Reinhold Niebuhr: Complex Synthesis:
MARSHALL, CHARLES BURTON
Reinhold Niebuhr: Complex Synthesis Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics. Edited by Harry R. Davis and Robert C. Good. Scribners. 364 pp. $6.50. The Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr. By Gordon Harland. Oxford,...
...As Harland puts it, politics has been "the very center of Niebuhr's thought and work, his daily meat and drink...
...He makes good use of critical estimates of Niebuhr by contemporaries...
...Order is balanced against justice as are their perversions, tyranny and anarchy...
...The substance is pure Niebuhr—the sort of major and inclusive work the author himself might have produced if he were a systematic and scholarly writer aiming at perfection instead of being disposed to write in a hurry under the compulsion of deep concern over living issues...
...The Republican platform is also replete with similar substitutes for hard thought...
...The dominant view could not be fixed into any category...
...The nutshells into which he puts his ideas are often on the prototype of a black walnut—hard digging for rich meat...
...It is full of dialectical cantilevers...
...The rest elucidates other facets of Niebuhr's intellect—notably his concepts of love, justice and the meaning of history...
...Fortunately, two of these are Professors Harry R. Davis of Beloit College and Robert C. Good of the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research...
...By meticulous sorting and reordering they have achieved the fullest measure of continuity, clarity and completeness...
...The years are closing in...
...Anyway, it took but that one sermon to make me a Niebuhr follower of sorts...
...6.00...
...To their compendium Harland's essay of appraisal, The Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, is an admirable complement...
...It was not an easy sermon...
...My own awareness of Niebuhr's ideas started 25 years ago...
...Idealism is set in tension with realism as are their extremes, sentimentalism and cynicism...
...Here and there they iron out a redundancy or eliminate a passage of lapsed importance, but they do not intrude at all...
...On the advice of a colleague, I went to hear Niebuhr preach at Harvard...
...The Gifford lectures resulted in the only one among Niebuhr's works that could be called systematic: The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941), a work which emphasizes the theological content of his thinking...
...At the time of his being selected for the Gifford lectures at the University of Edinburgh two decades ago, someone described Niebuhr as "intellectually . . . head and shoulders . . . legs and ankles above any other American...
...I should not dispute that estimate...
...It took a reading of Davis and Good and then of Harland to show me how much of him I had missed...
...To do the searching necessary for a rounded view of his thought has been beyond the time and facilities of all but a few scholarly devotees...
...So long as this is the case, Reinhold Niebuhr cannot be spared...
...I can think of no one else whose judgments stand up so soundly under the test of being reread...
...Davis and Good make this summarizing observation: "The architecture of Niebuhr's political and ethical thought is anything but simple...
...Harland takes care to trace the views Niebuhr arrived at and then outgrew along the way, including his early flirtation with pacifism, and dwells upon the subject's development in relation to the scene around him...
...Necessity is juxtaposed with freedom, possibility with impossibility, love with law, sin with grace, history with eternity...
...The involutions of Niebuhr's thought are matched only by the somewhat Teutonic complicacy of his syntax...
...170 articles and several heretofore unpublished manuscripts, the editors seem clearly to have conserved the best and have served him well...
...Davis and Good have aimed not to trace the evolution of Niebuhr's thought but rather to state in full the positions arrived at...
...It even pays respects to the notion of fostering peace by setting up a Peace Agency...
...Such a man should not rest...
...Roughly half of it corresponds to the subject matter of the Davis and Good volume...
...It was their eminently useful idea to gather and preserve in one place the essence of Niebuhr's political writings...
...Reviewed by Charles Burton Marshall Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research THE DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM trumpets "world peace through world law" just as if the words amounted to a proposition in policy...
...Their introduction to Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics makes a point of the author's cooperation and participation in the editorial effort...
...While time remains, the world will need all it can get of the astringent, critical wisdom he has been distilling into articles and books for more than 40 years...
...Drawing upon 16 books...
...The dispersion of such a wealth of ideas as Neibuhr has produced involves a risk of devaluation...
...But he denies being a theologian at all— one might call him an applied theologian...
...I started at once on the two of his books then in vogue —Moral Man and Immoral Society and Reflections on the End of an Era—and in the years since have tried to keep up with all of his writing...
...Oxford, 298 pp...
...No one of these perspectives may be ignored or minimized without damaging Niebuhr's complex synthesis...
...That descriptive phrase—"anything but simple"—puts the matter moderately...
...in his urgency for a better approximation of justice, he seemed to stand among liberals...
...Drew University's Gordon Harland describes him as seeking "to understand and present the historic Christian faith that its insights and resources might bring illumination and healing to the frightening problems and perplexities of our age...
...The whole is suspended in marvelous tension like some Gothic cathedral that rises and is held fast only by the elaboration of opposing forces...
...The theme, based on verses from Paul and revolving around man's predicament in being impelled by a concept of perfection beyond reach, did not resolve in any formula to assure Tightness of righteousness...
...High-sounding, question-begging phrases clutter the realm of public affairs, and sophistries continue to be puffed up quicker than human intelligence can puncture them...
...His discounting of man's perfectibility seemed to place him among conservatives...
...The structure of the discourse was rigorous— permitting no moment's diversion from the line of reasoning, and employing no flourishes of wit or metaphoric style to coax the audience...
...Man as creature is counterpoised with man as creator...
...The presuppositions of liberalism and conservatism are laid against each other, while the policies of socialism and laissez-faire are held in delicate balance...
...An account given me by one of the editors laid a different stress—an absence of pride of authorship, a complete freedom from considerations of sensitivity, a humble and almost indifferent willingness to defer to the editors on what to save and what to cast out...
...one of the most instructive and amusing portions deals with Holtan P. Ode-gard's attempt in Sin and Science to rebut Niebuhr from the standpoint of optimistic scientism...
Vol. 43 • August 1960 • No. 32
