Absolutes and My Grandfather's Aunt Sarah
DAVIS, ROBERT GORHAM
Thinking Aloud ABSOLUTES AND MY GRANDFATHER'S AUNT SARAH BY ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS When my grandfather Davis' little sister died, their Aunt Sarah on Cape Cod was saddened but relieved. Young...
...Bloom and Kolakowski blame the Enlightenment for its attack on absolutes...
...They could blame as readily the Protestant Reformation or Renaissance Humanism...
...They put aside sectarianism and welcomed cooperation with all men of good will in the fight against fascism...
...A look at the dictionary explains their problem...
...Of Mrs...
...Kolakowski writes in Religion that "Dostoyevsky's famous dictum, 'If there is no God, everything is permissible,' is valid not only as a moral rule...
...Kolakowski says that only through religion, through the" spiritual realm,' can we assure respect for life and the human person...
...but also as an epistemological principle...
...Since the existence of other nations with other beliefs (or other gods) puts absolutes in question, wars become holy...
...To answer Abolitionist arguments our Southern slaveholders had only to quote the Bible...
...This means that the legitimate use of theconcept'truth' ...is possible only on the assumption of an absolute Mind...
...Questioners in the Iran-contra hearings discreetly avoided using the word "fascist" for William J. Casey and Oliver L. North, despite their outright contempt for Congress and the Constitution, their love of plotting and military adventure, their invocation of God and anti-Communism to justify illegality...
...I had joined the party, however, just when the Moscow show trials made a mockery of these formulas...
...The solution, each says, is a return to absolutes...
...With plenty of Old Testament precedents in mind —God's punishment of King David, for instance—she wrote that the killing was a sign of God's "tender love...
...God is angry with Sin," she continues, especially in "a man loved and revered as our savior from slavery...
...Robert Gorham Dants, Columbia University professor emeritus of English, is a longtime contributor to the NL...
...So do I. I naturally think of them when I try to imagine what my own path back to the absolutes might be if Bloom and Kolakowski converted me...
...With Kolakowski, the noted Polish philosopher, it is very different...
...Sheneeds to be humbled...
...support...
...The response of the American Communist Party to the Hitler-Stalin Pact completed the lesson...
...that we may learn to live and obey his will...
...My given reasons were the usual ones and strongly felt: the rise of Hitler, the failure of the Western governments to support the Loyalists in Spain, the inefficiency and inequity of the capitalist system...
...This happens in Left and Right absolutisms alike...
...The Crusaders sacked Byzantium because it did not recognize the Roman Pope...
...Absolutes are irrational...
...As a result, I lost faith in the benevolence of a God who, though he had complete power to intervene, answered prayers, if atall, so very selectively...
...If the community is strong and unified enough, it can enforce absolutes by indoctrinating the young, banning contrary views and prosecuting heretics...
...And from what I knew of world history and saw happening later still in the Middle East, I could not believe that irrational religious absolutes were any less dangerous...
...Dogmas breed heresies, but in an absolutist state heretics can be consigned to the flames...
...The history of religious wars hardly bears this out...
...Only the Cape Cod branch held firm...
...She thought of the young son who was taken by God from the Lincolns even as little Ellen Maria had been taken from her own sister...
...All, of course, claimed to be speaking for God...
...My great-great-aunt Sarah died in 1902, siyears before 1 was born...
...The driving reason, though, was intellectual hubris...
...I knew from the family papers what agonies of fear of eternal damnation some of the Harwich people—especially children—suffered as they faced death...
...Religion is "a lived allegiance to an order of taboos" that provides the " immovable pillar of any viable moral system.' My ancestors, absolutists all, came to Massachusetts in the 17 th century as Separatists or Independents of Calvinist persuasion...
...While still a boy I lapsed from Unitarianism into complete infidelity...
...In The Closing of the American Mind Bloom urges the restoration of religious terms like "evil" and "soul" without facing up to the problem of religion as such...
...She asks if it was not God's justice to permit "those vile assassins to succeed in their wicked plot to show His displeasure in those who called themselves Christians for participating in such scenes of pleasure,' meaning the theater, that "blind the mind and alienate the heart from God...
...If we consult history, as Bloom and Kolakowski urge us to do, how many beliefs do we find that have never been doubted or questioned...
...My two great-great-uncles, though they spoke of her sentimentally on public occasions, worried about their own mother's salvation...
...Judaism, by its very existence, denies the Christian absolute, the divinity of Jesus...
...Or even the great questioner Socrates, whom the Athenian authorities put to death for impiety...
...If we want "absolutes"—the key term in his New Leader interview—we have to be prepared to go the whole religious route...
...He said so explicitly in his 1982 volume, Religion, and less explicitly in his 1986 Jefferson Lecture, "The Idolatry of Politics...
...As a capitalized noun "Absolute" means "the ultimate basis of all thought and being," a blank that philosophers like Bradley and Hegel and theologians like Barth and Tillich, disagreeing with each other, fill in as they please...
...Instead of promoting cooperation on problems that nations face in common and that threaten human existence itself, they urge, just when ethnic and religious conflicts are ablaze all over the world, that we ourselves return once more to Separatist myths and traditions...
...I thought about my great-great-aunt Sarah after I read Allan Bloom's phenomenal best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, and even more after I read "Recovering the Absolute: ATalk with Leszek Kolakowski" in The New Leader of September 7. Kolakowski is quoted on the dust jacket of Bloom's book as one of its heartiest endorsers...
...Clerical fascist regimes, ruling in the name of moral order, survived in Spain and Portugal long after World War II...
...Exactly what are these absolutes to which, in his New Leader interview, Kolakowski so insistently urges that we return...
...In 19321 set myself up in business as a Proletarian Critic, hectoring my betters for not seeing the light as Marx and I saw it...
...But I possess a chest full of journals and letters in which she and her siblings talk about God and morality with the thoroughgoing absoluteness that Kolakowski demands...
...She is too stiffnecked," one wrote the other...
...Certainly none of them had heard of critics of the Enlightenment like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, but they would have agreed with Bloom and Kolakowski that from the Deistic rationalism of the Enlightenment sprang our nihilistic immorality...
...At the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935 the world Communist parties announced a new Popular Front policy...
...No more absolutes...
...But the critical spirit that made me reject theism was not strong enough to preserve me from absolutism of another kind...
...But Kolakowski understands, as Bloom docs not, what such a return requires...
...They come and go in South and Central America, often with covert or open U.S...
...Everything fitted with everything else, and all for the good of mankind: action and theory, man and nature, past and future, art and economics, freedom and necessity, myself and history...
...Then I stopped believing in the very existence of a God who seemed so indifferent to the vast killing that went on at the time and throughout the century...
...Applied to beliefs it means "certain," "not to be doubted or questioned...
...Without Christ we are helpless against it...
...A lifetime of church attendance and good works meant nothing without compelling inner evidence of God's grace —arbitrarily granted, or arbitrarily withheld...
...For theCape Cod family Unitarianism was anti-Christian and meant eternal separation from God...
...Now He has taken away her husband in the midst of theatrical excitement.' My own case some 60 years later justified Aunt Sarah's fears for Ellen Maria...
...Kant failed in the attempt and no one has succeeded since...
...It does not help to have philosophers respond to the mood of the times by attacking rationalism and calling Enlightenment liberalism "pernicious" and "destructive...
...It is difficult enough for human beings under pressure to be rational...
...What makes beliefs absolute is not their credibility, it is their role in a belief system that is the basis of a church or community...
...Such acknowledgment of God's rule even by heathens and herd ics would be a satisfaction to my Aunt Sarah, vol like most of her satisfactions—and very appropriately in this case—it would be a grim one...
...I resigned...
...The effect can only be to make cooperation and compromise more difficult within the United States and in our diplomacy abroad...
...Young Ellen Maria's parents in Cambridge had planned to send her to a Unitarian Sunday School...
...On Saturday April 15, 1865, the day after Abraham Lincoln's assassination in Ford's Theater, Aunt Sarah reflected on the tragedy in her journal...
...Partisans of absolutes are chary of giving examples...
...As the chief supporters of the Congregational Church in Harwich they made its preachers toe a strictly orthodox line...
...But alarmist fears and accusations aside, it is obvious that the slogan "Back to Absolutes" gives a strong boost to the intransigent and irrational Right...
...My ancestors took religion seriously...
...Someoneclose to me for whom I prayed— and for whom indeed the whole church prayed —was killed in battle in 1918...
...I was against fascism, but even more was I dazzled by the chance to comprehend history as a concrete totality according to the vision Marx had adapted from Hegel and taught to Lenin...
...Applied to governments, the adjective, uncapitalized, means "not limited by constitutional provisions...
...Moral absolutes, we are told, cannot be attained by reason...
...It is disturbing, therefore, to find Leszek Kolakowski, author of a magisterial three-volume dissection of Marxism, contending that though the Enlightenment helped for a time, its long run effects were "baneful, " and that we can counter Leftist absolutisms established in the names of Marx and Hegel only by establishing Rightist absolutisms in the name of God...
...Religious and moral absolutes hold for those who believe them, not for those who don't...
...Of immortality he says, "If the course of the universe and of human affairs has no meaning related to eternity, it has no meaning at all...
...God in his infinite mercy and wisdom," Aunt Sarah wrote in her journal, "has taken Ellen Maria into His own Sunday School...
...It was a relief to be born free of such doctrines...
...The lesson went deeper when absolutisms ran murderously amok under Cambodia's Pol Pot and China's Mao Zedong...
...My ancestors had their absolutes, but they were different from those of the Church of England, which in turn had repudiated the absolutist claims of the Pope...
...I became a pragmatist, pluralist, humanist, Democrat, appreciating the safeguards against absolutism written into the Constitution by Deists and men of the Enlightenment...
...In 19371 joined the Communist Party...
...There was Original Sin too, of course, but that was always there...
...Belief involved too many terrible contradictions...
...Religious myth, Kolakowski says, "including its metaphysical component," can be understood only through "real participation in a religious community...
...Such ideas 1 literally inherited...
...Both men blame the Enlightenment, of which Unitarianism was one product, for the moral relativism thai corrupts our culture...
...We experience them fully only in traditions, rituals, taboos, myths, and direct encounters with God...
...Domestic sects will be encouraged to hold stubbornly, perhaps violently, to their unreconcilable positions—to cling to them not because of arguable merits that might persuade others, but as unchangeable moral absolutes ordained by God...
...By the mid-19th century, seveneighths of them had turned Unitarian...
...The early Christians disagreed over what Mosaic absolutes were still binding— circumcision, for instance...
...He wants students to have read the Bible, yet gives us no idea where he himself stands on God, immortality and Jesus...
...Lincoln she asks, "Can that wife, that mother, now continue to train her children in the ballroom or the opera—since God withheld her purpose once from the Inaugural Ball by taking away her son...
...When the Crusaders captured Jerusalem they killed all its resident Jews...
Vol. 70 • December 1987 • No. 19
