Progress and the Good Lord

...In our outfit we have no process for it, we wouldn't know how to go about it...

...And when I demurred, not being attached to a domestic domino theory, he added, "I mean Joe's interceding for you...

...Ritual solves no problems...

...But "militant atheism" goes further...

...Ignatius, that is first victim of this outrage...

...The Party succeeded in breaking the secular power of the church, confiscated its properties, shattered its hierarchy, persecuted the believers...

...Modern Western thought operates with the basic triad, the synthesis of two antitheses, which is the very model of progress...

...But in the process they often lost their unique power of placing human life under the perspective of eternity...

...Some things, even if well managed, are simply givens to which humans must adjust--aging, disappointment, choice, death, but also joy, beauty and love are all incoercible givens...

...Personally, I happen to hold the third theory, but that is irrelevant to the issue at hand...

...we have all talked ourselves into bone weariness about this...

...A layman said to me...

...there are common adversaries, the 'dads,' the brahmins, superiors, professors...

...Even if progress were to solve all problems humans would still need religion, not as a means of coping, but as a means of coming to terms with the contingency of existence...

...I have pondered and prayed and talked...

...But in spite of all such efforts, even if they were successful, the fact remains...

...But within religious context, such acts have primarily the significance of signs, the original meaning of the word usually translated as miracle...

...Fifty years later, it is rather obvious that that war has been lost...

...Recent programs of the Austrian and German Social Democratic Parties speak of a vital religious faith as a significant complement to secular effort for social change...

...The anti-religious stance of progressives is a response to this extension of religion into the realm of social strategy...

...The bond grows, past ordination, into the struggle, the muck, fury, shuffled lives and geographies of the past decade...

...We are not concerned here with the popular claim of the fifties that "Communism is a religion...

...Progress is possible because we have learned to rejoice in victory rather than mourn over the fallen foe--yet that death is equally real...

...but no medico Commonweal: 61...

...But it does provide a context of absolute certainty in a world which undercuts all certainty...

...By rendering unto God the things which are in God's hand, it leaves humans free to contend with the things which are very much in human hands...

...A nun echoed the same idea...

...We are concerned with a very different claim: that religion, in addition to being high ideology (like Communism), has certain characteristics (deification of an ideal figure, formalization of beliefs as dogma, ritualization of performance) which socialism and Communism, by their own emphatic and repeated proclamation, did not share or wish to share...

...While speaking of ideals, it leaves the world stripped in poverty and backwardness and detours its energies into the hope of heaven...

...The socialist movement heeded his advice that politics must become our religion...

...All such labeling is equally true--and equally false...

...It sees human suffering essentially as a problem to be solved, not a mystery which calls for meditation and reconciliation...

...In this case, Joe is running ahead, he takes the first fall...

...Progressivism--and Communism is only one, not particularly successful, variety~represents basically a strategy of coping...

...Yet with the success of its anti-ecclesiastical campaign, Communism gradually acquired distinctly religious characteristics precisely at those points at which it claimed to differ...

...The good Lord, it seems, is highly ambivalent about progress, and progressives reciprocate the sentiment...

...It seeks to relieve suffering, abolish injustice, change conditions...

...In central Europe, the clergy were known as "black police," while among progressives freedom from all remnants of religious faith was considered the sign of an open mind...

...Generations of Party members learned~of late by rote~that Marxism is superior to Christianity because it is a this-worldly, non-dogmatic, practical guide to faith and morals...

...But it makes it bearable by breaking Job's preoccupation with his own misery, placing it in the perspective of eternity...

...Progress cannot afford to be anti-religious...

...What is interesting is the Commonweal: 57 success of atheism, or, more precisely, the success of the Communist Party in rooting out the church as a significant social forcenand its effect, not on the church, but on the Party itself...

...Even choosing wisely and well means giving up, eternally, forever, another alternative...

...But by the same token, all human experience includes a dimension of givenness which demands a strategy of conciliation and reconciliation: placing all of human life including its problems under the perspective of eternity...

...In face of the brute givenness of tragedy which my effort cannot undo, I would be simply defeated...

...Sense...

...That I could go with...

...It deals with tragedy, which constitutes an unmitigated, unmeliorable personal defeat, by shifting focus from the broken, defeated human to the grandeur of God...

...But the purpose of that recognition is to set free for human effort the entire dimension of human life which belongs to Caesar...

...Feuerbach formulated the dominant progressive view of religion most clearly: religion is the highest ideology, projecting human ideals and aspirations into heaven...

...Quite understandably, they did not succeed: the entire orientation of religion is geared to a very different strategy...

...The Lutheran church was the pillar of the throne in Prussia, the Orthodox church in Russia, the Catholic church in Austria, and in turn the respective thrones were pillars of their churches...

...Later Leonine encyclicals took a different stance, admitting the legitimacy of efforts for progress under ecclesiastical auspices...

...I shall long remember an American's response to the deeply moving film classic La Strada~"Something simply has to be done about child labor laws in Italy...

...loner, the line-crosser, the nay-sayer, the etc., etc...

...Eternal perspective can free progress from the frantic, murderous attempt to create a secular substitute for God--but it cannot be a substitute for a human perspective...

...Religion becomes a socially reactionary force when it loses sight of the distinction, and offers reconciliation not as means of coming to terms with the fact, but rather as a substitute for effort to change what can be changed...

...Yet fifty years after the revolution, repeated waves of religious persecution and officially sponsored militant atheism campaigns testify no less convincingly to the continuing vigor of religion...

...No limit a priori can be placed to human effort...

...The same is true of dogma...

...Europeans, Lenin included, often saw this as a typically American, practical approach...

...The persistence of religion suggests that humans know better...

...Americans in fact do tend to respond to tragedy by "doing something about it," usually picking up the pieces or providing asylum to survivors...

...It may be unwarranted optimism, but a more mature synthesis may well be emerging in our times...

...That function finally is not merely cultural...

...It amounts to no more than a recognition of the category of high ideology, and the recognition that both religion and Communism fit into that category...

...Progressives must not resign the responsibility for human welfare to religion...

...It was left to the police and Western tourists to figure out how to deal with the elegant bleached blondes loitering around Prague's Hotel Alcron...

...Somewhat ironically, a parallel development can be traced in the churches as well...

...The hidden fourth which completes the diamond of which the triad of progress is a visible half, is the dark undertone of loss, of the tragic...

...Its significance is its practical irrelevance...

...It is a love letter...

...seeking consolation in the next...

...Joseph O'Rourke has been dismissed from the Society oJ Jesus...

...But the converse is no less true: a starving man needs bread, not only a blessing...

...Instances of religious inspiration can in fact be found in progressive movements throughout the West and throughout history...

...One priest, a member of another order said to me: "I don't know what 'expulsion' means...

...I love you, I Iove my own sanity, I love the Company, and I mourn the trouble of which your purgatory is a sign...

...Most recent Johanine encyclicals go further: they recognize the autonomous validity of social striving...

...There is no contradiction in principle between the most active possible resort to all the resources of modern medicine in coping with illness---and prayer...

...Progressives generally base their attitude to religion on the deeply held conviction that tragedy is profoundly unnecessary --that there are no irresoluble problems...

...It explicitly transforms behavior from the problem-solving level which, we need to note, is precisely the level on which tragedy defeats humans--to the level of theater in a profound sense by transforming tragedy into poetry...

...At the same time, even denominations once most stricken by a fascination with the "social gospel" are beginning to recognize the distinctly religious dimension of the church, traditionally described as offering the "means of grace and hope of glory...

...The early programs demanded militant atheism of all progressives---Sartre and the Soviet CP are anachronistic survivals of that stance in our time...

...The perspective of eternity is not a proper perspective for coping with temporal problems...

...The problem with such division is that religion draws that dividing line far too soon, resorting to strategy of reconciliation at times and in situations where effective action is possible...

...Perhaps it is the intellect first of all, the feeling, passionate intellect celebrated by FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN, S.J., is the anti-war priest and poet...

...The proof of that is not anthropological but existential: the recogCommonweal: 59 nition, which is one of the immediate givens of consciousness, that human existence presents itself to the human subject not only as a problem to be solved, but as a brute datum with which the subject must come to terms...

...The problem can be solved, yet the fact remains...

...You'd better look to yourself...

...The core of the religious strategy is finally not coping but reconciliation, changing not the world but human perspective on it...

...It is perennially relevant because human life, even in a hypothetical socialist society, intrinsically contains dimensions which are not amenable to the problem-solving approach...

...What is true is that the essence of progressive strategy is precisely the ability to reduce mystery to a tangible problem, to respond to tragedy by effective actionm and that this has not been the typical religious response...

...PROGRESS AND THE GOODLOnn ERAZIM KOHAK Must progressive impulses be severed from religious contexts...

...Already in the early fifties in Czechoslovakia, at the time of the mass arrests of clergy and believers, the commissars reserved a special kind of fury for the clergy...

...It was, from the start, an artificial, abstract and theoretical creed...

...The failure of militant atheism, however, is not particulady interesting...

...So is the entirely scholastic nature of present-day Marxism: perhaps the most striking (though by no means the most damaging) instance is the argument o~ the Great Soviet Encyclopedia that prostitution does not exist, Q.E.D...

...The death of the six million, the tragedy of Czechoslovakia, the aching void of La Strada all can and must spur me on to struggle against tyranny, for the self-determination of the victims of Russian imperialism, for a change of child labor laws in Italy...

...It must 18 October 1974:60 recognize the reality and autonomy of the eternal dimension of human existence, as well as its own inability and inappropriateness for trying to cope with it...

...Recent Anglican efforts at liturgical "reform," though they inevitably appear as misgu!ded COCU-ism to anyone who appreciates the full beauty, magnificence and wisdom of Archbishop Cranmer's Prayer Book, still testify to a new awareness of the distinctly religious dimension of religion...

...Precisely because it succeeded in eliminating the church as a live alternative, the Cornmunist Party found itself driven to meet that need...

...Nor did it take all that long...

...They are symptoms, not the real content and meaning of the religious message...

...Humans would worship God long after the Communist Party had been forgotten...

...The starting point may well have to be a modification of the traditional formula which divides the world into those things which can be changed and those which cannot...

...As such, it is entirely compatible with a pragmatic, highly activist strategy of coping with what can be changed...

...If no resources were available to the subject except for practical, problemsolving coping, the fact of tragedy would be paralyzing...

...At the same time, a strong case could be made for the proposition that progressive impulses, though religiously rooted, must become severed from their religious context before they can become a driving force of progress...

...The ultimate 18 October 1974:58 significance of such temporal victories is that they are signs of an eternal victory...

...That "cause" may well be an overdose of mescaline sulphate, a projection of father-image, or the encounter with the true living God...

...So does a living man, confronted with the utter contingency of his existence, the givenness of joy and tragedy, the rigid limitations of his finitude and the infinity of the task...

...There's always been a strange, heavy, willful, endangered bond among the brethren...

...Progress is contingent on bringing human hopes and aspirations back to earth, channeling human efforts to transforming this world rather than E~ZIM KOnAK is pro[essor o/ philosophy at Boston University...

...Such a claim is both true and trivial, because it is based almost entirely on a superficial definition Of religion as any belief deeply held and used as a guide in daily life...

...It reflects a conviction that those aspects of human experience which elicit a religious response are only culture-deep and can be eliminated by cpltural change...

...The two deal with different dimensions of the experience: the first with the problem of being ill, the second with the tragedy of illness--that I, who could be doing, living, loving, am forced to lie passively in bed, bear pain and face death...

...Worship provides for a displacement in the most profound sense...

...Perhaps a more accurate statement would be that all of human experience has two dimensions, that of a problem and that of a given...

...The development may not be dear, but the principle is...

...It may well be far more effective to recognize two dimensions of all human experience, the dimension of problem and the dimension of the absolute givenness...

...I am not now speaking on the problem level, about the trite question of the "cause" of religion...

...Unlike the practical teachings of the churches, dogma does not solve any problems...

...A dying man needs a priest, not a commissar...

...Not content to leave to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, (and justified by Caesar's admitted mismanagement) the churches, under the name of "social gospel," embarked on a mission of social relevance, seeking to provide programs for social change...

...Yet even the achievement of progress is paid for in rejected alternatives: value is not only created but also lost...

...This is what religion does in the statement "Into Thy hands I commend my spirit," by placing tragedy into the perspective of eternity in worship, faith and ritual...

...I need both to cope--and to come to terms with illness, not in the sense of not wishing or striving to become well, but in the sense of incorporating the brute fact of illness in my life...

...The odes to Stalin to send rain or current eulogies to Mao in gratitude for sunshine are too familiar...

...It was left to the police and tion it is a result of exploitation and since equally by definition exploitation does not exist there, prostitution does not exst, Q.E.D...

...It had to provide a dogma, an anchor of doctrinal security--but dogma, precisely because it represents not a program, but a statement of ultimate confidence, cannot function as instrument of practical social analysis...

...Frayed maybe...

...Those, too, are real and autonomous...

...I simply refuse to accept, in silence, or in peace, your eviction from the Jesuits, accomplished in the way we have witnessed...

...Similarly, the ritualization of Party work has been amply demonstrated by every aspect of Communist life, perhaps most clearly by the economic planning which produces plan and counter-plan and then depends on grey-market enterprise to keep the economy functioning...

...It had to provide an object of worship, a dogma and a ritual...

...It is on this basis that progressivism can build its program and its relation to religion...

...In contrast to the elaborate hierarchy of dignity which creeps even into the lowest religious denomination, they adopted the title "comrade," experimented with abolition of rank in their armies, sought to equalize incomes, and insisted throughout on the humanity of their leaders...

...It had to provide the perspective of ritual--but in so doing, it ceased t o ' be effective as social practice...

...To speak of the effect overstates the case: casual relations would be difficult to trace...

...In this sense Feuerbach writes that politics must become our religion: rather than glorify God, human effort must be directed to glorifying the human...

...Progress cannot solve the eternal mystery of being human---but it can solve its temporal problems...

...Or, in Feuerbach's terms, when politics becomes our religion, what is the effect on politics...

...Socialist strategies may well have become deificatory, dogmatic and ritualistic precisely because they failed to recognize the reality and autonomy of the religious dimension of experience...

...Conversely, strategies of progress draw the line too late----driving themselves into murderous fury by trying to change what cannot be changed...

...Just as Marxist ideas remain repressive as long as they are the exclusive property of a Marxist party in power, so religious ideas in the hands of established churches have had a profoundly regressive effect on Western social development...

...The birth of the new is paid for with the death of the old-and that dimension of loss remains as a perennial source of need for reconciliation...

...Clement Attlee is said to have described a socialist as an Englishman with a Bible...

...God's answer to Job is a classic instance: it does not solve Job's predicament, nor does it answer his questions-it solves no problem...

...The changing attitudes of socialists towards religion is an indication...

...My life is subject to an infinite number of contingencies, fortunes good and ill, which even the most earnest and effective wishing and striving cannot change...

...During thirteen to fifteen years of studies when the kids are outside looking in, it's a way of huddling, coping...

...Our editorial on the subject appeared in the September 20 issue...

...The decision to show you to the door is intolerable from every point of view--ethical, human, Christian...

...His most recent book is Lights On in the House of the Dead: A Prison Diary (Doubleday...

...The victorious Communist Party, in Russia and a generation later in countries which came under Russian sway in the wake of the Second World War, embarked on a systematic, self-conscious war against God...

...Social change requires human leaders, subject to correction--not deified God-figures like Stalin and Mao...

...But there is an intriguing concomitant variation: the increasing secularization of spiritual life has been quite clearly accompanied by an increasing ecclesiastieization of the Party...

...In seeking to fill the religious need, the Party became a very warped, oppressive church, while ceasing to function as an effective instrument of social change...

...Since democracy involves the recognition that the things which are Caesar's are rei publicae, this means leaving to human effort the entire dimension of human problems and their solution, human progress...

...The familiar fact of this shift is significant precisely because Communism and religion are genuinely different and do represent fundamentally different strategies...

...As such, it is legitimate--to pray instead of working is vicious...

...among members of her congregation, there was an agreement in favor of "working things out," with the intractable, (the prophetic...

...Religion finally represents humans' most profound strategy for coming to terms with that which cannot be changed...

...Moreover, I find it impossible to make even the smallest grain of sense out of the turmoil of the past weeks, except in the light of our friendship, our common and sweaty dedication to sanity, and our love of the Society of Jesus...

...There are hints of a parallel development in religion as well...

...with priests and nuns, with people from all sides...

...Penicillin can change the course of my illness, but it cannot change the fact that I am ill...

...In contrast to the dogmatic cast of religious teachings, they insisted on the functional, practical, "scientific" nature of their beliefs...

...On September 5, Father Eamon Taylor, S.J., New York Provincial, wrote a letter to his Province: (published in the National Jesuit News): " . . . Today I have a painJul duty, that of informing you that Fr...

...A strategy of progress, if it is not to be caught up in the murderous attempt to be God, must render unto God the things that are God's...

...Religion is not a substitute for a strategy of progress, but it may well be its precondition...

...To be sure, religious ideologies have always includedn and at times stressedmthe practical aspects of their message, The Bible has Jesus answer the Baptist's question whether Jesus is the Messiah by pointing to concrete solutions to actual problems--the blind see, the lame walk and the poor have the good news preached to them...

...In the early nineteenth century, the church turned directly against all efforts for social change...

...The function of ritual is closely similar...

...THE EDITORS Dear Brother Joe, For friendship's sake, for my own sanity, for love of the Society of Jesus in trouble---for these and for many other reasons I want to write you this letter...

...Perhaps it was an echo of a growing awareness, even in the midst of revolutionary victory, that political movements come, have their day and disappear, creatures of passing socio-economic constellations (as Marx recognized) while religious faith, perennially human, goes on forever...

...To the ills that flesh is heir to it opposes the efficacy of human action...

...Feuerbach's reading may have been schematic and religiously naive, but it was politically accurate enough to be convincing...

...His recent publications include Masaryk on Marx and The Victors and the Vanquished (with Heda Kovaly), published by Horizon Press...

...The adage, "ora et labora," is well borne in mind not only for what it includes, but also for the order in which it does so...

...Epictetus starts his Manual with the famous sentence: "There are some things humans can change, others they cannot...

...Everything, even death, faith and morals, is a subject to strategy of progress, to the extent to which it constitutes a problem...

...I can cope and strive in spite of defeat to the extent to which I can make peace with the brute fact of tragedy, injustice, the arbitrariness of things...

...Religion functions as logotherapy...

...It is not subject to shifting needs and demands of the temporal, rather, it represents something very much like a verbalization of eternity...

...That this shift in fact took place is too familiar to require elaboration...

...There is the fact that I was born when I was, am confronted with a life and world I did not choose, face a death I did not choose...

...At the end, when so much wreckage lay around, when So many had departed, the bond still lies on us...

...Having successfully eliminated the church as significant factor in the functioning of the society, the Party in turn became ecclesiasticized...

...But in the same way intellectuals frequently consider this as a typically proletarian response, Catholics as a Protestant one...

...Finally, in contrast to the formal, ritual nature of religious performance, they insisted that their own activities are totally non-symbolic, practical, geared to actual transformation of an actual world...

...Ritual makes joy, tragedy, and even daily life humanly manageable by transposing them from the level of problem-solving action to that of ageless play-acting--rituall--sub specie aeternitatis...

...A mature strategy of progress may well depend on the recognition that the two are distinct...

...Specifically, Communists emphatically rejected both relative and absolute deification...

...What concerns us is not the "objective cause" but the human function of religion: the need which it meets and the unique way in which it meets it...

...It did so--but in the process it became ineffective as an instrument of social change...

...If they are denied one form of religious strategy, they will invent another because the root of worship is not unresolved problems or ecclesiastical institution, but an intrinsic human need...

...AN OPEN LETTER TO JOE O'ROURKE DANIEL BERRIGAN To hell with the glory of God: or, how we got rid o| Joe As most oJ our readers know, on August 20, Father Joseph O'Rourke, S.J., agah~st the directives of his New York religious superiors, baptized a child in Marlboro, Massachusetts when the child had been re[used baptism because o] his mother's stand on an abortion issue...

...The three distinguishing marks of religion which we mentioned, worship, dogma, ritual, all have their place in the context of religious strategy...