REVIEWS

...or, as Kolakowski notes with Augustine, that evil is essentially a privation of good rather than a positive quality...

...Please write either to the Business Manager or DISSENT...

...Encounter, Fall 1974), deserves serious notice...

...Theoretically, both options deny either the perfection or the omnipotence of God...

...Less obviously, that is often the failing of socialists in general...

...But the perennial reality of evil and the perennial value of freedom are truths our own reason can recognize...

...It would seem crucial to recognize that freedom is not a concession to human imperfection, in which guise even the Communist party is at times reluctantly willing to tolerate it, but rather that freedom itself is the perfection of being human...

...10023...

...Once the truth is known, error can claim no rights, even though it might be tolerated on grounds of charity or social convenience...

...The exercise in translation is crucial...

...Incidentally, he is also proving himself a major thinker in his own right, not only in the margins of East European scholasticism...

...On the one hand, as against the Manichean conception of evil as coprimeval with good, the Church insisted on the derivative nature of evil by stressing that the Fall is not identical with the Creation but subsequent to it...

...Granted, that has been the traditional position of the Church of Rome...

...It is at this point that the Kolakowski thesis, unexceptionable in its realism with respect to human fallibility, becomes somewhat disquieting...

...All too many Marxist theoreticians who, like Kolakowski, achieved stature as internal critics of Marxism in Eastern Europe disappeared into obscurity in the West because they could not become anything else...

...It is not simply a matter of tolerating freedom because the truth has not been found—or until it shall be found...

...Kolakowski, a Polish philosopher currently living as an exile, raises a question by no means unfamiliar in socialist writings— is maximalism counterproductive?—and gives the familiar social democratic answer—yes...

...On the other hand, as against the Pelagian contention that evil is entirely contingent and eradicable by human effort, the Church affirmed the perennial quality of evil pro statu isto (" in the present state"), between the Fall and the Last Judgment...

...The Church of Poland, I presume, will learn to live with Gierek, the Italian Communist party will make its peace with the Church, and, as the confrontation becomes a dialectic, the social change it brings about can become a synthesis...

...This is why I think it crucial to argue, in Kolakowski's chosen idiom, that the doctrine of original sin presents a truth accessible to unaided natural reason...

...would help keep the project alive...

...It is God's healing grace that must be (and, incidentally, has been) revealed...

...Again, when the truth has been found, error has no more rights...

...What is remarkable is that Kolakowski does not make the familiar point in the familiar socialist idiom...

...Kolakowski's exercise in doctrinal theology does what we all need to do: recognize that "problems of socialism" are but one rather parochial formulation of perennial human problems...

...If evil is not really bad, we need not struggle against it—all we need is to approximate the divine perspective in which evil is but a paradoxical part of the perfection of the whole...

...But once the truth had been found and stated by the Holy Father, speaking ex cathedra, with the prefix Ipse dixit and the conclusion anathema sit, there can be no more freedom...

...Christians have traditionally held that evil is not rooted in the very essence of things and so can and must be struggled against, but that it is an inescapable characteristic of our present state, so that we should not expect the ultimate victory in this age...

...that evil came into the world through humans...

...I should like to bring to the attention of our readers one of the most valuable magazines in the world today, Index, a quarterly published in London, edited by Michael Scammell, and devoted entirely to articles and documentation concerning violations of human rights, artistic freedom, and freedom of speech and press in all countries...

...American readers can subscribe by writing to INDEX, Post Office Box 746, Ansonia Station, New York, N.Y...

...But given our experience with self-appointed redeemers, it seems most precarious to derive justification for freedom from human imperfection...

...A dialogue between the Stalinist wing of the Soviet CP and the most conservative Leonine wing of the Roman Catholic church might be dialectically neater, but it is not likely to be very productive...

...Thus Kolakowski returns to the orthodox position and concludes that we need a Church to remind us of the perennial and universal reality of evil (a task that he fears the Church will shun for the sake of popularity) as well as a socialist movement that will keep us from lapsing into quietism...

...This leads us to our original question: is the doctrine of original sin a truth accessible to unaided reason—or must it be revealed to us...

...The recognition of human fallibility—original sin—is crucial to save us from hybris, but to justify freedom solely on grounds of human imperfection offers a perennial temptation to all who think that, in virtue of special grace or special gnosis, they have escaped that condition...

...Doing so will only delay reply...

...A sworn and systematic enemy of censorship, Index offers vast quantities of material each quarter on its chosen theme, and it does this with responsibility, accuracy, and verve...

...It is all too depressingly similar to the Communist position that the Party must support freedom under conditions of class struggle, before its victory, but that there can be no freedom for dissent after "the victorious workers' and peasants' revolution under the leadership of the most enlightened segment of the proletariat --the Communist party...

...Specifically, Kolakowski poses the question of maximalism as the question of whether evil can ever be absorbed, or eradicated without remnant, by the good...

...Though it might sound strange in these pages, that, in his chosen idiom, is the question we should have to put to Leszek Kolakowski...

...THIS, of course, runs smack against traditional Catholic dogma—and as Kolakowski amply demonstrates, there are parts of that dogma, specifically the doctrine of original sin, which we dare not jettison, lest we fall prey to hybris...

...We need translation...

...Reaffirmation of IN THE MAGAZINES 197 original sin may be a short-term corrective, but at the same time it reaffirms that temptation...

...It sounds reasonable: being fallible, we cannot be dogmatic: dissent might prove to be the truth...

...One strategy is the neoplatonic contention that, colloquially speaking, evil is not all that bad...

...A genuine dialogue is far more likely IN THE KOLAKOWSKI SCHEMA, this should be assured by the recognition of original sin...

...Each time I read an issue, I feel tempted to reprint several of its articles in DISSENT, and only the problem of space prevents this...

...He is showing us the perennial human reality behind a parochial socialist formulation of a problem, and showing us a way out of our parochialism...

...His recent article, "Can the Devil be saved...

...valuable...

...Socialists should keep the maximalist vision alive as a yardstick for their efforts, but they should expect only amelioration of particular conditions...

...The traditional Christian answer is rather more subtle than the various secular reformulations...

...If you can't do it yourself, urge your library to take Index...

...I met its editor last year, a lively fellow who has done a remarkable job, and from his account it's clear that even a few score additional subscriptions in the U.S...

...But the magazine is so valuable that it merits the support of all believers in freedom—freedom in the U.S...

...Plurality of views is permissible when we do not know what is the truth...

...practically, one leads to quietism, the other to tyranny...

...Both of these options—as Church fathers, councils, and Kolakowski realized—are destructive and rightly condemned by the Church as heretical...

...Instead, he chooses the idiom of Roman Catholic doctrinal theology...

...by human will and effort, without remnant, and in the present age...

...Conversely, if evil is bad but eradicable, we need not only struggle against it, but to conquer it, destroy it without remnant, settling for nothing short of perfection...

...All things come from God and return in a cosmic harmony into him, enriching his perfection— even if from our finite perspective it is sometimes difficult to realize it...

...Against this background Kolakowski points out what the Church has known since Chalcedon: that the very assertion of the primacy of good creates a temptation to dispense with the reality of evil even in the present state...

...He is far more judicious about the Communist party—as an exmember, he knows from experience that, in order to engage in dialogue, the Party must be willing to admit at least a theoretical possibility of its own fallibility...

...and the U.S.S.R., in Chile and Cuba, in China and Uruguay...

...Since, however, humans are neither perfectly good nor perfectly wise, that quest for perfection can never proceed beyond the burning of the imperfect—vide the Inquisition and the Gulag...

...But I believe the translation we most need is not one from the formal doctrinal terms of one orthodoxy into those of another, but from the terms of doctrine into the terms of philosophy and, ultimately, into human experience...

...Though free from the constraints of East European regimes, they could not free themselves of East European_ conceptual conventions...

...For us, too, it is crucially important to break free if we ever wish to speak to anyone besides each other...

...The subscription price is $8...

...Kolakowski, though he identifies himself as a nonbeliever, in fact expresses a distinct preference for the most conservative trends in the Church...

...Kolakowski's translation, of course, remains Business Correspondence Anyone writing to DISSENT about subscriptions, bundle orders, or other business matters is requested please not to address his letter to the Editor...

...Freedom is what being human is all about...

...Given our experience with intolerance, I think it imperative to recognize the universal, perennial reality of evil in all of us...

...but this would also force us to treat freedom as a concession to human fallibility, to be tolerated only until the truth is revealed—as in the case of original sin—and so expose us to the millennial temptation...

...Yet any practicing Church member can assure him that the same is true of the Church...

...More explicitly, Kolakowski argues that, given the recalcitrance of the social medium, maximalist programs can be realized only in appearance, and even that at an unacceptable cost in coercion...

...In itself, hardly a startling thesis...

...The other strategy is Pelagian: evil is really bad, but it can be eradicated 196 between a John XXIII and an Alexander Dubcek, since both partners have to be able to admit their own fallibility...

...Yet deriving the need for freedom from human fallibility is the most disturbing element in the Kolakowski thesis...

...If it is the latter, then the Kolakowski translation of the problem of maximalism into doctrinal terms would be an essential step in freeing socialist thought from its utopian bind...

...Given the division of labor it proposes, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the appropriate partner for the dialogue is not a party like the British Labour party, steeped in nonconformist Protestantism, but rather the Communist party and the Catholic church or, more specifically yet, the hard-liners in each...