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T. S. Eliot’s Christian Society: Still Relevant Today?

The intellectual world of the 1920s was treated to a delicious irony. A pioneer of the modernist movement, T. S. Eliot, known for his fragmented, elusive poetry, became, in his own words, a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion." The author of The Waste Land, that obscure work of dark despair, began to accept assignments from the Anglican Church, tried his hand at Christmas verse and even wrote a series of captions for a patriotic exhibition of war photographs.

At this time, Eliot also shifted the focus of his intellectual energy from poetry to social theory. He truly believed that the very existence of Western civilization was threatened. The Waste Land had poignantly described the decay of civilization, and subsequent events only heightened Eliot’s sense of crisis. Communism arose in the East and fascism on the Continent.

The peace agreement between Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 confirmed Eliot’s worst fears about the weakness of the West. "Our whole national life seemed fraudulent," he remarked after the Munich pact. What future was there for the West other than uninterrupted decay or a descent into some form of authoritarianism?

Eliot knew of only one alternative: a vigorous rediscovery of what it means to live Christianly. He believed that unless England and America recovered a form of Christian society, they would fall into the paganism that had overtaken Germany and Russia.

Eliot’s social writings called into question two of the most sacred of sacred cows of Western thought: liberalism and democracy. He believed that liberalism was a corrosive force, for it provided people with no positive values. A liberal society is a negative society, he said; it does not work toward any end, it merely creates a vacuum.

Eliot distrusted individualism in both literature and politics. The Romantic movement’s reverence for "the Inner Light" he scorned as the "most untrustworthy and deceitful guide that ever offered itself to wandering humanity." Convinced of the truth of the doctrine of original sin, Eliot looked to theology for a solution to the human dilemma; he sought a salvation not through reform or education, but through grace. Though some intellectuals might be able to order their lives around arbitrary moral principles, the great mass of society, Eliot thought, needed something more substantive. "The religious habits of the race are still very strong, in all places, at all times, and for all people. There is no humanistic habit; humanism is, I think, merely the state of mind of a few persons, in a few places, at a few times."

In a 1932 essay "Christianity and Communism" (The Listener) , Eliot argued that only the Christian scheme made a place for those values "which I maintain or perish, the belief, for instance, in holy living and holy dying, in sanctity, chastity, humility, austerity." He took his case to the British public in a series of BBC broadcast talks. Russian communism is a religion, he said, and religion can only be fought with another religion. Only the church can galvanize a united response to the chaos of civilization. In a radio talk addressed to Germany after World War II, he called Christianity the most important unifying factor in Europe and said that only against the background of Christian faith does Western thought have any significance. "I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith," he concluded.

To critique an entire civilization is one thing; to present a reasonable alternative is quite another. Eliot’s proposed cure emerged in three books: After Strange Gods (1934) , The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1943).

In these books, which show a progression from virulence to tolerance, Eliot gave some indication of why he had come to believe so strongly in tradition. monarchy and a state church. Christian tradition, for him, was a counterweight to the emptiness of liberalism and the rigidity of conservatism. G. K. Chesterton defined tradition as "democracy extended through time," and for Eliot, tradition offered the advantages of democracy -- diverse viewpoints and a protection against tyranny -- nestled in the cocoon of time. Apart from tradition, democracy could too easily degenerate into hysteria. Eliot saw this as a particular danger in industrial society, which creates "people detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words a mob. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined" (Idea, p. 21) To guard against these moblike tendencies, Eliot lent his support to a class system.

Eliot thought the ruling class should not be determined by lineage or by economics but by common interests. Yet these elites must be attached to some class, for Eliot thought the family was the primary channel for transmitting cultural values; he doubted whether education or political institutions alone could transmit. values. In a BBC interview in 1958, Eliot concluded that "when one considers the classless society, even so far as it has adumbrated itself in the present situation of the world – its mediocrity, its reduction of human beings to the mass . . .the reduction which Plato foresaw, the reduction to a mass ready to be controlled, manipulated, by a dictator or an oligarchy: observing all those things one is emotionally disposed toward a class society."

But how could Christian values be disseminated by a Christian upper class apart from some form of oppressive rule? The most practicable idea Eliot set forth on this score was what he called the Community of Christians. He noted the peril of specialization in modern culture, which tends to isolate religious thinkers from those in philosophy, art, politics and science. The Community of Christians would bring together the most fertile minds from various fields for the express purpose of defining Christian values for society at large. It would serve as a "Church within the Church." Eliot did not insist that all members of such a community be Christian believers, only that the rulers accept the Christian faith as the system under which they were to govern.

Eliot participated in several groups that attempted to be a Community of Christians, and in them he learned the limitations of such a plan. His own groups could rarely agree on practical programs, or even whether it was desirable for them to discuss practical programs. Commonality of Christian commitment did not guarantee any kind of consensus agreement on ethical issues. (To appreciate the problem, imagine a Community of Christians today embracing Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore, Jr., and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin discussing homosexual rights and abortion policies.)

As the years passed, Eliot grew increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of reaching a Christian consensus in the West, resigning himself to the prospect of "centuries of barbarism."

Eliot’s writings on social and economic issues clearly point to underlying spiritual issues. For example, he traced many economic problems back to the moral problem of avarice. Our economic system, he wrote, encourages acquisitive rather than spiritual instincts. He questioned, too, the ethics of the most common investment procedures.

The real issue, he concluded, "is between the secularists and the antisecularists, between those who believe only in values realizable in time and on earth, and those who believe also in values realized only out of time. . . . The danger, for those who start from the temporal end, is Utopianism; settle the problem of distribution -- of wheat, coffee, aspirin or wireless sets -- and all the problems of evil will disappear. The danger, for those who start from the spiritual end, is Indifferentism; neglect the affairs of the world and save as many souls out of the wreckage as possible."

Oddly, however, Eliot paid little attention to previous attempts to create a Christian society -- in the Netherlands, for examole. or in Cromwell’s England, Calvin’s Geneva or even the South Africa of Eliot’s day. Each of these examples reveals some of the inherent dangers that Eliot tended to minimize in light of what he saw as the more immediate threat of paganism.

Ultimately, Eliot’s vision of a Christian society foundered on the issue of pluralism. In After Strange Gods he hinted darkly at the kind of oppression his society might lead to: "What is still more important [than homogeneity of culture] is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of freethinking Jews undesirable." What would happen to such undesirable Jews, or other free-thinkers? Censorship? Repression? Exile?

Similarly, his ideal version of secular education, though it allows for a "proportion" of persons professing other faiths, and for some disbelievers, recommends that these people conform to public Christian values, presumably as determined by the Community of Christians. Eliot himself had tolerance for divergent views (he lobbied strongly on behalf of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, for example) , but would all members of the Christian elite demonstrate such tolerance? History gives little reason for optimism.

Eliot was particularly elusive in discussing the interaction between church and state, the normal contact point between Christian ideals and society. He himself admitted that his observations on this point had limited value outside of England. Eliot believed a state of tension would, and probably should, always exist between church and state, and that individual Christians would feel a dual allegiance. "A higher religion imposes a conflict, a division, torment and struggle within the individual . . . we escape from this strain by attempting to revert to an identity of religion and culture which prevailed at a more primitive stage; as when we indulge in alcohol as an anodyne, we consciously seek unconsciousness" (Notes, p. 68) Typically, Eliot did not attempt to lessen the strain; rather, he saw the church as the "salt of the earth," affecting society at its deepest levels. To accomplish its goal, the church needs a hierarchy: one level to maintain official relations with the state, and another structure in direct contact with the smallest units of the community and also with its think-tank, the Community of Christians.

Few contemporary critics of Eliot’s ideas have disputed his diagnosis of society’s ills, as eloquently presented in his poems and more tendentiously in his essays. But they have doubted the relevancy of his proposed cure. Could the church really enliven society and provide the moral capital to combat its ills? Some have also wondered whether a secular, neutral society might provide better soil for growth in Christian life and values than a uniformly Christian one. Perhaps Christianity works better, and in its purest form, as a minority religion.

Other critics have doubted whether the church has much potential as a carrier of moral values. Is the church any less riddled with hypocrisy, avarice and power-drunkenness than society at large? And didn’t Eliot admit as much in such early poems as "The Hippopotamus" and "Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service"? Has the institutional church changed?

Nevertheless, Eliot’s reflections on society have continuing relevance. Many of the issues he raised are being debated, in different terms, in the United States today. Is the Moral Majority a version of Eliot’s Community of Christians? Should that alleged majority be able to impose its Christian-derived values on a pluralistic society? If not, from where will an alternative set of values emerge? Can we ever expect a set of values to emerge apart from religion? What form should the delicate interplay of church and state take in America? Eliot’s answers to these questions may not be persuasive, but he does show the perennial significance of such questions in a liberal society.

In "Thoughts after Lambeth" Eliot wrote, "The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide."

Eliot surely did his part to redeem the time and help preserve the faith. He did this mainly through his poetry, which so brilliantly displays the moral incoherence of our time, and recounts his own pilgrimage of faith. Eliot’s fervent attempts to reshape the actual structure of civilization came to nought, leaving us with many of the same problems he encountered -- and few commanding answers.

Jose Maria Arguedas: Godfather of Liberationism

An underlying liberation philosophy to validate Latin American theologies of liberation has yet to be extracted from the popular culture. In time, some scholar will no doubt reconstruct it academically Until then, the fiction of José María Arguedas provides some of the most vivid portraits of that culture available, as well as penetrating reflections upon its meaning. Little-known in North America, the Peruvian novelist apparently played an important, though indirect, role in the first flowering of liberation theology. Some observers claim that Arguedas considerably influenced fellow Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez, as both an author and a friend.

The closeness of the relationship between the two men is difficult to establish from the works of either, but the friendship they apparently share does not seem improbable. The Spanish-language edition of A Theology of Liberation is prefaced with an extensive quote from one of Arguedas’s novels and (in every language) the book is dedicated to him. In a commentary on one of Arguedas’s books, Gutiérrez reproduces some personal correspondence from the novelist. For his part, Arguedas writes in passing but appreciatively of Gutiérez in one of the rambling authorial interludes within his last novel. Finally, it was Gutiérez who celebrated Arguedas’s funeral mass in Chimbote after the novelist took his own life in 1969.

Arguedas was born in 1911 in Andahuaylas, southwest of Cuzco in Peru’s southern highlands. As a child, he traveled frequently within the borders of his native country. He graduated from the University of San Marcos in Lima, becoming an ethnologist, with particular expertise in the folklore of highland Indians, the Quechua. He taught at several universities and was a curator of Peru’s National Museum. He also participated actively in Peruvian politics.

Though Arguedas’s literary career was avocational, he still, over a span of 35 years, published a great many scholarly works, numerous short stories, some original poetry and the seven novels that earned him modest acclaim: Agua (1935) , Yawar fiesta (1941) , Diamantes y pedernales (1954) Los rios profundos (1958) , El Sexto (1961) , Todas las sangres (1964) and El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (posthumously, 1971) To date, Los rios profundos (Deep Rivers, University of Texas Press, 1978) and Yawar Fiesta (University of Texas Press, 1985) have been published in English. However, many North American university libraries and even some U.S. public libraries maintain collections of Arguedas’s work in Spanish.

In references sprinkled throughout his books, Gutiérrez cites Arguedas as a source of pivotal insights propelling his theological reflection. Foremost among these insights is the recognition that the Gods of the poor and those of the powerful are very different (The Power of the Poor in History,[Orbis 1983], p. 19). Indeed, the latter is actually an idol (A Theology of Liberation [Orbis, 1973], p. 195). The god of the powerful broods over a "fellowship of the wretched" which he is supposed to have ordained but -- thankfully -- being an idol, cannot really control. So it is that the de facto fellowship of the wretched becomes the means whereby the oppressed forge de jure solidarity. Together, oppressed people succeed in realizing their aims, for their God is not an idol. Rather, he is a Deliverer (We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People [Orbis, 1984], p. 21). The struggle between the poor and the powerful in Peru is the central theme in all Arguedas’s novels. He stands apart from other writers on this theme because he treats it as a spiritual conflict, not merely a sociopolitical reality.

Some commentators suggest that Arguedas’s interpretation of events points to a dialectical clash of cultures. "Culture" is used here in a very broad sense. The word denotes a distinctive world view, expressed in an integrated and fairly stable corpus of ideals and practices. Peru’s antithetical cultures -- the powerful and the poor -- are found on the coast and in the highlands respectively.

As seen in Arguedas’s work, coastal culture is rooted in a calculating, scientific, Western mentality. Materialistic, it exalts empirical rationality and denies the worth of intuition, sentiment or other psychic processes as vehicles to understanding or as guides to behavior. Mechanistic, coastal culture does not value the lives of imprecise human beings. It is highly individualistic, but only insofar as individualism justifies competition. In truth, coastal culture values the group or the mass.

Coastal culture extols religion, but since its basic world view has no real place for God, religion has mainly instrumental worth. It serves as a vehicle for rationalizing and enforcing the status quo. Clerics do not generally fare well in Arguedas’s novels, though Christian laypeople do not escape scrutiny either. The priest/headmaster of the boarding school where much of Los rios profundos is set takes time from his other duties to quell a small uprising in Abancay. His approach is to shame the rebellious campesinos and to put them under threat of damnation.

Owing in no small part to its roots in an Andean cosmology taken over from the Indians, highland culture presents a sharp contrast to that of the coast. The informing image of this world view is water, especially as found in the deep, swift streams that flow through Peru’s mountain gorges. Water binds all animate objects to the earth and is the source of affinity among living things, the ground of a profound, animistic empathy between humans and both animals and plants. More than a totem, however, water is for the Andeans what it was for the Greek philosopher Thales: a symbol for the nature of things. As such it is fluid and only partly comprehensible.

As water is witness, nature is no respecter of persons. Wellborn though he was, Don Braulio Felix is worse than cruel when he diverts his comuneros scarce water during a drought. His act is an outrage against "mama-allpa (Mother Earth) [who] bestows water freely, the same for everyone" (Agua, p. 27) Representing nature in general, water is benign but stern: the same stream that irrigates may also flood; bathing may end in drowning.

Highland culture takes at face value the pervasive sense of smallness that humans feel in the world. Since humans occupy no privileged place within the cosmos, highland culture sanctions a social order appropriate for humanity’s humble estate. At its best, it is cooperative, communitarian and non-acquisitive. Without being individualistic, highland culture assigns great worth to people as the essential elements of community life; in such a situation toleration is almost an absolute. Hence, highland culture is much better able to accommodate deviance and outright madness than is coastal culture.

Arguedas reinforces the foregoing point by offering up a stream of Runyonesque characters, among whom one of the most engaging is Moncada, the mad prophet of Chimbote:

"We are under siege," remarked an onlooker.

"Moncada is wise. Watch what you say, replied another. ‘He speaks the truth of the insane.

Elegantly dressed, Moncada spoke.

‘Here in Peru, from the days of San Martin, we have always been ruled by foreigners. We have never been anything but the servants of aliens.

"The foreigners are like rapists. They promise everything until they have had their ways, then they beat and scorn their victims. And now, today, the foreigners’ bastard children roll over and beg to be violated, themselves! I tell you, their ‘sophistication’ is just a sickness’ [El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, pp. 58-60].

Highlanders hold that insights into the nature of reality come through an impressionistic interweaving of experiences by the combined agencies of reason and intuition. In some sense osmotic, his weaving is most effectively undertaken in a setting such as the Andean countryside, where nature’s superabundance is readily available to human faculties.

In the short story "Orovilca," because the unnamed adolescent protagonist has drunk deep of creation in the highlands, he is wise among his classmates at a coastal boarding school. He tells his fellow students about birds and trees, he recounts myths, and divines signs of the times that they, products of the deserts, neither recognize nor are able to interpret.

The result of intuition is wisdom, which is not something that can be taught; rather, it is gathered. One might even say that, like the personified wisdom of the Hebrew Scriptures, it actually gathers the wise. Wisdom is much more than knowledge, with which it is favorably contrasted in many of Arguedas’s works. Knowledge is a value of coastal culture, something that is embodied apart from knowers and that hires itself out to competing individuals. Wisdom, by comparison, is embodied only in the community which holds it in common. It evolves along with the people who incarnate it. The moral consequences of each are different and provide a clear basis for commitment. Untoward moral implications of coastal culture, with its various presuppositions, suggest that it should be rejected. Knowledge is the product of reason, which structures experience according to the standards of logical coherence, involving denial and exclusion. Thus the picture of the world that passes for knowledge is bound to be distorted. Morality rooted in knowledge alone will thus almost certainly be mistaken in many of its prescriptions. A partisan of coastal culture will no doubt describe it as "streamlined" or "efficient." Arguedas, however, portrays it as self-limited at best. At its worst, it is self-deceptive.

Highland culture is a hybrid, a product of what Arguedas scholar Pedro Trigo calls "transculturation." It represents a mixture of native and European elements. It is mestizo in what, to Arguedas, was the best sense of that word: a mixture dominated by Indian influences but preserving the best of both the Old World and the New.

When whites and Indians first met in the highlands, the clash between their cultures was painful and profound. The resolution of the clash, however, was a happy one. Arguedas clearly hoped that a transculturation similar to that which occurred earlier in Peru’s history would happen again during his lifetime. Whether he sustained the confidence that coastal and highland cultures could be synthesized with so favorable an outcome is open to question.

The answer is judged on how one understands Arguedas’s last novel, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. In previous works – all, with the exception of El Sexto, set in the highlands -- the bearers of highland culture were often vanquished by costales or their minions, but their culture with its values and spirit prevailed. Thus the victory of the oppressors was hollow and short-lived.

Los zorros (as Arguedas called his last book) is disturbingly different from those previous, not nearly so sanguine. The work is a bleak portrayal of highland culture transplanted to the coastal city of Chimbote, a fishing port surrounded by deserts and shantytowns. There the highland society staggers into total disarray, amid a hellish landscape dominated by a factory which processes anchovies into fishmeal, spewing forth a pillar of acrid smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night.

In the midst of masses hypnotized by drunkenness, whoring and ambition wander a few men of integrity: Maxwell, a former religious, now a bricklayer and community leader; Bazalar, the pigman; Antolin Crispin, the blind musician; the mad prophet Moncada and his consumptive sidekick, Don Esteban de la Cruz. In general, however, the transplanted highlanders have traded their culture uncritically and pell-mell for that of the coast.

Gutiérrez, in an afterword to a commentary on Arguedas, argues that Los

zorros is as hopeful, in its own way, as other of Arguedas’s books, and that the novelist did not renounce his faith in liberation through transculturation, Other writers make similar assertions about Arguedas, but dismiss Los zorros as aberrant. Shortly after completing it, Arguedas committed suicide, the outcome of a long struggle with mental illness. As the product of a difficult period in the author’s Jife, so the argument goes, Los zorros cannot represent his best and clearest thinking.

On the other hand, the counterargument can be made that Los zorros was just the last stop on a long decline in Arguedas’s optimism about prospects for transculturation in Peru. The late novel Todas las sangres raises the question of whether costales might not hold out against highland culture indefinitely, sustained by the reserves of international capitalism. Too, in Los zorros Arguedas seems to express a new appreciation for the power of environment to shape those dwelling therein. Environment is an important consideration in an era that saw highlanders, in search of opportunity, migrate in vast numbers from the mountains to the barriadas around Lima and other coastal cities. However, as early as El Sexto, Arguedas apparently began to wonder whether highland culture could survive on the coast.

Taking its name from the prison in Lima’s sixth police district, El Sexto traces the consequences of environment on the attitudes and actions of a young political prisoner named Gabriel. For much of the book, Gabriel holds his own against the communists and Apristas (followers of non-Marxist political reformer Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre) who are his cellblock companions. Critic Edgardo Pantigoso writes that Gabriel is secure in his knowledge that "the force of Andean people resides. . . in the depth of their sensitivities. Against the doctrinaire and cerebral approach which others maintain, into the face of reality, Gabriel offers the values of a highland villager" (La rebelión contra el indigenismo y la afirmación del pueblo in el mundo de José María Arguedas, p. 232)

Against Pedro, a communist, Gabriel argues:

"Pedro, you don’t understand the sierra. It’s another world. Among the towering mountains, beside the rivers which tumble through the abysses, a man grows up with the most profound sensibilities. That’s the source of his power. In the mountains, Peru is very ancient. They haven’t rooted out its marrow. . . .

"I’m not a Communist," I told him. "I don’t have to be. I just listen to the old country. A man’s worth is told by his memory of the ancients, and not just by his modern mechanisms" [pp. 120, 122].

However, in a climate of systematic, institutionalized violence, over which it is neither the communists nor the Apristas but the self-serving guards and the criminal element who preside, Gabriel becomes the kingpin in a plot to assassinate the sadistic criminal called "Puñalada." Pantigoso argues that this a natural extension of Gabriel’s Andean sensibilities, but it seems more likely that Gabriel has in fact lost touch with the broad perspective of his native culture and has become acculturated to the narrow and perverse microculture of the prison. There, on the coast, he loses his soul, becoming just another thug struggling to survive and to have his way.

Arguedas worked toward a Peruvian transculturation, whereby the values of the highland people will not succumb to the blind, scientific or Western mentality of coastal culture. His vision has been carried along by Gutiérrez and other liberationists, who have placed the struggle between the poor and the powerful centrally in their works. Arguedas’s writings, a repository of images and concepts with both emotional and historical power, have reached far beyond the highlands and coasts of Peru.

The Other Borges: A Precursor from the Future

I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages. but those pages cannot save me. perhaps because what is good no longer belongs to anyone, not even to the other [Borges]. but rather to the language and to tradition. Otherwise. I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in the other.

Jorge Luis Borges [from Borges and I," in El Hacedor].

The work of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, a perennial Nobel Prize candidate for the past two decades, has been acclaimed by many scholars and critics as classic 20th-century world literature. A master of the fantastic tale, a critical theorist ahead of his time, Borges discarded old genres in order to create his own, which challenge and enrich our literary traditions. Borges’s intertextuality is baffling to some, but a treat to hedonic readers and lovers of literariness. In one slim volume, he rewrites old Greek myths: depicts ancient gaucho fights; parodies Poe and Chesterton; presents a Judas-redeemer who made the death of Christ possible for us sinners; creates an Irish patriot who is really a traitor, theologians transformed into heretics, Dante before death, Shakespeare before God. Borges writes with T. S. Eliot’s historical sense, "which compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that . . . literature . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order."

Every writer necessarily feeds on his predecessors. As Paul Valery would put it: "Nothing more original, nothing more unique than to feed off others. But they

must be digested -- the lion achieves his form by assimilating sheep." Like Eliot and Valéry, Borges would, to a degree, negate individual identity, but would aim simultaneously to rescue every literary work’s originality through the creative act of reading. The time spent writing a work is insignificant compared with the infinite amount of time devoted to its reading and recollection.

The last time I spoke with Jorge Luis Borges, I felt like a doubting Thomas. Lancaster, Pennsylvania -- Amish country -- in 1983 seemed an appropriate place for a revelation. The first time I had met him, seven years earlier in Orono, Maine, he had remained at a distance. seeming to speak only paragraph after paragraph versions from his standard text. Surrounded by up-and-coming critics wearing a variety of bright yellow ties (it was rumored that Borges, blind for over 20 years, could still see patches of yellow) , he clutched and caressed a favorite cane, offering few insights into himself, the man of flesh and blood.

I had read much of Borges’s work, including many relatively unknown essays and reviews, as I prepared to write a dissertation on his "Libros y autores extranjeros" ("Foreign Books and Authors") , a biweekly column he published from 1936-39 in the Buenos Aires magazine El Hogar.

Throughout this New England symposium in his honor, Borges responded to questions with pat answers. His words sounded so much like they came from a book that they did not engage anyone desiring to weave along with the writer, rather than nodding and thinking "that’s from ‘Partial Magic in the Quijote,’ last paragraph." To hear authors read aloud can be enjoyable, but during an informal encounter their quoting a partial text can get in the way of conversation. Borges was truly in persona that evening. I visualized what he said in perfect paragraphs, with footnotes, dazzling all listeners. I had two specific questions to ask him; to my surprise his answer to both was "I don’t know." He did not know who Ann Keen was, the writer who preceded him in "Libros y autores extranjeros," nor did he know who had taken over his column in El Hogar when he was hospitalized after a Christmas 1938 accident. He added, "Don’t bother reading my contributions to El Hogar. I was strictly a hack writer in those pages."

That remark in itself was certainly enough to get rolling a dissertation that was only beginning to take shape. I could not believe that a three-year period of Borges reviewing such figures as T. S. Eliot, Paul Valdry, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, H. G. Wells and Virginia Woolf -- not to mention Ellery Queen, C,. S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce and Shikibu Murasaki -- was not worthy of attention. After finishing a study of his short story Pierre Menard, Author of ‘Don Quijote"’ in which I utilized the materials from El Hogar, I spent several years (with the aid of my adviser Emir Rodriguez Monegal) trying to convince Borges to allow me to prepare an anthology of that most important "hack" from Argentina.

Borges, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and died in Geneva in 1986, had a bilingual upbringing (in English and Spanish), reflective of his Argentine and British ancestry Fanny Haslam, his paternal grandmother, was born in Staffordshire. She came to America to join her elder sister, who had settled in Argentina with her husband. Fanny, an avid reader, initiated the tradition of reading as an activity to be performed primarily in English at the Borges household. On his mother’s side prevailed the image of a great-grandfather Coronel Isidoro Suárez, who fought in the battle of Junin in Peru with Simón Bolivar in 1824. The readings of the family created a vast library of English books, from which Borges read at a very early age. He was fond of telling that he first read Don Quijote in English, and that when he finally got around to the original Spanish it seemed a poor translation from the English. Borges’s father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was an attorney and a teacher of psychology at a local English school. Leonor Acevedo de Borges, his mother, translated into Spanish several of Hawthorne’s stories, and, according to Borges, produced some translations of Virginia Woolf, Melville and Faulkner which have been attributed to him.

Borges became very popular with different groups of avant-garde poets, who were impressed with his knowledge of Expressionism. He published several of his poems, and translations of German Expressionist poets, in Spanish literary journals. He wrote two books in Spain and destroyed them both: one (a collection of poems in praise of the Russian Revolution) when he left Spain, the other one (a book of essays) upon his return to Buenos Aires.

It was not until 1921 that Borges saw Argentina again, and he sang to his newly discovered Buenos Aires in his first published book, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). During the rest of the decade, he published several volumes of poems and essays, and helped found and direct three literary journals. The next ten years were crucial for Borges, the creator of critical fictions, who was to become world-famous. The 1938 accident brought him close to death and, in his view, changed him into a different person.

In 1970 he published a version of that event in the New Yorker:

It was on Christmas Eve of 1938 -- the same year my father died -- that I had a severe accident. I was running up a stairway and suddenly felt something brush my scalp. I had grazed a freshly painted open casement window. In spite of first-aid treatment, the wound became poisoned and for a period of a week or so I lay sleepless every night and had hallucinations and high fever. One evening, I lost the power of speech and had to be rushed to the hospital for an immediate operation. Septicemia had set in, and for a month I hovered, all unknowingly, between life and death. . . . When I began to recover, I feared for my mental integrity. I remember that my mother wanted to read to me from a book I had just ordered, C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, but for two or three nights I kept putting her off. At last, she prevailed, and after hearing a page or two I fell into crying. My mother asked me why the tears. "I’m crying because I understand," I said. A bit later, I wondered whether I could ever write again. I had previously written quite a few poems and dozens of short reviews. I thought that if I tried to write a review now and failed, I’d be all through intellectually but that if I tried something I had never really done before and failed at that it wouldn’t be so bad and might even prepare me for the final revelation. I decided I would try to write a story. The result was "Pierre Menard, Author of ‘Don Quijote."’

"Pierre Menard," like its forerunner, "The Approach to al-Mu’tasim," was still a halfway house between the essay and the true tale ["Autobiographical Notes," New Yorker, September 11, 1970, p. 84].

This hybrid form that draws from and combines elements of both the essay and the short story is generally considered one of the identifying characteristics of Borges’s fiction. Understandably, critics who study his "halfway house" tend to focus on "The Approach" (1936) and "Pierre Menard" (1939). No one questions that the period between 1936 and 1939 was crucial for an understanding of Borges’ s development as a writer; however, little attention has been paid to Borges’s other literary activities during these years -- especially the various essays, reviews, biographical sketches and literary gossip that appeared in El Hogar.

Borges’s work as a reviewer is at the heart of his poetics of reading. After all, he states in the prologue of his first anthology of short stories (1941) : "It is an arduous and impoverishing whim to compose vast books, to extend for five hundred long-winded pages an idea whose perfect oral exposition lasts a few minutes. A better method is to pretend those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary." This anthology, which was expanded to the famous Ficciones (1944) , included one of his earliest hoaxes, "The Approach to al-Mu’tasim" (1936) : a short story in the form of an essay, a review of a book that did not exist.

It is not surprising that the man who wrote a pseudo-review about a nonexistent book, a man who spent three years writing a biweekly on foreign books and authors, should write "Pierre Menard," a story (composed in the form of an obituary) whose narrator is the reviewer of a nonexistent author’s life works. No wonder Borges’s intertextually rich fictions are based rhetorically on the art of book reviewing. The review represents a beginning of writing which immediately leads to another text, toward one reading and one’s readings. Thus, Borges prefers to feign that a book already exists and to offer his readers a summary, a review. His literature represents a critical assessment of those vast literary projects he did not execute, and the readings that inspired those projects appear in an endless chain of allusions.

In 1955, after the overthrow on Juan Perón, a totally blind Borges became the director of the National Library of Argentina. In 1961 he shared the prestigious Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett, which brought him renown throughout the Western world. Although his fame is based on his work as a storyteller (Ficciones and El Aleph) , any future international assessment of Borges must consider his poetry and essays. But the extent of his reputation will depend on the forms literature takes in the future. As Borges tells us in an essay on George Bernard Shaw: "If I were granted the possibility of reading any present-day page -- this one, for example -- as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 will be like." Will Borges, who believes that "every writer creates his precursors," become a mere precursor in a Bloomian battlefield?

Borges’s poetics of reading does not obviously examine literary history from a chronological point of view, a linear mode according to which precursors invariably connect themselves from one life to another -- and on toward the present. As Borges concludes in "Pierre Menard," who is Valdry disguised as Don Quijote disguised as Unamuno and Poe, the reading of a work may affect the subsequent reading of an earlier work. By reading the Aeneid and later the Odyssey, we stage our own history of that creative spirit of literature. We may, if we are so inclined, think of the Odyssey as having been written after the Aeneid. Or, as Borges states in "Kafka and His Precursors," we may read Kafka and then authors who wrote before him, and find in the latter certain Kafkaesque traits. Those authors resemble Kafka even though they might not resemble each other: Kafka is the precursor. What future dopplegangers await Borges and Kafka?

During yet another of Borges’s tours of American universities, I attended a reception and dinner with him at Franklin and Marshall College. Talking with him, I soon realized I was meeting a different Borges, one who spoke about his works like a common reader. For some reason, he would not let anyone interrupt our conversation. This time, he brought up El Hogar. We also covered the usual ground: the etymology of the word gaucho; Edgar Allan Poe; time and death. But he also asked me the etymologies of a few words of obvious Caribbean origin, and he listened patiently to my intertextual analysis of his story "The Two Who Dreamed" (which he translated from Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights) As dinner was announced and he was guided toward another room, he called out my name "Enrique, Enrique," insisting I help him along, expecting me to sit next to him, messing up the arrangements with nonstop, clutching conversation in Spanish, in the company of many who did not speak it. This was a private Borges who did not want to be in public, a man who needed a break from performance.

I sat on his left at supper and María Kodama, his constant companion, was on his right. She would load the fork for him with a bit of rice, some chicken and a few peas. Still talking and without taking his blind gaze off me, Borges would pick up his fork and eat from it. The fork was always ready for him, at the right spot, always providing the same combination of tastes, meeting his every expectation -- until the middle of the meal when, after a mouthful, he missed something. He looked ahead with half-closed eyes and said with loud disappointment: "NO PEAS," in English. Taste is in the mind.

After all had settled back to their own plates, and the two of us returned to our conversation about El Hogar, I mentioned the need for an anthology of those works. I even dared to say that "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quijote" had its truest roots in the El Hogar writings and not in his experience of recuperation from the 1938 accident. What an insensitive blunder that was! Here was Borges next to me, the jovial man of flesh and blood I had searched for, and I was talking text instead of man. Borges the critic would agree that the time spent writing a work is insignificant compared to the infinite amount of time devoted to its reading and recollection. But here was the other Borges -- the person -- with me in time.

Returning me to reality and setting me straight, Borges recounted the story of the accident, the sleepless nights, the fear of losing his faculties, his writing of "Pierre Menard" as a safe experiment. Then he lifted my right hand and placed it upon the deep scar on his head. That’s when I felt like a doubting Thomas. Autobiographical fallacies aside, I can now only repeat something Borges said, a paraphrase of Mark Twain he cited in reviewing Kipling’s autobiography (Something of Myself) in El Hogar: "It is not possible for a man to tell the truth about himself, or to keep from conveying to the reader the truth about himself." We parted as a shared, lived text.

A year later, a friend wrote me about Borges’s latest visit to Brazil, saying that the author had decided to include some of his articles from El Hogar in a Pléiade anthology planned for that year. Enclosed was a list of 32 pieces María Kodama was requesting urgently that I send to Borges. After so many years, I was rescuing these texts from oblivion, thanks to Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, and returning them to their writer -- for a French translation of his works!

In October 1984, Borges authorized a complete anthology of El Hogar -- this one in the original Spanish. I was to be editor, and Emir Rodriguez Monegal was to write a prologue. Both Emir and Borges passed away before this project was published in Barcelona in September 1986.

As the leaves fall in Pennsylvania, I recall Borges the etymologist alluding to the meaning of Bryn Mawr in Welsh: "So, you are teaching at Bryn Mawr. That’s on high ground, isn’t it?"

A New Vision for Eastern Orthodoxy?

Marking the first visit of an ecumenical patriarch to Jerusalem since that of Athenagoras in 1964, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, Demetrios I, traveled to Israel and Jordan last May for a meeting with the Greek patriarch of Jerusalem, Diodoros I. The trip was another indicator that some circles within Eastern Orthodoxy are now interested not only in greater pan-Orthodox unity, but in ecumenical and interfaith dialogue as well.

Entering the Old City at the historic Jaffa Gate, Demetrios was ceremonially welcomed by the bishops and priests of the Greek Orthodox Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre, Israeli government and municipal officials, a police honor guard, six bemedaled consuls-general, representatives of the Roman Catholic, Armenian, Syrian Orthodox and Ethiopian churches, two uniformed Dragomen, a baton tossing drum-major, the Arab Orthodox Boy Scout drum and bugle corps, uniformed schoolgirls, scores of monks, nuns, reporters, cameramen and a smattering of curious tourists. Even the regulars of the Lido Cafe left their card games to join the crowd, and the ever-present hawkers of flavored ices and soda pop did a brisk business on what was a typical hot, bright Jerusalem afternoon. Here and there, identifiable by their little earphones, were the security men scanning the buildings overhead as rose petals rained down on the distinguished visitor.

Amid a cacaphony of applause, cheers, booming drums and blatting bugles, the procession made its way through the narrow alleys of the Christian Quarter. Slowed repeatedly as old peasant ladies in black broke through the security cordon to kiss Demetrios’s hand, progress (measured in inches) was brought to a complete halt when a group of Arab Orthodox schoolchildren were led up to the patriarch for a blessing. Demetrios, sweating, exhausted, smiling, bent low to kiss the children, only to be nearly toppled when several tugged at his robes.

Two hundred yards from Jaffa Gate and 30 minutes later, the procession came at last to the great wooden door of the Jerusalem patriarchate where Diodoros awaited his guest. They met with hugs and kisses, these old, white-bearded men representing two of the oldest ecclesiastical sees in Christendom. Diodoros read his words of greeting; Demetrios responded, saying he had come "in the search for Orthodox and ecumenical unity."

Seeing them together in their robes -- large jeweled pectoral crosses, long ebony shepherd staffs in hand, the golden double-eagled symbol of Byzantium topping each staff -- one was reminded of the civilization that shaped the Christian East for 1,000 years. Byzantium at its most sublime was a wedding of spirit, light, form and flesh still observable in old ikons and fragments of mosaics scattered throughout Asia Minor; in the architecture of Hagia Sophia and the monasteries of Mount Athos, Mar Saba and St. Catherine; and in the thoughts of the Eastern church fathers, Athanasius, Irenaeus and the Cappadocians. The source of that civilizing light was Constantine’s city on the Bosphorus, Christian until 1453 (when the conquering Ottoman Turks renamed it Stambuli because they couldn’t pronounce the Greek word, Constantinopoli)

For those familiar with the history of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the meeting of Demetrios and Diodoros was also touched with sadness. In 1054 Rome and Constantinople parted in acrimonious mutual misunderstanding, and during 400 years of Ottoman rule the "one, holy, catholic, apostolic" Orthodox church of the East fragmented into a host of ethnic-national churches: Greek, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Armenian, Romanian. In the 20th century all these communities save the Greek fell prey to communist governments, which, like the Turks before them, closed the monasteries and made museums of churches.

History was no kinder to the Greek-held Jerusalem Patriarchate. Constantine’s Basilica of the Anastasis ("Resurrection") , built over the traditional site of Christ’s tomb, was burned by the Persians in 614, restored and then totally destroyed by the order of the Fatamid Caliph al-Hakim ("the Mad") in 1009. Later came the Latin Crusaders, Mongols, Mamelukes, and Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, who reduced the Greek bishops of the Patriarchate to mere custodians of holy place and shrines. In that custodial role a handful of Greek bishops continue to exercise authority over a community almost entirely Arab Orthodox in membership (today numbering about 40,000 in Israel, 120,000 in Jordan) , whose constant complaint is of episcopal intolerance and the spiritual and organizational impoverishment of the "indigenous church." The fact of increasingly strained relations between Greek and Arab Orthodox in the Holy Land these past 200 years added an element of irony to the meeting between Demetrios and Diodoros.

The first sign of Arab discontent with the Greek hierarchy occurred in the early 18th century when Arab Orthodox parishes in Galilee split from the Patriarchate to join with a number of Syrian churches as the new Greek Catholic (Melkite) Church in union with Rome. Thereafter Greek Catholics actively sought to attract co-religionists dissatisfied with the Hellenic domination of the local Orthodox church; and during the 19th century various Catholic groups engaged in missionary work among the Arab Orthodox. They were led by Jesuits who constructed schools for an education-starved population throughout Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. Smaller numbers of Arab Orthodox found new homes with the Anglican, German Lutheran and Presbyterian missions which had been established in the hope of proselytizing Muslims and Jews.

The root of Arab dissatisfaction was the neglect of the Arab congregations by the Greek bishops. The Arab laity complained that their churches were allowed to deteriorate and that no new ones were built; that the Greeks ordained illiterate Arab priests, forbade them to preach, and limited their duties to the performance of the Sunday liturgy; and that the Greeks encouraged Arab deacons to marry prior to ordination, so as to render them ineligible for promotion to bishop or appointment to the celibate Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre, which governs the Patriarchate.

At a time when the Patriarchate paid Arab priests a subsistence salary which forced them to rely on fees from baptisms, weddings and funerals to feed their families, it was charged that monies sent from Imperial Russia and other Orthodox countries for the welfare of the Arab Orthodox went directly into the pockets of the bishops and the patriarch. Charges of personal corruption were added -- for example, that "mistresses are kept in the monasteries." And the monasteries themselves, once the centers of the Orthodox faith in the Holy Land, had become empty shells, staffed by a caretaker monk or two.

The response of the Greek Patriarchate to the challenge of missionaries and domestic critics alike has not varied for 200 years. Today, as in the Ottoman period, the attitude seems to be that the primary responsibility of the Patriarchate is to safeguard the preferential status of the Greek Orthodox Church in the holy places, with the needs of the indigenous Arab Orthodox population coming second.

Well before the Ottoman conquest, Greeks had to fight Franciscans, Armenians and others for control of the holy places. Orthodox-Catholic relations throughout the Ottoman period were a history of unremitting and often bloody combat for possession of shrines, rights and privileges -- a competition encouraged by the Turks, who took away rights from one church and bestowed them on another whenever it suited Ottoman interests, or whenever an adequate bribe was proffered. By the middle of the 19th century the Greeks had largely won the battle, and the 1852 Agreement on the Status Quo of the Holy Places secured Greek rights in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Since then, successive British, Jordanian and Israeli governments, guided by their own self-interests, have maintained the Status Quo Agreement, upholding Greek pre-eminence.

After World War I, Greek Patriarch Damianos and his successor Timotheos were pressured by British Mandatory officials to propose reforms in the administration of the Patriarchate, but ways were found to avoid any implementation. It was not until the election of Patriarch Benediktos in February 1957 that certain changes occurred, initiated by the Hashemite government at the insistence of the Arab Orthodox laity in Jordan and the then Jordanian-administered areas of Jerusalem and the West Bank. Benediktos’s election was unique in that both Arabs and Greeks participated in it; and because the see was now politically divided, Jordan and Israel could both for the first time claim the prerogative of prevailing political authority. Only two months before the election, the Jordanian Parliament introduced draft legislation for new rules of governance for the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem. The proposals gave the Arab Orthodox laity a role in the financial affairs of the Patriarchate, and required that candidates for the office of patriarchate be Jordanian citizens, able to read and write perfect Arabic. The election of Benediktos was approved by Jordan King Hussein because the nominee supported the proposed changes. But no sooner was the Greek installed in office than he began lobbying Jordanian politicians, with the result that the "reforms" died in committee.

The gold patriarchal crown of Jerusalem has passed to the head of Diodoros, elected patriarch upon the death of Benediktos in 1981. Today Arab Orthodox continue to complain about the indifference of the Greek bishops of Jerusalem, and the bishops continue to defend the priority of their custodial rights over the holy places. The Patriarchate has also been involved in continuing scandals, including recent charges of gold and drug smuggling (Patriarch Diodoros being cleared of personal involvement).

It was, therefore, an occasion tinged with the ambiguities and quirks of history when Patriarchs Demetrios and Diodoros -- the former in search of ecumenical unity, the latter preoccupied with preserving Greek tribal hegemony in a scandal-ridden church -- embraced in Jerusalem. After exchanging greetings the two old men, both suffering from diabetes and the afternoon heat, walked arm-in-arm past rug shops, falafel stands, vendors of rosaries and frankincense, into the massive Crusader-built Church of the Holy Sepulchre (constructed on the ruins of Constantine’s Anastasis) where a Byzantine liturgy of thanksgiving was conducted to mark the event.

It is uncertain what the two church leaders discussed; they issued no bulletin or report concerning their meeting. But the exact content of their conversation is distinctly less important than the meeting’s symbolic value. Unable to preach, write or travel without the permission of the Turkish government, Demetrios could not have come to Jerusalem without the influence of the American Orthodox primate, Archbishop Jakovos, leader of the free, rich and powerful Greek Orthodox Church in North and South America. A somber presence at the Jerusalem meeting he is said to have engineered, Jakovos kept a cool distance from the hoopla. Yet if there is a new vision of "pan-Orthodox and ecumenical unity" in the Eastern church, no one is more responsible for it than this man, whose desire for an open church is matched only by his love for American baseball.

Consider his remarkable career. When the Church of Greece and the Jerusalem patriarchate turned against dialogue with Protestants, Jakovos unilaterally enrolled the American Greek Orthodox Church in the National Council of Churches, and sent Greek Orthodox theologians to the Protestant-dominated Ecumenical Institute in Switzerland. When the bishops of Athens and Jerusalem turned deaf ears to struggles of social and moral importance, Jakovos committed the American Orthodox church to the black civil rights movement and marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama. When Eastern Orthodox leaders throughout the world defended village priests who at Christmas and Easter routinely anathematized the Jewish people for "rejecting their King," Jakovos’s openness to Jews and Judaism earned him awards from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee. When "Muslim" continued to be a pejorative in the mouths of Orthodox laity and clergy, the American archbishop (born of Greek parents on the Turkish-held island of Invron) convened a conference for Orthodox-Islamic dialogue, the first of its kind.

Perhaps encouraged by the example of Pope John Paul II’s tireless journeys in search of a new church order, Jakovos and Demetrios have embarked on a series of visits to ecclesiastical capitals, ancient and modern. Jerusalem was the second stop on an itinerary that began with Alexandria, and was to have included Antioch (that visit being canceled at the last moment because of political unrest in Syria). In the effort to build bridges with sister churches under communist rule, trips are planned to Moscow, Georgia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria and Poland. To open a new dialogue with Catholics and Protestants, visits will be made this December to Rome, Canterbury and Geneva.

The Roman pontiff heads a monolithic institution, and what he says, like it or not, is heard and usually heeded throughout the Catholic world. In Eastern church tradition, however, the patriarch of Constantinople is merely "first among equals," taking his place alongside the patriarchs of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. And the Greek Orthodox archbishop in North and South America, however influential, is only one prelate in a Byzantine world church known for its pluralism (some would say chaos) and resistance to change. If Demetrios and Jakovos can convince their fellow Eastern Orthodox that they belong together with Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims in one family of faiths fathered by the God of Abraham, they will have awakened a church more than 500 years dormant.

Broken Continuities: “Night” and “White Crucifixion”

Around 3:00 A. M. on November 10, 1938,. gaping darkness began to spew the flames that were to burn unabated for the next seven years. On this night Nazi mobs executed a well-planned "spontaneous outrage" throughout the precincts of German Jewry. Synagogues were burned, their sacred objects profaned and destroyed; Jewish dwellings were ransacked, their contents strewn and pillaged. Shattering the windows of Jewish shops, the growing swarm left businesses in ruin. Uprooting tombstones and desecrating Jewish graves, the ghoulish throng violated even the sanctuary of the dead. Humiliation accompanied physical violence: in Leipzig, Jewish residents were hurled into a small stream at the zoological park where spectators spit at them, defiled them with mud and jeered at their plight. A chilling harbinger of nights yet to come, the events of this November darkness culminated in widespread arrest of Jewish citizens and led to their transport to concentration camps. Nazi propagandists, struck by a perverse poetry, gave to this night the name by which it has endured in memory: Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Irony abounds in such a name, for in the litter of shattered windows lies more than bits of glass. Kristallnacht testifies to a deeper breaking of basic human continuities. Shattered windows leave faith in fragments and pierce the wholeness of the human spirit.

In that same year of 1938 the Jewish artist Marc Chagall would complete a remarkable painting titled White Crucifixion. Here the artist depicts a crucified Christ, skirted with a tallith and encircled by a kaleidoscopic whirl of images, that narrates the progress of a Jewish pogrom. The skewed, tau-shaped cross extends toward the arc of destruction and bears particular meaning in that context. Whatever the cross of Christ may mean, in 1938 it was circumscribed by the realities of Holocaust: the onrush of a weapons-bearing mob overruns houses and sets them aflame; a group of villagers seeks to flee the destruction in a crowded boat, while others crouch on the outskirts of the village; an old man wipes the tears from his eyes as he vanishes from the picture, soon to be followed by a bewildered peasant and a third man who clutches a Torah to himself as he witnesses over his shoulder a synagogue fully ablaze.

Chagall’s juxtaposition of crucifixion and the immediacy of Jewish suffering creates an intense interplay of religious expectation and historical reality that challenges our facile assumptions. He does not intend to Christianize the painting, certainly not in the sense of affirming any atoning resolution of the Jewish plight. Rather, in the chaotic world of White Crucifixion all are unredeemed, caught in a vortex of destruction binding crucified victim and modern martyr. As the prayer shawl wraps the loins of the crucified figure, Chagall makes clear that the Christ and the Jewish sufferer are one.

Chagall has not been the only 20th-century Jewish artist to appropriate crucifixion imagery. David G. Roskie’s compelling study Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modem Jewish Culture discusses the cross symbol’s use not only in Chagall’s painting, but in the literary work of Der Nister, Lamed Shapiro, Sholem Asch, S. Y. Agnon and the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg (Harvard University Press, 1984 [pp. 258-310]) In literature written before World War II (and under the influence of biblical criticism that had emancipated Jesus’ image from its doctrinal Christian vesture) , these authors used the cross symbol variously; for Asch, the crucified figure in all his Jewishness symbolized universal suffering; for Shapiro and Agnon, on the other hand, the cross remained an emblem of violence and a reminder of Christian enmity against Jews. But to depict the Jew on the cross after the war was to confront a stronger taboo, for to do so required the victim to borrow from the oppressor’s cultural tradition. And the potential for being misunderstood would be immense: by fellow victims who would perceive apostasy and betrayal instead of solidarity, by oppressors who would hear forgiving consolation instead of indictment.

We must not misunderstand Jewish appropriation of the cross in the context of Holocaust art and literature. Where used at all, the cross functions not as an answer to atrocity, but as a question, protest and critique of the assumptions we may have made about profound suffering. Emil Fackenheim puts the matter in this way:

A good Christian suggests that perhaps Auschwitz was a divine reminder of the suffering of Christ. Should he not ask instead whether his Master himself, had He been present at Auschwitz, could have resisted degradation and dehumanization? What are the sufferings of the Cross compared to those of a mother whose child is slaughtered to the sound of laughter or the strains of a Viennese waltz? This question may sound sacrilegious to Christian ears. Yet we dare not shirk it, for we -- Christians as well as Jews -- must ask: at Auschwitz, did the grave win the victory after all, or, worse than the grave, did the devil himself win? [God’s Presence in History (New York University Press, 1972) , p. 75].

Questions such as these spring off Chagall’s canvas and into our sensibilities. White Crucifixion depicts a world of unleashed terror within which no saving voice can be heard nor any redeeming signs perceived. Separated from the imperiled villagers by only his apparent passivity, Chagall’s Messiah, this Jew of the cross, is no rescuer, but himself hangs powerless before the chaotic fire. The portrayal of Messiah as victim threatens to sever the basic continuity we have wanted to maintain between suffering and redemption (or to use Christian imagery, between cross and resurrection) To have redemptive meaning, the cross must answer the victims who whirl here in torment, for, in the Holocaust, the world becomes Golgotha turned on itself, "one great mount of crucifixion, with thousands of severed Jewish heads strewn below like so many thieves" (Roskie, p. 268)

Yet precisely here the language of redemption seems trivial, if not obscenely blind to the sufferer’s predicament. Can one speak of redemption in any way that does not trifle with the victim’s cry? Before the mother’s despair, words of redemption offer no consolation; instead, like the laughter and music which accompany her child’s murder, such words mock her torment and deny the profundity of her suffering. The rhetoric of redemption, no matter how benevolently used, remains the ploy of oppressors even decades later. No one may invoke it for the victim in whose world it may have no place.

One day when we came back from work, we saw three gallows rearing up in the assembly place, three black crows. Roll call. SS all around us, machine gun trained: the traditional ceremony. Three victims in chains -- and one of them, the little servant, the sad-eyed angel. . . . The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. . . . "Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind me asked. At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over. Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. . . . Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive. . . . For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking: "Where is God now?" And I heard a voice within me answer him: "Where is He? Here He is -- He is hanging here on this gallows . . ." [Avon, 1960, pp. 74-76].

This powerful tableau, haunting in its cruciform reflection, strikes and challenges Christian readers of Night. To use the apostle Paul’s term, this scene provides the word that scandalizes, that makes us stumble over our own expectations and knock down the comfortable prop we have made of resurrection faith. Here, Wiesel’s readers confront the new Golgotha. The cross put no final end to the reign of evil, for here crucifixion recurs all over again. Only now the victim is a young boy with the face of a sad-eyed angel; only now the darkness is lit by no Easter-dawn, but by the torch of a crematory fire, a fire whose smoke issues an unbroken night; only now God dies, instead of redeeming.

And I who believe that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner, whose dark eyes still held the reflection of that angelic sadness which had appeared one day upon the face of the hanged child? What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, who may have resembled him -- the Crucified, whose Cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine, and that conformity between the Cross and the suffering of men was in my eyes the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished?. . . But I could only embrace him, weeping ["Foreword to Night," pp. 10-11].

Mauriac, long a poignant witness to the connection between suffering and love, knew well that the cornerstone of his faith was at stake in Wiesel’s narrative. And yet, at the point at which he might have been tempted to proclaim his gospel, he finds that the only fitting response is to embrace the victim, blessing him with tears. The reason is clear: the death of the sad-eyed angel creates a stumbling block not only for Wiesel, but for Mauriac; not only for the Jewish victim, but for the Christian onlooker who cannot interpret away the scandalous scene without trivializing its grossly unredeemed features. In Mauriac’s embrace human compassion stifles theological conviction, rescuing it from becoming an oppressive utterance. The word of faith gives way to silence, but perhaps therein returns to its authentic ground.

Mauriac’s tearful embrace of the victim, Wiesel, provides us with an emblem that at once interprets the tableau in Night and becomes an apt metaphor for Christian devotion to the cross. As an emblem, Mauriac’s act keeps before us three fundamental features that should shape our response to both the sad-eyed child’s cross and Jesus’ cross: silence, humility and waiting together for God.

Mauriac’s response is, first, essentially silent. The point at which he would announce the victory of the cross gives way to the tacit embrace. In silence his act witnesses to the breaking of an essential continuity in our language of faith, the continuity between our words of redemption and the utterly unredeemed circumstances of radical victimization. We lack the words even to describe the plight of the victim, much less the words to make that plight whole. Where all is broken, words of promise turn rotten and oppressive, robbing the afflicted of the integrity of his or her own suffering.

Mauriac’s silence is ambivalent; it does not break the word of redemption as much as it hushes its utterance. In light of the Holocaust, the word of the cross can only be a personal and genuine confession. But we cannot presume to speak for the victim or, as reality, impose upon his or her world the expressions of our own desire. As the word of the cross shatters any pretentious language of strength, wisdom and power (I Cor. 1:18-31) , so does the word of Night stifle any Christian triumphalism. Silence must say No to the human boast.

Second, Mauriac’s tearful embrace expresses a profound humility and repentance. We misread the scene if we assume that the writer’s tears are tied only to his perception of the victim’s tragedy. The conversation between Mauriac and Wiesel begins with Mauriac’s recollection of the German occupation of France, admitting his painful knowledge of the trainloads of Jewish children standing at Austerlitz station. As Wiesel responds "I was one of them," Mauriac sees himself anew as an unwitting onlooker, the bystander guilty not of acts undertaken, but of acts not taken. The indictment is not Wiesel’s but Mauriac’s own, born of the self-perception that not to stand with the victim is to act in complicity with his or her oppressor. Mauriac’s tears signify his humble repentance, his turning away from the role of onlooker to align himself with the victim. The observer becomes witness, testifying on behalf of the victim. Crucifixion indicts, for in its shadow we are always the guilty bystander. Humility, such as Mauriac’s, puts an end to any assumption of benign righteousness; repentance denies complacency to the viewer of another’s passion.

Third, the embrace of Wiesel and Mauriac creates a community of victims and their witnesses who wait together for God. The powerless, in their very plight, dramatize the need for redemption, enabling us to see ourselves more humbly and indicting us when we do not. In them, our need for God and their forgiveness becomes blatantly apparent. When we become the victims’ ally, we receive the reconciling gift that only they can offer: the possibility of waiting together for the inbreaking of the Messiah’s reign. Waiting together, we effect not redemption, but the community that is its annunciator and first fruits.

Crucifixion, be it the cross of Jesus or the nocturnal Golgotha of Auschwitz, breaks the moral continuities by which we have considered ourselves secure and whole. To mend these fragments of human experience lies outside our power. We cannot repair the broken world. Yet, as we yield these broken continuities to narrative -- to memoir, to literature, to liturgy -- we begin to forge a new link that binds storyteller and hearer, victim and witness. But here we must be most careful. We rush to tell the story, confident that it is ours to tell when, in fact, it is ours to hear.

Ours is a season for listening and silence. Not when we speak to victims but when we listen to their testimony do we truly perceive the cross, the cross that breaks our moral certainties and shatters our continuities of power. We cannot give our victims the cross, for they are already its true bearers. Rather, it is they who present the cross to us in the form of its awful scandal. White Crucifixion and Night -- expressions of Jewish anguish distinctly not our own -- return to us the meaning of the cross in its most powerful form. The Jewish testament enables us to see anew what centuries of resurrection enthusiasm have obscured in our own tradition: the fractured bond between God and the world; the lived moment of forsaken-ness to which we are vulnerable and for which we are responsible in the lives of one another.

In the world of victims, our language of victory -- the language of redemption -- may alienate, echoing only the speech of oppressors. Though current, this perception is not distinctly modern, but dates at least from the ordeal of an early Christian apostle. Writing with critical fervor in I Corinthians, the apostle Paul reminds his readers that Christ’s resurrection, in its fullest expression, is eschatological, a word spoken in the future; when Christians claim its fullness prematurely, he argues that word becomes illusory and destructive. To approach the cross with too much faith, to stand in its shadow with certain confidence of Easter light, is finally to confront no cross at all, only the unrepentant echoes of our religious noise. Amid the creation which groans for redemption, the church must stand as if before Easter: open to its inbreaking, but unassuming of its prerogative. There, in the community of victims and witnesses, the faithful silently wait together for the Kingdom of God. There the church must express its humility, for, as the Holocaust chronicles make starkly clear, the Lord whom the church confesses is also its victim.

Women, Power, and Politics: Feminist Theology in Process Perspective

I. Feminist Theology as Process Theology

Feminism and process theology have "trafficed together" (to borrow Bernard Meland’s description of the relation of ultimacy and immediacy; see CST 15) since the earliest days of contemporary feminist theology. Perhaps the best summary of that dialogue was the conference and subsequent book, edited and introduced by Sheila Greeve Davaney, Feminism and Process Thought (FPT), which featured articles by Valerie Saiving, Penelope Washbourn, Marjorie Suchocki, and Jean Lambert. Each of these women has contributed further to the richly textured fabric of this discussion. And, in the meantime, others of us have joined in as well.

In the first section of this paper, I will lift out certain threads of feminist process theology, for the purpose of focusing our attention on observations, concepts, and arguments that are essential, and often distinctive, in this theological discourse. In so doing, I do not intend or pretend to be exhaustive of the feminists who consider themselves or are considered to be "process theologians." Rather, I am seeking to delineate representative themes and issues. In the second section of the paper, I will suggest the contours -- or rather, the Whiteheadian grounds -- of a more political feminist process theology.

As we embark on this venture, a couple of preliminary observations are in order. For most of these women -- and for myself as well -- our feminism and our introduction to process thought were independent developments, which became related by virtue of the exciting discovery of their power to illumine each other. So there is a sense of independence and a certain reciprocity between process thought and feminism. But the criteria of adequacy are feminist -- adequacy to women’s stories, experience, and vision -- rather than Whiteheadian. Not surprisingly, then, these essays -- for example, the papers in the Davaney volume -- have an existential quality; there is a sense of important issues at stake. And, lastly, there is an experimental quality about the essays as well; it is a time of testing. Valerie Salving mentions this point, and Marjorie Suchocki reminds us that Whitehead’s own test of a philosophical system includes not only internal coherence and logical consistency but also applicability to other and new areas of experience and ultimately adequacy to all experience.

A. Theologizing Out of Experience: Women’s Stories

The first point of contact between feminism and process thought is methodological rather than substantive -- but it is of crucial importance. Both represent a reevaluation of experience in philosophy and theology. For both, the method is one of philosophizing or theologizing out of experience. In the heyday of neo-orthodoxy, with its limited-access roads to theology, process thought gave a foothold to voices! speech/stories hitherto excluded, and established the grounds for breaking the silence with respect to women within the bounds of theological discourse itself.

More specifically, for both, it is physical or bodily experience which is the beginning of the becoming of actuality and the matrix out of which thought emerges and to which it responds. Thus, Whitehead’s philosophy emphasizes the importance of the object-to-subject structure of experience, the physical pole of all actual occasions, causal efficacy as the initial phase of the process of becoming, and "the withness of the body" as an essential element in perception. Penelope Washbourn takes up this theme in her argument against body/mind and self/other distinctions that lead us to speak of having a body rather than being a body and to obscure the bodily character of selfhood, relatedness, and creativity (FPT).

This leads us to a closely related point. Rosemary Radford Ruether and many feminist theologians in her wake have argued that body/mind dualism and a host of other dualisms axe rooted in the sexism of Western culture. In the context of this interpretation of the problem, Whitehead is a welcome fellow-traveler among feminist theologians, for he, too, is concerned with overcoming the dualisms that beset modern philosophy and social analysis, and, indeed, his philosophy can be interpreted as an effort to provide a more integral description of our experience. Thus, mind/body dualism gives way to the dipolarity of physical and conceptual elements interwoven in every actual occasion, and self/world dualism gives way to the doctrine of internal relations.

As Valerie Salving points out, feminism and process thought share the view that the philosophical tradition has defined "experience" too narrowly. Whitehead argues that the Cartesian tradition has excluded causality and so "a common world to think about" from experience. Feminists focus on the exclusion of women’s experience. Both emphasize the necessity of a reinterpretation of the nature of experience, so as to include the excluded dimensions within its scope (FPT). Within this framework, there is a divergence among feminist process theologians. Valerie Salving seeks to articulate a reinterpretation of essentially human experience, our common humanity defined androgynously. Penelope Washbourn takes as on a somewhat different journey, for she seeks to articulate distinctively female experience (FPT).

Finally, and related to the point above, "human experience never comes uninterpreted" (FPT 13). Women live in a culture of interpretation regarding men and women (their character, relations, roles, etc.) which distort women’s experience. In other words, "common sense" carries an "implicit metaphysics" of which we must become conscious and critical. Again, Valerie Saiving’s argument here echoes Whitehead’s analysis of the common sense of his own day.

B. Relationality

Surely the deepest bond between feminism and process thought is the recognition that we are constituted by our relationships, that relationality or sociality is the fundamental reality of all experience. In this respect, process thought and feminism resonate with the more recent arguments of Carol Gilligan that women’s moral development is characterized by agency attentive to the web of relationships -- although ethics in the mode of process thought would view this as normative for men and women alike. Ultimately, this insight reaches to the nature of God in relation to the world. Marjorie Suchocki symbolizes this dimension of feminist process theology with poetic and philosophical power in her imagery of weaving (WW 76-86).

Again, the sociality or relationality of experience suggests several paths of inquiry and argument: The reciprocity of relationship and individuality (Valerie Saiving) or of mutuality and openness to new possibilities (Marjorie Suchocki), the priority of bodily experience as a principle of interpretation of women’s self-identity, spirituality, and relatedness to reality (Penelope Washbourn) or of intimacy (Carter Heyward; see RG). Later, I will propose a principle of worldliness. These are not "either/or" options but a matter of different emphases within the complex pattern of a doctrine of internal relations.

It is in this context that feminism and process thought converge in a reconsideration of the meaning of power. Power is grounded in the fact that our actions issue from and into a web of relationships. "Nexus" is the technical term in process thought. In other words, it is the nature of power to be community-creating -- or destroying. For some, it has the character of energy, an energy born of and expressed in solidarity with others. But, in process thought as in feminist thought, this basic insight has been elaborated to affirm that power is expressed in receptivity to the influence of others as well as in agency with respect to others. Bernard Loomer set the terms of this definition of power in his 1976 essay, "Two Conceptions of Power," in which he distinguishes between "unilateral" power and "relational" power and explores the implications of this distinction. In this view, power (which is synonymous with "stature" or "size") is "the capacity to sustain a mutually internal relationship" (TCP 22). It requires being "present" to one another, listening and speaking (mutual self-disclosure), and attentive to the "concrete" existence of one another.

I should say one more thing about the feminist appropriation of process theology and its doctrine of internal relations. While most feminists have emphasized the power and possibilities which a relational ontology and anthropology offers, Peggy Ann Way, drawing on Bernard Meland’s focus on the causal efficacy aspect of Whitehead’s thought, emphasizes instead the limitations which follow inescapably from our embeddedness in a bodily and social matrix (GF). And others echo the same theme in their attentiveness to the elements of loss and tragedy in human experience.

C. Creativity

The other theme that distinguishes feminist process theologians is the theme of creativity. Marjorie Suchocki’s emphasis on openness to new possibilities as constitutive of human and divine nature alike expresses the importance of this theme (FPT ). Penelope Washbourn demonstrates the power of her feminist, revisionist interpretation exactly with respect to this notion of creativity, drawing on the female experience of childbirth as the basis of her argument that creativity should be understood not in terms of construction or making (the potter and clay image) but in terms of emergence from a social and bodily matrix to which it is responsive even as it is also unique and something new. It is the image of giving birth rather than building or making, and it hears/speaks the language of gift, growth, and gracefulness rather than control. (FF1’). In process thought, creativity is grounded more clearly in the conceptual pole of experience and has to do with the capacity to imagine or envision new and alternative possibilities as well as the capacity for the creative synthesis of the actual world with the possible good.

D. Passion

I want to mention one further theme in which feminist and process theology have a common stake. It is not as prominent as the themes of relationship and creativity, but it is becoming more so -- and that is the theme of passion. In feminism, passion appears in the celebration of our bodies/ourselves and in the intimacy thus made possible. In feminism, passion appears also in the struggle for justice and in the recognition that the old dynamics of distancing/abstraction, disinterest/apathy, and even the principle of universalizability are not adequate to the struggle. Here, Carter Heyward is particularly eloquent (I cannot say whether she considers herself a process theologian; see OPJ). In process thought, passion appears in the very nature of causation, perception, and cognition as "concern" -- in the Quaker meaning of the term, according to Whitehead (AI 176). This affective tone at the base of all experience suggests the fallacy of efforts at value-free facts or passion-free judgment. But the criteriological question remains. There is a difference between the ethics of "me and my friends" and an ethics motivated by the passion of love of the world.

II. A Constructive Argument for Political Feminist Theology on Whiteheadian Grounds

So far so good. But, thus far, this mutual admiration society between feminism and process thought has been basically apolitical. I say this, acknowledging the feminist argument that "the personal is the political." I am concerned, nevertheless, that this very important discussion of the bodily and the intimate, the constitutive and the interpersonal dimensions of relationality and creativity does not of itself generate an explicit argument regarding the vision, the criteria, and the commitment for the political struggle for justice for women and between women and men. In my view, the apolitical character of process-oriented feminist theology is due, in no small part, to the apolitical character of process theology itself as it has developed to this point. The notable exception is Douglas Sturm, and, very recently, John Cobb and Schubert Ogden have turned their attention in the direction of politics and justice. But there has also been a rather selective appropriation of Whitehead by feminist process theologians. Specifically, the dipolarity of actuality, the unity and reciprocity of physical and conceptual in all experiencing, has been the basis for the reappropriation and reevaluation of the bodily dimensions of women’s experience. But there has not been much exploration of the specific character of the "mental" pole. Also, the bodily has not become an avenue to the worldly, as it is in Whitehead. I want to sketch the contours of a political theology -- on Whiteheadian grounds and of a piece with the feminist arguments considered above.

A. Taking Experience Seriously -- and Politically: The Meaning of Assemblage and the Definition of the Issue

We have already noticed the shared concern for "theologizing out of experience" in the methodologies of feminist and process theologies. Yet process theology has also been criticized for its inattention to social analysis, to analysis of the social order -- or, one might say, the structural and symbolic character of our common experience.¹And process theologians give some credence to this criticism. Bernard Loomer says, for example, "I think that a theology of relations can include the positive values of theologies of liberation without being committed to specific analyses of racism, sexism, or economic functioning (TAG 147; my italics).

It is my contention that Whitehead’s notion of assemblage is a mode of taking the social order seriously -- and politically -- within process thought. In Modes of Thought, Whitehead distinguishes two modes of philosophy: The one is "systematization" or systematic philosophy, which is "the criticism of generality from the specialism of science" (MT 4); this is a matter for experts. The other is "assemblage," which is the "survey of society from the standpoint of generality" (AI 97). In this aspect, philosophy is not the task of specialists but of citizens (AI 99).

In Adventures of Ideas, the standpoint of generality is lodged firmly in empirical, historical inquiry. Here, assemblage requires "a survey of possibilities and their comparison with actualities . . . [in which] the fact, the theory, the alternatives, and the ideal are weighed together" (AI 98; my italics). On this reading, assemblage is not a transcendent principle of criticism, abstract vis-a-vis any concrete, particular situation. Rather, it maintains its foothold in particularity -- in the analyses of actual situations or problems, the contention among interpretations and alternative solutions, the appreciation or the variety of vivid values or standpoints, the articulation of relevant ideals. Here, Whitehead argues that the philosophic mode of thought appropriate to morality requires a "standpoint of generality," informed by history, appreciative of diversity, and "undaunted by novelty" (AI 97-98).

I have argued elsewhere for a revisionist interpretation of this concept of assemblage (see GRV). To reiterate briefly here: assemblage is a mode of thought in which "relevant ideals" can only be given their concrete meaning and have their relevance tested in the context of our actual world. Now the obvious fact is that the actual or public world is characterized by various forms of injustice, which is to say, by values and structures that organize our common life in such a way as to obscure, distort, and deny the essential fact that we have our world -- and our humanity -- in common. Assemblage, that standpoint of generality which weighs together facts, theories, alternatives, and ideals, must take its empirical cue, its ground of relevance, from the actual injustice of the world, exactly that it may be the bearer of "some imaginative novelty, relevant yet transcending traditional ways" (FR 66). What is needed is a principle of interpretation of the facts of the situation which is attentive to and adequate to these various forms of injustice. My proposal is that Whitehead’s notion of "assemblage" requires clarification and specification in terms of some definition of the issue at stake in the situation.² Thus, far from being uncommitted to specific analyses of social issues, as Loomer would have it. a theology of relations appropriate to the feminist struggle for justice and to democratic citizenship would require such analyses. And, so interpreted, assemblage provides process thought with the method of social analysis requisite to moral judgment and the social struggle for justice and peace.

B. Relationality and the Politics of Mutual Persuasion

Secondly, Whitehead’s argument that we are constituted by our relationships envisions a worldliness and even a political sensibility that is mostly ignored in this dialogue between feminism and process thought.

Whitehead’s analysis of the nature of experience is politically significant in three respects.

I) In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead criticizes modern philosophy for its devaluation of the public realm (ontologically, epistemologically, ethically, politically, etc.); in his words, "there is no common world to think about" (SMW 84). It is my contention that his reinterpretation of the nature of experience seeks to make a persuasive case for the ontological possibility and intelligibility of public-regarding moral principles. The key here is the principle of relativity, the fact that the nature of a thing consists in its relations with other things. But Whitehead’s special concern is the relations among things which are actual (actual entities); these are the subject of his theory of "objective immortality." Objectification "refers to the particular mode in which the potentiality of one actual entity is realized in another actual entity" (category of explanation viii); objectification explains how the past becomes a component and a condition in the becoming of the present. Thus, in Whitehead’s marvelous phrase, every action is "a mode of . . . housing the world" (PR 80/124). The world becomes a "common world to think about" in that it is exemplified in the constitution of every actual entity or action (PR 7/Il, 148/224). This objectification of the world in action establishes both the solidarity and the intelligibility of the world. For the dictum of modem epistemology that "apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing" does not, in this view, exclude the public world from its scope (PR 167/254). It is in the constitution of actuality or action that the world appears -- as it is, and as it might yet be.

This theme is elaborated in Whitehead’s discussion of perception in terms of the notion of "the withness of the body." In his critique of Descartes and Hume, Whitehead argues that, insofar as perception is limited to sense-data: "We have already done violence to our immediate conviction by thus thrusting the body out of the story, for, as Hume himself declares, we know that we see by our eyes, and taste by our palates" (PR 122/187). Perception of the contemporary world is a complex physical feeling characterized by the fact that "we feel with the body" (PR 311/474). Thus perception in the mode of presentational immediacy (sense-perception) involves both presentational objectification of a contemporary actuality as "the passive subject of relations and qualities" (AI 197), and causal objectification of the past in the present:

The conclusion is that the contemporary world is not perceived in virtue of its own proper activity, but in virtue of activities derived from the past, the past which conditions it and which also conditions the contemporary percipient. These activities are primarily in the past of the human body, and more remotely m the past of the environment within which the body is functioning. (AI 219)

In other words, the basis of perception is the various bodily organs "as passing on their experiences by channels of transmission and enhancement" (PR 119/181). Their experiences refer to the actual world. It is because contemporaries share a past or world transmitted through the body that their past and present importance and our mutual and moral responsibility for the future enter into our experience. Note here that, in Whitehead’s thought, bodiliness (the body basis of perception) introduces a certain worldliness into our experience as well.

2) My second point here has to do with Whitehead’s description of the "satisfaction," the final phase of the process of becoming of everything actual. The individuality of an actuality consists in its particular standpoint or "social location" in the actual world; in its creative synthesis of its world of actualities and potentialities; and in its "self-enjoyment of being one among many" (PR 145/220). This experience of being one among many is, of course, the very definition of the polis in the Greek tradition, and this description of the intrinsic character of experience in terms of the joy of solidarity carries a certain political sensibility right to the heart of individuality. If the "self-enjoyment of being one among many" is the height of individual self-realization, politics is integral rather than alienated vis-a-vis what it means to be human.

3) The other side of the coin of objective immortality is the self-transcendence inherent in action. Every action has consequences which establish a context of possibilities and limitations for future actions. In a word, action is power. But this power is, as we have seen in the discussion above, characterized by receptivity as well as agency, by mutuality. Power is grounded in the fact that our actions issue from and in a network, a web of relationships. In other words, it is the nature of power to form associations. That is so whether we are talking of giving birth or participating in a feminist organization. Whitehead himself recognizes the political significance of this power in his account of the historical development of human freedom. The turning point in the history of freedom, according to Whitehead’s version of the story, comes with St. Paul and the emergence of independent associations (namely, the churches) and, therewith, the freedom of "corporate" action as distinct from the freedom of individual thought or action. The point is that, in his analysis of the human venture in Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead develops an interpretation of human freedom as essentially political -- though he does not develop this line of argument. Nevertheless, it reminds us that public-regarding independent or voluntary associations (the churches, the abolitionist and suffrage movements and the feminist and other liberationist groups of our day) have, in this country and elsewhere, throughout our history, provided the organization of social criticism, the definition of moral vision and purpose, and the advocacy and impetus for changing the world.

Two lines of argument as to the nature of justice and the political struggle for justice seem to me to follow from these elements of worldliness and citizenship in the interpretation of the nature of experience. One: It seems to me that the sociality of human nature provides the basis on which to formulate a theory of human rights related to the creation and nurture of relationships, that is, rights of association. In other words, a Whiteheadian doctrine of human rights should be cast in terms of claims upon the social order for the protection and promotion of human capacities essential to the initiation, preservation, and transformation of relationships. The elaboration of this point must await another occasion.

Two: Whitehead’s primary contribution to a political process theology, however, is his argument for a politics of mutual persuasion. It is easy to misinterpret the argument for persuasion. In my view, the political significance of persuasion rests not only on the possibilities of mutuality and even harmony but also upon the inevitabilities of conflict. The principle of persuasion presupposes that the world is constituted by different standpoints, perspectives, and purposes -- that "Strife is at least as real a fact in the world as Harmony" (AI 32). Thus to speak of the creation of the world as "the victory of persuasion over force" is not an appeal to some pre-established harmony but an imperative to the non-violent resolution of conflict, on the grounds that violence, domination, and degradation cannot transform or transmute conflict into a creative and enduring generality of harmony or the public good. The paradigm of persuasion as the normative expression of power constitutes a fundamental critique of power as domination/subordination and violence.

Now, Whitehead’s insight that the politics of persuasion and the recourse to violence are antithetical rings true to me in the light of my work in the area of sexual and family violence, which has given me new eyes to see the destructive character of violence and the fear of violence. Indeed, we must discover and develop a more adequate theological interpretation of what it means to be human in the presence of God -- and of the multivalent violation of our humanity that violence represents. We must recognize in violence the distinction wreaked on body/spirit (they are not separate), on our capacities to think and speak and act, on our relationships, on the delight and joy which is our true end. But this, too, is another paper. In the face of the incredible levels of violence against women, the media glorification of violence as an effective and attractive way to solve problems, and the increasing dependence of governments on capabilities for violence of unprecedented potentialities -- we need to give serious energy, resources and the best of our human capacities to strategies for non-violent conflict resolution. In this context, the politics of relational power and mutual persuasion is the politics of solidarity for the sake of advocacy, advocacy of an end to violence and violation, advocacy of justice and peace.

C. Creativity and the Politics of Transformation

The connection of solidarity with advocacy brings me to my second concern in the dialogue between feminism and process thought. The politics of mutual persuasion is not just a process of non-violent conflict resolution. The fundamental purposiveness of human action, in process thought, liberates the principle of persuasion from the classical liberal emphasis on the priority of process by raising the question of "to what end?" Its raison d’être is those ideals, the realization of which in this or that occasion or group of occasions creates, sustains, and transforms the world. Thus, in mutual persuasion, a public world is created which rests not only on the instinctual or emotional basis of community but on thought, the imaginative consideration of relevant ideals.

It is important to remember the dipolarity of experience, [namely, that all experience is constituted by a "mental" as well as a "physical" pole]. Although all thought emerges out of and is responsive to the physical pole of experience, it is the conceptual pole that is the ground of human freedom. In Whitehead’s analysis of freedom, there are two moments or, more aptly, elements: the element of initiation of new and alternative possibilities, and the element of aesthetic integration of this new vision with the worldly and bodily past into some creative synthesis, culminating in the "self-enjoyment of being one among many." Now the weaving of the old and the new together in some richly textured, complexly designed, beautiful yet fitting cloth is critical here. But I want to emphasize the importance of imagination and its potential -- when teamed with solidarity -- for introducing new beginnings and so changing the world. Ultimately, the imagination of new possibilities is grounded in the vision and passion of God -- to which I shall return.

It is a cliché that Whitehead is a rationalist as well as an empiricist. My point is that the power of thinking in this mode of thought is not so much the power of logic (or of common sense) as the power of imagination of the possible, the power of sensitivity or appreciative consciousness regarding the actual, the power of empirical generalization (the airplane flight) and of mutual persuasion. In my view, imagination is key, because of its self- and world-transformative significance in an unjust world. But the very multivalence of conceptuality in process thought is worthy of some further consideration (see HE). I say this exactly because of the history of the exclusion of women from the institutional spaces of education and inquiry, as well as politics. We have been denied participation in the public realms of intellectual, political, and religious leadership, and we are aptly critical of the ways in which thinking and power have been expressed in our absence -- and ambivalent about their relevance in our own experience. We have begun the revisionist task with respect to power; we must do so, also, with respect to thinking. Whitehead’s philosophical system is not finally adequate, but his insight into the link between imagination and transformation suggests a possibly fruitful direction for our own feminist mode of inquiry.

D. Passion and the Religion of World-Loyalty

In Religion in the Making, Whitehead defines religion ("civilized" or "rational" religion, as he was wont to put it) as "world-loyalty" (RM 59). In this view, the politics of mutual persuasion and imaginative transformation, solidarity and advocacy, are essentially related to the religion of world-loyalty, a religiousness characterized not only by its standpoint of social criticism but by its lure to love of the world.

Let me turn from this definition of religion to the doctrine of the relation of God and the world which underlies and undergirds it -- and the politics of solidarity and advocacy. Specifically I want to address the question of the power of God in the World.

Whitehead rejects the concept of God as Holy Warrior, who parts the sea and closes it over Pharaoh and his army, in favor of the concept of God the Holy Poet, who wisely, carefully, patiently weaves together or, to change the metaphor, harmonizes the harmonies and discords. Now this shift in symbolism bears closer examination. According to G. Ernest Wright, the significance of warrior language for God is its affirmation of the political significance of the relation of God and the world vs. the reduction of this relation to the existential, individual relation of God to the self (OT 145). For Whitehead, God represents the perfection of persuasion rather than violence. And the symbol of God the Poet is apt, for, far from abandoning the political significance of the relation of God and the world, it could be interpreted to represent just that. We have only to remember the significance of poetry and song in every struggle for justice from the days of Miriam and Moses through the slave songs of this nation’s beginnings to the civil rights, peace, and feminist movements of our own era. Here, Whitehead articulates a concept of God as One whose vision of new possibilities and passion for their realization inspires and so empowers us. The point I want to emphasize here is the imagination of God. Whitehead’s God is One who is incredibly imaginative in the face of what we do and who perseveringly "confronts what is actual in [the world] with what is possible for it" (RM 153). By virtue of God’s vision, we may not perish, but change the world. Thus, God is the ground of the imagination toward transformation so critical to the politics of justice in an unjust world. We cannot say a priori what are the possibilities and limitations of transformation. In my view, one of the difficult tasks before us, as women dealing with violence and the threat of violence, as participants in the struggles for justice and peace, is discerning the new in our lives, naming and celebrating the changes.

We have already noted that process theology has rejected the doctrine of divine impassability in favor of a doctrine of divine suffering and joy in solidarity with the world. Moreover, process theology has rejected the doctrine of divine omnipotence in favor of a doctrine of divine freedom, power, and creativity which acknowledges the irreducible plurality of powers and freedoms in a world of creativities. God shares rather than abrogates our solidarity and our plurality. But God is absolutely unique by virtue of the perfection of the divine experience/understanding of the actual world and the divine vision of and passion for the good. Indeed, we should speak of God in terms of the perfection rather than the limitation of power, the perfection of the power of persuasion. Now persuasion -- or advocacy -- rightly interpreted, is a complex relationship with the world. It requires a discerning listening to the stories of suffering and joy, a disclosure of relevant possibilities, a love that will not let us go, and a word/song of judgment and grace that transforms and enables self and world transformation. On this point, Whitehead is clear. He is persistently and specifically critical of anti-democratic doctrines of God and the world, theologies of "a Divine Despot and a slavish Universe, each with morals of its kind" (Al 26, 36). In their stead, he articulates a concept of God as One whose love of the world (world-loyalty) is our salvation and the ultimate principle of human purpose and virtue. This concept of God as the lure to the creation of world-community represents a radical call to action in a world turning conflict not into complex harmony but into holocaust.

In conclusion and summary’ God is a unity (trinity?) of I) suffering with the worldly reality of injustice and violence in love (the consequent nature); 2) vision of new and alternative possibilities for the world (the primordial nature); and 3) passionate persuasion for the transformation of the world, passion for justice and peace, constitutive of the world as the initial aim of every creative act (the superjective nature). This unity of suffering love, vision, and passionate persuasion is the perfection of advocacy. This concept of God as Holy Advocate, calling us and empowering us to advocacy for justice and peace, can only strengthen the bond between process theology and feminism.

References:

CST -- Bernard Meland. "How is Culture a Source for Theology?" Criterion 3:3 (Summer 1964).

FPT -- Feminism and Process Thought. Ed. Sheila Greeve Davaney. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1981.

GF -- Peggy Ann Way. Growth and Finitude: Limitation in Pastoral Work and Thought. Diss.: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1979.

GRV -- Lois Gehr Livezey. "Goods, Rights, and Virtues: Toward an Interpretation of Justice in Process Thought." The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, 1986.

HE -- Bernard Meland. Higher Education and the Human Spirit. Chicago: Seminary Cooperative Bookstore, 1965.

OT -- G. Ernest Wright. The Old Testament and Theology. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.

OPJ -- Isabel Carter Heyward. Our Passion for Justice: Images of Power, Sexuality, and Liberation. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984.

RG -- Isabel Carter Heyward. The Redemption of God: A Theology of Mutual Relation. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982.

TAG -- Bernard Loomer. "Theology in the American Grain." Process Philosophy and Social Thought. Ed. John B. Cobb, Jr. and W. Widick Schroeder. Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1981.

TCP -- Bernard Loomer. "Two Conceptions of Power." Process Studies 6:1 (Spring 1976).

WW -- Marjorie Suchocki. "Weaving the World." Process Studies 14:2 (Summer 1985).

Notes:

1Henry Young and others argued this point at a conference on ‘Liberation in Process Thought and the Black Experience," Chicago, Illinois, November 8-9, 1985,

2 Some readers will recognize this argument for the priority of the issue in social analysis as the methodological clue to social ethics, developed by Alan B. Anderson and George W. Pickering in their study of CCCO and the color line in Chicago. See Alan B. Anderson, "The Search for Method in Social Ethics," in Belief and Ethics, edited by W. Widick Schroeder and Gibson Winter (Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1978), 107-128; and Alan B. Anderson and George W. Pickering, Confronting the Color Line. The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1986). See also Mary D. Pellauer, "Understanding Sexism," in Issues of Justice: Social Sources and Religious Meanings, ed. Warren R. Copeland and Roger D. Hatch (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1988), 127-152.

Sexual and Family Violence: A Growing Issue for the Churches

The problem of sexual and family violence is at least as old as Lot’s offer of his daughters to the men of Sodom, an offer all the more grievous because it was made in the name of the ethic of hospitality to strangers and sojourners: "Behold, I have two daughters who have not known man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof" (Gen. 19:8). Lot, however, is remembered in Christian tradition as the "righteous" Lot (II Peter 2:7) ; his act of giving his daughters to violence and violation goes unnoticed. The betrayal of intimates and the conspiracy of silence so commonly bound together in sexual and family violence are also features of this biblical story.

In the intervening centuries theologians have only occasionally addressed issues of sexual assault or domestic abuse. In The City of God Augustine did write on the meaning of rape, which had become an issue for the church with the rape of Christian women during the sack of Rome in 410, and he begins his discussion with the apt judgment that responsibility for rape belongs to the rapist, not the raped. But all too quickly Augustine’s perverse version of the hermeneutics of suspicion becomes clear: he suggests that women may experience rape with pleasure, and that such women may be getting what they deserve. In facing the perennial question of why this crime is inflicted on Christian women, he opines:

Some most flagrant and wicked desires are allowed free play at present by the secret judgment of God . . . Moreover, it is possible that those Christian women, who are unconscious of any undue pride on account of their virtuous chastity, whereby they sinlessly suffered the violence of their captors, had yet some lurking infirmity which might have betrayed them into a proud and contemptuous bearing, had they not been subjected to the humiliation that befell them in the taking of the city [Whitney J. Oates, editor, Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, vol. 2 (Random House, 1948) , p. 351.

Clearly, Augustine’s doctrine of sin -- with its inextricable mix of sex and lust -- and his doctrine of divine providence lead him into speculations that are unhinged from the experience of rape and invidious to the women violated.

John Calvin wrote the following words to a battered woman seeking his counsel:

We have a special sympathy for poor women who are evilly and roughly treated by their husbands, because of the roughness and cruelty of the tyranny and captivity which is their lot. We do not find ourselves permitted by the Word of God, however, to advise a woman to leave her husband, except by force of necessity; and we do not understand this force to be operative when a husband behaves roughly and uses threats to his wife, nor even when he beats her, but when there is imminent peril to her life . . . [W]e . . . exhort her to bear with patience the cross which God has seen fit to place upon her; and meanwhile not to deviate from the duty which she has before God to please her husband, but to be faithful whatever happens ["Letter From Calvin to an Unknown Woman," June 4, 1559, Calvini Opera, XVII, col. 539, in P. E. Hughes, editor, The Register of the Company of Pastors of Geneva in the Time of Calvin (Eerdmans, 1966) , pp. 344-345].

In this brief letter, the familiar but devastating themes in pastoral responses to battered women are given classical expression. Violence and "tyranny" at home are women’s "lot," a fate to be suffered rather than a problem to be solved. Indeed, Calvin, like Augustine before him and countless others since, seems compelled to explain violence against women by appealing ultimately to the will of God. The inviolability of the institution of marriage justifies a deaf ear and a blind eye to the violation of a woman’s body and spirit through torture and terror. Only the clear and present danger of death legitimates the separation of batterer and battered -- and Calvin does not seem to regard the ever-present life-threatening potential of such violence very seriously. He takes for granted the subordination and servanthood of women in family relations. Calvin stops short of justifying wife- and child-beating in the name of patriarchal duty and discipline, but his message is clear: the Christian duty of a battered wife is not to oppose violence and violation but to endure it and, further, to please her batterer husband.

In Christian Scripture and tradition, then, we find an ethic of care for strangers that renders precarious the protection of daughters; an ethic of chastity -- laden with innuendos of pleasure, lust and pride -- that renders precarious the moral standing and human rights of women; and an ethic of Christian duty that renders precarious the basic safety of wives. Our theological heritage is an accomplice to sexual violence and violation.

For the most part, the complicity of the churches and their theologians in sexual violence is a complicity of silence. We have simply crossed to the other side of the road, in the dubious tradition of the religious leaders in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Even today, when issues of sexual violence receive considerable media attention, surveys and studies indicate that the majority of ministers and seminary students know almost nothing about the dynamics of sexual and family violence and have little or no experience in dealing with it.

Breaking the Silence: The Feminist Revolution. The sexual revolution, which effected a new, more positive valuation of the bodily and sexual character of our humanity, ought also to have affirmed the inviolability of the body (as of the conscience) and respect for the physical integrity of every human being. But the sexual revolution has not been a revolution against coercive sexuality. Indeed, some studies indicate that rape is increasing, and that over 50 per cent of male high school and college students view coercive sex as acceptable behavior (Diane Russell, Sexual Exploitation: Rape, Child Sexual Abuse, and Workplace Harassment [Sage Publications, 1984], pp. 62-65). Nor has the sexual revolution been a revolution for equality in male-female relations. Sexual violence is primarily a problem of violence against women and girls. Until we challenge the status of women as men’s servants and subordinates at home and at work, assault, harassment and abuse will continue.

It is the feminist, not the sexual, revolution that has effectively broken the silence about sexual and family violence, transforming the private hells into a public issue amenable to shared concern, public discourse and common action. The feminist revolution has insisted on the distinction between coercion and consent in sexual relations. It has insisted on equality between women and men, and on justice for women regarding access to basic needs, the means of sustaining a livelihood and the decision-making processes that organize and regulate the common life.

The dramatic emergence of sexual and domestic violence as a public issue testifies to the power of breaking the silence. In June 1974, a Ms. magazine article described the founding of a battered women’s shelter near London. Within the next decade 500 battered women’s shelters were established in the United States. Society has acknowledged that "family violence" includes not only spouse abuse but the abuse of children by parents and other relatives, sibling abuse and the abuse of elderly parents by their adult children. The abuses covered by the term family violence illustrate the problem of defining the issue. Some definitions of family violence limit it to physical assault that causes or intends to cause physical pain and injury, but others include verbal abuse, threats of violence and other actions causing mental or psychological harm. More recently, definitions of family violence have incorporated coercive sexual relations, including the sexual abuse of children by family members, and also marital rape. Definitions of domestic abuse may include neglect, especially in relation to children and the elderly, and financial abuse, a prominent issue in the relations of adult children to their aging parents. What connects these various forms of abuse is the element of coercion or nonconsent; the violation of bodily integrity and well being; and the betrayal of covenantal relationships.

In the past ten or 15 years many states have revised rape laws to encompass male as well as female victims, marital rape, acts of sexual coercion not involving intercourse and assaults in which there is no instance of resistance or physical harm. Some procedures for prosecuting rape have also been changed. Columnist Ellen Goodman illustrates the changed attitude by summarizing several recent rape cases with the phrase: "If she says no, then it’s rape." Beyond and behind the legal change, a reinterpretation of the nature of rape has occurred. We have learned that sexual assault and harassment are exercises of power and control or anger, not expressions of sexual need, interest or pleasure. Testimony by sex offenders corroborates victims’ reports that rape is a life-threatening experience.

Underreporting, the limited and nonrandom character of most surveys, and the problem of definition make reliable statistics on sexual and family violence difficult to establish. But even the most cautious estimates indicate far higher rates of abuse than previously imagined. It is clear that violence against women and violence within families is commonplace, and that the perpetrators and the victims of such violence are ordinary people. Some call it the most democratic violence in America: it is a serious problem among all classes and races of the population.

Murray Straus’s studies suggest that marital violence occurs in one out of four marriages, not as a single event but as a pattern (Richard J. Gelles and Claire Pedrick Cornell, Intimate Violence in Families [Sage Publications, 1985], p. 69) The Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence estimates that one girl out of three and one boy out of seven are sexually abused by age 18, and that in half the cases their abusers are family members; that 1 million children are physically abused by parents or caretakers every year; and that 1 million elderly people are abused every year by their adult children. In Diane Russell’s study of rape, 44 per cent of the women interviewed had been subjected to rape or attempted rape, and contrary to the prevalent stereotype, strangers accounted for only 11 per cent of the perpetrators. Her work also indicated that rape rates are rising: in every age group the rape rates are significantly higher than for the same age group in any earlier period (e.g., for women under 20, the rape rate increased from 11 per cent in 1931 to 36 per cent in 1976).

Women’s stories of sexual violence are stories of terror and torture. We are only beginning to recognize what experiences of sexual violence mean in women’s lives. Indeed, we scarcely have a language or a theory to deal with the short- and long-term effects too long neglected by the care-giving community and by the victims themselves. The studies done on "rape trauma syndrome" are an example of the research needed in the field. Investigations of the intergenerational effects of family violence are another significant contribution.

Breaking the Silence: The Churches’ Response. Breaking the silence is a fitting task for churches and church members. We know the power of the Word in our own lives, and we are called to witness to the good news of the gospel, the gracious love of God for us revealed in Jesus Christ. And it makes a difference. Pastors attest to the impact of mentioning the problem of sexual and family violence in a sermon or a prayer, or posting information about a rape crisis center or a battered women’s shelter on a bulletin board or mentioning it in a newsletter.

Churches are beginning to respond, especially by educating people through congregational programs and outreach support for community-wide care-giving services. Some concrete examples will illustrate various possibilities in this direction, and perhaps encourage thought and action about what more can and should be done by religious institutions. Seattle’s Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence deserves special mention for its decade of pioneering work on family violence with Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish congregations and organizations. Directed by Marie Fortune, a pastor and author of Sexual Violence, The Unmentionable Sin: An Ethical and Pastoral Perspective (Pilgrim Press, 1983), the Center has developed resources for congregational study and action, including a study guide for teen-agers on preventing sexual abuse, a monograph on violence against women of color, and a manual for congregational use in discovering and developing community resources on family violence. CPSDV has also initiated national conferences on family violence and theological education.

Denominational judicatories are beginning to generate their own resources. For example, the Council on Women and the Church of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has developed a packet of materials on family violence for local church use, "A Time to Speak," and also a pamphlet and filmstrip on sexual harassment, Naming the Unnamed: Sexual Harassment in the Church. The Division for Parish Resources of the Lutheran Church in America has included several brochures on family violence in its family-resource series; these resources are valuable for families affected by abuse as well as for congregational study. The Office of Ministries with Women and Families in Crisis of the United Methodist Church has also been engaged with this issue. A 1981 church-wide survey revealed sexual and family violence to be a serious problem within the church. Since then the church has followed two avenues of action: developing resources for the education of members, and supporting model ministries -- such as The Refuge in Erie, Pennsylvania, a church-sponsored shelter.

Theological education is a critical dimension of educating the churches. Few seminaries provide courses on sexual and family violence. At best, some reference may be made to the issue in a pastoral counseling course -- usually within the narrow bounds of crisis counseling or therapeutic intervention. But even sensitive and responsive crisis counseling requires an understanding of the social dimensions of family and sexual violence. If ministers are to be prepared for pastoral counseling and congregational consciousness-raising, the curriculum must include specific and multidisciplinary attention to these issues.

In seminaries as in churches, breaking the silence has a powerful impact on the community itself: student organizations sponsor films and speakers on the topic; campus incidents are addressed rather than denied; field-education placements in shelters are developed, or a session on sexual harassment is provided for field-education supervisors; resources on these issues are added to the library, and continuing-education programs are developed. Thus, even a very modest institutionalization of this issue in theological education provides legitimacy and resources to those addressing the problems, and a space for healing, thinking, talking and acting together.

Some churches are involved in community services, especially emergency-care services: crisis counseling centers, battered women’s shelters and other housing for homeless women and young people -- many of whom are running away from physical and sexual abuse. Long-term housing for homeless women and their children is also a critical need, one often ignored by churches’ outreach missions because the homeless men on the streets of downtown areas are more visible. Ministers and laypersons should get to know the community’s resources for responding to and preventing family and sexual violence: What programs and services exist? What is their perspective on or interpretation of the sexual and family violence with which they deal? What are their policies and procedures?

Churches also must develop their capacities for informed and effective advocacy before the legislatures and the legal system. Innovative and vigorous support is needed for a greatly expanded network of community services for the abuser as well as the abused. Laws are needed to establish adequate legal protection from sexual assault and abuse at home and work.

Last but not least, Christian theology must provide a firmer foundation for care and justice, for standing against sexual and family violence, for healing the violated and for changing society’s values and structures. Our education, service and advocacy depend upon the adequacy of our theological vision -- the way we interpret Scripture and tradition regarding relations between women and men, sex, marriage, parenting and violence. In this adventure of faith and thought, the victims of violence and violation can offer valuable guidance. We need to listen to their stories with an ear for the religious reflections that sustain capacities to survive, to heal and to flourish. A careful and respectful attention to the voices of the violated may also encourage the reconstruction of our theologies, as the experiences and interpretations of sexual violence cast new light on old theological symbols and doctrines.

Ending violence and violation must be a presupposition of pastoral counseling and congregational service and support activities. In the past, a preoccupation with keeping the family together at any cost has contributed to the churches’ complicity in violence against women. But if the conditions of trust and communication so critical to viable, meaningful and stable family life are to be created and nurtured, violence must be stopped. Here, too, we are led to theological and ethical reflection, and a reconsideration of what it means to be human in the presence of God.

All violence -- and certainly sexual violence -- is destructive of essential human capacities and distinctive human purposes. It is obviously physically destructive of victims’ bodies and, indeed, of their lives. The seriousness of this destruction must be emphasized in view of the devaluation of bodies, especially women’s bodies, in traditional Christianity. Ironically, Christian orthodoxy affirms that the integral relation of body and spirit is what makes us human. Thus, sexual violence is always also existentially and spiritually destructive. It threatens self-respect and mutual trust, giving rise to feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, humiliation, worthlessness, mistrust and even self-blame.

Violence is also destructive of the freedom requisite to being and becoming human. Essential human capacities for thought and action; conscience, consent, and choice; communication and association, worship and discipleship can be realized only in freedom. Violence against women or children paralyzes thought and so threatens capacity to deliberate on a course of action or to imagine alternative futures. It mutes speech and so perpetuates the conspiracy of silence that has left victims without recourse to help and healing -- or justice.

Humans are distinctive in their capacity to create, sustain, transform -- and destroy -- community, both interpersonal and political: Violence, whatever else it does, categorically repudiates mutuality and equal participation in decisions affecting intimate and family relations. It denies to victims their citizenship in the family or in the society at large. It is not uncommon for a man who batters his wife also to forbid her to associate with others, whether for friendship, enjoyment or politics. Independent forms of association are ruthlessly suppressed, as they are in all types of tyrannies.

Humankind is created for rejoicing. The Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian Church begins with the question: What is the chief end of humankind? The answer is: To glorify God, and to enjoy God forever. But in the face of violence, joy gives way to terror. We should not trivialize this violation of human purpose. As Christians who declare that human life is life lived in the presence of God, we must speak boldly against the violence that reduces life to a matter of survival. The psalmist was wiser: "May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy!" (Ps. 126).

Christian theology does not lack grounds upon which to stand against sexual violence and violation. Shalom is the vision of a society without violence or fear: "I will give you peace in the land, and none shall make you afraid" (Lev. 26:6). No violence! No fear! In a society as violent as ours, a commitment to nonviolence, in interpersonal as well as international relations, is a radical commitment. But shalom means that, and more. Commentaries on the concept speak of a profound and comprehensive sort of well-being: "abundant welfare," with its connotations of justice and the common good. In Until Justice and Peace Embrace, Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that shalom also means harmonious and responsible relationship with God, other human beings and nature. In the city of shalom, duty gives way to delight.

Shalom is one angle of vision on opposing sexual violence, but it is not the only one. A doctrine of creation that gives theological justification to human rights; the history of exodus and covenant; the ministry of Jesus Christ; the ethic of care for the stranger; and the stories of women in the Bible are all fruitful resources for liturgies of healing and for the work of securing justice. Each of us must explore our own traditions with an ear for victims’ stories and an eye on ending violence.

"May God keep you safe until the word of your life is fully spoken." Margaret Fuller’s words of blessing remind us what sexual violence destroys and what the struggle for peace and justice means. It is time to break the silence on sexual and family abuse -- a silence that still haunts churches and schools of theological education even as these very issues are front-page news. Our silence will not protect us; it is life-threatening, and it is unfaithful to our commission. Let us speak the word of our lives, the gospel of our faith. Let us speak truth to power for the sake of the survival of some and justice for all.

The Zambian Debt Dilemma: A Just Repayment Plan

Sometimes first impressions are surprisingly accurate: mine were. As happens with visitors to a new country my recent introduction to Zambia was the airport, with its huge, cavernous terminal. Yet I saw only a few employees and guards and virtually no passengers other than those of us who got off the flight from London. Many gift-shop shelves were empty -- a sharp contrast to American airport gift shops. Light bulbs had burned out and had not been replaced. The big clock centered high above the main lobby had stopped. I felt as if the terminal had been built in another era. Or maybe it had been built with the expectation that the country would grow and prosper. I later learned that both assumptions were correct.

I traveled to Zambia, a country of 7 million people in southern Africa, with World Mission Associates, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as part of a small team of missionaries and businesspeople to see what, if anything, could be done about Zambia’s foreign-debt dilemma. We wanted to look at the problem from two sides. First, what could be done about the debt right now? Second, what could we do to help the small-businessperson succeed, become more self-sufficient, reduce dependency on imports and promote exports?

By international standards, Zambia’s foreign debt isn’t large -- between $4 and $5 billion. But on a per-capita basis the debt is one of the largest in the world. It is oppressive. Most of the money Zambia makes in foreign exchange goes right back to Western bankers, offering Zambians no chance to get ahead. Because of interest payments, funds that are essential for development leave the country. Roads go without repair for years, buses break down and can’t be fixed for lack of spare parts, gas stations are open but don’t have gas, the telephones may or may not work on any given day, and some farmers can’t afford to buy seed to plant. The nation’s economy is unquestionably decelerating because of this burden. It is not an overstatement to say that the choice may soon come down to feeding the people or paying the bankers.

How did this situation develop? During its glory days of copper mining in the mid-‘60s, Zambia was considered a good credit risk. Bankers aggressively marketed their money, since copper prices were strong and Zambia was one of the world’s leading producers. But the copper industry changed when fiber optics and other copper substitutes replaced copper wire, driving down the price. Both bankers and borrowers thought the situation wouldn’t last long, and bankers continued lending money, in the belief that prices would rebound. Though copper prices today are at a six-year high, they are still relatively low. Development in the agricultural industry is inadequate, and convincing people to leave mining areas for farms remains difficult.

Certainly mistakes were made. The bankers were too aggressive in lending money, and the Zambians were too eager to take it. Some of the money was mismanaged or stolen -- many Zambians won’t deny that -- yet the repayment problem remains. In spite of this, exporting precious foreign exchange from a poor nation to a wealthy one is wrong. While Western bankers see it as an economic issue or a profit-and-loss issue for their banks, that view misses the point. For Zambia, the transfer of funds is a justice issue.

The life of the average Zambian is slowly deteriorating. A widely respected pastor of a church in Lusaka, the capital, told me that in recent times riots and strikes have been occurring frequently -- at least once a week. A few days before I arrived, the postal workers went on strike to demand free transportation to their jobs. They got it. While I was in Lusaka the government said it would have to raise fuel prices, but the reaction was so negative that it backed off the next day. Officials apparently had learned a lesson from last year when they had raised the price of mealie meal -- the staple food for Zambians, made of crushed corn cooked in water -- and widespread rioting resulted.

One farmer explained his problem to me -- a problem that reflects Zambia’s dilemma in miniature. Last year he borrowed 3,000 kwacha (the Zambian currency unit) for growing corn. This year the rains stopped early and a drought covered his land. Consequently, his harvest brought him only 1,200 kwacha. He asked me, "How am I going to pay back the loan?" In one respect he is more fortunate than his country, for his loan is denominated in kwacha. Zambia’s loans are denominated in foreign currencies, usually dollars, and this situation is having a devastating effect. When I arrived in Zambia, $1 bought 16 kwacha. Two and a half weeks later it bought 20 kwacha. The principal of a $1 million loan would have gone up by 4 million kwacha, interest not included. The country’s economy is going backward.

Our group determined that the best solution to Zambia’s economic troubles would be a ten-year interest moratorium on its loans. The Zambians want to repay their debts, so a default was not considered. But in order to repay they need to keep all the development capital they can within the country. This requires time.

Recently the Club of Paris suggested that creditors of sub-Saharan nations consider lowering their interest rates to very reduced levels. But in fact, certain U.S. agencies are restricted by law from making loans at rates below their cost of funds. It would take an act of Congress to do what the Club of Paris suggested.

Another way for Zambia to escape its economic vise would be unilaterally to declare a debt-repayment moratorium, but a small country with a small debt would find it difficult to act by itself. Western countries would impound its foreign capital and freeze its bank accounts. The bankers would probably not willingly write off the debt, being blinded by profit margin concerns. The solution will have to involve politics: Western governments should pressure their banks to accept a ten-year interest moratorium. This will allow Zambia to get on its feet again financially, leaving precious capital in the country. And if we Christians are concerned about justice, we must pressure our governments to help countries like Zambia.

The other side of the debt solution involves helping people of Third World countries such as Zambia to become more self-sufficient. Few Zambians with whom I talked want a handout. They need help to get started, but they don’t want to rely on foreign giveaways for their support.

For the most part, the small-business-person in Zambia has been forgotten by relief organizations and government programs, with most aid going into large projects run by large companies. This seems to be primarily because the administrative cost of funding numerous small programs is too high for undertaking such a plan. Many people simply need a $25.00 or $50.00 loan to get started. They may be market vendors, street food-sellers, seamstresses or farmers. Yet they have an almost total lack of access to credit. For banks it becomes too expensive to make such small loans.

However, some microenterprise development programs are working in other countries. For example, in Bangladesh the Grameen Bank was created to loan up to $200.00 to small-scale enterprises. It now loans over $1 million per month, with a default rate of under 1 per cent.

Another organization that has met with success is the Trickle-Up Program, an independent, nonprofit organization based in New York City. It helps men and women in small-scale enterprises by providing a $100.00 grant for each business. The organization seeks to help people -- whom development planners usually overlook -- who can use their own skills and materials to sell to a local market. The Trickle-Up Program has started or expanded nearly 3,000 business enterprises.

Microenterprise development holds the greatest possibility and hope for the Third World poor. Properly structured and administered development banks or grant programs can have a major impact on the success of import substitution businesses. In addition, marketing African goods abroad could help the export side. If Third World people had a market for their goods and commodities, they could be more self-sufficient. Perhaps some who are concerned could put together a trading company to market African products aggressively in the U.S. SERRV, an ecumenical marketing organization associated with the Church of the Brethren and based in Maryland, is a good model. It currently markets handicrafts from about 200 producers in more than 40 countries. Producers receive an equitable share of the retail price, and numerous individuals throughout the world have the dignity of being gainfully employed.

One group of churches in Kenya has organized a central warehouse and distribution facility for handicrafts. It has representatives who travel around the country locating marketable products such as baskets, wood carvings and fine jewelry. By working closely with various groups and fostering accountability, it has successfully located reliable producers. The distributors are now shipping a fair amount of goods to buyers in Europe.

The week before I arrived at one Zambian village, a relief worker with a Western organization had just left. Because the rains stopped early this year he had been surveying the area in order to predict where the famine would hit so that his group could be prepared. His time would be better spent working on solutions to long-term economic problems. If interest payments were temporarily stopped, Zambia (and other countries like it) could take better care of its citizens and would need fewer relief dollars -- dollars often wasted on interest payments.

If we as Christians are serious about justice, the time to talk about the debt dilemma is past. We need to be involved now, and opportunities of many sorts abound. But in particular we must act on a policy level as prophets and consciences to our governments and businesses. Zambia’s massive debt is contributing to its death. I hope our voices will be heard on the side of life.

Spirituality in Abstract Art

"Art is the daughter of the divine," contended philosopher Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s. Most art 1overs today would assume that Steiner was referring to a pre-20th-century past. True, art was once the daughter of the divine, they might say. But in the 20th century the once-dutiful daughter has struck out on her own, ignoring her religious heritage (indeed, ignoring religious subject matter altogether) and turned her attention to form. Abstract art is a purely aesthetic activity. Certainly in the late 20th century, it is rarely associated with religion.

However, in recent years this story of abstract art has begun to undergo revision. Art critics have discovered that for many artists, abstraction is a way not to express emptiness but to communicate particular ideals. A number of major exhibitions exploring the roots of abstract art have emphasized artists’ utopian hopes bred by the industrial revolution, or their revolutionary political thought, or their revival of primitivism out of a dissatisfaction with the modern world.

The latest of these exhibitions appeared in Los Angeles and Chicago during the first six months of this year: "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985." (It is on view at the Gemeetemuseum in the Hague from September 1 through November 22.) While the exhibition leaves intact the notion that the "daughter of the divine" has indeed struck out on her own, it offers an intriguing challenge to the widespread belief that she has altogether abandoned her spiritual focus. Rather, like many adventurous spirits through history, and a fair number of seekers during our own age, she has shunned traditional religious expression in favor of esoteric aspects of spiritual life.

For those able to accept a broad definition of the word "spiritual" -- one that encompasses elements of the mystical, the gnostic, Eastern religions and the occult, and has few, if any, discernible connections with the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures -- abstract art might be approached as a doorway to the symbolism of modern culture’s spiritual underground. In any case, the arguments advanced by exhibit curator Maurice Tuchman and others in the exhibition catalogue (copublished by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Abbeville Press, New York) deepen our appreciation not only of abstract art but of a little-understood aspect of the religious temper of our times.

To understand the daughter’s journey, it is helpful to recall the break with traditional religious art that took place in the Romantic period. Friedrich Schleiermacher gave theological impetus to highly privatized religious forms with his Romantic insistence that inner piety is more important than outer forms. "Indeed," argues Robert Rosenblum in Modem Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (Harper & Row, 1975) , "Schleiermacher’s theological search for divinity outside the trappings of the Church lies at the core of many a Romantic artist’s dilemma: how to express experiences of the spiritual, of the transcendental, without having recourse to such traditional themes as the adoration, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, whose vitality, in the Age of Enlightenment, was constantly being sapped."

Rosenblum, an art historian invoked in one of the catalogue essays, was among the first scholars to assert that abstract art, far from representing a neat break with representational art, is actually part of a Romantic tradition reflected in northern European artists like Caspar David Friedrich and Joseph M. Turner, who infused landscape paintings with a "sense of divinity." Abstract artists faced the same problem as the earlier Romantics, he said: "how to find, in a secular world, a convincing means of expressing those religious experiences that, before the Romantics, had been channeled into the traditional themes of Christian art." According to art historian Charlotte Douglas, the shift to abstract art in the early 20th century was prompted by a need for new dimensions of consciousness, forms suited "to serve as a passport to and report from" the so-called higher realms.

Esoteric cousins of theosophy that attracted the artists featured in the exhibition include Rosicrucianism, alchemy, Tantrism, cabalism and Hermeticism. The writings of psychiatrist Carl Jung, who was himself interested in alchemy, parapsychology and the occult, were a favorite of some artists. Others favored Jacob Boehme, the 16th-century Lutheran shoemaker who combined Neo-platonism, the Jewish Cabala and Hermetic writings and the Bible in explaining his experiences of God. Still other artists made use of symbols from medieval legends, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, the religion of American Indians, the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff and the works of medieval Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart, John of Ruysbroeck and Richard Rolle.

That theosophy and other types of occult and mystical thought have influenced abstract artists is supplemented in the show by 125 books by theosophers, philosophers and mystics whose images and ideas also appear in the tradition of abstract art. The argument for the relationship begins with four artists generally viewed as pioneer abstractionists, all of whom are shown to have been steeped in spiritual concerns.

Piet Mondrian, the Dutch painter best know for his abstract gridwork of interlocking perpendicular black lines and enclosing squares of red and yellow, was an avid reader of theosophy, who once said he learned everything he knew from Madame Blavatsky He joined the Dutch Theosophical Society in 1909, about the same time that his work began its gradual evolution toward the abstract. The shift was heralded in his landscapes: wide expanses of beach and sea; forest scenes that highlight the vertical thrust of trees from a horizontal

expanse of earth. Mondrian’s preoccupation with the tension between vertical and horizontal was later depicted in the haunting abstract cruciform patterns that would become his trademark. One critic has said that given the antisocial attitudes apparently underlying abstract works, a viewer unfamiliar with Mondrian’s personal religious quest might associate his grids with jail bars. But according to Mondrian’s own notebooks, the patterns represent the struggle toward unity of cosmic dualities and the religious symmetry undergirding the material universe. A strong believer in the theosophical doctrine of human evolution from a lower, materialistic stage toward spirituality and higher insight, Mondrian wrote that the hallmark of the New Age would be the "new man" who "can live only in the atmosphere of the universal."

For Wassily Kandinsky, the religious themes implicit in his paintings are made explicit in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a little book he wrote in 1910, the year he did his first abstract painting. Kandinsky, like many abstract artists, saw himself as a spiritual as well as an aesthetic pioneer. Like Mondrian, Kandinsky was versed in theosophy, and felt that abstraction was the best means available to artists for depicting an unseen realm. With near-messianic fervor, Kandinsky announced that the type of painting he envisioned would advance the new "spiritual epoch." In his book he describes the spiritual realm as a triangle in upward motion. At its apex stands a man whose vision points the way; within are artists, who are "prophets," providing "spiritual food."

Familiarity with this theory is all but crucial to understanding a painting like Kandinsky’s "Variegation in the Triangle." This 1927 work consists of an obtuse triangle set against a background of dense clouds that seem to be in motion. At the apex of the triangle is a circle, a symbol of wholeness and unity in much mystical thought, and within the triangle are circles connected by straight lines, likely representing the artist-prophets.

Two other pioneers, Frantisek Kupka, a Czech, and Kasimir Malevitch, a Russian who in 1914 and 1915 exhibited a series of squares on plain backgrounds, were also avid readers of theosophy and other metaphysical works. Kupka studied Greek, German and Oriental philosophy, along with a variety of theosophical texts. Douglas writes that the aesthetics of Malevich and his circle "resulted from a unified world view that encompassed all dichotomies; for them science and Eastern mystical ideas were seamlessly joined in a conceptual continuum, and knowledge of the world might be obtained by beginning at any point."

Tuchman stresses that it was not just the founders of abstract art who were interested in spiritual investigations. "Abstraction’s emergence throughout the 20th century was continually nourished by elements from the common pool of mystical ideas." What artists found appealing about the various arcane religious and philosophical systems was their underlying premise that the spiritual world is governed by laws that mirror natural laws and that can be expressed in symbols. The idea is akin to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion that every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of mind. Geometric forms are thus paradigms of spiritual evolution. The spiritua1 world, like the natural world, is charged with energy, producing cosmic vibrations and human auras. The spiritual principles that intrigued certain artists included synesthesia, the overlap between the senses by which a painting can simulate music; duality, the idea that the cosmos reflects an underlying principle of yin and yang; and so-called "sacred geometry," the belief that, as Plato put it, "God geometricizes."

Against this background, the works take on new meanings. For example, the Russian Ivan Kliun’s work titled "Red Light, Spherical Composition," which portrays a hazy red-orange sphere against a black background, bears a striking resemblance to Fludd’ s mandalas. Yves Klein’s "Cosmogony" is a canvas covered with blue, red and black circles that seem to be in movement, as if engaged in a cosmic dance. The works of Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) , an early American abstractionist who was an avid reader of Christian mystics, combine symbols from traditional Christianity and the occult. Hartley once said that it was "out of the heat of his reading" of the mystics that he began his works. In "The Transference of Richard Rolle" (1932-33) Hartley pays tribute to that 14th-century English mystic. The painting is of a cloud, set against a deep blue sky and hovering over a barren red-rock landscape. The cloud is imprinted with a yellow triangle enclosing Rolle’s monogram, suggesting transcendence within the Trinity. And the use of American Indian pictography by Jackson Pollock and others indicates the interest in the 1930s and ‘40s in the vitality and spirituality of Indian culture.

As the century wore on, some artists abandoned the search for iconography and turned to more radical abstraction. Viewing the exhibit, I found it especially fascinating to ponder some of the purer abstract works -- such as the rich, dark, imageless canvases of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko -- in relation to the apophatic tradition in Christian mysticism. Masters of that tradition, sometimes called the via negativa, choose words like nothingness, darkness and obscurity to symbolize God, the wholly other Absolute who is unknowable by means of the intellect but approachable through love.

Newman’s and Rothkos somber, borderless canvases suggest deep silence and infinite void, yet somehow, too, evoke a sense of presence and mystery. Newman, an American who died in 1970, made no attempt to hide his spiritual interests. In 1943 he wrote, "The painter is concerned . . . with the presentation into the world mystery. His imagination is therefore attempting to dig into metaphysical secrets. To that extent, his art is concerned with the sublime. It is a religious art which through symbols will catch the basic truth of life."

For many Christians, the theme of the show is sure to be problematic, perhaps rightly so. Scrutiny of the artists’ sources reveals a deep immersion in multiple forms of Neoplatonic spirituality -- a spiritual pursuit that has accompanied Christianity from the time of Irenaeus, who thundered against the gnostics in the second century, to the present, a time in which ultraconservative Christians view the occult as a direct manifestation of evil spirits. The dangers of a spirituality divorced from the disciplines and dogmas of established religion have always been clear to Christian leaders. One is reminded of St. Paul’s admonition to "test the spirits."

On the other hand, this reading of abstract art offers yet more evidence that the religious landscape has undergone radical shifts. In their new book American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (Rutgers University Press, 1987). Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney note that traditional Christian symbols can no longer be relied on to forge a synthesis of religion and culture. They cite a need for a new mode of synthesis, one suited to a post-Protestant age. Seeing the connection between abstract art and spiritual exploration is sure to contribute to a better understanding of the metaphysical quests taking place on the fringes of our culture. Though these quests undoubtedly are alien to many, they are rooted in intellectual currents that arose more than a century ago and have never disappeared.

Between Anarchy and Fanaticism: Religious Freedom’s Challenge

Today’s American religious community is beset with tension. On the left, religious liberals fear that the various spiritual orthodoxies Will lead to extremism. Every act of spiritual zealotry -- such as the bombing of abortion clinics -- awakens in them the specter of religious fanatics controlling America. They believe that the slightest hint of an infringement upon the separation of church and state must be resisted to save our country from an impending obscurantist theocracy.

That paranoid fantasy has an equally corrosive counterpart on the right. If Americans are not educated, industrious and sober; if our streets are violent and our sexuality pagan; if our family life is unstable and our personalities unsound -- in short, if America has lost its moral stature and thus its national self-respect, then, for religious conservatives, it is the fault of those who prate of freedom and sow anarchy -- not the least cause being liberal religionist loss of proper faith.

These ghostly figures -- religious fanatics on the one hand, and spiritual ethical nihilists, on the other -- haunt our discussions of religious freedom. I have no illusion that by raising them from the pit of our unconscious I shall thereby exorcise them. I only hope that by encouraging us to face our wild imaginings I may make it somewhat easier for us to distinguish the ghosts from reality.

My approach to this conflict begins with an assertion of religious self-respect, namely, that religion ought not look to secular disciplines to assign it its role in helping determine our social policy, and it ought vigorously to resist the frequent efforts to tell it to stand at the distant sidelines. Like many religionists of both the left and the right, I believe that religion must play a far more significant role in the life of our culture than it has recently if our democracy is to regain its strong moral tone.

But beyond this initial statement of unity, the two religious perspectives radically and disturbingly divide. To begin with the camp in which I may be found, religious liberals appreciate pluralism and tolerate divergent lifestyles because they know that theirs is a limited truth. Indeed, they see all religion deriving as much from human spiritual striving and creativity as from God’s instructive presence. They know enough of God’s truth to devote their lives to it, perhaps even to seek to share its benefits with others who could benefit from its truth. But since they regard that truth as refracted through human finitude, they cannot insist that their version of it must now become the one way for everyone -- and been forced by the government. Self and soul and conscience may lead others to different forms of God’s service. This openness to the diversity of religious insight this willingness to appreciate and even learn from others, is the glory of religious liberalism, keeping it forever fresh.

Traditional religion speaks in more certain terms. Its holy books are God’s own words, not merely inspired literature. In them God has given humankind specific, clear instructions for individual and social conduct. True, every religion has experienced discord, and its forms have changed over time. But pluralism and diversity must stay within the discipline of God’s word or be deemed heretical. True, There are limits on the demands that can be made of sinners, and every person’s conscience deserves some respect. But to cultivate a social neutrality toward God’s fundamental teachings adds to the sinfulness of our time. This certainty in knowing God’s one, true way generates the courage to stand against the majority and endure any suffering. It is the glory of traditional religion.

There is no theological way of reconciling these different understandings of the human and divine aspects of religion. No tactical procedures, like getting to know one another or conducting dialogue in good will -- for all the intrinsic worth and moral significance of that effort -- will overcome so fundamental a disagreement. Realistically, then, we must expect to continue living with considerable religious tension.

I do not consider this lack of religious serenity a major threat to our democratic future. It should, rather, give us greater insight into the moral daring our founders displayed by separating religion and government. They did not erect their symbolic "wall" between the two because they disparaged religion. They considered it self evident that a reality transcending nature validated democracy by mandating concern for the common welfare and respect for every individual. Because belief empowered and shaped political life, they granted all religions the right of free exercise, and knowing the human desire to dominate, they courageously insisted that government not infringe upon religious life. They even made it possible for some uncommon believers to be exceptions to the nation’s laws -- a breathtaking acknowledgment of the significance of religious belief. The price of such benign disinterest by the state was that the religious faiths must refrain from intruding creedal matters into political affairs.

Jefferson and his co-workers displayed creative genius by not seeking to resolve this problem. They gave us no rule by which to mediate the conflicts arising from the state’s positive need for religion and its legal distance from it. They surely had no model for the place of religion in their ideal republic, for they were convinced that the previous arrangements had been disastrous for the commonweal. They simply left it to the democratic process to resolve future conflicts between religion and government. I assume that they could accept so indeterminate a structure because they had confidence in democracy.

What the Constitution or the Bill of Rights could not specify, or could indicate only ambiguously, the ongoing give-and-take of an engaged citizenry would slowly clarify. Politically they were pragmatists, though morally they remained idealists. It is an unphilosophic combination of standards, but one which, I am convinced, can scarcely be improved on for those who would govern both democratically and humanely.

Our generation is less sanguine about the practice of democracy than were the Jeffersonians, and the high emotions of our politics of confrontation testify to our security. How, then, shall we idealists who are also determined to be realists find the courage to walk the open, uncertain way they marked out for us? Seeking to serve God, where can we find the compelling reason to treat with civility the arguments and the people we know to be profoundly wrong?

To begin with, though we have had to give up Jefferson’s moral confidence in a rationally enlightened humankind, we have good reason to share his other motive for separating government from religion, mainly, humankind’s tragic experience with melding the state’s unlimited power and religion’s absolute truth. Though we no longer see classic wars of religion, most Americans are repelled by the way religion exacerbates the conflicts between Irish Protestants and Catholics, Lebanese Christians and Muslims, Israeli right-wing Orthodox and Palestinian Christians and Muslims, and Indian Hindus and Sikhs and Pakistani Muslims. (The pseudo-religions of our time, communism and Nazism, have acted with equal if not greater inhumanity; but they, at least, made no claim of fealty to a God whose supreme concern is peace.) When religious leaders like the Ayatollah Khomeini or Meir Kahane propose to run a country strictly by what they understand to be God’s revealed word, and hence to do so undemocratically, most American believers become deeply troubled.

Moreover, we can draw on an experience unavailable to the authors of our religious liberty, namely 200 years of American history. The bold experiment in separation has, on the whole, succeeded remarkably well. It has kept America free of religious wars, persecution and established intolerance. It has enabled us, with spasms of regression, to overcome prejudices entrenched for centuries and to be increasingly humane to those whose faiths seem to us odd or even offensive. It has fostered an ethos according to which most Americans see religion as a beneficent contributor to our nation’s social welfare. And it has largely benefited the life of the faiths themselves.

Forced to rely on persuasion and example rather than on government support, American religions exhibit a vitality and personal significance unmatched in most other societies. American religion, in my estimation, has weathered Western civilization’s turn to secularity comparatively well, and that, I think, is largely because it has needed to stand on its own.

I have had my own experience with the swing of the religious-secular pendulum. Growing up in the 1930s in Columbus, Ohio -- no home then of aggressive religious orthodoxy -- I regularly felt the coercion of the dominant Protestant mentality. I realized one day that the song we were expected to sing as we marched into assembly at Heyl Avenue Elementary School was "Onward, Christian Soldiers." In high school, the principal did not hesitate, when chiding me for my immaturity, to call me to fulfill the injunction of Scripture -- that is, of Paul -- to give up childish things and act like an adult. Were America a Christian country, as the administrators I encountered took for granted, then we non-Christian patriots might well have had to find a way to participate in a religion we did not share. But we were also being taught that all citizens, regardless of religion, had equal rights in this country. To all of us who did not share the dominant -- though unevangelical -- Protestantism, the secular side of public education and of all civic life was liberating.

After World War II, secularity seized the cultural sway from Protestantism, and to some extent carried its revolution so far that it destroyed its own moral foundations. We are now seeking through our democratic disputes to determine just where the line between civic secularity and religious practice should be drawn. In trying to do so, the evils of the present ought not erase from memory -- it certainly cannot erase from mine -- the evils of the prior stage. American secularity came to power because of religion’s failure to respect the simple human tights Americans have long felt everyone has. If secularity itself now requires reining in, this movement ought not to undermine human freedom. Indeed, with American religion and secularity becoming increasingly diverse, no single religious position can hope to speak for us all. Any practice so bland as to be unobjectionable will surely be too empty to rectify our lack of spirituality.

Religious liberals, who claim to find God in human experience, should view as significant the two centuries of this American experiment with religious openness. They should see democracy as revelatory of how religious institutions can be combined with quite different institutions to build a moral social life. For the classic faiths, however, history dare not usurp the authority of God’s given word. Yet human experience does have an important, though subsidiary, role in religious orthodoxies. On the simplest level, they have achieved much of their recent success by learning the current fashions for successful communication. Their content, too, has not been unaffected by sociocultural developments, as their present celebration of the joy of marital sexuality indicates. More important, they know that Americans will judge the value of their faith largely by its fruits in human relations. (When, to give a recent example, his superiors removed the Roman Catholic archbishop of Seattle from areas of leadership where his soul had led him to gentle yet prophetic dissent from them, many pious Americans were appalled.)

Thomas Jefferson may well have been America’s greatest political thinker and draftsman, but Abraham Lincoln, I suggest, remains our model believer. By the conservative standards of his day, he seemed almost an infidel, refusing to attend a church or even to avow Christian faith. But no one then doubted -- and no one now, in a far less religious age, doubts -- the utter depth of his devotion to humankind and the awesome responsibilities that can lay upon us. Something like Lincoln’s faith runs strongly through the American psyche. Its persistence goes far to explain why, though institutional affiliation remains low, public-opinion surveys consistently show Americans as overwhelmingly affirming religious belief. Most traditional religious groups in the country can, I think, find ways of learning from this elemental American commitment to humaneness.

Liberals have already valuably explored the spiritual virtues of human freedom and creativity. They now need to make plain why their demythologization of sin and commandment does not eventually lead to a destructive anarchy. In a time when freedom is regularly abused, what limits do they place on the exercise of the individual will? What do they consider an irresponsible, irreligious exercise of personal autonomy, and how do they propose to teach and exemplify their doctrine of religious constraint?

Conservatives have tellingly demonstrated the spiritual fruits of faithfulness to God’s expressed will. They now need to explain, why a doctrine of inerrancy is not likely to lead to the sinfulness and profanation of fanaticism. What value does their understanding of God’s revelation place upon democracy? What sort of freedom is appropriate in their midst and how able are they to grant full dignity to people who hold different beliefs?

Few theological tasks could be as critical for our time as these: teaching us how, while loving freedom, to mandate high standards of behavior; and how, while maintaining God’s truth, to accommodate variety and dissent. Freedom of religion is not a condition achieved once and for all by a statute composed in Virginia, or by-statements recorded in the Constitution. It is today what it has always been: an incomparable American adventure, a courageous effort to solve in life what cannot be reconciled in theory.