for political purposes. Public reason insists that all public political language will affirm the rights of citizens: because of this, religious language that excludes any from divine favor, or that purports to give “reportage” of the scenarios of divine judgment to justify such exclusion, cannot meet the proviso. Only those images of hope that inspire the language of universal and equal human dignity can enter into public political language. This is both a sound criterion of political language as well as a hallmark of authentic Christian eschatology, which affirms the universal scope and intensity of God’s love, rather than presuming to predict who—if anyone—might experience the selfincurred loss of that love. Another way to approach this question is to ask: Can a Christian elected to or seeking political office exercise a prophetic role, not only in the broad secular sense of acting with vision, courage, and foresight, but also in the more specifically theological sense of witnessing to the meaning of the Word of God within contemporary political life? In its proper theological sense, prophecy is a public act of interpretation of the Word of God, an explicit act of bearing witness to God. Clearly, this will be part of the meaning of Christian faith in the background culture and a source of personal inspiration to Christian political leaders. It cannot, however, be an explicit aspect of their exercise of political office, since that office calls for the affirmation of shared political values rather than of the sacred texts and teachings of a religious tradition. When they do use religious language, it will be for the sake of evoking aspects of the human condition or of a national predicament: Their emphasis will be on its hermeneutical potential to illuminate and interpret shared meaning, rather than to witness to its sovereign truth. This need not at all imply that they take it any less seriously, but simply that they recognize that their role as elected office holders is to affirm publicly shared political values rather than to bear witness to a specific religious tradition. This emphasis on shared meaning does not lessen the potential of religious language to disturb, challenge, and

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unsettle established conventions and prejudices: “shared meaning” is “shareable meaning” in the sense that the hermeneutic potential of the Word of God can challenge accepted practices while at the same time being at least potentially intelligible to those who do not share Christian convictions. Matthew’s “Last Judgment” discourse emphasizes that individual salvation depends upon the encounter with the anonymous Christ, that explicit knowledge of Christ, mediated by Christian tradition, is not essential to that personal encounter with him that we face in our neighbor. In an analogous way, Christians can recognize that their calling to witness to Christ in the public political forum can have the same kind of “anonymity.” Public political language calls for the expression of shareable ethical values: In seeking to evoke and espouse such values, Christians are seeking the anonymous Christ in the person of their neighbor, in the ethical challenges of social and political existence. Refraining from religious language in circumstances where it may alienate other citizens of good will is a form of respect, recognizing that Christian witness must often take the form of anonymity precisely for the sake of respecting the presence of Christ in our neighbor. At the same time, the (perhaps inevitable) sparseness of the language of hope in the public political language of contemporary pluralist societies alerts us to the urgent need for its constant revivification in the background culture. The anonymous witness to Christ in our neighbor expressed in the language of rights and civility in the public political forum must be accompanied by that explicit witness and worship that affirms Christian identity and inspires Christians to commit themselves to the demands of political integrity. In the background culture, the mediation of hope to society calls for the explicit act of evangelization: If the tension of Christian hope between concern for history and independence from history is to serve society as a whole, it must be communicated as a faith in the Kingdom of God and the resurrection of Christ. In this way, Christian identity in contemporary democracy can avoid both a reduction of religious faith to ethics and an imposition of faith upon others. In the background culture it seeks to communicate the power and richness of Christian faith both as a form of evangelization and as a service to political culture. In the

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public political forum, it is dedicated to affirming and extending the ethical values that are mandated by Christian faith but that can also be shared through public political language. It is both witness and service: an explicit witness to Christ in word and sacrament, and service to the anonymous Christ in our neighbor with whom we share the language of public ethical and political life. The Eucharist: Hope in the Midst of Ethical Failure Christian identity and witness are primordially expressed in the celebration of the Eucharist. It was in the Eucharist that Christ gave thanks for the bread and wine of creation as signs of the Kingdom, and in his meals with sinners and the outcast that he symbolized their acceptance into the Kingdom. It was in his last meal with his disciples, in the midst of the rejection of his proclamation of the Kingdom that was soon to be enacted in his arrest, that Jesus gave his own body and blood to the Church as his living presence in its midst for all time. In the Eucharist, Christians become Church as Body of Christ and live in hope of the Kingdom through sharing the one whose resurrection anticipates it. In this they are called to the world, since the Kingdom that has its sign in the Eucharist is the transformation of the world: the Church’s character as witness to the Kingdom calls it beyond itself to live in solidarity with all those who strive to realize the values of the Kingdom in the various ways and contexts that these are expressed and experienced. Yet, for many within secular society, the celebration of the Eucharist is irrelevant to ethics, and specifically to the project of a liberal society. For this perspective, respect for human rights is simply a response to the givenness of human value: it needs no reference to God, and even less a participation in religious ritual. This stance reflects both an overestimation of the self-sustaining strength of human ethical commitments, and a misreading of the role of the Eucharist in Christian life. Nonetheless, aspects of this stance still echo a tension that has biblical roots. At least since the time of Amos and Isaiah, the relationship between the ritual and the ethical has been one of the most urgent points of tension in the biblical tradition. The prophetic condemnation of

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empty ritual, performed by the unjust and exploitative, is a classical touchstone for authentic religious life. Indeed, Isaiah’s conviction of the irrelevance of the temple ritual to a true relationship to God is so strong that he gives his rejection of it in 1:10–11 the elevated status of “torah,” thus denying that the priests give true “torah” to the people: “Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Give ear to the torah of our God, you people of Gomorrah! ‘What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? Says the Lord.’”14 The power of this prophetic critique in the religious consciousness of later Judaism is brought home to us in the mutually affirming encounter between Jesus and the scribe in Mark 12: “The scribe said to him: ‘Excellent, Teacher! You are right in saying, “He is the One, there is no other than he.” Yes, “to love him with all our heart, with all our thoughts and with all our strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves” is worth more than any burnt offering or sacrifice.’ Jesus approved the insight of this answer and told him, ‘You are not far from the reign of God’” (Mark 12:32–33). For the post-exilic Jewish tradition, love of neighbor went hand in hand with love of God, a God whom it was fitting to worship through ritual sacrifice so long as that ritual was performed by those who had “circumcised their hearts” (Deuteronomy 10:16, 30:6). Yet the radical critique of ritual in the prophetic tradition had posed a fundamental religious question that Christianity inherited: if God is best worshipped by the love of the pure in heart, as expressed in ethical action, then what role can ritual have? Is a prophetic prioritization of ethics really the end of religion in the sense of formal ritual acts of worship? In our contemporary context, so different from that which the prophets knew, has the prioritization of ethics become the marginalization of religious ritual acts, even of the Eucharist itself, on grounds that might seem to gain plausibility from the prophets of Israel? In the contemporary context of a widespread sense of the irrelevance of religious traditions and religious practice to the life of liberal societies, how can the fundamental importance of the Eucharist for social hope be communicated, not as a denial of the ancient prophetic priority but as its culmination?

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It is well known that the tension between ritual and ethics, so forcefully addressed by the prophets, has been resolved to the detriment of religious practice in influential currents of modern thought. Whereas, for ancient Judaism, authentic ritual had to be verified in ethical action, many thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition have argued that ethics does not need religious ritual—or, indeed, religious faith at all. From this perspective, ethics is free-standing: its insights do not require a logical connection with faith in God, nor do its commitments require the sustaining context of religious ritual, which is, at best, a harmless irrelevancy. This modern interpretation of the priority of ethics over ritual has a well-worn popular rendition. Few assertions are more familiar to those seeking to hand on traditions of religious practice than this one: “I don’t need to go to church to be a good person!” For this perspective the ethical arises from the apprehension of value, from insight into ethical need, which is self-sufficient and selfjustifying: anyone willing to adopt the “ethical point of view” should respond to ethical imperatives through their own force and truth. Their universality precludes any link to specific traditions and the forms of celebration and ritual associated with those traditions. Commitment to human rights, for example, proceeds from an insight into the value of the human person that is accessible to us all. There is no need for religious traditions to sensitize us to such values, nor for religious ritual to enable us to be ethical: Whether in terms of the content of our ethical obligations, or of the motivation to behave ethically, ethics is perceived as quite independent of religion and religious ritual. There is no need to draw on the resources of religious tradition, since the ethical commitment of liberal societies is self-sufficient. In one sense, this is as it should be. There is a very important strand in Catholic thought that emphasizes the independence of the ethical from religious beliefs and ritual: the “natural law” tradition. It is part of the Catholic tradition’s emphasis on the openness of the human mind and heart to the goodness and purposefulness of creation that ethical principles have their own universality and intelligibility. This does not mean that these principles developed independently of the great religious traditions of the human race, but it does mean that they

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can have intelligibility and communicability between and beyond the communities that bear these religious traditions.15 My critical concern is not so much with the contention that universal ethical principles can be intelligible across traditions or to those who share no religious tradition: it is rather with the possibility of living by—of enacting—such principles. While ethical principles can be stated as universal imperatives in ways that are free of any and all religious traditions, what can give liberal societies the resources to live in an ethical way? While a universalist ethics reflects a gradually increasing awareness of the ethical dignity of all human beings, including those whose marginal status is obscured by ideology and the exercise of power, what can give us the resources to translate such awareness into a life that actively supports human dignity in a global context? What enables us to make the sacrifices that are essential to living in an ethical way? In the context of a universalist ethics, what can enable us to comprehend and empathize with such a world of desperate ethical need—or, indeed, to seek to relieve this need? In stating these questions, I do not at all intend to ridicule the aspirations of a universalist ethics, but rather to point to the enormity of the task it sets itself. Universalist ethical statements set a goal for human cooperation that can play a very beneficial role in global human self-consciousness. At the same time, they inevitably highlight the gulf between ethical aspirations and ethical achievement. Awareness of this gulf is made possible by global mass media, so that a characteristic mark of liberal societies is a strong public universal ethics coupled with a constant level of awareness of how such principles are betrayed and flouted in many and varied parts of the world. Commitment to a strong universalist ethics implies, therefore, two things: a readiness to sacrifice interests for the needs of others on a global scale; and a willingness to persevere with universal ethical ideals despite constant access to evidence of their betrayal. Of course, commitment to ethics has always required readiness to make sacrifices and to come to terms with the stark facts of ethical failure. The difference today is that this is on a universal scale and with an extraordinarily high level of available information on the realities of human conflict. This gives a particular focus and urgency to the question: What can sustain the ethical? What

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can enable both the sacrifices necessary to think and act ethically and the patience and hope that can come to terms with ethical failure? The extent of this sacrifice and the need for hope become clear when we reflect on the degree of ethical commitment required to found, maintain, and restore human communities of whatever scope and character. The greatest sacrifices are called for from those who seek to reconcile, to overcome barriers between people, to dissolve deeply entrenched enmities. We need only to call to mind our current world situation to remind ourselves sufficiently of the salient facts: We live in a world marked by a high level of universalist ethical awareness, and at the same time a world deeply scarred by fierce and intractable interethnic and intercommunal enmities. In Western societies, we enjoy many valuable forms of respect for individual autonomy, and at the same time experience a sense of crisis in all those forms of life that require sustained fidelity and willingness to sacrifice individual interests for the sake of communal forms of life. A marked feature of many of these forms of commitment to ethical community is their projective character: that is, they are commitments to sustained fidelity to a future life, whose character can be portrayed in hope but never guaranteed by limiting conditions. Those who take vows of marriage or of religious and priestly life, or who dedicate their lives to ministering to communities of faith, cannot predict what sacrifices their lives will demand, yet they know that the community of life they are committed to depends on the projective and faithful character of their commitment. Many forms of ethical community depend on the sacrifices involved in commitment to vocations that often bear no evident fruits for those whose commitment is at stake. Doctors, teachers, and members of many caring professions often do not see the fruits of their labors, or receive the recognition due to them, and must find other sustaining sources for their personal commitment. Many politicians and public servants dedicate their careers to projects sustaining the common good while knowing that the results of their labors may be stillborn or overwhelmed by more powerful political forces. Parents bear children in the hope, rather than the knowledge, that the child they bring to adulthood will honor them and recognize their sacrifices.

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These brief reflections serve to remind us of the enormous demands that are made on ethical consciousness, of the heavy burden that ethical aspirations seek to carry. It is here that the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the self-sufficiency of the ethical is most radically challenged: Can this self-sufficient ethical project bear the crushing burden of sacrifice and the searing disappointment of ethical failure? A Christian should not glibly or smugly deny the reality, as a psychological or social fact, of individuals or communities living a committed ethical life from the resources of secular ethical insight and concern. Nor should we ignore the positive dimensions of a whole range of secular rituals, which can nourish ethical commitment through the experience of community memory and the evocation of cherished symbols of resistance and solidarity. Yet if the enactment of a universalist ethics urgently requires sacrifice and hope, we are led back to religious questions, since both the act of self-sacrifice and the virtue of hope are signs of transcendence, projecting beyond a given context of ethical reciprocity or the known facts that can recognizably ground optimism. If ethics has this projective character, can it place its trust in reality, in “Being,” so that this projective hope can be sustained by the faith that ethical action is, in some sense, in accord with the true character, the ultimate mystery, of things? And if so, is the union with this ultimate mystery in religious ritual the sustaining ground of ethical commitment? In what sense is the Eucharist the enactment of that union with God that comes to terms with ethical failure, and that gives sacrifice and hope the strength to challenge the historical power of evil? This aspect of the Eucharist comes into prominence when we recall that its immediate context was the rejection of Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom of God. The proclamation of God’s rule, as a realm of transformed relationships of justice, peace, and reconciliation, had been rejected by religious and political authority. Jesus’s attempt to convert his people to a new religious and ethical vision, sustained by a new relationship to the Father, had failed: like the prophets before him, Jesus would be executed by the powerful in reaction to any attempt to challenge their interests. In this sense, the first Eucharist was a coming-to-terms with the failure of an ethical ideal. It was not an ideal preached in abstraction from the nature of reality, since it was

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based on Jesus’s Abba relationship, and thus grounded in the ultimate meaning of human ethical destiny. Yet it was an ethical ideal in the sense that it was the proclamation of a vision of human relationships that ran counter to the brutal reality of Jesus’s time and place, and it failed to convert that reality. I have argued that sacrifice and hope have a projective character in relation to ethics. In the face of ethical failure, what sustaining ground can render sacrifice something more than mere self-immolation and hope stronger than optimistic fantasy? It is here, of course, that the meaning of the first Eucharist for ethics is so fundamental. Its character as an expression of eschatological hope is clearly apparent: “Never again shall I drink from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the Kingdom of God” (Mark 14:25). In Eucharist: Symbol of Transformation, William Crockett emphasizes the context of the first Eucharist in a tradition of meals anticipating the eschatological banquet; he argues that this eschatological perspective links the Eucharist to an offer of a share in the blessings of eschatological salvation.16 It is this eschatological character that makes the Eucharist a sacrament of hope: Through participation in the Eucharist, the Christian becomes one with Jesus’s hopeful expectation of drinking the new wine in the Kingdom of God, an expectation confirmed by the Father in Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. In the Eucharist, then, ethical action is given a new ground: Its sacrifice and hope can come to terms with ethical failure because of God’s gift of Christ to the world. Its projective character is not an ungrounded optimism but a hope sustained by eucharistic love. The true meaning of ritual is to enact, in the mode of anamnesis, God’s gift of his own life to us in Christ, a life that can sustain us in the midst of ethical failure. In this sense, ritual does not distract from ethics, nor is it irrelevant to it: It is in the eucharistic ritual that we share in God’s gift of new life, a gift that energizes the hope that is fundamental to an ethical commitment that will not despair in the face of historical evil. As Paul writes in Romans 8: “If God is on our side, who is against us? He did not spare his own Son, but surrendered him for us all; and with this gift how can he fail to lavish upon us all he has to give?” (31–32).

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For a eucharistic theology, the bond with Being, with a sustaining source of life, is in the concrete historical reality of God’s gift in Christ, a transformation of human history that gives grounds for hope that the vision of the Kingdom is not an ethical fantasy but the truest description of human destiny. In this way, the Eucharist is not the abandonment of ethics in favor of ritual, but rather its full realization as hope for the Kingdom. In the Eucharist, the ethical is brought into the heart of the liturgical relationship to God, so that the fragile resources of human ethical self-transcendence can be nourished by communion with God’s infinite love and sustained by hope in God’s reconciling future. For David Power, “a deep union with Christ himself in the eschatological gift of the Spirit is what is offered and promised [in the Eucharist], but it has to be guaranteed by a communion with him in suffering through the way of discipleship on earth.”17 This note of ethical response returns us to the ancient concerns of Amos and Isaiah: In the Christian Eucharist, ritual is freed of all trace of scapegoating and immolation through the free self-sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth, and it is made one with ethical commitment since it is the foretaste of the Kingdom of God. Yet experience tells us that even the Eucharist can become a ritual divorced from ethical action, especially when participation in Christian ritual is less a sign of commitment to the demands of Christian discipleship than a means of marking out various kinds of essentially secular group identity or of affirming a purely inward-looking spirituality. The urgency of Paul’s call at the beginning of Romans 12 is justified in light of the human tendency to revert to ritual self-affirmation at the expense of ethical discipleship: “Therefore, my brothers, I implore you by God’s mercy to offer your very selves to him: a living sacrifice, dedicated and fit for his acceptance, the worship offered by mind and heart” (Romans 12:1). If the true meaning of the bond between Eucharist and ethics is in the transformation of ethical failure into hope, of despair into the disciple’s readiness to take up the cross of unselfish love, then the answer to the charge of the irrelevancy of the Eucharist to ethics will be in the hope and love of those who participate in it. A focus on the Eucharist

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as God’s gift of new life in Christ amid the betrayal of ethical ideals can give Christians both the confidence to stand for those ideals in the public forum and the sobriety to recognize the reality of historical evil and the intensity of human suffering. The search to communicate with infinite being that is at the root of religious ritual is transformed through the Eucharist into the recognition that the eternal God is to be found in the image of the suffering Christ, who hopes for the new wine of the Kingdom. Because of this, all those who suffer can know that they are not thereby alienated from the divine source of life but drawn towards it by the God who became a suffering human being. At the same time, the vision of the Kingdom reminds us that suffering, and most of all the imposition of suffering on others, is contrary to the destiny of creation. Nourished by the Eucharist, Christian discipleship commits itself to the ethical task of helping to make a foretaste of that Kingdom possible, together with all those who recognize that the true God is to be found in acts of love. Finally, the Eucharist can give ethics a true sense of the meaning of self-sacrifice. David Power emphasizes that Christian use of the language of sacrifice “reverses the quest to restore order by preparing victims and appeasing a threatening anger, whether that of God or that of spirits that abide in the universe. Instead it points to a communion of solidarity in love in God’s spirit that withstands human judgment and prevails in the midst of suffering.”18 Likewise, ethical self-sacrifice should not be thought of as appeasing the force of unreasonable demands, or of expiating guilt by acts of self-immolation. The abuse of the call to self-sacrifice, by both religious and political powers, is a long enough litany of suffering. It is not the discarding of individual life in favor of a future state conjured up by various ideologies. If Christ’s self-sacrifice was the highest expression of his fidelity to the vision of the Kingdom, then a Christian conception of ethical self-sacrifice will focus on fidelity to community, on forms of life that can enable individuals to flourish through the quality of their sustained commitment to each other. It is part of a Christian response to the Eucharist to seek and support such forms of life, so that the bonds of love can be made more visible in the world.

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Notes 1. I owe the use of the term “disembedding” to Anthony Giddens’s work, in particular his Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 2. John Paul II, Redemptor hominis (1979): 18; www.vatican.va/edocs/ ENG0218/_INDEX.HTM. Although Christian faith makes no predictions about the future of particular institutions or forms of society in human history, it can certainly discern and wholeheartedly support the development of a global consciousness of human unity and dignity as part of a response to God—support expressed by Paul VI in his reflections on international cooperation for development and peace in Populorum progressio (1967): “Some would regard these hopes as vain flights of fancy. It may be that these people are not realistic enough, and that they have not noticed that the world is moving rapidly in a certain direction. Men are growing more anxious to establish closer ties of brotherhood; despite their ignorance, their mistakes, their offenses, and even their lapses into barbarism and their wanderings from the path of salvation, they are slowly making their way to the Creator, even without adverting to it” (79). www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi _enc_26031967_populorum_en.html. 3. In The Common Good and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), David Hollenbach cautions against excessive expectations for solidarity in large-scale societies, and, in particular, too close a link between the virtues of solidarity and charity. At the same time, he emphasizes that solidarity admits of degrees, and, even in large societies, “from a common good perspective, justice calls for the minimal level of solidarity required to enable all of society’s members to live with basic dignity” (192). 4. For a valuable discussion of the role of trust and credibility in political leadership, see John Kane, The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), especially ch. 2, “Moral Capital and Leadership.” 5. Rawls puts a similar expression of the proviso thus: “On the wide view, citizens of faith who cite the Gospel parable of the Good Samaritan do not stop there, but go on to give a public justification for this parable’s conclusions in terms of political values. In this way, citizens who hold different doctrines are reassured, and this strengthens the ties of civic

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6.

7.

8.

9.

friendship.” The Law of Peoples with “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 155. In his Common Objects of Love (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 2002), Oliver O’Donovan argues that the source of a Christian conception of secularity lay in Judaism’s sense of unfulfilled promise, as a society that knew itself to be a “contradiction to be endured in hope.” Secularity is truly meaningful only in an eschatological perspective, since it is a tension between what is “not yet” and what will be fulfilled: “the virtue that undergirds all secular politics is an expectant patience. What follows from the rejection of belief is an intolerable tension between the need for meaning in society and the only partial capacity of society to satisfy the need. An unbelieving society has forgotten how to be secular” (42). In this sense, as Jürgen Moltmann points out, our powers of self-destruction mean that we live in “the eternal present of what has traditionally been called the ‘Last Judgment.’” The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 208. In his illuminating analysis in The Politics of Hope (New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), Bernard P. Dauenhauer emphasizes that “My account of hope does not preclude reference to God, but neither does it necessarily imply such a reference. Rather, on my account, hope can be directed either to divine or human others or both. Further, the kind of hope pertinent to the domain of politics is explicitly, though not necessarily exclusively, directed towards other human beings” (109). Yet, although hope is a gift of the Spirit that is independent of explicit religious beliefs, the conviction of a future always open to human striving is inconsistent with an atheistic belief in the meaninglessness of the universe. For Zygmunt Bauman, in his The Individualized Society (Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press/Blackwell, 2001), part of the contemporary process of individualization is the lack of cultural means to interpret such dispositions as hope, contending that what we experience is “the denial of collective public vehicles of transcendence and the abandonment of the individual to the lonely struggle with a task which most individuals lack the resources to perform alone” (5). Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press/Blackwell, 2000) emphasizes the negative effects that this process of individualization is having on citizenship (36– 38). Whether the Kingdom of God is a “rupture” with human history, or the fulfillment of what is “immanent” in history is a matter of fundamental

140╇╇ Chapter Four theological debate. Moltmann’s The Coming of God is strongly critical of Pannenberg’s conception of “universal history,” since, he contends, it misinterprets the apocalyptic character of key biblical texts. For Moltmann, the “apocalyptic expectations of rupture and end . . . do not lend history any meaning, but withdraw from it every legitimation” (134). Yet, as Pannenberg notes in response, the promise of hope must stand in some sort of positive relationship to the present reality of the one to whom it is addressed, since otherwise it becomes threat rather than promise. Systematische Theologie, vol. 3, 199. A key point, in my own view, is that what is “immanent” has developed within a salvation history formed by God’s providence, so that the Kingdom of God will include those works of love performed in response to the gifts of God within that salvation history. Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, in their Hope against Hope: Christian Eschatology in Contemporary Context (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1999), argue that “the potential for or capacity to produce the new does not lie latent within the old, but relies utterly on a new work of the God of the resurrection” (80), a conception that enables Christians to “live up to the hilt in this life but with their sights set firmly on a horizon lying beyond it” (209). Yet I would argue that the conjunction of hope for the Kingdom and commitment to this world is better grounded in Gaudium et spes’s recognition of the sense in which this grace-filled history can foreshadow the Kingdom of God: “When we have spread on earth the fruits of our nature and our enterprise—human dignity, brotherly communion and freedom—according to the command of the Lord and in his Spirit, we will find them once again, cleansed this time from the stain of sin, illuminated and transfigured, when Christ presents to his Father an eternal and universal kingdom” (Flannery, 938, para. 39). 10. This is notably stated in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, 1865: “The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it

Christian Hope and the Eucharist╇╇ 141 continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” The Book of Great American Documents, ed. Vincent Wilson, Jr. (Brookeville, MD: American History Research Associates, 1987), 78–79. 11. “I try to think of the Labor movement, not as putting an extra sixpence into somebody’s pocket, or making somebody Prime Minister or Premier, but as a movement bringing something better to the people, better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people. We have a great objective—the light on the hill—which we aim to reach by working for the betterment of mankind not only here but anywhere we may give a helping hand. If it were not for that, the Labor movement would not be worth fighting for.” For background and interpretation of this speech by Joseph Benedict Chifley, see Sean Scalmer “The Light on the Hill,” at http://workers.labor.net.au/17/c_historicalfeature_chifley.html (accessed July 3rd, 2008), and David Day, Chifley (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2001), 485. 2. The key passage, especially through its role in Peter’s discourse in Acts 2, 1 is Joel 3:1: “Then afterward I will pour out my spirit upon all mankind. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” In the Old Testament, “it is clear . . . that in broad circles in Israel, even those which are incontestably theocratic, the dream was regarded as a regular means by which Yahweh revealed himself.” Albrecht Oepke, “’οναρ,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 5, ed. Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids, MI: William Eerdmans, 1967), 230. Yet there is also strong prophetic criticism of any reliance on dreams as a source of revelation, particularly in the struggle between Jeremiah and false prophecy, cf. Jeremiah 23:25, 28: “I have heard the prophets who prophesy lies in my name say, ‘I had a dream! I had a dream!’ . . . Let the prophet who has a dream recount his dream; let him who has my word speak my word truthfully!” In the New Testament, apart from some references in Acts, the key references to dreams as private revelation are in Matthew 1 and 2 (1:20, 2:13, 2:19). Jesus himself never refers to dreams, and “no New Testament witness ever thought of basing the central message, the Gospel, or an essential part of it, on dreams” (Oepke, “’οναρ,” 235).

142╇╇ Chapter Four 13. Probably the most memorable use of this image in modern political oratory is Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963. As part of the background culture, King’s speech derives much of its power from its explicit use of biblical imagery and the language of Negro spirituals, in ways that are also communicated through shareable ethical ideals. It is significant that he links his use of “dream” with the preexisting notion of “the American dream,” developing this to a vision of future equality and freedom: “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today my friends—so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/speeches/address _at_march_on_washington.pdf (accessed July 3, 2008). 14. Walter Dietrich, Jesaja und die Politik (Munich: Christian Kaiser, 1976), 216. Dietrich argues that for Isaiah the priestly torah or teaching, associated with the temple cult, had become irrelevant and worthless, since it served only to distract from the true torah of justice between human beings. 15. In the previous chapter, I attempted to illustrate the character of Christian ethics as both drawing from tradition but communicable beyond those participating in tradition-bearing communities by reflecting on noninstrumental relationships as definitively embodied in Jesus Christ, and at the same time as inherently attractive and fulfilling ways of life that can be communicated and realized in the pluralist context of liberal societies. 16. William Crockett, Eucharist: Symbol of Transformation (New York: Pueblo, 1989), 5–14. 17. David Power, The Eucharistic Mystery (New York: Crossroads, 1992), 294. 18. Ibid., 322.

8 chapter five

Two Stories of Liberal Society and Contemporary Catholic Identity

The previous chapters of this book have emphasized how much the Church has to contribute to liberal societies in order to assist them to tell their better story: in chapter two, through a theology of Church, Kingdom, and secularity; in chapter three, through a Christian theology of the virtues of noninstrumental relationships; and in chapter four, through the theology of hope and the Eucharist. In this final chapter I will be considering the effect of the Church’s relationship to the two stories of liberal society on its own life. How does its relationship to liberal society affect the Church’s own process of identityformation in the contemporary world? Since the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church has been involved in a profound and often painful process of reforming its identity in relation to the world, and much of that process has to do with its relationship to liberal societies. Contemporary concern about the meaning and shape of Catholic identity reveals both an anxiety about the possible loss of identity, but also, more positively, a recognition that the Catholic tradition can be embodied in and through different sociocultural delineations, aspirations, and achievements in response to changing historical circumstances and challenges. These changes in historical identity are not, for Catholic faith, changes in the theological identity of the Church, which springs from the once-and-for-all character of revelation and the fidelity of the Spirit; but they are, nevertheless, changes in the ways in which the Church addresses itself to the world and thereby in the ways in which it expresses or crystallizes dimensions of Christian life that are implicit in the tradition. In different historical periods, the ╇ 143

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Church is challenged to reflect afresh on the meaning of the Gospel, so that it can shape its own life and its evangelizing message in ways that genuinely do speak to contemporaries. In some periods—such as the time of the classical councils—this resulted in the formulation and enunciation of dogma. In others, such as at the time of Vatican II, it was not expressed in new dogma but rather in new understandings of the Church’s own life and of its relationship to the world. Since Vatican II the Catholic Church has undergone a process that has reshaped its social presence and deeply affected its sense of identity. The preconciliar forms of identity were no longer felt to be adequate to meet the needs of the contemporary world. Yet it is clear that the specific shape of the identity of the Catholic Church today is still deeply contested, and much of that contestation stems from the question how it should relate to liberal societies. “Catholicism” in the “Age of Mobilization” and Its Demise In order to gain some historical perspective on this question, let us first consider the social identity that the Church had in Western societies prior to Vatican II. Here I will be drawing, in particular, on Peter Hünermann’s essay “Catholicism in Europe: its diversity and its future—an ecclesiological reflection”;1 and on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.2 For both of these writers, in the period from the French Revolution up to about 1960, the Catholic Church’s relationship to modernizing liberal societies was characterized by practices of mobilization and defensive demarcation. By considering the features of this relationship, we can gain some historical insight into the challenges and opportunities that face the Church today in its attempt to develop a new response to liberal societies in the contemporary world. Hünermann argues that the word “Catholicism” came into widespread use only after the French Revolution, when the Catholic Church ceased to be the established Church and the religious background and underpinning to culture and society, and when it became instead an often beleaguered social movement—a movement that, in different ways in different countries, attempted to assert and defend itself using the new tools of civil rights that were the positive heritage of the French

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Revolution.3 This new social phenomenon of “Catholicism,” which became a largely lay movement under the direction of the hierarchy, sought to define itself against dominant political and social groups (e.g., Protestant majorities in Anglo-Saxon countries or dominant anticlerical liberal elites in Latin countries) and to develop a range of concrete communal and institutional identities: “What is meant by the term ‘Catholicism’ or the ‘Catholic movement’ is the totality of those tendencies and institutional formations . . . through which Catholics react to the post-revolutionary situation, in order to affirm themselves and their claims in society on the basis of the new possibilities offered by public freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, etc.”4 In the France of the ancien régime, there was no separate entity called “Catholicism,” since the Church was an omnipresent dimension of national life. After the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was disestablished and largely lost its leading role in politics and culture. Rather than being the dominant cultural institution, it became a particular group within national life—competing with other groups, such as the anticlerical liberals or socialists, for popular allegiance. “Catholicism” had to maintain its identity in cultural and political struggles with other groups. However, in this process it could use the new political tools of the liberal revolutions: freedom of the press, of assembly, of electing political representatives. Hünermann notes that, in past epochs, the Church had adopted— and influenced—the political forms and practices of the wider society: the Church’s institutional structures had imitated many features of imperial, monarchical, and aristocratic polities. However, in the postrevolutionary period, the new liberal institutions and practices did not become part of the institutional life of the Church. They were, however, taken up by lay Catholics in order to defend and assert their own identity in this new situation: lay Catholics maintained their own identity within society by forming political parties (e.g., the Catholic Center Party in Germany), by developing their own newspapers and periodicals, and by establishing their own cultural and political groups and organizations. In societies with a Protestant majority, in particular the Anglo–Saxon world of the United States and the British Empire, an essentially similar process took place: whereas, in the British Empire,

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Catholics had formerly suffered under political and legal restrictions, the development of liberal institutions and practices gave them civil rights and allowed them to become a social group able to maintain its identity by invoking these civil rights. So, both in the postrevolutionary formerly Catholic states and in the Protestant British Empire, “Catholicism” developed as a largely lay political, social, and cultural movement that exercised the new liberal rights in order to maintain its identity. However, these liberal rights could not be exercised within the church itself: there was no longer a reflection of general political institutions in the institutional life of the church. Lay Catholics used the tools of liberal society to defend the rights of an institution that was strongly hierarchical and authoritarian in its own internal life. Charles Taylor’s analysis of this development is in essential agreement with Hünermann. For Taylor the period from the French revolution to 1960 can be called the “Age of Mobilization.” After the demise of the ancien régime, both religious and secular groups sought to mobilize their followers in particular ways. Taylor draws on Emile Durkheim’s understanding of religion as the expression of social union to clarify the difference between the ancien régime and the Age of Mobilization: whereas the ancien régime could be called “palaeo-Durkheimian” in that it was based on the union of throne and altar, the relationship between religion and society after the French and American revolutions can be called “neoDurkheimian,” in that, although these revolutions abolished established churches, religion was still regarded as crucial to maintaining civilized order and had great power to mobilize, organize, and command group allegiance.5 For Hünermann, this particular kind of Catholic identity began to dissolve from the mid–twentieth century, a process that was hastened by Vatican II. He emphasizes that it dissolved from its theological and ecclesiological foundations: its failure to embody the new freedoms of liberal society within the Church itself—and not only as a means of defending the Church against external forces—meant that it was no longer sustainable by the mid-twentieth century. The various forms of pastoral and social engagement of “Catholicism” had presupposed

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a socialization in faith through a Catholic religious culture that was starting to break up by the mid-twentieth century. Whereas in earlier times the personal search for meaning led to a commitment to Catholic faith as the only socially available religious option, liberal freedoms now offered a range of options for the exploration of personal meaning. This change was exacerbated by the fact that “Catholicism” had largely passed on the practices of faith by processes of socialization, essentially neglecting the question of personal religious conversion. The social expressions of Catholicism began to lose their inner plausibility once this process of socialization no longer led to faith commitment, as the question of personal choice and personal conversion loomed larger. 6 Taylor sums up the change in terms of a transition from the “Age of Mobilization” to the “Age of Authenticity.” Like Hünermann, he emphasizes the tensions implicit in the way in which the Catholic Church of the Age of Mobilization linked group allegiance and personal faith: the Church had difficulty “seeing how contradictory the goal ultimately is, of a Church tightly held together by a strong hierarchical authority, which will nevertheless be filled with practitioners of heartfelt devotion. . . . The irreversible aspect of Vatican II is that it brought this contradiction to the surface.”7 The key aspects of the cultural revolution of the 1960s were, first, that it “undermined the neo-Durkheimian alignments of faith with political identity; and second, it undercut the close connection of religious faith and a certain sexual morality, one of the important fusions of religion with supposedly civilization-bearing morality.”8 For Taylor, the tragedy of the Church’s teaching in sexual ethics is that it still, at least in appearance, suffers from defects such as “the denigration of sexuality, horror at the Dionysian, fixed gender roles, or a refusal to discuss identity issues,” together with an “unfortunate fusion of Christian sexual ethics with certain models of the ‘natural.’” This has a strongly repellent effect in “the Age of Authenticity, with a widespread popular culture in which individual self-realization and sexual fulfillment are interwoven.”9 The “irony is that this alienation takes place” just when Vatican II removed many of the other obstacles to evangelization in

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the contemporary world: “Unquestionably, clericalism, moralism and the primacy of fear were largely repudiated. Other elements of the complex were less clearly addressed.”10 Taylor’s and Hünermann’s reflections on the possibilities and challenges for the Church in the post-Vatican II world, in this Age of Authenticity, are also in fundamental agreement, although reflecting their respective disciplinary perspectives—for Hünermann theological and ecclesiological, for Taylor philosophical and sociological. Hünermann argues that the contemporary task of evangelization must be focused on personal evangelization and a reform of Church structures. Evangelization must now be undertaken on the basis of an understanding of the individual person in modern, liberal societies—an individual with a wide range of personal choice, and who will come to faith through personal conversion. Socialization processes can no longer be assumed to result in personal faith—indeed, Hünermann argues, European Catholicism is rapidly ceasing to be able to pass on faith traditions and practices.11 In terms of structures, the Church must be willing to embody within its own life the “form and characteristics of public life in the age in which it finds itself,” just as it did in the past.12 This is an implication of the Catholic tradition, which lives in dialogue with rational truths publicly affirmed in a given epoch: the key “rational truth” affirmed in contemporary consciousness is human rights, which imply, in political terms, the separation of powers and a free flow of information, which is “profoundly at variance with the social structure that the Catholic Church is trying today to maintain.”13 For Taylor, “we no longer live in societies in which the widespread sense can be maintained that faith in God is central to the ordered life we (partially) enjoy.” In this world “the fate of belief depends much more than before on powerful intuitions of individuals, radiating out to others. And these intuitions will be far from self-evident to others again.”14 Yet in an age that emphasizes personal search and self-expression, there will still be a collective connection. An individual search may still lead to strong community allegiances, based in traditional forms and beliefs: “The new framework has a strongly individualist component, but this does not necessarily mean that the content will be individuating.”15 Much of the tension within religious

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communities in our time, he argues, is the “site of a battle between neo- and post-Durkheimian construals of our condition,”16 especially in terms of the respective roles of spiritual authority and of contemporary modes of spiritual quest. Taylor emphasizes that we cannot return to a neo-Durkheimian world of group mobilization, nor should we forget its faults of hypocrisy and stultification.17 The flaccid and self-seeking modes of spirituality of the Age of Authenticity, in turn, should not be identified with the whole movement.18 In the terms that I have used in this book, what Taylor emphasizes is a relationship of individual choice to tradition as resource rather than as constraint. In appropriating tradition-as-resource, individuals can indeed identify with and be formed by communal forms of faith and worship, but their choice to do so has become more and more a matter of personal orientation and discernment. Contemporary Catholic Identity: Between Solidarity and Demarcation The analyses of Hünermann and Taylor demonstrate that Catholicism in the period 1800–1960, from the French Revolution to the Second Vatican Council, developed a distinctive identity characterized by powerful practices of demarcation from both secular liberalism and anticlericalism and from Protestantism. These demarcatory practices included, for example, mobilization in a range of groups and sodalities, Church laws against mixed marriages, massive commitment to Catholic education, and theological emphases and devotional practices that emphasized the contrasts between Catholicism and Protestantism. The end of this period of stringent and defensive demarcation—of the old battles against the militantly antireligious expressions of the Enlightenment, and the gradual disappearance of sectarianism in favor of ecumenism—has been an enormously liberating phenomenon for the Catholic Church, a liberation that has enabled it to focus increasingly on the task of witnessing to God’s love in solidarity with human suffering in a global context. Yet this profound and far-reaching historical change in the Church’s situation has also required a massive change in the sense of identity of Church communities. As John

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Thornhill writes in Sign and Promise: A Theology of the Church for a Changing World, the post–Vatican II Church is in the midst of the challenge of ideological change. Thornhill uses the word “ideology” here in the broadest sense to describe the “consensus arrived at by a particular group in history, through which they achieve their social identity and common purpose.”19 For Thornhill the sheer magnitude of the task of ideological change, in this sense of the word, calling for the crystallization of new identities inspired by Vatican II, goes far to explain why there has been so much tension and disillusion in the Catholic Church after the euphoria associated—for many—with the Council. As he emphasizes: “While it was not easy to appreciate at the time, in retrospect we may recognize that such an outcome was to be expected: it was inevitable that the Council’s decisions should give rise to a painful period of transformation and uncertainty.”20 The work of the Council hastened the process by which Catholics were “disembedded” from this previous identity, formed in postReformation and postrevolutionary conflicts. It empowered them both to return to the biblical and patristic sources of tradition—John XXIII’s approfondimento—and to commit themselves to a universal human solidarity in the contemporary world—his aggiornamento. Yet these resources for a new theological identity—an identity that has borne such rich fruit in new biblical and liturgical expressions of Catholicism—have yet to find a stable ecclesial and social identity. The end of the old forms of identity has been accompanied by a marked decline in Church attendance and other markers of Catholic practice. Paradoxically, the new openness and commitment to universal solidarity of the Catholic Church has developed at the same time as a decline in formal religious practice, in the willingness to participate in local Catholic eucharistic communities. The capacity of the Catholic Church to serve the world is threatened by the diminution of local communities, especially in the younger generation, which has been the accompaniment of this deeply rooted process of ideological change.21 As Taylor notes, the irony of the Church’s contemporary situation is that the rejection of institutionalized religion by many inhabitants of the Age of Authenticity coincided—chronologically speaking—with

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the very real achievements of the Council in freeing the Church of some of the chief obstacles to evangelization in the modern world. The gradual dissolution of the crystallizations of socioreligious identity that Hünermann and Taylor analyze has been accompanied by a new freedom and universality, a new sense of the Church’s calling to be in solidarity with—to quote the first paragraph of Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World—“the joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties, of the human beings of this age, especially of those who are poor and afflicted.”22 Yet this new sense of universal solidarity, because it has been accompanied by a dissolution of the particular identities of the past, has developed hand in hand with the urgent need to re-form the Church’s communal identity, the local vitality that is the essential basis for a commitment to solidarity on a global scale. If a new commitment to universal solidarity transcends the defensive and demarcating postures of the past, what will be the form of a new identity that will provide the strength to maintain this openness to the world and commitment to stand with others in their suffering? Can such openness foster new and vibrant communities that can resist the tendency to set up new forms of defensive or self-affirming demarcation, and constantly renew the call to witness to human solidarity in the name of the Gospel? The major concern of this book is the Church’s relationship to the two stories of liberal society. In this light, a constitutive dimension of the Church’s process of identity-formation in the post-Vatican II world must be to affirm the struggle for human rights in resistance to the libido dominandi, which has so much of its contemporary expression in the lust to instrumentalize and consume. In doing so, the Church will be supporting the positive story of liberal society. In solidarity with all people of good will, the Church can shape its sociocultural identity in terms of the struggle against the reduction of individual freedom to the selfish, grasping will in politics, economics, sexuality, and all other forms of life. Its principal focus will be to resist a globalizing ideology of individualist consumption, an instrumentalization of humanity and of planet Earth itself. In this sense, a Catholic conception of human rights, as a key part of Catholic identity, is directed against whatever

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consumes the human person, whatever reduces the person to a commodity, whether that be an embryo reduced to a tool for research or a process worker reduced to wage slavery. There is, however, another possible form of identity for the Church in liberal societies: that is, to see its main opponent as the exponents of the Age of Authenticity itself. A large proportion of the members of liberal societies are willing to support the Church or are at least potential allies in the struggle for the common good, but they are critical of the Church’s teaching in a range of matters to do with life ethics and sexual ethics. An appeal to personal autonomy and personal authenticity is central to this criticism. One option for the Church’s future presence in liberal societies is to make opposition to and demarcation from these groups the principal factor in identity-formation. Inevitably, this will include an insistence on the Church’s teaching authority in the relevant areas in specific and comprehensive detail—an insistence directed not only at its external critics, but also at those within the Church who cannot give assent to all aspects of this teaching, and who thereby jeopardize the clarity of this project of identity. I want to argue that the Church should aim to shape its identity within liberal societies principally through affirmation of the positive story of liberal society, and in defense of humanity against what is truly its negative story, rather than in demarcation from what it judges to be distortions or falsifications of individual autonomy or authenticity. This is not because what is at stake in questions of life ethics and sexual ethics is in any sense unimportant. It is rather because the need for the Church to oppose the instrumentalization and commodification of humanity on a global scale is a more fundamental and universal criterion of identity: There can be no doubt that the Church’s mission is to defend those who are oppressed by the libido dominandi. There can be no dialogue with the lust for power, although there can always be a call for conversion. To understand the Church’s social identity in this way is not a matter of opposing particular groups of people but rather the structures of sin themselves.23 Because of this, its mission is both very difficult and truly Christian. It is difficult because it is not a demarcation from particular, readily identifiable, groups of people or ideas but an attack on the sinful tendencies to domination

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and commodification that can be found in all social structures; and it is Christian because it recognizes the universality of sin, especially in ourselves. In contrast, dialogue is called for in relation to the contemporary concern for autonomy and authenticity, with those who work for the common good in many areas of life and yet reject the Church’s teaching on abortion, euthanasia, and areas of sexual ethics. Clearly, this is often an extremely difficult form of dialogue, yet it is worth pursuing with those who share the Church’s concern to feed the hungry and liberate the captive. To understand the contemporary challenge in this way is not to underestimate the importance of ethical issues to do with autonomy, but rather to highlight the temptations of forming Catholic identity in such a way as to make demarcation from these aspects of liberal society the crucial criterion. Human Rights and Catholic Identity What are the challenges for the Church in forming its contemporary social identity in solidarity with the global struggle for human rights? First of all, positively and uncontroversially, we can affirm that the promotion of human rights is central to the contemporary selfunderstanding of the Church, and that it has been so at least since the promulgation of Pacem in terris. Consider, for example, Paul VI’s address to the General Assembly of the United Nations in October 1965;24 the affirmation by the 1971 Synod of Bishops that the promotion of justice is a “constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel”;25 and—among many possible statements—John Paul II’s November 2000 address marking the fiftieth anniversary of the European convention on human rights:26 in all these statements, there can be no doubt that the papacy has given the promotion of human rights a key role in the Church’s relationship to the contemporary world and thereby in the process of shaping a renewed Catholic identity that has been underway since Vatican II and before. The positive potential of conceiving Catholic identity with human rights as a fundamental concern and criterion is manifold. In the first place, this form of identity does not have demarcation from antagonistic ideological forces or estranged Christian communities as a

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constitutive feature. Whereas nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Catholicism was given much of its familiar sociocultural shape by defensive demarcation from secularist movements and from Protestantism, a Catholic identity dedicated to the promotion of human rights is capable of initiating a wide range of alliances for a cause that is gradually being recognized as the moral lingua franca of the human race. Part of this, of course, is the result of a more fortunate historical situation resulting from the development of Christian ecumenism and from the demise of Marxism-Leninism as a state system in Europe and as a creed capable of dynamic political mobilization in a global context. However, this new sense of identity also has its roots in the historically epoch-making theological insight, expressed most comprehensively in Gaudium et spes, that the Church is most truly itself when it is at the service of all humanity. This insight was given a specifically Christological shape in the emphasis on the union of Jesus Christ with every human person, in whom we see the face of Christ. In response to a globalized ideology of individual consumption, the Church can proclaim a vision of humanity that, while not denying the value of technological progress, sets such progress within a rich and multidimensional context of human existence in the light of Christian faith. In response to the vast distances of place and awareness in the global economy between producer and consumer, which so militate against solidarity, the Church can affirm its nature as communion: a communion of local communities, which affords so many opportunities for mutual awareness, contact, and support between fellow Christians—and between human beings of all creeds, and of radically different national and economic circumstances. This commitment to global solidarity with the oppressed, articulated through a philosophy of human rights, is motivated and energized by a theological vision of the human person and human community. As Robert Schreiter argues in The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local, the Church’s support for human rights is a “global theological flow,” an example of a “theological discourse that, while not uniform or systemic, represents a series of linked, mutually intelligible discourses that address the contradictions or failures of global systems.”27

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This “global theological flow” of commitment to human rights has many different sources within the life of the Catholic Church: among these are Vatican II itself, especially the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World; the writings of Paul VI, including his Evangelii nuntiandi of 1975, which reflects on the relationship between liberation and salvation; the writings of John Paul II, in particular his Sollicitudo rei socialis of 1988, with its emphasis on international solidarity, and Centesimus annus of 1991, with its reflections on the global economic system after the fall of communism; the commitment of the late Jesuit General, Pedro Arrupe, to lead the Society of Jesus to take up the “preferential option for the poor”; and the influence of both Latin American liberation theology and various forms of a theology of public life and social justice in Europe and the United States. These specifically theological and reflective contributions are instances of resistance to the ideology of individualist consumerism and wealth accumulation; others include networks of solidarity, which include everything from the international Caritas networks to partnerships between brother and sister schools in affluent and poorer countries. Such networks can assist in overcoming the remoteness of the producers of the consumer goods of globalized systems, helping in various ways to show us the face of those whose harsh and low-paid work is the unseen hand behind the high-tech products that the members of affluent societies consume. At the same time, this new and very promising shape of Catholic identity gives rise to a number of profound challenges and critical issues, both in the internal life of the Church and in its external relationships. Internally, an emphasis on commitment to and advocacy of human rights can help to give Catholic communities a more prophetic character; yet it also has challenges in terms of sustaining long-term motivation, since it is less concerned with affirmation and consolation than with prophetic challenge and its inevitable risks. Preconciliar Catholicism was, of course, a very demanding form of life in many ways: in its often austere and rigorous spiritual ideals, and in its high demands on personal behavior and family life (for example, in the expectation of large families with all the attendant sacrifices).

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However, it is also true that the point and the social context for being Catholic—for maintaining an identity—were clear and palpable, since confessional and ideological differences loomed so large in the immediate social environment. This form of Catholic identity, although it bore fruit in many extraordinary forms of practical compassion, was less concerned with changing the world or the condition of humanity as a whole than with maintaining Catholic institutions against their opponents, with the imperatives of mobilization and demarcation. A great challenge to a sense of identity based on the promotion of human rights is that it is no longer concerned with maintenance or with social demarcation, but with the affirmation of a global cause with many potential allies. It is not something exclusively Catholic, although it is something truly Catholic. A Catholic commitment to human rights is not intensified by a sense of demarcation from other readily identifiable ideological communities, since its struggle is with the universal “structures of sin.” Its motivation must come from a sense of human solidarity experienced in light of the Gospel as a part of Christian formation. Of course, in the struggle for human rights, Catholics will be opposed to all those who advocate unfettered exploitation or domination, but this is a much less well-defined and socially identifiable “other” than the confessional or ideological demarcations that gave preconciliar Catholicism much of its social identity. (This is generally true in the context of developed economies, although in developing countries the face of the economic or social oppressor may well be much more painfully visible.) Much of the energy of the Catholic promotion of human rights is about forming alliances and informing conscience for the sake of the common good, so that, although it is certainly shaped by the character of Catholic social teaching, Catholic identity is focused much more on the needs of those whose rights are oppressed than on the need to preserve appropriate markers of demarcation. An aspect of this is the complexity and wide-ranging character of the questions involved: there is no single issue in the socioeconomic debate, for example, that has anything like the same resonance as the question of abortion or its role in marking Catholic identity. This complexity is addressed by papal and conciliar social teaching, and by

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the many different national expressions and theological developments of this teaching. Embodying this teaching in the process of identityformation is, however, a formidable challenge, partly because of the very fact that it is not a simplistic denunciation of capitalism, but rather a critical appraisal of the market economy in relation to fundamental ethical and anthropological criteria. The oft-quoted quip that “the Church’s social teaching is its best kept secret” hints nervously at some difficult realities: the difficulty of communicating a complex critique of the market economy; the human weaknesses of Church members preoccupied with their own personal and family problems; the temptation the hierarchy can experience to emphasize other issues that have more demarcatory potential; and the lazy preference of the secular media for copy that will confirm these demarcations on questions of individual choice rather than challenge some of the fundamental social practices and vices of Western societies. One particular challenge is the difficulty of making a constructively critical attitude to the global market economy a part of this identity. One reason for this is that market capitalism and its phenomena are such powerful givens that it is very difficult for many Catholics to conceive of any alternative, and it is much less an identifiable “other” than it is the ever-present background to our lives and decisions. Another important factor in demoralizing criticism is the extraordinary technological progress made possible by the microchip revolution. For consumers in affluent countries, globalization is associated with the breathtaking speed of development of computers, the Internet, e-mail, mobile phones, and a host of related technologies. This technological revolution is so powerful and its products so astonishing that they can give even the ordinary consumer a sense of being connected with an innovative and dynamic world, a world made possible by economic globalization. This is particularly true since they enable much greater individual mobility and possibilities for communication. This empowerment of individual choice discourages criticism: surely a system that produces possibilities like these should not be held back by governmental or bureaucratic controls. Much of the marketing of these goods betrays a conception of human nature as individualist, competitive, striving for growth and power, unlimited by human frailty,

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and untrammeled by traditional or communal bonds. This threatens to become a new global ideology, an ersatz humanism of individual consumption and empowerment. This ideology and the consumer goods associated with it, together with the remoteness of those who produce these goods, tend to make the global market system a given that is far beyond the comprehension of the ordinary consumer. The demands of relevant and effective criticism of this situation are high: because solidarity with those who are remote is intrinsically difficult, because solutions to the injustices of globalization are beyond the scope of national governments, and because consumers are eager to share in the benefits of the microchip revolution. Many Western consumers would be willing to pay more for these products if they were confident that this would benefit those who produce them. Yet achieving this goal depends on forms of organized solidarity that have the commitment and endurance to unsettle and circumvent the power and elusiveness of globalizing economic interests. This solidarity will require sustained moral commitment at a personal level.28 How can the Church form its members in an identity marked by solidarity with the global cause of human rights? In the first place it must encourage practices of moral imagination, of empathy, with those who suffer from the injustices of the globalizing economic system and from political oppression and violence. Such practices are always demanding, particularly as every member of a local Catholic community has his or her own pain, his or her own need for consolation, however comfortable or affluent their lives might be. It must also encourage intellectual practices of discernment, the ability of members of the Church to distance themselves from the givenness of the economic system and its outcomes. Through a range of processes of education, drawing on Catholic social teaching and on public sources of information, Catholic communities can assist their members to become aware of the critical issues at stake and the urgent need for change. It must also encourage and inspire practices of self-giving, the willingness to make sacrifices for those in need, whether these are relatively modest contributions of time, money, and expertise, or more demanding commitments of a front-line character. In the nature

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of personal vocation, the character and scope of this self-giving is a uniquely individual matter. These virtues of empathy, discernment, and self-giving are formed in Christian communities through hearing and meditating on Scripture. The prophetic dimension of Scripture challenges Christians to distance themselves from taken-for-granted circumstances and to confront themselves with the question: Is this, can this be, part of the Kingdom? Is it God’s will that human beings, made in his image, should live like this? Especially through the Psalms, Christians are empowered to respond to God, to tell the story of their own struggles and consolations in communal prayer. Most of all, the Scriptures communicate the person of Jesus, the one in whom the Kingdom was and is present. The virtues and practices that can shape an ecclesial identity marked by solidarity with global suffering and prophetic criticism of the structures of sin make constant and extraordinary demands. The previous chapter sought to emphasize the crushing burdens that the ethical consciousness can impose on us when it attempts to respond to a world of pain. For Christians, these burdens can only be borne through the grace of God: Only by living on the bread of the Word and the bread of the Eucharist can Christians have the strength to face a suffering world with joy and hope. The Word is heard and preached, and the Eucharist is celebrated, in eucharistic communities: it is in the experience of communion, of union with the triune God and with each other, that Christians receive the strength to live in solidarity with a suffering world. The identity of the Church as missionary, as universally human, is grounded in and energized by its identity as communio, a community drawn together by the Spirit to remember Jesus of Nazareth and to share his life.29 These eucharistic communities are intrinsically local: Within these local communities individual members of the Church can receive the care and affirmation that can help to give them the strength to look outwards, to live within the Church as a universal communion that seeks to practice universal solidarity. 30 I have argued that a constitutive aspect of the Church’s contemporary identity is support for human rights in a universal context, a support that affirms the best features of liberal societies and that identifies the structures of sin in the urge to dominate, commodify,

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and instrumentalize human beings and other created goods. Such a stance can also assist the Church to avoid processes of identity formation that are essentially demarcations from specific “others,” from social groups that are perceived to be inimical to the Church. Yet it is clear that the cause of human rights is itself beset by ambiguity and controversy, so that to make it part of the Church’s processes of identity-formation must be a task informed by critical discernment. While there have been powerful synergies between Catholic agencies and a host of other religious and secular groups in what could broadly be called “common good” issues, there has also been a great deal of conflict between the churches and interpretations of human rights that emphasize individual human autonomy in sexual identity and beginning- and end-of-life decisions. The most recent, tragic example of the breakdown of an alliance between the Church and a secular human rights agency is the estrangement between the Church and Amnesty International over the question of abortion rights. In the European context, there has been considerable controversy over the meaning of “homophobia” and the right of the Church to communicate its teaching about homosexuality.31 Many of these issues do express real differences in anthropological, and therefore ethical, perspectives between the Catholic Church and other groups. However, it is crucial that these undeniably important issues do not become the catalyst for the crystallization of a future form of Catholic identity rooted in ideological demarcation from secular ethics in these areas, to the detriment of a comprehensive commitment to the promotion of human rights in all the dimensions of the human person and human community. As we have seen, the papal commitment to this breadth of vision is clear.32 A comprehensive vision of human rights will see the development of solidarity with makers of consumer goods in industrial enclaves in developing countries as equally urgent as, for example, the opposition to a sexual ethic of uncommitted gratification closer to home. Liberal societies often manifest such profound misunderstanding of the Church’s teaching in the areas of sexual and life ethics, and subject its stances to such hostility and mockery, that the temptation to define

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Catholic identity through opposition to and demarcation from secular conceptions of ethical autonomy is very strong. Much of this hostility appears to stem from a sense that the Church has no right to make judgments about personal life-choices, those that purportedly inflict no harm on others. Yet this stance itself reflects a strange blindness in much contemporary secular ethics: the refusal to consider the ethical meaning of personal existence—of the true meaning of self-respect— and the restriction of ethics to relationships to others, not to mention the denial of the human fetus’s right to life. In its teaching on the meaning of personal life, as expressed especially in sexual and bioethics, the Church continues the classical tradition of ethics as a reflection on the human good, whether in relation to ourselves or to others, and it communicates this in public debate. Yet there are also very real dangers in making demarcation from a secular ethics of human autonomy the key dynamic in forming the Church’s identity in secular societies. One is that it maintains a focus on issues of individual choice: in this sense it concedes the field to a particular kind of liberal individualism. Rather than resisting commodification and instrumentalization of the human as such, the Church is tempted to resist it most publicly and vehemently in the field of personal choices in affluent societies. In this way, as often in the past, the Church may develop forms of identity that are partly dictated by its opposition to a particular historical challenge, sometimes with a consequent narrowing of vision. Another is that it is more likely to lead to a demarcation from certain identifiable social groups in Western societies, rather than to see the Church’s essential ethical identity in its opposition to commodification and instrumentalization in all their forms, as universal structures of sin. Finally, it can limit the potential for cooperation in other human rights areas with people of good will in liberal societies. These forms of cooperation must always be guided by critical discernment, informed by the detailed Catholic moral tradition on “cooperation with evil.” At the same time, it is important that Catholics’ readiness to cooperate is informed by an appreciation of how much those who may reject the Church’s teaching in some areas can share a common commitment to justice in others.

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Further, it needs to be acknowledged that a number of these issues in sexual and life ethics are matters of continuing debate in the Catholic community itself, and that constructive and respectful disagreement with the magisterium need not be a denial of Catholic identity in this regard—for example, in terms of the question of civil recognition of homosexual unions, or indeed of some form of recognition of these unions within the ecclesial community. In this sense, while opposition to abortion or the destruction of embryos is rightly part of the Church’s promotion of human rights, there are areas where dialogue, however difficult it may be in practice, should prevail over demarcation. A Church that consistently and comprehensively identifies and criticizes any form of commodification and instrumentalization of the human is very well placed to engage in this dialogue. This comprehensiveness both emphasizes the importance of sexual and life ethics to the Church’s vision of the human and avoids any exclusive emphasis on these questions as a demarcatory mechanism. The Church’s fundamental concern is not to demarcate itself from the secular, since there are many groups and ideas in secular society that the Church can work with in common opposition to the ideology of individualistic materialism, although this commonality will be limited by real differences of perspective on ethical issues arising from different conceptions of individual autonomy. The desire to affirm identity by demarcation is an extremely powerful social tendency that has deeply affected all religions: Its danger is to draw the energy of religious communities towards the maintenance of such markers and towards the personal and social consolations that a strong sense of identity can convey. Yet the experience of the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council offers an opportunity, however challenging, to resist the attraction of such a process and to seek Christian identity primarily in an engagement with the world in the light of the Gospel. The overcoming of any and all forms of commodification through reverence of the human will not always provide us with readily identifiable markers of psychological or communal identification, but that has nothing necessarily to do with its closeness to the heart of the Gospel.

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Notes 1. Peter Hünermann, “Katholizismus in Europa: Seine Vielgestaltigkeit und seine Zukunft. Eine ekklesiologische Reflexion,” in Theologie in Europa? Europa in der Theologie, ed. Gerhard Larcher, 43–57 (Graz-Wien-Köln: Theological Faculty of the University of Graz, 2002). 2. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 2007). 3. The word “Catholicism” was first used by Dutch Protestants as a response to the Catholic word “Protestantism.” Hünermann, “Katholizismus in Europa,” 43. 4. Ibid. 5. Taylor, A Secular Age, 455. Hünermann describes the characteristic identity of “Catholicism” in terms similar to Taylor’s concept of an Age of Mobilization: “The Catholicisms of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century presupposed believers who were firmly rooted in their faith and in the Church and, on this basis, could be animated to actively commit themselves in the various organizations and groupings of Catholicism with the aim of achieving a fundamental renewal and permeation of social life through the Christian spirit.” “Katholizismus in Europa,” 52 (author’s translation). 6. Ibid., 52–53. 7. Taylor, A Secular Age, 466. 8. Ibid., 526. 9. Ibid., 503. 10. Ibid. 11. In “Evangelization of Europe? Observations on a Church in Peril,” in Mission in the Third Millennium, ed. Robert Schreiter (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), Hünermann argues that “the European church as institution is in a process of dissolution,” in the sense of “the church as a public and normative form of interaction and communication that makes possible a certain orientation in life and society, enabling people to relate to one another” (58). The shrinkage of “the People of God in Europe since 1950,” according to the available statistical data, indicates a loss of “Christian memory,” since there is no longer the basis for faith to be transmitted from one generation to the next (60). 12. Ibid., 65. 13. Ibid., 68.

164╇╇ Chapter Five 14. Taylor, A Secular Age, 531. This point reflects the key concern of Taylor’s project in A Secular Age: “the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others” (3). 15. Ibid., 516. In “Europe in Crisis: A Question of Belief or Unbelief? Perspectives from the Vatican,” Modern Theology 23:2 (April 2007), Lieven Boeve emphasizes the Church’s need to engage with the meaning of contemporary individualization: “While it is true that Europe is no longer understood in its totality from the perspective of the Christian conceptual horizon, the ‘process of secularization’ did not simply lead to a primarily secular society with which Christianity is thus obliged to interact. Europe, rather, is undergoing a process of ‘detraditionalisation,’ whereby no single given tradition (including—but not only—the religious) is capable of continuing unquestioned (including secular atheism). At the level of description, it is important to insist in this regard that there is a distinction to be made between individualization (a necessary dimension of identity construction on account of detraditionalisation) and individualism (absolute self-determination). The rejection of the latter does not discharge the Christian faith of its duty to come to terms with the former” (222). 16. Taylor, A Secular Age, 510. 17. Ibid., 513. 18. Ibid., 512. 19. John Thornhill, Sign and Promise: A Theology of the Church for a Changing World (London: Collins, 1988), 4. See also Thornhill’s more recent articles interpreting the reception of Vatican II: “Creative Fidelity in a Time of Transition,” Australasian Catholic Record, 79:1 (2002): 3–17; and “Historians Bringing to Light the Achievement of Vatican II,” Australasian Catholic Record, 82:3 (2005): 259–80. 20. Thornhill, Sign and Promise, 3. 21. There has been some Australian research in this vein. For example, in The Catholic Community in Australia (Adelaide: Open Book Publishers, 2005), Robert Dixon reports that only “six to seven per cent of Catholics in their twenties” attend Mass on a typical Sunday. “The graph strongly suggests that the steady fall in attendances will continue for some time to come, as the higher rates of attendance associated with older attenders are unlikely to be reached by younger Catholics as they get older” (96). 22. In his Theologischer Kommentar zur Pastoralkonstitution über die Kirche in der Welt von Heute Gaudium et Spes, vol. 4 (Herders Theologischer

Two Stories of Liberal Society and Contemporary Catholic Identity╇╇ 165 Kommentar zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil, ed. Peter Hünermann and Bernd Hilberath [Freiburg: Herder, 2005]), Hans-Joachim Sander interprets Gaudium et spes as a “topological project” of the Church, that is, a reflection on its identity in terms of its “whereabouts,” meeting the challenge to be able to “orient itself in an unfamiliar landscape” (587). As a pastoral council, it conceived the world church in a pastoral way: “With this identification of Christian faith it challenged the church and its members to identify itself with a new place, that is in relation to the whole of humanity, in their presence here and today. This relationship formed a new community for the church, the pastoral community of the world church” (585). For Sander, Gaudium et spes understood the church without any exclusions of other human beings, whether or not they are part of the church. He notes (729) that without the attention to human rights there would be no “pastoral location” for the theological engagement with human dignity, which is the pastoral expression of a renewed Christology: “Christ himself is the sign for the new location of the Church. It does not exclude human beings, but approaches them” (741, author’s translation). 23. In his Sollicitudo rei socialis, paras. 36 and 37, John Paul II writes of these structures in terms that show the influence of Augustine’s emphasis on the libido dominandi: “If the present situation can be attributed to difficulties of various kinds, it is not out of place to speak of ‘structures of sin,’ which . . . are rooted in personal sin, and thus always linked to the concrete acts of individuals who introduce these structures, consolidate them and make them difficult to remove. . . . And among the actions and attitudes opposed to the will of God, the good of neighbor and the ‘structures’ created by them, two are very typical: on the one hand, the all-consuming desire for profit, and on the other, the thirst for power, with the intention of imposing one’s will upon others.” 4. www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/speeches/1965/documents/hf_p-vi 2 _spe_19651004_united-nations_fr.html. In this speech Paul VI extolled the United Nations not only as a means of overcoming conflict but as fostering human solidarity: “Ici s’instaure un système de solidarité, qui fait que de hautes finalités, dans l’ordre de la civilisation, reçoivent l’appui unanime et ordonné de toute la famille des Peuples, pour le bien de tous et de chacun. C’est ce qu’il y a de plus beau dans l’Organisation des Nations Unies, c’est son visage humain le plus authentique; c’est l’idéal dont rêve l’humanité dans son pèlerinage à travers le temps; c’est le plus grand espoir du monde; Nous oserons dire: c’est le reflet du dessein de Dieu -

166╇╇ Chapter Five

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

dessein transcendant et plein d’amour - pour le progrès de la société humaine sur la terre, reflet où Nous voyons le message évangélique, de céleste, se faire terrestre” (6). 1971 Synod of Bishops, Justice in the World, www.socialethics.us/images/ Bishops_on_Justice_in_the_World,_1971.pdf (accessed July 1, 2008): “Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel, or, in other words, of the Church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation” (6). www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/2000/oct-dec/docu ments/hf_jp-ii_spe_20001103_convention-human-rights_en.html. This speech emphasizes that the inalienable rights that spring from the inviolable dignity of the human person are at “the heart of our common European heritage” (2), and notes the “tendency to separate human rights from their anthropological foundation—that is, from the vision of the human person that is native to European culture” (3). Robert Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 16. As Neil Ormerod argues in “Theology, History and Globalization,” Gregorianum 88:1 (2007), 23–48: “the emerging reality of globalization is making historically unprecedented demands on the moral self-transcendence of the human subject. . . . Such a process is not automatic. It requires moral commitment, but also a growing degree of psychic flexibility” (41). As Walter Kasper argues in “The Church as Communion,” in his Theology and Church (London: SCM, 1989), since the communion of the church is a sacrament for the world, communion must be expressed in mission: “In this way the church can and must be a sacrament—that is, a sign and instrument of unity and peace in the world. For we cannot share the Eucharistic bread without sharing our daily bread as well. The effort for justice, peace and liberty among people and nations, and the striving for a new civilization of love, is therefore a fundamental perspective for the church today” (164). Conversely, mission cannot be sustained unless it is nourished by the experience of communion. Responding to critiques of communion ecclesiology, Richard Lennan writes: “It would, of course, be imprudent to deny the possibility that the focus on communion can decline into a mere inward-looking fellowship, which domesticates both the radical edge and the missionary impulse of Trinitarian love. On the other hand, an emphasis on mission that does not first appropriate its

Two Stories of Liberal Society and Contemporary Catholic Identity╇╇ 167 grounding in the creative excess of divine love is also dangerous, since it can reduce mission to a loveless duty.” “Communion Ecclesiology: Foundations, Critiques, and Affirmations,” Pacifica 20 (February 2007): 34– 35. See also Lennan’s discussion of communion ecclesiology in Risking the Church: The Challenges of Catholic Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 95–96. 30. Participation in the Eucharist also responds to the universally human and religious desire for celebration, for the festive, which only a genuinely communal faith can provide. As Charles Taylor notes in reference to the tension between individual spiritual self-expression and communal traditions: “the strongly collective option will not lose adherents. Perhaps even the contrary trend might declare itself. . . . One reason to take this latter idea seriously is the continuing importance of the festive. People still seek these moments of fusion, which wrench us out of the everyday, and put us in contact with something beyond ourselves. . . . And what has perhaps not sufficiently been remarked is the way in which this dimension of religion, which goes back to its earliest forms, well before the Axial age, is still alive and well today, in spite of all attempts by Reforming élites over many centuries to render our religious and/or moral lives more personal and inward, to disenchant the universe and downplay the collective” (A Secular Age, 516–17). Taylor sees the extraordinary influence of Taizé as a recent sign of this. 1. For the text of the European Parliament resolution condemning “Ho3 mophobia” (April 26, 2007), see www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/get Doc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+TA+P6-TA-2007-0167+0 +DOC+WORD+V0//EN. For a study of the question of the legal recognition of homosexual unions from the perspective of a former legal advisor at the Secretariat of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community, see Adriana Opromolla, “Law, Gender and Religious Belief in Europe: Considerations from a Catholic Perspective,” Ecclesiastical Law Journal 9 (2007), 161–74. 32. In his many writings on social ethics in a global context, John Paul II encouraged, and indeed did much to shape, an understanding of the Church’s identity as constitutively related to a comprehensive commitment to human rights, inviting alliances with all people of good will. In his Evangelium vitae (1995), however, he gave strong support to a view of liberal societies as allowing the “emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable ‘culture of death,’” which is a “structure of sin” in its own right (12). He rightly

168╇╇ Chapter Five highlighted the contradiction between a general commitment to human rights in these societies and the attack on human life through abortion and euthanasia. However, his criticism of certain interpretations of freedom and subjectivity includes practices, such as contraception, which, for many Catholics, are radically different in kind from abortion and do not necessarily “imply a self-centered concept of freedom, which regards procreation as an obstacle to personal fulfillment” (13). Furthermore, his use of the term “a culture of death” precludes dialogue with those who argue for the right to abortion and euthanasia but who are also staunch opponents of death-dealing mechanisms of oppression and instrumentalization of the human. As Charles Curran notes in The Moral Theology of John Paul II (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005), Evangelium vitae is distinguished by a particular eschatology that is affected by its subject matter. According to Curran, John Paul knew “that the Catholic position on these issues is strongly opposed by many in society. By seeing this opposition in terms of a culture of death versus a culture of life, he can give an even stronger support for his own position. But in the process, his opposition to these practices leads him to adopt an eschatology and a Christ-against-culture approach that goes against the positions he takes elsewhere.” For Curran, this approach “cannot logically call for Christians to work together with all people of goodwill for the common good and authentic human development. This oppositional approach is markedly out of keeping with the realistic transforming model accepted in the other writings of John Paul II” (86).

Index

Age of Authenticity, 108n18, 147–49 Age of Mobilization, 144–49; “Catholicism” in, 108n18, 144–49; and dissolution/demise of Catholic identity/social expressions, 146–47, 163n11; Hünermann’s analysis, 144–49, 163n5, 163n11; and postrevolutionary France, 144–46, 163n3; post-Vatican II transition to Age of Authenticity, 108n18, 147–49; and social identity of the Church, 144–49; Taylor’s analysis, 144, 146–49, 164n14 Alcoholics Anonymous, Twelve Steps of, 106n15 Alison, James, 108n19 Amnesty International, 16, 41, 160 Aquinas, Thomas: and Joachim’s third age of the Spirit, 40–41, 53, 66–67n6; more positive view of political realm in contrast to Augustine’s, 27, 36n72 Arrupe, Pedro, 155 Augustine: and ambivalence of freedom, 20, 27; City of God and the “two cities” as two loves, 3, 5, 20–27; and the civitas terrena (neutral public sphere), 21–22; and contemporary Christians in liberal societies, 22–27, 33n51; contemporary understandings of “earthly city”/”heavenly city,”

20–23, 30n36, 31n39, 31–32n46, 32nn48–49, 33n51, 49, 69n43, 77; on freedom and the will, 24–25, 35n62; and freedom in relation to two loves, 23–27, 34n52; and grace of salvation, 23, 34n53; and humility, 24–25, 26, 35n71, 88, 98; and Joachim’s “age of the Spirit,” 53–54; and noninstrumental relationships, 77; and peaceful communities, 25–27; on shared commitment to community, 36n72, 79; on the virtues, 24–25, 26, 35n71, 85, 88, 98 Australian Labor Party, 126, 141n11 Bauckham, Richard, 139–40n9 Bauman, Zygmunt, 139n8 Becker, Gerhold, 62–63, 74nn65–66 Benedict XVI, Pope, 73n60 Boeve, Lieven, 164n15 Boff, Leonardo, 67n14 Bovon, Francois, 72n56 British Empire, Catholicism in, 145–46 Cahill, Lisa, 105n10 Canning, Raymond, 35n71 “Catholicism in Europe: its diversity and its future—an ecclesiological reflection” (Hünermann), 144 A Catholic Modernity? (Taylor), 4, 12, 14

169╇

170╇╇ Index Catholic social teaching, 156–57 Cavanaugh, William, 5, 39, 45–52; on Chilean Church and solidarity of Christians as the Body of Christ, 45–49; and Christian “bodily practices” (rituals), 49–50; and the Church as only genuine form of community, 51–52; conception of the Church and liberal secular state, 30n36, 48–51, 69n45, 70nn47–48; on the Eucharist, 47–48; on liberal secular state and Augustine’s “earthly city,” 30n36, 49, 69n43; and Maritain’s political philosophy/”New Christendom” approach, 46–49; and tasks of Church and state, 50–51, 70nn47–48 Centesimus annus (John Paul II), 104n6, 155 Chauvet, Louis-Marie, 95–97 Chifley, Joseph Benedict, 126 Chilean church, 45–49 Christianity and the Secular (Markus), 21 Christology: contemporary implications of reflections on self-giving and self-loss, 95–98; and human rights, 74n61; and noninstrumental relationships, 93–102; sacrificial/non-sacrificial interpretations of Jesus’s death, 95–97, 109n23, 109n25; service to others and Christian witness in secular society, 52–53, 57–66, 73n60; and Shanks’s notion of a new theology (a “third modernity”), 44 “The Church as Public Space” (Cavanaugh), 49 church attendance/formal religious practice: and influence on secular

citizens, 101–2, 111n37; postVatican II decline in, 150, 164n21 Churchgoing and Christian Ethics (Gill), 101–2 “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies” (Cavanaugh), 48 City of God (Augustine), 3, 5, 20–27 Communism, 28n3, 110–11n33 Congar, Yves, 66–67n6 contemporary Catholic identity (and commitment to universal ethical ideals), 37–75, 151, 164–65n22; Cavanaugh’s conception of the Church as only genuine form of community, 51–52; and Christian social ethic, 55–56, 72n52; and concept of human dignity, 2, 62–65; and differentiation from secular world, 38–39; service to others and Christian witness, 52–53, 57–66, 73n60; and “solidarity of the shaken,” 41–42, 43–45, 51–52, 55; and universalist moral ideals of liberal society, 52–53, 56–57 contemporary Catholic identity (and the Church-Kingdom relationship), 52–57, 61–66, 70n49, 71nn50–51, 72nn52–53; Cavanaugh and solidarity of Christians as the Body of Christ, 45–49; Cavanaugh’s conception of Church and state, 30n36, 48–51, 69n45, 70nn47–48; and Joachim’s notion of third “age of the Spirit,” 40–45, 53–57, 66–67n6, 67n14; and pluralism, 42, 44–45; and Shanks’s notion of a new theology (a “third modernity”), 42–45; and “solidarity of the shaken,” 41–42, 43–45, 51–52, 55; and transconfessional social movements, 42–45 contemporary Catholic social

Index╇╇ 171 identity (and relation to liberal society), 6, 51–57, 61–66, 143–68; and the Age of Authenticity, 108n18, 147–49; and the Age of Mobilization, 108n18, 144–49, 163n11; challenges of global market economy and technological progress, 80, 85–86, 104nn5–6, 157–58, 166n28; and Christian social ethic, 55–56, 72n52; Church structures, 148; decline in formal religious practice, 150, 164n21; demarcation from secular social groups, 149, 156, 160–62, 167n32; eucharistic communities, 159, 166n29, 167n30; evangelization, 148; human rights and challenges for, 151–62; human rights statements, 153, 165n24, 166nn25–26; Hünermann’s analysis, 144–49, 151, 163n5, 163n11; individualization, 148–49, 164n15; liberation theology, 155; post-Vatican II possibilities and challenges, 146–53, 163n11, 164nn14–15, 164–65n22; preferential option for the poor, 155; pre-Vatican II social identity, 144–49, 163n5, 163n11, 164n14; sexual and life ethics, 147–48, 156–57, 160–62, 167–68n32; task of communicating virtues, 76–77, 85–93, 100–102, 142n15, 158–59; Taylor’s analysis, 144, 146–49, 150–51, 164n14; transconfessional social movements, 42–45; Vatican II writings, 155 Crockett, William, 109n25, 135 Crosby, Michael H., 106n15 Curran, Charles, 167–68n32 Dante Alighieri, 66n5 Dauenhauer, Bernard P., 139n8

De doctrina Christiana (Augustine), 31n46 demarcatory practices, 149, 156, 160–62, 167–68n32 De regimine principum (Aquinas), 36n72 The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (O’Donovan), 4, 12, 17 Dietrich, Walter, 142n14 Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Freedom) (Vatican II), 6, 18, 75n69 Divini redemptoris (Pius XI), 110n33 Dixon, Robert, 164n21 Doak, Mary, 69–70n45 Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Vatican II), 66–67n6 Durkheim, Emile, 146 Dyson, R. W., 20–21, 22, 31n39 Eastern Europe, 28n3 ethical and ritual: and Catholic “natural law” tradition, 131–32; the Eucharist and tension between, 114, 129–37; prophetic critiques of empty ritual, 129–30, 142n14; sacrifices and commitment to ethical community, 133–34 Eucharist: Cavanaugh on, 47–48; and Christian hope in the midst of ethical failure, 113–14, 129, 134– 37; eschatological character of, 135; ethical action in, 135–37; eucharistic communities, 159, 166n29, 167n30; the first Eucharist and Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom of God, 134–35; and the Kingdom of God, 134–37; and tension between ethical and ritual, 114, 129–37 Eucharist: Symbol of Transformation (Crockett), 135 Evangelii nuntiandi (Paul VI), 155

172╇╇ Index Evangelium vitae (John Paul II), 167–68n32 evangelization, 128–29, 148 First Amendment to the American Constitution, 13, 18 First World War, 91 Fourth Lateran Council (1215), 40, 66n5 freedom, ambivalence of, 1, 2–3, 7–36; Augustine’s reflections on human freedom in relation to two loves, 3, 5, 20–27, 34n52; and the demise of Christendom, 12–20; freedom and humility, 24–25, 35n62; freedom as source of creativity, 2–3, 7, 11; freedom of choice/voluntarism, 2–3, 7, 11, 28n3; negative/positive freedom, 9–10; tradition-as-social resource, 4, 8–12 French Revolution and postrevolutionary France, 144–46, 149, 163n3 Fuellenbach, John, 71n51 Gaudium et spes (Vatican II), 3, 6; and the Church’s commitment to human rights, 155; and the Church’s commitment to universal solidarity, 151, 164–65n22; and the Church’s contributions to liberal society, 36n73; on the Church’s identity and service of all humanity, 154; hope and expectations of Kingdom of God, 139–40n9; the incarnation/ paschal mystery and union of Christ with humanity, 60–61, 73n58; term “earthly city,” 32n49 Germany, Federal Republic of, 30n35, 62, 74n65 Giddens, Anthony, 104n5 Gill, Robin, 101–2, 111n37

Girard, René, 95–96, 109n23 global market economy: challenges and critical issues for Church’s commitment to human rights, 157–58, 166n28; instrumental relationships and consumption, 80, 104nn5–6; John Paul II’s critique of, 104n6; and liberal society, 85–86 God and Modernity: A New and Better Way to Do Theology (Shanks), 39, 41–45 Hart, Trevor, 139–40n9 Hollenbach, David, 72n52, 75n72, 138n3 homosexual unions, civil recognition of, 162 Honorius III, Pope, 66n5 hope, Christian, 5–6, 112–42; and Christian witness, 127–29; communicating to others, 116; the Eucharist as expression of hope in the midst of ethical failure, 113–14, 129, 134–37; hopeful dispositions necessary for survival, 123–24, 139nn7–8; hopeful political leadership and the discernment of human capacities, 119–20; and Kingdom of God, 115–18, 125, 139–40n9; and the openness of the future, 122–25; and our sense of each other’s sinfulness, 121–22; and the potential for solidarity in societies, 119, 138n3; and public reason, 114–29; Rawls’s proviso and public political forums, 114, 118, 122, 125–27, 138n5; and tension between inspiration to solidarity within history/independence from history, 115–18 human dignity: the Church’s social ethic, 55–56, 72n52; how the

Index╇╇ 173 Church can communicate its support for, 2, 63–65; and the modern liberal state, 18–19, 62–65; for moral philosophers/professional ethicists, 62–63, 74n64, 74n66 human rights: and Catholic sexual and life ethics, 160–62, 167–68n32; and Catholic social teachings, 156–57; and challenges for contemporary Catholic social identity, 151–62; and Christology, 74n61; and eucharistic communities, 159, 166n29, 167n30; and liberal secular society, 1, 15, 18–19, 30n35; and liberation theology, 155; preferential option for the poor, 155; statements by contemporary Church, 153, 165n24, 166nn25–26; Vatican II writings, 155; and virtues the Church must encourage, 158–59 humility: Augustine on, 24–25, 26, 35n62, 35n71, 88, 98; contrast between self-aggrandizement and, 26, 35n71; and freedom, 24–25, 35n62; Jesus Christ’s proclamation of the Kingdom based on, 93–94; and noninstrumental relationships, 77–78, 87–89, 93–94, 98, 100, 106n15; and Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, 106n15 Hünermann, Peter, 144–49; and postVatican II Catholic identity, 151; and pre-Vatican II Catholic social identity, 144–49, 163n5, 163n11 “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (Rawls), 5, 63–65, 75n72, 114 Ignatius Loyola, 34n52 “I Have a Dream” speech, King’s (1963), 142n13 individualization, 148–49, 164n15 “In Search of Humanity: Human

Dignity as a Basic Moral Attitude” (Becker), 62–63 Insole, Christopher, 33n50, 75n72 instrumental relationships, 77, 79–81; Augustine and the libido dominandi, 79, 80; dominative and exploitative political relationships in liberal society, 79–80; economic systems/ markets, 80, 104nn5–6; personal satisfaction of needs and desires, 81, 104–5n8; and self-interest, 81. See also noninstrumental relationships intellectual discernment, 158 Isaiah and prophetic critiques of empty ritual, 129–30, 142n14 Joachim da Fiore and Joachite tradition, 5, 39–45, 53–57; and Church-Kingdom relationship, 39–45, 53–57; condemnation by Fourth Lateran Council, 40, 66n5; contemporary theological questions arising from, 41; notion of third “age of the Spirit,” 40–45, 53–57, 66– 67n6, 67n14; and Shanks’s notion of a new theology (a “third modernity”), 42–45; and social/historical doctrine of trinity, 40–41, 42–43 John Paul II: and the Church’s relationship to liberal society, 71n50, 113; critique of economic systems and commodification/markets, 104n6; and issue of Church’s demarcation from other social groups/secular ethics, 167n32; statements on human rights, 155, 166n26; on structures of sin in liberal society, 165n23 Johnson, L. T., 72–73n56 John XXIII, Pope, 150 Kant, Immanuel, 102n2 Kasper, Walter, 66–67n6, 166n29

174╇╇ Index King, Martin Luther, Jr., 142n13 Kingdom of God: and Christian hope, 115–18, 125, 139–40n9; and Christological understanding of noninstrumental relationships, 93–102; and the Eucharist, 134–37; Jesus Christ’s proclamations of, 93– 98; Joachite tradition and ChurchKingdom relationship, 39–45, 53– 57; liberal secular society and the Church-Kingdom relationship, 52– 57, 70n49, 71nn50–51, 72nn52–53; and service/witness, 52–53, 61–66; and universalist moral ideals of liberal society, 52, 56–57; values of, 53; Vatican II and distinction between Kingdom in history and the Church, 71n51 Kirkpatrick, Frank, 103n3 Kraynak, Robert, 33n51 Latin American liberation theology, 155 Lennan, Richard, 166n29 liberal secular society: and the ambivalence of freedom, 1, 2–3, 7–36; Augustinian heritage and contemporary understandings of “earthly city” and “heavenly city,” 20–23, 30n36, 31n39, 31–32n46, 32nn48–49, 33n51, 49, 69n43; businesses and workplaces, 82; Cavanaugh’s rejection of, 48–51, 69n45, 70nn47–48; Christians’ secular identity as citizens of, 100–101; and the ChurchKingdom relationship, 52–57, 70n49, 71nn50–51, 72nn52–53; the Church’s contemporary task to assist, 37; and the civitas terrena (neutral public sphere), 21–22, 31n46; and coercive Christendom, 14–15, 29n21; and concept of human dignity, 18–19, 62–65; and contemporary

Christian identity, 51–57, 61–66, 143–68; contemporary marriage and family, 83, 105n10; and the culture of churchgoing, 101–2, 111n37; defining, 7–8; and the demise of Christendom, 12–20; as democratic, 8, 27n1; as guardian of the goods of creation, 56; and humanism, 15–16; and human rights, 1, 15, 18–19, 30n35, 81–82; individual actions and choices in, 8–9; national politics and democratic procedures, 82; negative story of, 14, 98–100, 110nn32–33; and noninstrumental relationships, 76–111; O’Donovan and ambivalence of, 4, 12–14, 16–20, 98–99; and “ontology of the human,” 9–12, 28n2, 83–84; and peaceful communities, 25–27; pluralism and communal activities of, 86, 105n12; positive story of, 81–84, 152–53; and “rights culture,” 15; secular moral ideals and the Church, 37–51, 52, 56–57; service to others and Christian witness in, 52–53, 57–66, 73n60; Taylor and ambivalence of, 4, 14–20; and totalitarianism, 99–100, 110nn32– 33; and tradition-as-constraint, 4, 10; and tradition-as-social resource, 4, 8–12; two stories of freedom/ conflict between, 2–3, 11–12, 28n3; virtues of, 76–77, 85–93, 100–102, 142n15; and voluntarism, 7, 11, 28n3, 98–99; voluntary social organizations/communities, 82–83. See also public political life and public reason Lincoln, Abraham, 125–26, 140n10 Luke, Gospel of, 57–58, 72n56 Lumen gentium (Vatican II), 35n54, 71n51

Index╇╇ 175 Macintyre, Alasdair, 69n45 Mackey, James, 70n49 Mahoney, Jack, 106–7n16 Maritain, Jacques: and ChurchKingdom relationship, 46–49, 56; and contributions of the Church to the common good, 68n29, 110n32; and Gospel’s influence on democratic values, 47; and natural law as basis of human rights, 47; “New Christendom” approach, 46–49; political philosophy, 46–49, 68n29 Markus, Robert, 31n46, 36n72; on Augustine’s two cities, 21–22; on Augustine’s understanding of political community, 36n72; on the civitas terrena (neutral public sphere), 21–22, 31n46 Marx, Karl, 80 Matthew’s “Parable of the Last Judgment,” 60, 61, 128 McEvoy, James, 29n21 Médecins sans Frontières, 16 media technology, 85–86 Meier, John P., 73n57 Milbank, John, 21, 22, 102–3n2 Moltmann, Jürgen, 66–67n6, 67n14, 139–40n9, 139n7 moral imagination (empathy), 158 moral philosophers/professional ethicists and concept of human dignity, 62–63, 74n64, 74n66 Murray, John Courtney, 69n43 natural law tradition: contemporary expressions of natural law in terms of human rights, 56, 72n55; and independence of the ethical from ritual, 131–32; O’Donovan on subjective rights and, 13, 17–18, 28n14; O’Donovan on universal human rights and, 18–19

The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local (Schreiter), 154 Newlands, George, 74n61 noninstrumental relationships, 76–111; and Age of Mobilization/ Age of Authenticity, 108n18; and Augustine’s two cities, 77; and Christians’ secular identity, 100– 101; Christological understanding of, 93–102; and “communal” relationships, 78; contemporary marriage and family, 83, 105n10; and the culture of churchgoing, 101–2, 111n37; and development of an ontology of the human, 83–84; and difference between society and community, 78–79, 103n3; economic levels, 82, 85–86; and everyday social transactions, 78–79, 102–3n2, 103n3; and humility, 77– 78, 87–89, 93–94, 98, 100, 106n15; and individual freedom, 84–85; and instrumental relationships, 77, 79– 81; and Jesus Christ’s proclamation of the Kingdom, 93–98; moral formation and education in the virtues, 86–87; and negative story of liberal society, 98–100; and pluralism of liberal societies, 86, 105n12; political level, 81–82; and positive story of liberal societies, 81–84; and reverence for others, 87– 89, 93–94, 97, 100; and self-giving/ sacrifice, 87–98, 100, 108n19, 109n25; self-identity and selffulfillment in, 90–92; social levels, 82–83; virtues of (and the church’s task of communicating), 76–77, 85–93, 100–102, 142n15, 158–59; voluntary social organizations/ communities, 82–83

176╇╇ Index O’Connell, Timothy, 106n13 O’Daly, Gerard, 32n48 O’Donovan, Oliver, 28n14, 102– 3n2; and ambivalence of liberal modernity, 4, 12–14, 16–20, 98–99; on Antichristic character of liberal society, 14, 98–99, 110n32; on Christian conception of secularity, 139n6; on end of Christendom and development of liberal society, 18– 19; on end of Christendom and First Amendment, 13, 18; and everyday social transactions, 102–3n2; on natural law and notion of subjective rights, 13, 17–18, 28n14; on natural law and universal human rights, 18–19; on political authority and reign of Christ, 12–14; on the state’s limited role in Christendom, 13; and subjective dignity of the human person, 18–19 “ontology of the human,” 9–12, 28n2, 83–84 Ormerod, Neil, 166n28 Pacem in terris (John XXIII), 153 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 30n35, 72n53, 139–40n9 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. See Gaudium et Spes (Vatican II) Patočka, Jan, 41 Paul VI, Pope, 49, 138n2; address to General Assembly of the United Nations (1965), 153, 165n24; and the Church’s commitment to human rights, 155 Peter Lombard, 40 Pius XI, Pope, 110n33 Plant, Raymond, 104n6 pluralism: and communal activities of liberal society, 86, 105n12; and

language/symbols of hope in public political discourse, 125–26; and Shanks’s notion of a new theology (a “third modernity”), 42, 44–45 Populorum progressio (Paul VI), 138n2 Porter, Jean, 28–29n14, 72n55 post-Vatican II Catholicism: Church structures, 148; dissolution/demise of Catholic social expressions, 146–47, 163n11; evangelization, 148; individualization, 148–49, 164n15; possibilities and challenges for the Church, 148–49, 163n11, 164nn14–15; transition to Age of Authenticity, 108n18, 147–49 Power, David, 136, 137 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 107n17 prophetic critiques of empty ritual, 129–30, 142n14 public political life and public reason: achieving equilibrium between vigilance and trust in public institutions, 120–22; and Christian hope, 114–29; Christian politicians and theological/secular language, 122, 138n5; and Christian witness/evangelization, 127–29; hopeful political leadership and the discernment of human capacities, 119–20; and hope in the openness of the future, 122–25; the images/ language of dreams, 126, 141n12, 142n13; language/symbols of Christian hope in, 120, 125–29; and pluralism, 125–26; political leadership and moral virtue for sake of common good, 120–22; and potential for solidarity in societies, 119, 138n3; Rawls and how Christians can contribute to public political life, 5, 63–65, 75n72,

Index╇╇ 177 75nn68–69; and Rawls’s proviso, 64–65, 75n72, 114, 118, 122, 125–27, 138n5 Rahner, Hugo, 34n52 Ratzinger, Joseph, 33n51, 73n58 Rawls, John: and how Christians can contribute to public political life, 5, 63–65, 75n72, 75nn68–69; proviso, 64–65, 75n72, 114, 118, 122, 125– 27, 138n5; and “public reason,” 63–65, 75nn68–69 Redemptor hominis (John Paul II), 113 Redemptoris missio (John Paul II), 71nn50–51 Reformation, 15 reverence for others: and international human rights statements, 89, 106– 7n16; Jesus Christ’s proclamation of the Kingdom based on, 94; and noninstrumental relationships, 87–89, 93–94, 97, 100 Riordan, Patrick, 75n69 rituals: Cavanaugh and Christian “bodily practices,” 49–50; the Eucharist and tension between ethical and, 114, 129–37; prophetic critiques of empty ritual, 129–30, 142n14. See also ethical and ritual Rudman, Stanley, 106–7n16 Sander, Hans-Joachim, 164–65n22 Schreiter, Robert, 154 A Secular Age (Taylor), 144, 164n14 secular society. See liberal secular society self-giving, 87–98, 100; Augustine and self-giving in communities, 91; and the Church’s challenge to liberal societies, 92–93; and the Church’s commitment to human rights, 158– 59; contemporary implications of

Christological reflections on, 95–98; Jesus Christ’s proclamation of the Kingdom based on, 94–98, 108n19; and noninstrumental relationships, 87–98, 100, 108n19, 109n25; and risk of self-diminution (self-loss), 89–92, 107n17; sacrificial/nonsacrificial interpretations of Jesus’s death, 95–97, 109n23, 109n25; and term “sacrifice,” 96–97 Senior, Donald, 73n57 Sentences (Peter Lombard), 40 service to others, 52–53, 57–66, 73n60; and contemporary relationship between Church and Kingdom/secular society, 61–66; experiencing the Kingdom as, 58– 59; and hope, 58–59; and salvation, 60; and witness, 59 sexual ethics teachings, 147–48, 160– 62, 167–68n32 Shanks, Andrew, 5, 39–45, 67n14; the Church-Kingdom relationship and Joachite tradition, 39–45; and new transconfessional social movements, 42–45; notion of a new theology (a “third modernity”), 42–45; “solidarity of the shaken,” 41–42, 43–45, 51–52, 55 Sigmund, Paul E., 36n72 Sign and Promise: A Theology of the Church for a Changing World (Thornhill), 149–50 Silva Henriquez, Cardinal Raul, 49 Singer, Peter, 74n64, 107n17 Society of Jesus, 155 “solidarity of the shaken,” 41–42, 43–45, 51–52, 55 Sollicitudo rei socialis (John Paul II), 155, 165n23 Sources of the Self (Taylor), 14 Spohn, William, 106n13

178╇╇ Index Stiltner, Brian, 68n29 Summa Theologica (Aquinas), 40–41 Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Chauvet), 95 Synod of Bishops, 1971 affirmation, 153, 166n25 Taylor, Charles: on Age of Mobilization/Age of Authenticity, 108n18, 146; and ambivalence of liberal modernity, 4, 14–20; challenging liberal society to be open to Gospel of love of God, 16–17; on coercive Christendom and liberal society, 14–15, 29n21; on end of Christendom and “rights culture” of modern liberalism, 15; on liberal societies and development of a universalist ethic, 15–16; and ontology of the human, 28n2; and post-Vatican II Catholic identity, 150–51; and pre-Vatican II Catholic social identity, 144, 146–49, 164n14; on tension between individual spiritual self-expression and communal traditions, 167n30 Te Selle, Eugene, 31–32n46, 33–34n51 Theodosius I, emperor, 22, 32n48 Thornhill, John, 149–50 Tinder, Glenn, 110–11n33 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 83, 105n9, 110–11n33 Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Cavanaugh), 45 totalitarianism, 99–100, 110nn32–33 tradition-as-constraint, 4, 10 tradition-as-social resource, 4, 8–12 transconfessional social movements, 42–45

Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, 106n15 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 19, 30n35, 106–7n16 universal ethical ideals: and ChurchKingdom relationship, 52, 56–57; contemporary Catholic social identity and commitment to universal solidarity, 151, 164–65n22; contemporary liberal societies and resolution of ethicalritual tension, 131–33; Taylor on liberal societies and, 15–16. See also contemporary Catholic identity (and commitment to universal ethical ideals); human rights van Bavel, T. Johannes, OSA, 34n53 Vatican Council II: and challenge of ideological change for the Church, 6, 150; and Chilean Church, 49; and commitment to human rights, 155; distinction between Kingdom in history and the Church, 71n51; on grace of salvation, 23, 35n54. See also Age of Mobilization; Gaudium et spes (Vatican II); post-Vatican II Catholicism virtues and liberal society: Augustine on, 24–25, 26, 35n71, 85, 88, 98; and Christians’ secular identity, 100–101; the Church’s influence on secular citizens, 101–2, 111n37; and the Church’s task of communicating, 76–77, 85–93, 100–102, 142n15, 158–59; education in, 86–87; humility, 24–25, 26, 35n71, 87–89, 98, 100, 106n15; and market economy/media technology, 85–86; and moral formation in Christian

Index╇╇ 179 communities, 106n13; and pluralism, 86, 105n12; reverence for others, 87–89, 100; self-giving, 87–98, 100 voluntarism: and the ambivalence of freedom, 7, 11, 28n3; fall of Communism and freedom as, 28n3; and noninstrumental relationships, 98–99 voluntary religious organizations, 82–83, 105n9 Weimar Republic, 99, 109n31 Williams, Rowan, 32n48, 104–5n8

witness, Christian: and Christians elected to political office, 127–28; Christological perspective, 52–53, 57–66, 73n60; and contemporary relationship between Church and Kingdom/secular society, 6, 52–53, 57–66; explicit acts of evangelization in public political forum, 128–29; and hope, 127–29; Lucan passages on Jesus’ call to, 57–58, 72n56; and service to others, 52–53, 57–66 Wordsworth, William, 116