The Gospel, Secularism and the American Experiment-part II

In For the Life of the World Even Schmemann argues that when looked from the point of view phenomenology of religion (Religionswissenschaft), the world is sacramental in character—a means not simply of knowledge about God, but the place of a real encounter with God. For Schmemann, as for the Fathers and the Scriptures, the world points beyond itself to God Who is both the Creator and Goal of creation (including human beings). For this reason, even understood broadly, worship, to the degree that it is true worship, reveals to us God, creation and humanity. The key here is the adjective true in true worship. It is not simply any worship, but only worship that is—whatever its other differences—in fundamental agreement with Christian worship's "the intuition and experience of the world as an 'epiphany' of God." (p. 120) And so, a few pages later he writes: "It is indeed extremely important for us to remember that the uniqueness, the newness of Christian worship is not that it has no continuity with worship 'in general,' . . . but that in Christ this very continuity is fulfilled, receives its ultimate and truly new significance so as to truly bring all 'natural' worship to an end." (p. 122)

There is then for Schmemann (as there is for the Fathers and the Scriptures) a notion of "natural law." Not a natural law that is divorced from faith—a law known by naked reason divorced from faith—but one which can nevertheless be grasped (to return to Murray) by "the careful inquires" those men and women who, even if they are not Christians, are people of good will and who live lives that are "wise and honest." (p. 118) The argument that Schmemann makes against secularism is very much a "natural law" argument. Secularism, to repeat what I quoted in the previous post, "emphatically negates . . . the sacramentality" of humanity and the world and substitutes in place of the givenness of a sacramentality world, a view of the Christian worship that sees worship as an expression of human desire/need and as such subject to human manipulation.

Returning to the question of government, as part of the creation, there is a sacramental character to the human person. The tripartite character of the American experiment, "a free people under a limited government, guided by law and ultimately under the sovereignty of God," is I think a humble acknowledgement of the sacramentality of the human person. This is not to suggest that democracy is the only form of government that respects the inherent dignity of the human. Indeed, it is not to suggest that democracy in general, or American democracy in particular, does so flawlessly. Returning to Murray: " The American Proposition ["that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights"] is at once doctrinal and practical, a theorem and a problem. It is an affirmation and also an intention. It presents itself as a coherent structure of thought that lays claim to intellectual assent; it also present itself as an organized political project that aims at historical success. Our Fathers asserted it and most ably argued it; they also undertook to "work it out," and they signally succeeded." (p. xi)

That being said, Murray reminds us that the practical, "historical success" of the tripartite character of the American experiment "is never to be taken for granted, nor can it come to some absolute term; and any given measure of success demands enlargement of penalty of instant decline." (p. xi) Giving Orthodox critics here and abroad their due, does America seems to be flirting with the penalty of instant decline. American failure does not invalidate the truthfulness of the tripartite anthropology at the heart of the American experiment.

I would go further. There is a fundamental computability ("continuity" to use Schmemman's term) between Orthodox theological anthropology and American political anthropology. I would argue that it is the vocation of Orthodox Christians in America to articulate a critical and appreciative response to American political anthropology. Part of this means developing practically a style of Church governance and pastoral care that reflects the providential convergence of our theological vision of the person and the American experiment.

For example, I trust people to live their lives. I trust the people in my parish live their lives and administer the parish with minimal interference or direction from me. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, or their invitation, I trust people not only in "in fear and trembling" but also mutual love, respect and affection, to meet the demands made on them by of their vocations. Unless there is some compelling reason—a clear indication that someone has rejected the sovereignty of God or they ask me a question—I stay out of their lives.

The genius of the American experiment is practical. its offers us a balanced, humble vision for the use of authority. Yes, in its inception, that vision of authority's use was political; it just as applicable to the exercise of pastoral and administrative authority in the Church.

The question is not monarchy or democracy, but between the humble service and protection of human freedom and dignity, on the one hand, or the exploitation and degradation of the human on the other. As a theoretical matter, I can imagine a king or tsar defending the inherent dignity of all people, even as I can imagine a democracy, a priest, a bishop or a parish council failing to do so. In all cases it seems to me the key is the theoretical, practical and joyful acceptance
the freedom of all men and women. Further this must be embodied by the willingness on those in authority to exercise self-restraint in the authority of their office and to submit themselves to the demands of natural law.

The question now becomes for me as an Orthodox Christian, am I willing to take up the challenge laid at my feet by the American experiment?

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

The Gospel, Secularism and the American Experiment-part I

So, based on the number and quality of the comments, it seems that there is great interest (here at least) in the social teaching of the Church. Thank you all for your comments and observations. I find them very helpful in clarifying my own thinking on the issue we are addressing. Let me offer some reflections

A common thread in most discussion about the relationship between church and state is the tacit--and at times not so tacit--assumption that the American experiment is a secular, anti-religious, and even anti-Christian movement. While certainly this was, and in many ways still is, the case in the French system of government it is not the case in America.

Yes, there is a strong strain of secularism in American culture—but an argument could be made that this represents a deviation from the founding principles. No, America was not founded on the Gospel—and certainly we are not an "Orthodox" nation—but strictly speak no government is, or for that matter needs to be so founded. Nations are called Orthodox or Christian only by analogy or as a reflection of an openness to the Gospel or (most crudely) because of the majority (or at least a plurality) of its citizens are Christian of one sort or another.

For Orthodox, the idea of America and American culture as secular (in a pejorative sense), that it is anti-Christian and harmful to our Christian faith, is something popularized but Fr Alexander Schmemann. He argues, quite eloquently and convincingly, that secularism "is above all a negation of worship. I stress: --not of God's existence, not of some kind of transcendence and therefore some kind of religion. If secularism in theological terms in a heresy, it is primarily a heresy about man. It is a negation of man as a worshiping being, as homo adorans: the one for whom worship is the essential act which both 'posits' his humanity and fulfills it. It is the rejection as ontologically and epistemologically 'decisive,' of the words which 'always, everywhere and for all' were the true 'epiphany' of man's relation to God, to the world and to himself." (For the Life of the World, p. 118)

For Schmemann, secularism an anthropological heresy (remembering that heresy always implies a choice). At its core it denies that the worship of the Triune God is the act that both reveals and fulfills human nature (i.e., worship is both an act of ontological & epistemological self-revelation and self-realization). Further, it is a rejection of the idea that worship is the privileged means (again both ontological and epistemological) by which the communion of God, creation and humanity are realized. Implicit within this view of secularism is a rejection of the position of those, "quite numerous today, who consciously or unconsciously reduce Christianity to either intellectual ('future of belief') or socio-ethical ('Christian service to the world') categories and who therefore think it must be possible to find not only some kind of accommodation, but even a deeper harmony between our 'secular age' on the one hand and worship in the other hand." (pp. 118-119)

While his description of secularism is insightful, as often happens with his work, his use of the concept as a lens through which to see American culture is heavy handed. Yes, secularism is a central theme in American culture but, as the work of Fr John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, suggests secularism as Schmemann uses the term is not an inherent part of that ensemble of founding truths that "command the structure and the courses of the political-economic system of the United State." (p. 106) Commenting on Murray's work in the forward to We Hold These Truths, Walter J Burghardt, S.J., writes that "Reduced to its skeleton," the American model affirms as foundational the importance of "a free people under a limited government, guided by law and ultimately under the sovereignty of God." (pp. vii-viii)

If, as Schmemann and Murray each in his own way suggests, we have become fragmented as a society, it is because (as Murray points out) it is because we have lost that founding consensus. So, to take but one example, "the American university [has] long since bade a quiet goodbye to the whole notion of an American consensus, as implying that there are truths that we hold in common, and a natural law that makes known to all of us the structure of the moral universe in such wise that all of us are bound by it to a common obedience." (p. 40) In this, I fear, many Orthodox Christian—having read, but misunderstood—not only Schmemann's criticisms of America, but also the Father and indeed the Scriptures themselves, argue rather on the side of disintegration.

What do I mean?

I will in my next post, return to Schmemann's For the Life of the World to answer the question I've just posed.

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Joy, Love and Our Common Good

Image via WikipediaContinuing yesterday's post Institutional Problems, Personal Solutions:

In moments of transition, there is a need to acknowledge, to affirm, what is going on in the community. Especially when that transition is associated with powerful feelings, be they positive or (as is more likely) negative, these need to be acknowledge and given a place within the life of the community. Practically this means helping people listen to and identify their feelings. More important still, people often need help in situated their feelings within the larger process of the community's transition, even as the community's transition needs itself to be situated within the larger story of the Gospel (i.e., oriented).

As I think about things, it seems to me that helping and compassion are fundamentally about orientation and acknowledgment. This doesn't mean I ought not to offer practical solutions where that is possible. But these solutions to actually be practical, to really be helpful and compassionate, must grow out of orientation and acknowledgement. At a minimum, if I don't know where the community is going (orientation), or if I don't know what people are struggle with (acknowledgment), then my help and compassion is likely to be ineffective. Worse, I may be serving my own needs rather than the community's.

Finally, playfulness.

Playfulness is not a value we usually associate with the Orthodox Church. And yet, in every traditional Orthodox culture there is a tradition of feasting, of music and dance. Pastorally I have found that one the best ways to unite an ethnically mixed community is to encourage people to eat each other's foods, sample each other's alcohols, and to encourage and welcome everyone's music, language and customs.

None of this can be done if the leadership—clerical or lay—or overly serious. There is a place, a valuable and important place, in our spiritual lives for frivolity, for fun.

If I were to make any critical comment about the way in which the Orthodox Church response pastorally to transitions, it is that we are often not very playful. Sometimes we are so deadly serious. But playfulness admits a bit of space, it allows us some room to move without being self-conscious or anxious. This all to say, that we must cultivate in our communities, a real sense of joy.

This is hard to cultivate of we are unwilling to look at ourselves honestly. It is hard to cultivate joy if we either take our eyes off the Kingdom of God, or the practical steps along the way. And apart from our willing to bear each other's burdens there can be no joy.

But while all this is true, without joy these other things are likewise impossible.

In a 1983 homily for Forgiveness Sunday, Fr Alexander Schmemann says:

As once more we are
about to enter the Great Lent, I would like to remind us – myself first of all, and all of you my fathers, brothers, and sisters – of the verse that we just sang, one of the stichera, and that verse says: "Let us begin Lent, the Fast, with joy."

Only yesterday we were commemorating Adam crying, lamenting at the gates of Paradise, and now every second line of the Triodion and the liturgical books of Great Lent will speak of repentance, acknowledging what dark and helpless lives we live, in which we sometimes are immersed. And yet, no one will prove to me that the general tonality of Great Lent is not that of a tremendous joy! Not what we call "joy" in this world – not just something entertaining, interesting, or amusing – but the deepest definition of joy, that joy of which Christ says: "no one will take away from you" (Jn. 16:22). Why joy? What is that joy?

Fr Alexander answers his own question by saying that Lent is a gift. And while this gift has many facets, is the gift that makes possible our

return to each other: this is where we begin tonight. This is what we are doing right now. For if we would think of the real sins we have committed, we would say that one of the most important is exactly the style and tonality which we maintain with each other: our complaining and criticizing. I don't think that there are cases of great and destructive hatred or assassination, or something similar. It is just that we exist as if we are completely out of each other's life, out of each other's interests, out of each other's love. Without having repaired this relationship, there is no possibility of entering into Lent. Sin – whether we call it "original" sin or "primordial" sin – has broken the unity of life in this world, it has broken time, and time has become that fragmented current which takes us into old age and death. It has broken our social relations, it has broken families. Everything is diabolos – divided and destroyed. But Christ has come into the world and said: "... and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself" (Jn. 12:32).

In the final analysis, all communities are, in one form or another, in transition because all human beings are in transition. What we learn from those communities that are suffering because of a trauma is that our love for one another is maybe not as deeply rooted and firmly held as we might like to think. I am not as loving as I imagine I am—the sign of that is my lack of joy.

In helping communities and individuals negotiate transitions, I must first and foremost love them. This love is not by any means sentimental. It is rather the willingness on my part to bring to place all that God has given me personally, professionally and as a priest of the Orthodox, at the service of the person in front of me. Reflecting both as a social scientist, and more importantly as a Christian, I have come to realize that it is only in my willingness to serve the good of this unique person that I am able as well to serve the common good of the institution, of the parish or diocese that is also my concern.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory