Jürgen Habermas - Zeit der Übergänge [See my translation here.]
In the so-far far from fully successful attempt to reform my character, I'm going to start posting more from Hans Kung and other writers as I come across things I need to work on. Maybe if I do it in public, eventually pride and fear of being found out for having a weak character will give me a push in a better direction. And, I admit, I find it helps me to cope with the catastrophes facing us and shows me how I'm falling short in action.
OK, enough of the public confessional.
From Hans Kung, On Being A Christian, Action
Apart from the formulation of the chief commandment, drawn from the Old Testament, Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels uses the words "love" and "loving" in the sense of love of neighbor, like the word "neighbor" itself, very sparingly. Nevertheless, love of one's fellow man is present everywhere in Jesus' proclamation. Evidently, where love is concerned, actions speak louder than words. It is not talk, but action, which makes clear the nature of love. Practice is the criterion. What then is love according to Jesus?
Both God and Man
A first answer is that, according to Jesus,love is essentially love of both God and man. Jesus came to fulfill the law by making God's will prevail, and God's will aims at man's well-being. That is why he can say that all the commandments are summed up in this dual commandment of love. Judaism had already spoken sporadically of love in this dual sense. But Jesus achieves simply and concretely an unparalleled reduction and and concentration of all the commandments into this dual commandment and combines the love of God and the love of man in an indissoluble unity. Since then it has been impossible to play off God and man against each other. Then love becomes a requirement which can encompass without restriction the whole life of man and yet is involved in a distinctive way in each individual case. It is typical of Jesus that love thus becomes the criterion of piety and of a person's whole conduct.
For Jesus however love of God and love of man are not the same thing since for hi quite obviously God and man are not the same. It is not God who loses, but man, when either God is humanized or man idolized. God remains God. God remains the one Lord of the world and of man. He cannot be replaced by human fellowship. Where is the man so free of limitations and faults that he could become God for me, the object of a complete and unconditional love? The romanticism or mysticism of love can conjure up an idealized picture of the other person, can conceal or postpone but not eliminate conflicts. In the light however of the unconditional love of God who embraces all, our fellow man too can be loved quite radically, as he is, with all his limitations and faults. There is no doubt that Jesus gives to God the absolute primacy, precisely in man's interest. That is why he claims man as a whole, his whole will, his heart, his innermost core, the person himself. And that is why, when someone is converted, comes back to him in trustful faith, he expects no more and no less than love wholehearted, undivided love; you must love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul and your whole mind, his is the first and greatest commandment.
But this love does not mean a mystical union with God, in which someone tries to withdraw from the world, to be isolated from men and one with God. In the last resort, a love of God without love of man is no love at all. And if God must keep his inalienable primacy and God's love can never become a means or a symbol for love of man, neither can love of man ever become a means or a symbol for love of God. It is not only for God's sake, but for his own sake, that I mus love my fellow man. I must not keep looking over my shoulder at God when I turn to my fellow man, not indulge in pious talk when I am supposed to be helping somebody. The Samaritan helps without dragging in religious reasons: the need of the man fallen among thieves is sufficient for him and at that moment his whole attention is concentrated on the victim. Those declared blessed at the last judgement had no idea that they had met the Lord himself in those whom they had fed, to whom they had given drink, whom they had sheltered, clothed and visited. On the other hand those who are condemned show that, at best, they would have loved their fellow men for the Lord's sake. This is not only false love of God, but also false love of men.
Yet love of man is still too general a description. We are speaking uncertainly of universal humanity, but we must be more precise. In Jesus' way of speaking there is not even a hint of "embracing millions," of a "kiss for the whole world," as in the poem of Schiller turned by Beethoven in the Ninth Symphony into a great hymn of joy. A kiss of that kind costs nothing; it is not like kissing this one sick, imprisoned, underprivileged, starving man. Humanism costs so much less, the more it is directed to all mankind and the less it is open to the approach of the individual man with his needs. It is easier to plead for peace in the Far East than for peace in one's own family or in one's own sphere of influence. The humane Europeans can more easily identify with Black People in North American and in South Africa than the immigrant workers in his own country. The more distant our fellow men, the easier it is to profess our love in words.
That last sentence reminds me of the often repeated observation that in order to murder people in war, the warrior has to first be led to distance themselves, to alienate from themselves from the humanity of those they we sent to kill, which is what some of the Hollywood glamorization of military training during the Reagan era fascist chic movies did after the establishment became worried that the anti-war movement during the Vietnam war had made Americans unwilling to engage in foreign wars of economic interest.* Perhaps such bigoted hate of an abstract other and that kind of abstracted "love" at a distance are a lot closer than they are supposed to be. I would guess it is how so many of those idealistic American Commies and lefties were able to manifest in their idealized "love of man" a devotion to such mass murderers, enslavers, oppressors of such abstracted, romanticized, idealized people in those far away lands of the Soviet empire and China, even North Korea at some particular points of such degenerate humanism.
This view of the obligation of Christians when they profess to be followers of Jesus is nothing sappy or easy, it has to count as some of the hardest, most constantly challenging effort, generally unrewarded with edifying support. And even as some rare people have come close to matching the conception of Jesus in the Gospels - as a general population of coming even as close as a less radical version of it as is typically asserted to comprise "The Law" of Moses - the temptations to turn it into something else is constant.** I can only observe that at a distance, I have done nothing like approach either the lesser or the most radical interpretation of The Law that Jesus taught.
As the quote from Habermass says, it is the thing which is not merely a preformation or catalyst of all of the good that is potentially and actually contained in modern democratic societies and countries, it is the one and only source that feeds the entire thing. That is why anything that diverts people from it are not only a danger to other people, individually, they are a danger to egalitarian democracy, equal justice and the freedom of body, of life, of mind which are made possible through those. That is exactly what has, so ironically, been the focus of sustained attack ever since the beginning of the modernist attack on Christianity and Judaism and religion in general. The very freedoms enjoyed by those of the relatively liberated upper classes of Britain, of France, etc. and those of the United States, based in the liberation they felt from the diminution of the feudal orders, of the extension of that as the United States was forming, led them to reject those very things that fed that in favor of materialistic atheism, scientism, which cannot support the equality that is embodied in the commandments mentioned above. You have to see someone else as equal to yourself, no matter what their condition in life is, before you reject your right to force their lives into your purpose,as possible or to leave them in abject misery so your own beautiful mind will not be troubled by leaving them there.
The parable of the Samaritan as included by Kung in this pasage, structured as to who passes by on the other side of the road and who stops and helps the man fallen among thieves is,as all of the parables of Jesus, a supernatural understanding that requires pages and pages and pages of unpacking. They aren't mere framings, they are windows that you get out of the frames through. The best I can do is describe it abstractly in terms of entire societies in the context of egalitarian democracy and that would take me a lot longer than I have. It's the kind of window by which I've seen my theme more clearly than by any other. I can see how the "white evangelicals" have gone so far from what they profess, their devotion to the Bible inverter, the modern Herod, Trump in their choices to reject the central teaching of a man they claim to believe is God, I can see how the right-wing hierarchs of the Catholic Church make common cause and support him. And I can see what I'm doing wrong, too through it.
* And, I suppose to some extent, to oppose Communism, though the Communist rulers of China have certainly proven that American elites were fully able to accommodate Communist dictatorship if they did business with them.
** It must not have done much for Mother Teresa's spiritual progress when the BBC's Malcolm Muggeridge "discovered" her and made her into the figure of sentimental, popular religious sentimentality that she was made into. A sort of Catholic Princess Diana figure who, as coincidence showed in the timing of their deaths, couldn't eclipse the worldly Princess. I doubt that even someone who was more devoted to making that radical form of love real in the slums of Britain or North America would have become that kind of figure in the West, they'd have been too dangerous to the governments and establishments of their countries, in whom the media have a vested, financial interest. The media in the United States didn't turn the public image of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. into a plaster saint until he had been murdered and safely silenced, lest he bring his campaign for the Beloved Community too close to them. They knew they were in no such danger from Mother Teresa and her order impinging too closely on them.
From Hans Kung, On Being A Christian, Action
Apart from the formulation of the chief commandment, drawn from the Old Testament, Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels uses the words "love" and "loving" in the sense of love of neighbor, like the word "neighbor" itself, very sparingly. Nevertheless, love of one's fellow man is present everywhere in Jesus' proclamation. Evidently, where love is concerned, actions speak louder than words. It is not talk, but action, which makes clear the nature of love. Practice is the criterion. What then is love according to Jesus?
Both God and Man
A first answer is that, according to Jesus,love is essentially love of both God and man. Jesus came to fulfill the law by making God's will prevail, and God's will aims at man's well-being. That is why he can say that all the commandments are summed up in this dual commandment of love. Judaism had already spoken sporadically of love in this dual sense. But Jesus achieves simply and concretely an unparalleled reduction and and concentration of all the commandments into this dual commandment and combines the love of God and the love of man in an indissoluble unity. Since then it has been impossible to play off God and man against each other. Then love becomes a requirement which can encompass without restriction the whole life of man and yet is involved in a distinctive way in each individual case. It is typical of Jesus that love thus becomes the criterion of piety and of a person's whole conduct.
For Jesus however love of God and love of man are not the same thing since for hi quite obviously God and man are not the same. It is not God who loses, but man, when either God is humanized or man idolized. God remains God. God remains the one Lord of the world and of man. He cannot be replaced by human fellowship. Where is the man so free of limitations and faults that he could become God for me, the object of a complete and unconditional love? The romanticism or mysticism of love can conjure up an idealized picture of the other person, can conceal or postpone but not eliminate conflicts. In the light however of the unconditional love of God who embraces all, our fellow man too can be loved quite radically, as he is, with all his limitations and faults. There is no doubt that Jesus gives to God the absolute primacy, precisely in man's interest. That is why he claims man as a whole, his whole will, his heart, his innermost core, the person himself. And that is why, when someone is converted, comes back to him in trustful faith, he expects no more and no less than love wholehearted, undivided love; you must love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul and your whole mind, his is the first and greatest commandment.
But this love does not mean a mystical union with God, in which someone tries to withdraw from the world, to be isolated from men and one with God. In the last resort, a love of God without love of man is no love at all. And if God must keep his inalienable primacy and God's love can never become a means or a symbol for love of man, neither can love of man ever become a means or a symbol for love of God. It is not only for God's sake, but for his own sake, that I mus love my fellow man. I must not keep looking over my shoulder at God when I turn to my fellow man, not indulge in pious talk when I am supposed to be helping somebody. The Samaritan helps without dragging in religious reasons: the need of the man fallen among thieves is sufficient for him and at that moment his whole attention is concentrated on the victim. Those declared blessed at the last judgement had no idea that they had met the Lord himself in those whom they had fed, to whom they had given drink, whom they had sheltered, clothed and visited. On the other hand those who are condemned show that, at best, they would have loved their fellow men for the Lord's sake. This is not only false love of God, but also false love of men.
Yet love of man is still too general a description. We are speaking uncertainly of universal humanity, but we must be more precise. In Jesus' way of speaking there is not even a hint of "embracing millions," of a "kiss for the whole world," as in the poem of Schiller turned by Beethoven in the Ninth Symphony into a great hymn of joy. A kiss of that kind costs nothing; it is not like kissing this one sick, imprisoned, underprivileged, starving man. Humanism costs so much less, the more it is directed to all mankind and the less it is open to the approach of the individual man with his needs. It is easier to plead for peace in the Far East than for peace in one's own family or in one's own sphere of influence. The humane Europeans can more easily identify with Black People in North American and in South Africa than the immigrant workers in his own country. The more distant our fellow men, the easier it is to profess our love in words.
That last sentence reminds me of the often repeated observation that in order to murder people in war, the warrior has to first be led to distance themselves, to alienate from themselves from the humanity of those they we sent to kill, which is what some of the Hollywood glamorization of military training during the Reagan era fascist chic movies did after the establishment became worried that the anti-war movement during the Vietnam war had made Americans unwilling to engage in foreign wars of economic interest.* Perhaps such bigoted hate of an abstract other and that kind of abstracted "love" at a distance are a lot closer than they are supposed to be. I would guess it is how so many of those idealistic American Commies and lefties were able to manifest in their idealized "love of man" a devotion to such mass murderers, enslavers, oppressors of such abstracted, romanticized, idealized people in those far away lands of the Soviet empire and China, even North Korea at some particular points of such degenerate humanism.
This view of the obligation of Christians when they profess to be followers of Jesus is nothing sappy or easy, it has to count as some of the hardest, most constantly challenging effort, generally unrewarded with edifying support. And even as some rare people have come close to matching the conception of Jesus in the Gospels - as a general population of coming even as close as a less radical version of it as is typically asserted to comprise "The Law" of Moses - the temptations to turn it into something else is constant.** I can only observe that at a distance, I have done nothing like approach either the lesser or the most radical interpretation of The Law that Jesus taught.
As the quote from Habermass says, it is the thing which is not merely a preformation or catalyst of all of the good that is potentially and actually contained in modern democratic societies and countries, it is the one and only source that feeds the entire thing. That is why anything that diverts people from it are not only a danger to other people, individually, they are a danger to egalitarian democracy, equal justice and the freedom of body, of life, of mind which are made possible through those. That is exactly what has, so ironically, been the focus of sustained attack ever since the beginning of the modernist attack on Christianity and Judaism and religion in general. The very freedoms enjoyed by those of the relatively liberated upper classes of Britain, of France, etc. and those of the United States, based in the liberation they felt from the diminution of the feudal orders, of the extension of that as the United States was forming, led them to reject those very things that fed that in favor of materialistic atheism, scientism, which cannot support the equality that is embodied in the commandments mentioned above. You have to see someone else as equal to yourself, no matter what their condition in life is, before you reject your right to force their lives into your purpose,as possible or to leave them in abject misery so your own beautiful mind will not be troubled by leaving them there.
The parable of the Samaritan as included by Kung in this pasage, structured as to who passes by on the other side of the road and who stops and helps the man fallen among thieves is,as all of the parables of Jesus, a supernatural understanding that requires pages and pages and pages of unpacking. They aren't mere framings, they are windows that you get out of the frames through. The best I can do is describe it abstractly in terms of entire societies in the context of egalitarian democracy and that would take me a lot longer than I have. It's the kind of window by which I've seen my theme more clearly than by any other. I can see how the "white evangelicals" have gone so far from what they profess, their devotion to the Bible inverter, the modern Herod, Trump in their choices to reject the central teaching of a man they claim to believe is God, I can see how the right-wing hierarchs of the Catholic Church make common cause and support him. And I can see what I'm doing wrong, too through it.
* And, I suppose to some extent, to oppose Communism, though the Communist rulers of China have certainly proven that American elites were fully able to accommodate Communist dictatorship if they did business with them.
** It must not have done much for Mother Teresa's spiritual progress when the BBC's Malcolm Muggeridge "discovered" her and made her into the figure of sentimental, popular religious sentimentality that she was made into. A sort of Catholic Princess Diana figure who, as coincidence showed in the timing of their deaths, couldn't eclipse the worldly Princess. I doubt that even someone who was more devoted to making that radical form of love real in the slums of Britain or North America would have become that kind of figure in the West, they'd have been too dangerous to the governments and establishments of their countries, in whom the media have a vested, financial interest. The media in the United States didn't turn the public image of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. into a plaster saint until he had been murdered and safely silenced, lest he bring his campaign for the Beloved Community too close to them. They knew they were in no such danger from Mother Teresa and her order impinging too closely on them.
No comments:
Post a Comment