Com o avanço das forças neoconservadoras e neoliberais no âmbito da educação pública brasileira, os ataques e as tentativas de interdição da Pedagogia Libertadora e do legado de seu precursor, o professor Paulo Freire, têm se tornado cada vez mais frequentes. Sob ameaça, a teoria pedagógica humanista e progressista de Freire tem sido, equivocadamente, associada ao marxismo. Este artigo tem como objetivo apresentar os pressupostos teórico-filosóficos da Pedagogia Libertadora, bem como as implicações de tais pressupostos no método didático-pedagógico de Paulo Freire. Para isso, destaca sua relação com a fenomenologia, com o existencialismo cristão e com a dialética idealista. Expõe divergências entre o ideário libertador e a filosofia marxista, contrapondo suas perspectivas ontológicas e epistemológicas. No que diz respeito ao método libertador, analisa-o a partir da compreensão de seu desenvolvimento ao longo da produção intelectual de Freire e evidencia sua relação com a Escola Nova. Toma como referencial teórico-metodológico o materialismo histórico dialético, pois o conjunto de ideias existentes em uma dada formação social, dentre elas as ideais pedagógicas, são determinadas pela produção material da vida.Palavras-chave: Contra-Hegemonia. Educação Popular. Marxismo.The phenomenology as a philosophical foundation of Pedagogia Libertadora: a historical-critical analysis of the theory of Paulo FreireABSTRACTWith the advancement of neoconservative and neoliberal forces within Brazilian public education, the attacks and attempts of interdiction of the Pedagogia Libertadora and the legacy of its precursor, teacher Paulo Freire, have become increasingly frequent. Under threat, Freire humanist and progressive pedagogical theory has been mistakenly associated with Marxism. This article aims to present the theoretical-philosophical assumptions of the Pedagogia Libertadora, as well as the implications of such assumptions in the didactic-pedagogical method of Paulo Freire. For this, it highlights its relation with phenomenology, with Christian existentialism and with the idealistic dialectic. It exposes divergences between the liberating ideology and the Marxist philosophy, opposing its ontological and epistemological perspectives. With regard to the liberating method, it analyzes it from the understanding of its development throughout the intellectual production of Freire and evidences its relation with the New School. It takes as a theoretical-methodological reference the dialectical historical materialism, since the set of ideas existing in a given social formation, among them the pedagogical ideals, are determined by the material production of life.Keywords: Counter-Hegemony. Popular Education. Marxism.La fenomenología como fundamento filosófico de la Pedagogía Libertadora: una análisis histórico-crítico de la teoría de Paulo FreireRESUMENCon el avance de las fuerzas neoconservadoras y neoliberales dentro de la educación pública brasileña, los ataques e intentos de interdicción de la Pedagogía Libertadora y el legado de su precursor, el maestro Paulo Freire, se han vuelto cada vez más frecuentes. Bajo amenaza, la teoría pedagógica progresista y humanitaria de Freire ha sido asociada erróneamente con el marxismo. Este artículo pretende presentar los supuestos teórico-filosóficos de la Pedagogía Libertadora, así como las implicaciones de tales supuestos en el método didáctico-pedagógico de Paulo Freire. Para ello, destaca su relación con la fenomenología, con el existencialismo cristiano y con la dialéctica idealista. Expone divergencias entre la ideología liberadora y la filosofía marxista, oponiéndose a sus perspectivas ontológicas y epistemológicas. Con respecto al método liberador, lo analiza desde la comprensión de su desarrollo a lo largo de la producción intelectual de Freire y evidencia su relación con la Nueva Escuela. Toma como referencia teórico-metodológica el materialismo histórico dialéctico, ya que el conjunto de ideas existentes en una formación social dada, entre ellas, los ideales pedagógicos, están determinados por la producción material de la vida.PALABRAS CLAVE: Contrahegemonía. Educación Popular. Marxismo.
ABSTRACT: This text aims to establish a critical dialogue, in view of the context of a pandemic that also affected education, about curricular practice in the remote format of teaching. In this context, the curriculum also seems to have been contaminated by the virus of inaccessibility and social inequality, decharacterizing the democratic rule of law. We understand that managing critical perspective in this format is not easy, but it is possible. Our vision is proclaimed as critical, to the extent that we position ourselves in the group of theories of education and curriculum of the ground close to Marxian thought of explaining the concrete world through dialectical historical materialism. For this, we used as a methodological instrument the bibliographic research to support our reflections, and the semi-structured interview with teachers, students and mothers, in order to understand education/teaching in the context of pandemic, in the range of elementary school of Basic Education. The article outlines an overview of the context of remote teaching during the pandemic and then presents, through the analysis of questionnaires applied to research interlocutors, possible ways to think of a critical curricular organization more humane and emancipatory with a view to the scenario of returning to educational work in the post-covid-19 scenario. ; Este texto tiene como objetivo establecer un diálogo crítico, en vista del contexto de una pandemia que también afectó a la educación, sobre la práctica curricular en el formato remoto de la enseñanza. En este contexto, el currículo también parece haber sido contaminado por el virus de la inaccesibilidad y la desigualdad social, caracterizando el Estado democrático de derecho. Entendemos que gestionar la perspectiva crítica en este formato no es fácil, pero es posible. Nuestra visión se proclama como crítica, en la medida en que nos posicionamos en el grupo de teorías de la educación y el currículo del terreno cercano al pensamiento marxista de explicar el mundo concreto a través del materialismo histórico dialéctico. Para ello, utilizamos como instrumento metodológico la investigación bibliográfica para apoyar nuestras reflexiones, y la entrevista semiestructurada con profesores, alumnos y madres, con el fin de entender la educación/enseñanza en el contexto de la pandemia, en el rango de escuela primaria de Educación Básica. El artículo describe una visión general del contexto de la enseñanza a distancia durante la pandemia y luego presenta, a través del análisis de cuestionarios aplicados a interlocutores de investigación, posibles formas de pensar en una organización curricular crítica más humana y emancipadora con miras al escenario de volver al trabajo educativo en el escenario post-covid-19. ; Este texto tem como objetivo estabelecer um diálogo crítico, diante do contexto de pandemia que também acometeu a educação, sobre a prática curricular no formato remoto de ensino. Neste contexto, o currículo também parece ter sido contaminado pelo vírus da inacessibilidade e desigualdade social, descaracterizando o estado de direito democrático. Compreendemos que gerenciar a perspectiva crítica neste formato não é fácil, mas é possível. A nossa visão se anuncia como crítica, na medida em que nos posicionamos no grupo das teorias de educação e de currículo do terreno próximas ao pensamento marxiano de explicar o mundo concreto por meio do materialismo histórico dialético. Para tanto, utilizamos como instrumento metodológico a pesquisa bibliográfica para fundamentar as nossas reflexões, e a entrevista semiestruturada com professores, estudantes e mães, no intuito de compreender a educação/ensino no contexto de pandemia, na gama do Ensino Fundamental da Educação Básica. O artigo traça um panorama sobre o contexto do ensino remoto durante a pandemia e em seguida apresenta, por meio da análise de questionários aplicados aos interlocutores de pesquisa, possíveis saídas para pensar em uma organização curricular crítica mais humana e emancipadora, com vistas ao cenário de retorno aos trabalhos educacionais no cenário pós covid-19.
This research brings up a study about external exams and their implications for teaching autonomy and profession. The reference is the county of Russas, located in the Jaguaribe Valley Region, in the State of Ceará. We intend to analyze the implications of the Municipal System for the Evaluation of Elementary Education (SMAEF - acronym in portuguese), in the county of Russas-CE, in the autonomy and valorization of teaching work. The paradigm was investigative Marxism with the Dialectical Historical Materialism method. Fifty seven teachers from the educational network of the county of Russas-CE were interviewed, from April to June 2020, using the Google Forms. We used speech analysis. Of 57 respondents, 50 reported that the level of demand for results that falls on teachers, through the education network, is high, while only 7 reported that the requirement is reasonable. In addition, with an educational policy focused on large-scale exams, 73.7% of respondents reported that the autonomy of teaching work was reduced with the SMAEF policy. The autonomy and appreciation of teaching work enters a path of suppression. Finally, it remains to be seen what kind of children and adolescents we seek to form from this mercantile and meritocratic logic that public education is transforming every day. So that inequalities in opportunities do not perpetuate, we need to modify this scenario and raise the issue of large-scale exam policies to the political, historical and social level. ; Esta investigación plantea un estudio sobre evaluaciones externas y sus implicaciones en la autonomía y profesión docente. La referencia es el municipio de Russas, ubicado en la Región del Vale do Jaguaribe, en el Estado de Ceará. Pretendemos analizar las implicaciones del Sistema Municipal para la Evaluación de la Educación Primaria (SMAEF), en el municipio de Russas-CE, en la autonomía y valorización del trabajo docente. El paradigma fue el marxismo de investigación con el método materialismo histórico dialéctico. Se entrevistó a 57 docentes de la red educativa del municipio de Russas-CE, de abril a junio de 2020, utilizando el formulario electrónico en Google Forms. Utilizamos el análisis del discurso. De 57 entrevistados, 50 informaron que el nivel de demanda de resultados que recae en los docentes, a través de la red educativa, es alto, mientras que solo 7 informaron que el requisito es razonable. Además, con una política educativa centrada en evaluaciones a gran escala, el 73.7% de los entrevistados informaron que la autonomía del trabajo docente se redujo con la política SMAEF. La autonomía y la valorización del trabajo docente entra en un camino de supresión. Finalmente, queda por ver qué tipo de niños y adolescentes buscamos formar en base a esta lógica mercantilizadora y meritocrática que la educación pública cambia todos los días. Para que las desigualdades en las oportunidades no se perpetúen, necesitamos modificar este escenario y plantear el tema de las políticas de evaluación a gran escala a nivel político, histórico y social. ; Esta pesquisa traz à tona um estudo a respeito das avaliações externas e suas implicações na autonomia e profissão docente. A referência é o município de Russas, localizado na Região do Vale do Jaguaribe, no estado do Ceará. Analisa as implicações do Sistema Municipal de Avaliação do Ensino Fundamental (SMAEF) do município de Russas-CE na autonomia e valorização do trabalho docente. O paradigma foi o marxismo investigativo com o método Materialismo Histórico Dialético. Foram entrevistados 57 professores da rede de ensino do município de Russas-CE, no período de abril a junho de 2020, por meio de Formulário Eletrônico do Google Forms. Utiliza-se a análise de discurso. De 57 entrevistados, 50 informaram que o nível de exigência por resultados que recai sobre os docentes, por meio da rede de ensino, é alto, enquanto apenas 7 informaram que a exigência é razoável. Somado a isso, com uma política educacional voltada com afinco para as avaliações em larga escala, 73,7% dos entrevistados informaram que a autonomia do trabalho docente foi reduzida com a política do SMAEF. A autonomia e a valorização do trabalho docente entram por uma via de supressão. Por fim, resta saber que tipo de crianças e adolescentes se busca formar com base nessa lógica mercantilizadora e meritocrática na qual a educação pública se transforma a cada dia. Para que as desigualdades de oportunidades não perpetuem, é necessário modificar esse cenário e elevar a problemática das políticas de avaliação em larga escala ao patamar político, histórico e social.
[spa] La presente investigación tiene por objetivo exponer la estructura Epistemocrítica de la escritura filosófica benjaminiana. A partir de aquí y del montaje de determinadas obras y formas de expresión se intentará construir una determinada imagen [Bild] de la experiencia histórica de las dictaduras de España y Chile. Todo esto en medio de un despliegue dialéctico sui generis, propio de todo fenómeno de Ursprung, tanto para una idea como para una originaria forma histórica, tal como se da en los proyectos sobre la idea del Trauerspiel alemán y de los pasajes parisinos de Passagen-Werk. En principio, los dos primeros capítulos muestran el recorrido benjaminiano que va desde la Schriftbild de la alegoría barroca a la dialektische Bild de su materialismo histórico, la construcción de los marcos cognoscitivo y ontológico en medio de la tensión entre verdad y conocimiento, entre Idea, Urphänomen y concepto. Sobrevuela esta tensión la oposición entre la idea de forma y el contenido ideal en la obra de arte, especialmente la contraposición teórica de los primeros románticos y Goethe (Idee y Urbild). Desde aquí se llega a la interpretación de la imagen en la poética de Baudelaire, donde la tensión entre alegorías y correspondencias finaliza en una prosa que expone la vivencia del shock como real experiencia moderna provocada por el fetiche de la mercancía industrial, la autoalienación en la gran urbe la trasparenta en la imagen del paria y la prostituta en defensa del capital. De tal forma, la destrucción de la experiencia de la narración a manos de la información y la novela anuncia la destrucción de un mundo perceptivo artesanal que desaparece con la reproducción técnica, y definitivamente con la gran guerra; se vislumbra la decadencia de la burguesía europea y el posterior genocidio del pueblo judío en los Lagers nazis. El París que ve Benjamin como capital del siglo XIX lo hace legible como fantasmagoría, la forma originaria de su Urgeschichte. Para esto muestra el proceso económico de este siglo como Urphänomen, a partir del despliegue de una serie concreta de formas históricas de los pasajes parisinos, desde su inicio a su ocaso, como obra arquitectónica y como forma de expresión de la representación del progreso del capital. En este contexto, la expresión de las primeras ferias internacionales, las primeras construcciones de acero y vidrio, completarán esta constelación figurativa que conformarían las ideas de progreso y catástrofe, fundadas en una representación cosista y positivista de ese pensar burgués. Para finalizar, el tercer capítulo complementa la estructura epistemológica benjaminiana en medio de las ideas de verdad y justicia, articuladas ontológicamente a partir de la exposición de una diversidad de conceptos como acción política, testimonio, testificación, imagen dialéctica, memoria y su articulación en una configuración imaginal de obras y formas históricas. El interés como investigador recae en las experiencias históricas olvidadas de las dictaduras de España y Chile, especialmente las vividas por los trabajadores izquierdistas y anarquistas en sus respectivas luchas sociales y políticas, que han quedado impresas en una materialidad maltrecha, como desechos técnicos, ruinas arquitectónicas y obras de artes. Así, desde la exposición de variados documentos, fotografías, normas, leyes de amnistía, informes y entrevistas que testifican la vida y muerte de estos trabajadores, también se recogen los testimonios de sus familiares directos, antes y después de sus detenciones y desapariciones. Por ejemplo, el esfuerzo de Angel Piedras por no olvidar es expuesto, una y otra vez, en la confección de las listas de los represaliados de Nava del rey, acercándolo a la incansable búsqueda de las madres e hijas de los trabajadores chilenos detenidos y desaparecidos políticos en la dictadura de Pinochet. Las investigaciones históricas de Pedro Piedras Monroy, Pere López Sánchez y Miquel Fernández González como expresiones de diferentes experiencias en medio del golpe de Estado franquista, de la guerra civil, de la derrota republicana y posterior dictadura, difieren sólo en las localizaciones espaciales: Nava del Rey, Can Tunis o Prat Vermell y el barrio chino del Raval de Barcelona. Sin embargo, como experiencias límites de resistencia no se diferencian mayormente de las expuestas por Mario Amorós como testimonios de los familiares de detenidos y desaparecidos chilenos, muchos de ellos campesinos que apoyaron la Unidad Popular del Presidente Salvador Allende. Todos ellos conforman una misma constelación saturada de fuerzas reaccionarias, latifundistas y conservadoras que destruyen el tejido social y político ganado hasta ese entonces, construido desde los primeros movimientos de reivindicación por los derechos de los trabajadores. Presentamos las fotografías de las ruinas de la mina de cal de Lonquén, Chile, sus mapas cartografiados como antiguo mayorazgo colonial de la familia Ruiz de Tagle, donde en septiembre de 1973 quince trabajadores son asesinados, antes torturados, por carabineros de la localidad, quienes hacen desaparecer los cuerpos al arrojarlos vivos en esas ruinas. Años después la mina es destruida por sus nuevos dueños, familiares del presidente demócrata-cristiano Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle. Sólo en el transcurso del año 2017 serán detenidos y enjuiciados los ex-policías, dejando fuera a los instigadores civiles de los delitos. Si para Benjamin las ideas cobran vida cuando los extremos se juntan a su alrededor y la imagen dialéctica es como un relámpago esférico [Kugelblitz] que atraviesa el horizonte de lo pretérito, nuestra imagen se ha configurado frente a determinadas ideas [Idee] y en medio de diversas formas históricas; aquí no sólo contamos con el olvido impuesto por ese progreso y esa catástrofe decimonónica que aún sigue en curso, sino que cruzamos en medio de las ideas de justicia y verdad, pero también entre memoria histórica e historia genuina, donde la materia que la compone guarda la huella, la marca de la experiencia, sobre todo en la configuración de la imagen escritural [Schriftbild] de un pasado, que bajo este esfuerzo e interés doctoral, trata de vislumbrar la Eingedenken (remembranza) de estos luchadores proletarios, la brizna de paja de la que pende el ahogado, el Angel (eje) entre el ahora de lo que ha sido, el Jetztsein (ser-ahora) de su cognoscibilidad. Ahí, en ese instante en que la imagen le salta al sujeto de la historia, cuando la clase oprimida lucha en su situación más expuesta, se hace justicia a lo conocido, entramos por un instante en su verdad y salvamos sus experiencias olvidadas. ; [eng] The objective of the research is to expose the Epistemocritic structure of Benjaminian philosophical writing. With this purpose, this research will try to build a certain image [Bild] of the historical experience of the Spanish and Chilean dictatorships from the assembly of certain works and forms of expression. All this in the middle of a sui generis dialectical display, typical of all Ursprung phenomena, both for an idea and for an original historical form, as it occurs in the projects about the idea of the German Trauerspiel and the Parisian passages of Passagen-Werk. The first two chapters show the Benjaminian journey from the Schriftbild of the baroque allegory to the dialektische Bild of its historical materialism, the construction of the cognitive and ontological frameworks in the middle of the tension between truth and knowledge, between Idea, Urphänomen and concept. The opposition between the idea of form and the ideal content in the work of art overcomes this tension, especially the theoretical opposition of the early Romantics and Goethe. From here, it arrives the interpretation of the image in Baudelaire's poetics, where the tension between allegories and correspondences ends in a prose that exposes the experience of shock as a real modern experience, caused by the fetish of industrial merchandise, and self-alienation in the great city is shown trough the image of the outcast and the prostitute in defense of capital. The third chapter complements the Benjaminian epistemological structure in the midst of some ideas articulated ontologically from the exposition of a diversity of concepts such as political action, testimony, testification, dialectical image, memory and its articulation in an imaginal configuration of works and historical forms. The interest as a researcher lies in the forgotten historical experiences of these dictatorships, especially those experienced by leftist and anarchist workers in their respective social and political struggles, which have been imprinted in a battered materiality, such as technical waste, architectural ruins and works of art. Thus, from the exhibition of various documents, photographs, norms, amnesty laws, reports and interviews that testify the life and death of these workers, the testimonies of their direct relatives are also collected, before and after their arrests and disappearances. If the ideas [Idee] come to life for Benjamin when the extremes are gathered around them and the dialectical image is like a spherical lightning [Kugelblitz] that crosses the horizon of the past, our image has been set against certain ideas and in the midst of different historical forms. We cross in the middle of the ideas of justice and truth, but also between historical memory and a genuine history, where the matter that composes it keeps the mark, the mark of experience, especially in the configuration of the scriptural image [Schriftbild] from a past, that under this effort and doctoral interest, tries to glimpse the Eingedenken (remembrance) of these proletarian fighters, the straw that hangs from the drowned, the Angel (axis) between the Jetztsein (be-now) of his knowability. There, in that moment in which the image jumps to the subject of history, when the oppressed class fights in its most exposed situation, justice is done to the known, we enter for a moment into its truth and we save its forgotten experiences.
Halloween in Houston The Following is a response to Vardoulakis book Spinoza, The Epicurean that I gave at SPEP. I previously blogged about the book. One of the many merits of Dimitris Vardoulakis' Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism is that it focuses on the question of obedience as central to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Obedience is what differentiates revelation from knowledge, scripture from philosophy, action from belief. On one side, the first of these terms, there is obedience, that which falls under the control the state, and on the other freedom, the domain of philosophy. However, such an assertion would suggest obedience is a simple matter, that the line between obedience and freedom can be sharply drawn. Vardoulakis suggests that obedience must be understood through a dialectic of authority and freedom. As Vardoulakis describes this dialectic: Authority requires obedience whereas the drive to calculate our utility presupposes that we make our own practical judgements. Thus, under certain conditions, when authority takes over and suspends our judgements the result is political submission. But, also, under different conditions, we may calculate that it is to our utility to let someone else—for instance, someone with more knowledge or expertise—calculate our utility on our behalf. We can show the same interdependence by starting with utility: it is impossible to conceive of the human in terms of the calculation of utility without admitting that obedience, and hence authority, are necessary in certain circumstances. There is no such a thing as pure reason in human action. There is no human immune to obedience. Vardoulakis formulation is striking in two parts, first, as I have already indicated, in suggesting that the division between obedience and freedom, authority and utility, is not easy to draw, as one necessarily spills over into the other, but more importantly in suggesting that this relation is necessarily dialectical. This is the second major contribution of Vardoulakis' book, in arguing not for a dialectic reading of Spinoza but for a specifically Spinozist dialectic. The idea of a dialectic in Spinoza is a necessarily vexed one. Much of the current turn to Spinoza in contemporary thought, especially that of Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri, have promoted Spinoza as an alternative to the dialectic. It is a matter of deciding between affirmation and negation, Spinoza and Hegel. However, Pierre Macherey in the closing of Hegel or Spinoza, puts forward the notion that Spinoza offers a non-teleological dialectic. As Macherey writes, outlining the fundamental problems of this dialectic, What is or what would be a dialectic that functioned in the absence of all guarantees, in an absolutely causal manner, without a prior orientation that would establish within it, from beginning, the principle of absolute negativity, without the promise that all the contradictions in which it engages are by rights resolved, because they carry within them the conditions of their resolution? The contemporary turn to Spinoza is itself split, without a necessary conditions of a guarantee, between those who see Spinoza as opposed to the dialectic, to negativity and contradiction, and those that see in Spinoza not the nondialectical other of the dialectic, but its dialectical correction, a surprising one since, as Macherey argues, in this case the correction comes before the deviation, Spinoza before Hegel. Spinoza makes possible a dialectic without telos or resolution, a materialist dialectic. Vardoulakis' declaration of the dialectic of authority and utility is most productively read against the backdrop of this turn to a Spinozist dialectic, or a dialectic in Spinoza, which is to say along with Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar as his central interlocutors. (I say Balibar and Macherey, but for the purpose of this response I am going to focus on the former, but Macherey's Sagesse ou Ignorance would seem to have its own dialectic of obedience). As I will argue, in each case what is examined dialectically is obedience itself, or, what we could call, following contemporary philosophy, subjection. That subjection is dialectical can be glimpsed from Spinoza's well known formulation that the masses fight for "servitude as if it was salvation," the formulation suggests that subjection must be thought not just as something passively endured but something actively strived for, we need to see subjection in activity and activity in subjection. In this way a dialectical reading overcomes the limitations of those interpretations which have apparently found in Spinoza only a theory of subjection, of ideology, or of subversion, of affirmative transformation.. The most obvious of the former would be Louis Althusser, for whom the Spinozist theory of the imagination, with its focus on the subject, is the basis of ideological interpellation. It also overcomes the limitations of those, such as Deleuze and Negri, who find in Spinoza the affirmation of a constitutive and transformative power. Reading Spinoza dialectically means recognize that the very terms of opposition, subjection and constitution, negation and affirmation, must be thought of as thoroughly intertwined. Spinoza is neither a thinker of pure subjection, of the imagination, or first kind of knowledge as ideology, but nor is he the thinker of constituent power or affirmative lines of flight. He is neither of these things, or perhaps both of these things, because subjection and its opposite, lines of flight or constitutive power, are neither of these things. We are always dealing with both, and with both intertwined, that is part of what it means to read Spinoza dialectically. What do we mean by dialectic? In some sense a definition of the dialectic would seem to be, well undialectical, but beyond such an objection, which is both always tempting and always disappointing, I think that we can offer a basic formulation of at least a few common aspects. First, such a dialectic involves both a unity and a contradiction of opposites, but one without a third term or necessary resolution. Authority and Utility do not resolve themselves into some sublation through the authority of utility itself in a kind of enlightened democracy. However, this does not mean that such a dialectic is entirely static. The rejection of a general resolution, of a third term, means that the resolution of these tensions can only be thought in their historical specificity. Spinoza's historical study of Moses is not an illustration of a general principle but specific instances of what in a concrete situation, a political dialectic. As Balibar argues, "Spinoza's definition can be considered dialectical in the sense that the passage from the abstract to the concrete, as the development of the initial formula's contradictions, arises from a historical study." Spinoza's engagement with the singular case in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is necessary because the contradictions of utility and authority only resolve themselves in a specific situation. The existing historical situation is not just a contradictory unity of authority and utility, but also reason and imagination. Etienne Balibar has made this particular dialectic central to his understanding of Spinoza. Spinoza reflects on the intersections of imagination and reason, affect and intellect, in the constitution of the collective and the individual in at least two places. The first is in terms of the general definition of ambition. Ambition is the affective constitution of society, the desire that others love what I love, that others live according to my temperament [ingenium]. As such it is inseparable from the imagination, from the imaginary constitution of the other's desire and love. In and through ambition we constitute the image of the other, of 'men' [homines] in general, the generic image of others that functions as a guide for our actions and desires (EIIIP29). It is no longer the love or hatred of this or that individual, or collection of individuals that orients an individual's actions, but a generic idea, a kind of 'society effect.' There are two limits to this affective constitution of ambition. First, at the level of sociality, and the conceptual grasp of social relations, 'men' is a universal. For Spinoza all universals stem from the human body's finitude, it is affected by so many images that it can no longer grasp the singular differences (EIIP40S). What is left then is a generic idea that is produced by the inability to imagine all the myriad things, a universal that is always tainted by some particular content: some will imagine man as a rational animal, while others will think of a featherless biped. The 'men' who we strive to act like, whose image governs our loves and hates, is a fiction, an unstable universal that is imagined differently by different individuals. It is as much a condition of discord as harmony. Second, there is a problem at the level of the object of this sociality, that which we want others to love or hate. We desire that others love what we love, the love (or hatred) we feel is strengthened by the idea that others love what we love. This ambition becomes a source of conflict especially if the object that we desire is subject to the rule of scarcity, and thus cannot be possessed by all equally. Ambition is thus internally conflicted. As Spinoza writes, 'those who love are not of one mind in their love—while they rejoice to sing the praises of the thing they love, they fear to be believed' (EIVP37S1). The constitution of society through ambition is inherently contradictory, the very things that draw people together, the desire to love as others love and to have others love what I love, divide them as well. As conflicted as this sociality is, it is a sociality, which is to say that the ambivalence of ambition are not a remnant of the state of nature, but are a product of sociality itself. Society, or, as Spinoza puts it, the city, is not exclusively founded on the ambivalent sociality of the passions. It is also founded on reason, on the powers of the intellect. It is the same conatus, the same striving, underlying reason and ambition. In each case there is a striving to make the temperament of the individual coincide with others, to constitute a collective temperament that would reflect the individual. However, the essential difference is in how this relation to the other and the object is constituted. The rational constitution of the state is based on the recognition that it is more useful to live with others. This idea of man is not the idea of men constituted through the imagination, it is not the universal idea, but the utility of sociality relations. It is not the desire that others live as I live, or that I coordinate my love and hates with others, but mankind can accomplish more collectively than individually (EIVP35S). As Spinoza famously writes, 'nothing is more useful to man than man' (EIVP37S2). This idea of man does not produce the ambivalence that determines the affect of ambition. Individuals guided by reason actually agree with each other, add and assist each other, rather than strive to orient their actions around an impossible object of what the others want. Moreover, reason as an object of desire is truly common, not only can it be shared by all, but its worth increases with the number of people who participate in it (EIVP36). Reason is not scarce, not finite, and is actually increased by others thinking the same thing. Men under the guidance of reason can overcome the contradictions of ambition and actually desire that others desire what they desire. These two different foundations of the city, these two different genesis of sociality, one based on the affect of ambition and the other based on reason, are not two different options: there is not a city of affects and a city of reason supplanting each other as two different phases, two different orders. Spinoza's text presents them as two different demonstrations of the same thing, suggesting the coexistence of these two different constitutions of society. As Balibar writes, 'Sociability is therefore the unity of a real agreement and an imaginary ambivalence, both of which have real effects.' We are always dealing with both affects, with ambition, and reason, with a city founded on a projection of our ideas of man, and a city founded on our rational utility. While there is no telos, no necessary progression by which the city founded on reason, a democracy, necessarily displaces a city founded on founded on superstition and affects, that does no meant that the relation is entirely static. The particular combination of reason and affects defines the nature of a given city, and its particular history. There is no more one generic essence of the city's striving than there is an essence of man's singular striving. The striving, the particular relations that constitute the city, the collective, must be thought from the singular case, from the specific way it is affected and determined. There is thus a history, but this history must be thought from the singular case, from the particular way in which any given city combines ambition and reason, affects and knowledge. For Balibar this is not just a reading of Spinoza, but could be understood to be a general thesis about politics in general, which is always situated between reason, on the fundamental thesis that "nothing is more useful to man than man," that we benefit from living in a society, from the way in which living among others makes our lives better than a solitary life. This fact is true of any society which has an irreducible dimension of utility. At the same time every society is founded on an imaginary institution, an image of what it means to be in a city, what it means to be human. Every city is both rational and imagined, and this contradictory unity of these two scenes exists in each specific case. As much as it is possible to push the city to become more rational, which is to say less exclusive and hierarchal, it is never possible to dispense with the other scene entirely. This limit acts back on political philosophy itself, as Balibar argues any attempt to think through the relation of Spinoza and Marx must necessarily recognize the limit of each to think the other scene. As Balibar writes, It would be easy to conclude that Marx is basically unaware of the "other scene" of politics, the scene of communitarian affiliation, and therefore unaware of symbolic violence as well (although he names it or has bequeathed us with the word ideology, one of the aptest names for it); and to conclude that Spinoza, for his part, basically ignores the irreducible level of economic antagonism (doubtless because, at the economic level, where conatus can perhaps be conceived of as a "productive force," Spinoza is basically an optimist and a utilitarian" (Balibar 2015: 12) The dialectic of imagination and reason means that any philosophy that focuses on reason, on individual or collective interest as the basis of politics, must necessarily contend with imaginary identifications, and any politics of the imagination, or imagined communities, must necessarily contend with the rational basis of any social relation. It is possible to map these two dialectics onto each other, to argue that reason is utility and vice versa, since nothing is more useful to man than man, and, at the same time, that authority is constituted in an through the imagination, since authority, that which cannot be contested often passes through the theological, which is to say superstition which is founded upon the imagination. However, what I would like to suggest is that we see the dialectic of utility and authority and that of imagination and reason as two fundamentally different dialectics, which intersect without necessarily reflecting each other. This is in part because, as Vardoulakis argues, authority cannot be neatly mapped onto the imagination even as it passes through it especially in those forms inflected by religion and superstition. Authority exists in part because humanity does not always recognize what is useful, namely that a political order which combines the efforts of each, is useful. For those who do not recognized the utility of society, or more to the point, those who do not recognize it in the moment, since we see the better and do the worse from time to time, we are all social and anti-social, authority provides another foundation for society. Authority is a necessary supplement to the rational basis of society, and as such it could be described as a rational irrationality, or a-rationality. Authority which is outside of reason because it cannot be contested by reason has a rational basis, or to put it more succinctly, sometimes there is a utility to authority. However, at the exact moment that such a claim can be made, a claim that would unite two into one through the expansive sense of utility, they come asunder because if authority is useful, a necessary supplement to the rational understanding of society, than it can be evaluated in terms of its utility. This is what Negri identifies as the historical criticism of religion. Religion, it is argued, played its part in sustaining and bringing together the human community during a period in which it could not govern itself, as in the case of Moses leading his people out of slavery, but it is no longer useful, creating conflict rather than accord, and functioning as a fetter on the powers and forces of society. Any attempt to unify authority and utility into one term, make authority useful or utility itself authority, necessarily fails, producing its opposite. The two dialectics could also be differentiated in terms of their specific foundations. Imagination and reason are grounded on an anthropological basis, on humanities capacity to affect and be affected. The two images of humanity, the one defined by utility and rationality is an concept of humanity, while the other, that of the imagined community is an image, and like all images it is defined by the bodies inability to hold multiple images together. All images of humanity, or of a common community, are necessarily shaped by particular images of society. In contrast to this, authority is less an anthropological fact than a particular institution, it is artificial, or more to the point it is an attempt to contend with the artificial ground of any social order. This is why there is an appeal to the theological in those moments of foundation. As much as the two dialectics overlap, as reason and utility are two different expressions of the same thing, and imagination and authority pass through the same relation to the past, they cannot be said to be the same thing, the political or institutional cannot be reduced to the anthropological and vice versa. The two different dialectical reflect the fundamental fact that any given political order is at once an effect of anthropology, stemming from human reason and imagination, but exceeds it in that any political order cannot be reduced to imagination and reason. This brings us to what could be considered the third moment of the spinozist dialectic, one that pushes it furthest from a Hegelian understanding, if the first is to be found in the unity of opposites, a basic criteria for a dialectic, and the second in the non-teleology, or, to say the same thing differently in the historical specificity of its resolution, then the third moment is in the necessary overdetermination of the dialectic itself. There is never anything like a contradiction, or even a central contradiction, which would be able to encompass the totality of the historical moment. It is not a matter of a dialectic of authority and utility, of reason and imagination, or of affect and concept, to add another figure but of the necessary overdetermination of any dialectic, as reason and imagination, utility and authority intersect with and complicate each other. This is only to name the two we have briefly considered here, we could also consider the dialectic of desire and the affects which have been explored by Frédéric Lordon. The merit of Vardoulakis book is not just that he has given us a new contradiction, that of authority and utility, which remain outside of the scope of most discussions of Spinoza, but that in insisting on the dialectical dimension of that relation he offers a way to not only encompass the others, but brings us that closer to thinking together Spinoza and dialectical thought.
Draft Translation: Not for CitationWhat follows is another attempt at a translation of an important text by André Tosel on the Marx/Spinoza relation. It is not a finished, or polished translation, but a rough sketch put forward to help people get a sense of this overlooked articulation of the relation between Marx and Spinoza.For a Systematic Study of the Relation of Marx to Spinoza: Remarks and Hypotheses
André Tosel Published in 2008 in the book Spinoza au XIXe Siècle The question of relation of the thought of Marx to that of Spinoza has up until now been the subject of more of a hermeneutic investigation than a philology. It is easier to construct a history of the different interpretations of Spinoza at the center of different Marxisms then to have determined the precise function of the reference to Spinoza in the work of Marx and to define the use Marx made of the spinozist problematic and the elaboration of his thought. More or less the Marxists that were first developed a relation to Spinoza were an important milestone on the way to developing what could be called a historical and materialist dialectic. The relation begins in the midst of the Second International. The singularity of Spinoza's thought has often been reduced to a stepping stone on the way to "monist" immanentism, which is supposed to be its philosophical structure at least in the reception of two thinkers, as Plekhanov has asserted in some preliminary texts working from some notes of Engels in manuscripts published in the USSR under the title of the Dialectic of Nature. In the dogmatic frame of the struggle between idealism and materialism, Spinoza anticipates materialism by his thesis of the unity of nature and by his doctrine of the equal dignity of the attribute of extension in relation to the attribute of thought. The doctrine of mode and substance causality, coupled with the critique of final causality and the illusions of superstition, signifies at the same time an overcoming of mechanistic thinking and the first form of the dialectic. Rare were those who, like Antonio Labriola, were careful not to oppose two conceptions of the world head-on and maintained a certain distance with polemical opposition, preferring instead to indicate that Marx did for mode of production what Spinoza had done for the world of the passions—a geometry of their production. In the Soviet Union before the Stalinist freeze, this interpretive tension is reproduced: Spinoza becomes the terrain through which the clarification of the dialectic takes place opposing mechanists and anti-mechanists, and original articulation of the thesis of liberty as the comprehension of necessity. These problems have been clarified somewhat. (Zapata, 1983; Seidel, 1984; Tosel, 1995)One would have to wait for the deconstructive enterprise of Louis Althusser for this movement to be reversed. Spinoza is no longer a moment in the teleology which is integrated and surpassed on the way to Marxism-Leninism. His work is the means of theoretical production for reformulating the philosophical and scientific revolution of Marx without recourse to only the Hegelian dialectic. Spinoza is the first to have elaborated a model of structural causality that makes it possible to think the efficacy of the structure as an absent cause over its effects. The theory of knowledge is not one that authorizes absolute knowledge, but it announces this infinite exigency of a break with ideology without the hope of arriving at transparent knowledge. It obliges one to renounce any idea of communism as a state of a final reconciliation in social relations which would be deprived of any contradictions. "We have always been spinozists,' Althusser announces in the Elements of Self-Criticism, and then proceed to the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect from the Hegelian dialectic. It is then only an epistemological obstacle which prevents Marx from realizing the full power of his critique of political economy and to explore the continent of history that he discovered. Spinoza for clarifying Marx himself. Everything has been clarified. (Cotten 1992; Raymond, Moreau, 1997). In terms of historical research, the spinozist studies that have been made after the end of the nineteen sixties in France and Italy have often been made by researchers who have rubbed shoulders with Marxism. We find the same oscillation between a tendency to read Spinoza according to a pre-marxist perspective, in the sense of a dialectic of emancipation, or liberation from a theological political complex and disalienation, even constituent power, and another tendency insisting on the infinity of the struggle against all illusions, even those of total liberation, affirming the unsurpassable dimension of the imagination in the constitution of the conatus and in the production of the power of the multitude. This oscillation is manifest often in the same commentators, often itself a function of the change of the historical conjuncture. However, up until now, there has never been an attempt to study from Marx's works themselves the structural function of the spinozist reference in the constitution of Marxist theory, one which would permit us to better understand the understanding that Marx made of Spinozist work. The interpretations have anyway have developed from a certain exteriority to the letter of Marxists texts. Several years ago, a German researcher, Fred E. Schrader, in a short text dedicated to the thematic of "substance and concept" chez Marx (Substanz und Funktion: zur Marxsrezeption Spinoza's) drew attention to this situation (1984). He rightly noted that it was necessary to distinguish two moments in the research to avoid any merely external confrontation: a) first, obviously, document the explicit and implicit mentions of Spinoza in Marx's text; 1) then, reconstruct the position of the reference to Spinoza in the process of the constitution of the critique of political economy which is the central Marxist work, alongside of the references to "Hegel" which one knows were constitutive in the years of 1857-1858. Only this philological and philosophical work can permit us to renew the state of the question. Schrader's study must be considered. We propose to develop it and comment on it because up until now it has not received the attention that it merits. Before everything else, it is necessary to be precise. The work envisioned must be considerable, it includes taking into account the texts published by Marx, those published posthumously by Engels and by Kautsky, and all of those—collections of notes and thematic notebooks—which make up the incomplete nature of Capital, including Marx's correspondence. The MEGA 2, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, still incomplete, has not finished being scrutinized. This work could begin from the hypothesis that we can conceptualize two periods in Marx's work from which it is possible to reassemble occurrences that conceptualize the reference to Spinoza in order to determine their structural function. The first period corresponds to the years of his formation and the interlinking of the critique of politics and the early critique of political economy, it begins with the concept of history underlying the German Ideology and culminates in the Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist Manifesto. The second period begins with the research operating under the title of the critique of political economy beginning in 1857, interrupted provisionally in January of 1859 and beginning again in 1861. The reference to Spinoza is more explicit in the first period where it is a matter of an specifically political practice, articulating a materialism of practice. It is less explicit in the second period, it functions nonetheless as a fundamental operator in the essential theory of the substance of value in capital. The Philosophical Intensifier of Spinoza of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Destruction of the Theologico-Political Complex and Democratic Radicalism. Marx encounters Spinoza in the beginning of his theoretical and political journey. In 1841 we know from the preface by Alexandre Matheron (Cahiers Spinoza), Marx, after his doctorate, reproduced the extracts he copied from the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (MEGA 2 VI/I Berlin, 1977). He is curiously presented as the author of these texts and moreover they are reorganized in their own order which is not that of the Tractatus itself. The chapters containing the critique of the supernatural, of the miracle, and all of all forms of superstition are brought forward as essential and open on the properly political chapters dedicated to the freedom of thought (XX) and the foundation of the republic (XVI). The Ethics is not ignored but it is not reproduced, Letter XII takes the place of a speculative text and is accompanied with Letter LXXVI to Burgh. Everything takes place as if Marx considered as the most important question to be that of theological politics and is concentrated on the question of human freedom in its radical ethico-political dimension. What is important is that the revolutionary democratic state is realized according to this concept. One could also consider that Spinoza is utilized here as one of the figures that a Doctorate of Philosophy considers along with Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel as provocations, of that which puts knowledge in the service of a life liberated from the fear of authorities, which reappropriates humanity's power of thinking and acting confiscated in the service of gods and fetishes. In a certain manner Epicurus is the paradoxically the first of the thinkers who claims that "it is a misfortune to live in necessity, but it is not necessary to live under necessity." This truth finds a new application, after the French Revolution, in the age of a new ethics, where free individuals recognize themselves in a free state. 2. The explicit reference to Spinoza is displaced in the texts of the years 1841-1843—the Kreuznach manuscript dedicated to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, followed by the introduction and the Jewish Question. These constitute the Feuerbachian moment of Marx, at the heart of his theory of the alienation of the human essence. One must not make this critique of politics a simple transition towards the discovery of the alienation of social powers, nor understand it as an end of a politics understood as primarily statist. It is the ethico-political liberation which requires a transformation of social relations and which is a transvaluation or emancipation of social powers. Spinoza is not named, but certain passages from the TTP are repeated almost to the letter: Spinoza figures as the index of a new task , that is lacking in Hegel which is that of thinking beyond the dualism of civil society and the state. The name of this passage is democracy or true democracy. Marx returns to the letter of the Spinozist thesis according to which democracy is not only the name of a constituted political regime, but the essence of politics, the most natural regime, constituting the power of the people. The intensive force of Spinoza is that of democracy not as a mystical act or utopian ecstasy, but as a process of constitution that replaces actual void of the Hegelian state where the people lack themselves, in which the state becomes something separate, still theologico-political. Democracy is the active process by which the people is refigured as the negative instance of any separate political form and gives a political form to its social power. "Democracy is the truth of monarchy, monarchy is not the truth of democracy. Monarchy is necessarily democracy in contradiction with itself, whereas the monarchial moment is no contradiction within democracy. Monarchy cannot, while democracy can be understood in terms of itself In democracy none of the moments obtains a significance other than what befits it. Each is really only a moment of the whole Demos. In monarchy one part determines the character of the whole; the entire constitution must be modified according to the immutable head. Democracy is the generic constitution; monarchy is a species, and indeed a poor one. Democracy is content and form; monarchy should be only form, but it adulterates the content. In monarchy the whole, the people, is subsumed under one of its modes of existence,. the political constitution; in democracy the constitution itself appears only as one determination, and indeed as the self-determination of the people. In monarchy we have the people of the constitution, in democracy the constitution of the people. Democracy is the resolved mystery of all constitutions. Here the constitution not only in itself, according to essence, but according to existence and actuality is returned to its real ground, actual man, the actual people, and established as its own work. The constitution appears as what it is, the free product of men." It is possible to remark that this constituent power of the demos tends to be presented as a sort of causa sui in the order of world of social relations. The naturalist dimension thematized in the Ethics is not posited here with the insistence of humanity as part of nature, with the thematization of the relations between internal and external causality. Necessity seems to have disappeared for an instant. It is notable that this in the same moment that Feuerbach defends Spinoza's naturalism against Hegelian idealism and makes the author of the Ethics the Moses of modern thought who has destroyed theology by his pantheism, while reproaching him, for not having arrived at a radical humanist affirmation, since he maintained an equivocal equivalence between the naturalization of god and the divinization of nature. The Marxist reference is primarily to the ethico-political Spinoza, one of the "intellectual heroes of morality" as he says in a text contemporary with it, "Comments on the Latest Russian Censorship—" along with Kant and Fichte he is one of the heroes that found and defend the principal of moral autonomy. Spinoza makes it possible to undertake a philosophical political of Hegel, the people would be the only ontological instance that constitutes the political constitution, which is to say democracy, of civil society. Spinoza makes it possible to introduce a new dialectic within the incomplete dialectic of The Principles of the Philosophy of Right. This dialectic is simultaneously a critique. The object of this critical dialectic is the self-constitution of political activity in the struggle to overcome the domination of abstract entities erected into speculative abstractions defining the latest avatars of the theological-political complex. Schrader does not say more in the exposition of the reference to Spinoza in this first period. We could take a step beyond his analysis. A unpublished path seems to be presented. We could in fact explore it as Yovel has done (Spinoza and Other Heretics); also the first book of Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (1968) examines the double relation of the human conatus to other conatuses and objects that suit them or do not suit them the rudiments of a theory of objectification of the human essence that Marx elaborates in the texts of 1844 where he analyzes the people under the figure of the proletariat subject and object of alienated labor. The reading can shed light on Spinoza, but Marx has for his interlocuters Hegel, Adam Smith, and Feuerbach. Spinoza does not intervene here explicitly. It is preferable to follow the letter of his texts. 3. The text which follows, The Holy Family of 1845, indicates an unexamined reversal of perspective. Far from finding in Spinoza a radical thinker of liberty through the radicalization of the democratic process and developing Feuerbach's theses of the virtues of Spinoza's naturalization, far from continuing the anti-idealist elements of Spinoza, Marx for the first time distances himself from Spinoza placing him on the side of Descartes, of Malebranche, of Leibniz, of abstract rationalist metaphysics, in a paragraph before celebrating the materialists in which he inscribes himself. These are the materialists of the French Enlightenment, La Mettrie, Holbach, Helvétius, which are lauded for having operated outside of metaphysics. These are the authors that Plekhanov reinscribes as a defenders of monistic materialism in the thought of nature and in the theory of history. Certainly as Olivier Bloch in an important contribution has demonstrated ("Materialism, genesis of Marxism, 1981, reprinted in Matières à penser, Vrin, 1997), this chapter of the history of philosophy is a plagiarism by Marx who literally takes it from the Manuel d'histoire de la philosophie moderne by Charles Renouvier (1844). The soviet Diamat has been founded by a French critic… But the fact remains that Marx endorses this reconstruction which prefers Bacon, Hobbes and Locke to Spinoza, lauding them for the empiricism and nominalism: the English thinkers critique metaphysic speculation and open directly the way to materialism. Pierre Bayler in France can be considered the only fellow traveler of British empiricism by his scepticism he dissolves the metaphysics of Spinoza and Leibniz (The Holy Family, 171). The Spinoza criticized here is that of the Ethics understood as a dogmatic treatise of metaphysics which has a "profane content" but it has lost its historical condition. This is no longer the antitheological political Spinoza but the speculative philosopher. Is it necessary to conclude that this is a contradiction on the part of Marx and to forget his previous theses? It is a surprising oversight because that which Marx and Renouvier give credit to Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke can be imputed to Spinoza as well. Everything takes place as if Marx, put off by the metaphysics of the Ethics forgets what he had found in the TTP—and this seems to be a permanent transformation. In fact the contradiction is not only apparent, or, more to the point, it concerns Spinoza himself. Marx does not have as his object an analysis of Spinozism. He uses the latter by breaking it down according to the needs of his task which is at this moment is to study the activity of real man and the possibility of his transformation by bringing together the theoretical humanism of Feuerbach, the French communism and socialism, and the English thinkers who represent this humanism in the domain of practice. "[Metaphysics] will be defeated for forever by materialism which has now been perfected by the work of speculation itself and coincides with humanism. As Feuerbach represented materialism in the theoretical domain, French and English socialism and communism represent materialism in the practical field which now coincides with humanism." (The Holy Family, pg. 168) One can detect in this passage the presence of a schematic of the history of modern philosophy which has echoes of Moses Hess and Ludwig Feuerbach, the two have confronted the problem of the critical comprehension of Hegel and have begun to present a reinterpretation of the grand moments of the history of philosophy after their master. Marx deviates from the interpretation of Hess given in a text which had a particular impact: The Sacred History of Mankind by a Young Disciple of Spinoza (1838). Hess appropriates Spinoza's theory of knowledge and exploits his theory of the imagination to develop a positive sense of social utopia, and overall makes Spinoza the true alternative to Hegel's Christian philosophy. Far from being an acosmism, the theory of substance is the perfect incarnation of the Hebraic idea of the unconditional unity of all. It is paradoxical, the other part, of the interpretation by Renouvier followed by Marx recovers and conceals that of Feuerbach that one can find in the same period in Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy (1842) and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843). Marx brushes up against these theses of Feuerbach on Spinoza without reproducing them in their entirety. They make Spinoza an important moment in modern philosophy: at the heart of this movement they make this philosophy an important realization of the humanization of God, Spinoza remains still a speculative philosopher who is at once produces the realization and negation of God. Speculative metaphysics realizes with him its ultimate phase which is determined contradictorily as theism and atheism in the form of pantheism. "Spinoza is the originator of speculative philosophy, Schelling its restorer, Hegel its perfecter."(Thesis 102) Pantheism becomes the only consequential theology in that it anticipates the end of theology in atheism. The Spinozist substance transforms all independent beings into predicates, into attributes of a unique and independent being. God is no longer only a thing thought, it is equally an extended thing (Thesis 3). Spinoza does not make the self-activity of self-consciousness the attribute that unifies and transforms substance into subject. This was Hegel's tour de force but he paid for it with an absolute idealism of spirit since once again spirit prevails over extension and concrete man is subject to abstraction separated from reality of self-consciousness. This inscription of Spinoza in metaphysics is all the more paradoxical because Marx finds in empiricism and British materialism the theses that Feuerbach attributes to Spinoza, and Marx accepts a definition in which materialism coincides with communism. As can be seen in this passage from Principles of the Philosophy of the Future Pantheism is theological atheism or theological materialism; it is the negation of theology while itself confined to the standpoint of theology, for it turns matter, the negation of God, into a predicate or an attribute of the Divine Being. But he who turns matter into an attribute of God, declares matter to be a divine being. The realisation of God must in principle presuppose godliness, that is, the truth and essentiality of the real. The deification of the real, of that which exists materially – materialism, empiricism, realism, and humanism – or the negation of theology, is the essence of the modern era. Pantheism is therefore nothing more than the essence of the modern era elevated into the divine essence, into a religio-philosophical principle. Empiricism or realism – meaning thereby the so-called sciences of the real, but in particular the natural science – negates theology, albeit not theoretically but only practically, namely, through the actual deed in so far as the realist makes the negation of God, or at least that which is not God, into the essential business of his life and the essential object of his activity. However, he who devotes his mind and heart exclusively to that which is material and sensuous actually denies the trans-sensuous its reality; for only that which constitutes an object of the real and concrete activity is real, at least for man. "What I don't know doesn't affect me." To say that it is not possible to know anything of the supersensuous is only an excuse. One ceases to know anything about God and divine things only when one does not want to know anything about them. How much did one know about God, about the devils or angels as long as these supersensuous beings were still objects of a real faith? To be interested in something is to have the talent for it. The medieval mystics and scholastics had no talent and aptitude for natural science only because they had no interest in nature. Where the sense for something is not lacking, there also the senses and organs do not lack. If the heart is open to something, the mind will not be closed to it. Thus, the reason why mankind in the modern era lost the organs for the supersensuous world and its secrets is because it also lost the sense for them together with the belief in them; because its essential tendency was anti-Christian and anti-theological; that is, anthropological, cosmic, realistic, and materialistic. [In the context of the present work, the differences between materialism, empiricism, realism, and humanism are, of course, irrelevant.] Spinoza hit the nail on the head with his paradoxical proposition: God is an extended, that is, material being. He found, at least for his time, the true philosophical expression for the materialistic tendency of the modern era; he legitimated and sanctioned it: God himself is a materialist. Spinoza's philosophy was religion; he himself was an amazing man. Unlike so many others, Spinoza's materialism did not stand in contradiction to the notion of a non-material and anti-materialistic God who also quite consistently imposes on man the duty to give himself up only to anti-materialistic, heavenly tendencies and concerns, for God is nothing other than the archetypal and ideal image of man; what God is and how he is, is what man ought to be or wants to be, or at least hopes to be in the future. But only where theory does not belie practice, and practice theory, is there character, truth, and religion. Spinoza is the Moses of modern free-thinkers and materialists. 4. The anti-metaphysical fury of Marx, the blind submission to Renouvier, limits him in developing an interpretation of the Ethics more nuanced and sensitive to the historical contradictions. This situation is even more strange because it is in The Holy Family that Marx interprets materialist philosophers such that they are a Feuerbachian Spinoza. On can find then three theses that Marx distributes to different representatives of materialism and that can also be imputed to Spinoza. --Thesis 1. Nature is a primary reality, it can be explained by itself without recourse to the principle of a creator. Nothing comes from nothing. One can then have recourse to Bacon for who "the primitive forms of matter are essentially living forms, individuals, and it is they that produce specific differences." He follows, as does Hobbes, in adding that "one cannot separate thought from the matter which thinks." Thought cannot be separated from matter capable of thought. --Thesis 2. The human order is inscribed in a specific manner in nature. This specificity does not specify anything extra-worldly of human activity. Hobbes has demonstrated the sensible nature of activity. "Man is subordinate to the same laws that nature. Power and liberty are identical." The Holy Family) This order is known to promote the art of forming ideas, the human species is fundamentally educatable. ---Thesis 3. What is important is to think the constitution of this human order according to radical possibilities of the ways of transforming these necessary conditions of experience of liberty-power. "If man is unfree in the materialist sense, i.e., is free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality, crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social source of crime must be destroyed, and each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being. If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human. If man is social by nature, he will develop his true nature only in society, and the power of his nature must be measured not by the power of separate individuals but by the power of society." (The Holy Family 176). It is not necessary to give the history of philosophy presented in The Holy Family a structural importance. It acts as a provisionally constructed polemical text where Marx has given the means for his own philosophical conception in broad strokes in order to better understand the intersection of humanism, materialism, and communism. The incongruence of the treatment of Spinoza, reinterpreted to be behind Feuerbach's position, was not overlooked by Marx's comrades in combat since H. Krieg (himself denounces by Marx in a virulent circular as a confused partisan of religious socialism), he wrote in a letter of June 6, 1845 in order to restore Spinoza's battle against metaphysics overlooked by Marx, "you're probably right about what it says in the English Hobbes and Locke [i.e. that they vacillate contradictorily between materialism and theism], the same for Voltaire and his direct partisans; but Holbach is practically Spinozist, and it is with and Diderot that the Enlightenment reaches its summit and becomes revolutionary." (cited by Maximilien Rubel and his edition of the philosophical texts of Marx titled Philosophie) 5. The instrumental and fluctuating character of the reference to Spinoza as a metaphysician is confirmed precisely by The German Ideology. Marx returns in passing to the place of Spinoza in modern philosophy. Spinoza has developed the principle of substantial immanence but he has not integrated the principle with self-consciousness. Hegel would be the unity of Spinoza and Fichte (The German Ideology, 107). But for Marx this representation consigns him to a partial aspect of the Hegelian synthesis. Self-consciousness is at once a hypostasis of the real activity of human beings in the process of their self-production and the "the real consciousness of the social relations in which they appear to exists and to which they appear to be autonomous." In a similar manner substance is "an ideal hypostatized expression of the world as it exists" that is take as the foundation of the world "existing for itself." Marx returns to Feuerbach for clarification of substance and it anthropological resolution. We do not know much more, but the text seems to distinguish the Hegelian critique of substance and its possible materialist significance as "the existing world." We would have expected considerations on the immanence of modes in natura naturans and of their dynamic interdetermination. In any case, Marx refuses the young Hegelain opposition between self-consciousness and substance, and proposes to maintain the category of substance as an inseparable unity of the existing mode and the beings which constitute the world in the play of their relations. Marx's criticism has as its target the mystification of self-consciousness and its anti-substantial phobia. Everything takes place as if the ontological categories of Spinoza up until now rejected as conservative metaphysics have an intensive force irreducible to the critique of the young Hegelians. However, it remains that in this complex itinerary the use value of the reference to Spinoza is concentrated in the theological political constellation and the political constitution of the political force of social force. This reference becomes the presupposition of the materialist conception of history, but it does not intervene in the texture of these concepts. The Spinoza Reference in the Critique of Political Economy, Substance and Concept Returning to Schrader and his propositions for the study of the second moment of the reference to Spinoza, that of the Marxist use of Spinozist concepts from the Ethics in the development of the critique of political economy in the development of Capital. Schrader pays particular attention to the reappearance in the margins of the reference to Spinoza in the period of the creation and exposition of the critique of political economy which is developed from 1851 to 1863. An important letter from Marx to Lassale from May 31, 1858 which was published in an obscure book on Heraclitus, gives to Spinoza's metaphysics the same status that he gave to Hegel in a famous letter to Engels a few months before. Even among philosophers who give a systematic form to the works, as for example Spinoza, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented. The true system is only present in itself. (Marx MEW, 29, Berlin, 1963, 561).
What was of great use to me as regards method of treatment was Hegel's Logic at which I had taken another look by mere accident... If ever the time comes when such work is again possible, I should very much like to write 2 or 3 sheets making accessible to the common reader the rational aspect of the method which Hegel not only discovered but also mystified. (Correspondence Marx-Engels) Marx makes it clear that the elaboration of the critique passes through the utilization of elements of philosophical works which others appear to have completely bypassed. The presence of Hegel is the center of the interpretation of Capital. It would appear certain to this period that Marx no longer takes inspiration from the Feuerbachian critique of abstract speculation. In this case, the Idea separated from its contents generates the latter in a mystified way by legitimizing the crudest aspects, losing the benefit of seizing the real as a contradictory process, as is explained in The Holy Family or The Poverty of Philosophy. Hegel is from now on solicited for his dialectical discoveries: he elaborates the dialectic as an immanent process of thought and his discoveries serve Marx in developing his proper critique. The presence of Hegel in the period up to the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867, in passing through diverse manuscripts of 1857-1858 (The Grundrisse) and the manuscripts from 1861-1863, has been attested to and demonstrated by works, either to reaffirm the heretical Hegelianism of Marx, (Rosdolsky, Reichelt, Zelenyi, all dedicated to research the logic of Capital, all following one of the most famous injunctions of all times, Lenin in the Notes on Dialectics) or to combat it in order to argue that Marx was Hegelian or anti-Hegelian (Althusser, and Bidet in his famous study, The Making of Marx's Capital). This usage of Hegel consists essentially in using the categories of logic to expose the theoretical structure of the passages which operate from the commodity to value, from money as the measure of value to money as the means of exchange and as the universal means of payment, from money to capital. Schrader proposes the following recovery of the Marxist exposition of Hegelian categories: --Exchange value and the form of value correspond to the pure quantity of Hegel: this value and its measure is realized as money. The Marxist measure of value adopts the Hegelian determinations of the quantitative relations and their measure. --The circulation of commodities and money is described by the concepts of an infinite qualitative and quantitative process. --Finally the passage from money to capital transposes the passage from being to essence. Marx has thus read and reused these conceptual determinations for the diverse functions of commodity, value, money and circulation. And what about Spinoza? According to Schrader, he intervenes to resolve a logical problem that is at this point unresolved, that of the determination of the concept of capital supposed to integrate the logically preceding determinations. In good Hegelianism, Marx has made the movement of capital that of the essence of the concept. When Marx maintains that exchange value is realized in the circulation of other substances, in an indefinite totality, without losing the determination of its form, always remaining money and commodities, he makes capital the totality of substances. However, it thus impossible to maintain the internal connection between capital and labor, and more precisely abstract labor. Spinoza intervenes to make possible another use of the category of substance: that would not have its function to subsume the plurality of all substances, but to determine the quality of the fluent quantity that defines abstract labor. One can see this in the text of Volume One of Capital, revised by Marx in 1873 for the French translation of J. Roy. The category of substance is introduce in the passage from the commodity to its determination as the contradictory unity of use value and exchange value. The exchange of commodities is only possible if the their values are "expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantities." This something is a substance specific to all commodities. "This common "something" cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities…[] it is evident that one makes an abstraction from use value when one exchanges, and that the relation of exchange is characterized by this abstraction (Capital). Exchange and the production process which supports it operate this real abstraction from the useful qualities of the objects to be exchanged. This utility, although necessary, does not render possible the exchange of objects of value insofar as they products of labor. Exchange concerns the objects considered as products of labor. If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract. Capitalism cannot be grasped as a subject enveloping the totality of the process of the development. It is no longer a simple quantity in indefinite expansion. It is thought as the "social substance of as exchange values." This substance can be determined as capital, but it goes beyond this process of determination by constituting a remainder, a "residue" that constantly reappears. "Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values." The concept of Capital is not that of the concept of substance becoming subject., it returns to the concept of social substance defined as abstract labor creator of value, substance of value, and substance which increases value: purely progressive quantity reduced to its infinity which is a true infinity irreducible to the logic of bad infinity, that of capital which nonetheless subsumes it. However it is said that this reconstruction does not rest on an explicit reference to Spinoza. The objection is well founded. Schrader responds that it is Marx who reread Hegel and saw that the formal system of Spinoza could be used against Hegel critique of the concept of substance in the Logic. It is a matter of the problem of determination. Omnis determination negatio, Marx keeps reminding everyone of this. If it is Hegel who validates Spinoza's judgement by demonstrating its insufficiency which for Marx transforms into a sufficient truth to permit him to avoid identifying capital with the Hegelian concept. Capital can increase its reality only by determining this social substance of abstract labor, by negating it. The tendency of capital, its ideal, is the absolute negation of this substance. Marx makes the insufficiency of Spinoza's substance according to Hegel into a virtue. In the Logic the principle according to which determination is negation is recognized as essential. But Spinoza, according to Hegel, remains with determination as limit which is founded on an other being. The mode is in another from which it derives its being but this other is in itself. It is the integral concept of all realities. But its immanence is only apparent. Each mode negates each other, determination of each is the result of the determined negation of all of the others. Far from determining itself in these negations, substance is negated in its absolute indifference. It does not reflect itself in these negations no more than they reflect it. The Spinozist principle does not arrive at absolute negation that it anticipates contradictorily. The substance is posed by an external reflection which compromises the otherwise affirmed subsistence of the determinations which become an effervescent moment (attributes and modes). This can be read in the texts from The Science of Logic dedicated to Spinoza. "Of this proposition that determinateness is negation, the unity of Spinoza's substance — or that there is only one substance — is the necessary consequence. Thought and being or extension, the two attributes, namely, which Spinoza had before him, he had of necessity to posit as one in this unity; for as determinate realities they are negations whose infinity is their unity. According to Spinoza's definition, of which we say more more subsequently, the infinity of anything is its affirmation. He grasped them therefore as attributes, that is, as not having a separate existence, a self-subsistent being of their own, but only as sublated, as moments; or rather, since substance in its own self lacks any determination whatever, they are for him not even moments, and the attributes like the modes are distinctions made by an external intellect. Similarly, the substantiality of individuals cannot persist in the face of that proposition."Hegel, Science of Logic "Since absolute indifference may seem to be the fundamental determination of Spinoza's substance, we may add that this is indeed the case in so far as in both every determination of being, like every further concrete differentiation of thought and extension and so forth, is posited as vanished. If we stop short at the abstraction [of substance] then it is a matter of complete indifference what something looked like in reality before it was swallowed up in this abyss. But when substance is conceived as indifference, it is tied up with the need for determining it and for taking this determination into consideration; it is not to remain Spinoza's substance, the sole determination of which is the negative one that everything is absorbed in it. With Spinoza, the moment of difference — attributes, thought and extension, then the modes too, the affections, and every other determination — is introduced empirically; it is intellect, itself a mode, which is the source of the differentiation." Hegel, Science of Logic 3. It is capital which fails to realize its ideal determinations of essence and which falls back into the residue of the social substance, of the abstract labor which it masks. Capital as a mode of production is ruled by the real abstractions of exchange value which are not comprehended by social agents. Value is a social abstraction that is produced from the base of multiple dispersed evaluations, that the understanding of the economist produces only after the fact, but can be known as a real abstraction operated by society and which is determined as a social substance of abstract time. The determination of the common substance as abstract labor makes it possible to dissipate the mystification produced by the appearance of capital as the self moving essence of value. All of the people, who are modes of this substance, cannot immediately represent to themselves the internal determinations of this substance in which they appear other than as representation of theological-political complex, the same as the agents of capital who cannot represent to themselves the determinations of capital (commodity-value-money-forms of capital) without fetishizing them as autonomous movements of the value form. Theoretical knowledge, the Wissenschaft, does not dissolve this fetishism because the mechanisms of its social reproduction are founded on the constitution of these forms of representation and their real efficacy. Capital cannot arrive at self-identity in terms of an absolute reflection. The determination that Hegel imputes to Spinoza negatively of substance as exterior reflection can better convey the determinations of moments of its critique. This places within the development of initial economic forms this sort of equivalent of the attribute of extension that is human labor, this common social substance comprising the forms of modal representations which capture it, that is to say that the forms of consciousness and their functional relations in the material process of reproduction. It is therefore the relationship between the substances of abstract human labor and mystified or adequate forms of social representations of this substance that Marx finds in in the hidden Spinozian system and that he utilizes in order to escape the limits of Hegel's categories, which tend to sublimate substance into the concept and therefore annul the contradictions of capital in the passage from substance to the essence and the concept. From this point of view, Hegel and Spinoza would both be utilized without reservations by Marx as the complimentary and constitutive means of production of the critique of political economy. Spinoza would thus be primarily critical to the extent that the process of the development of the determination of capital cannot be ruled by the teleological order of being-essence-concept. The theory of the substance of abstract labor interrupts the movement of the idealization of capital from the mimesis of the Hegelian order that has been opposed. Spinoza is a moment of the emendation of the intellect internal to the Marxist critique, not an external instance that would be opposed in the confrontation with exteriority. On an Incomplete Analysis 1. Schrader goes no further. The outline of his work remains open. In particular this analysis Postulates as evidence a substantial theory of abstract labor, one that has come under criticism from multiple non-marxist thinkers (Croce, Pareto, Menger) and also, more recently, by Marxists (Althusser and Bidet). In this case the relation to Spinoza would lose its fecundity. But if one leaves to the side the labor theory of value and its supposed foundational role, on the internal level the analysis still remains allusive, because it would have been necessary to exceed the level of Volume One of Capital in order to demonstrate the decisive character of Spinoza's conceptuality in the Marxist conception. Despite these uncertainties, the perspective opened by Schrader is stimulating in that can necessitate a more rigorous study, tempering the contradictory interpretations by the rigors of philology. 2. Schrader's final remarks seem to us be more provocative. Starting from the idea that Spinoza and Marx begin from two different historical moments—that of manufacturing capital limited by the desire of hoarding and that of capitalism fully developed—the logical and ethico-political thesis of the submission of needs to absolute monetary enrichment, and that therefore the refusal of money as an end in itself, he begins to construct a shocking analogy between the third type of knowledge in Spinoza and the knowledge of the capitalist which exposes its money to circulation in order to multiply it. The determination of particular things sub specie aeternitas, as deepening the knowledge of their essence would symbolize with the effort of capitalists to insert money to measure things in their circulation sub specie capitalis. The reference to Marx attests to the irony of Marx: if the movement of true knowledge is infinite, this infinity cannot be confused with that of monetary accumulation which becomes a bad infinity because the means of accumulation are reversed and perverted to be posited as an end in itself. 3. It is more correct, as Schrader makes apparent, to find a space more effective for the forma mentis common to Marx and Spinoza: the two both diagnosis the pathology of the understanding and that of a form of life proper to a given historical world. Both understand the irreversible character of modern passions and set to understand and eventually cure these pathologies. Spinoza, son of a merchant enriched by international trade and a merchant himself in his youth, does not have contempt for money and the new wealth of nations promoted by capitalist economy. He does not dream of a return to oikos of finite needs in a household setting, he is not an aristoltean who condemns bad infinity of the circulation of merchandise which has as its object money and not the use value of merchandise. He registers the emergence of exchange value, he sees, as Aristotle did, that it is the subordination of true value. Remember the famous text from Ethics IV Appendix, consecrated to the function of money. XXVIII. Now to achieve these things the powers of each man would hardly be sufficient if men did not help one another. But money has provided a convenient instrument for acquiring all these aids. That is why its image usually occupies the mind of the multitude more than anything else. For they can imagine hardly any species of joy without the accompanying idea of money as its cause. XXlX. But this is a vice only in those who seek money neither from need nor on account of necessities, but because they have learned the art of making money and pride themselves on it very much. As for the body, they feed it according to custom, but sparingly, because they believe they lose as much of their goods as they devote to the preservation of their body. Those, however, who know the true use of money, and set bounds to their wealth according to need, live contentedly with little. The realization of money as a concept, the accumulation of money for accumulation, is unrealized. Marx adds that this goal is inaccessible because the character of use value of commodities contradicts the universal sociality of value. The common social substance in so far as it is measured in abstract labor time is measured according to quantitatively determined portions. Money is supposed to represent value in its infinite becoming of an end in itself, but it can only effectively represent a determined part. This contradiction is resolved in the deplacement that money makes in becoming capital, exchange value multiplied in profit. Spinoza's therapeutic of desire also concern the intellect of calculation: the latter is not condemned, it is superior to the intellect of avarice which theorizes by avarita and does not develop the capacity to act and think. This understanding, however, is called upon to better understand the monetary economy by subordinating it to immanent true utility, that which is inscribed in the republic of free citizens. It is only in this sense that the accumulation of wealth under the monetary form can enter into the correct perspective of knowledge of the third kind. Marx in his own way wants to understand the action of human beings without deploring or flattering them. Capital cannot be understood going from substance to the essence of the concept, but it has its basis in substance, the social substance of abstract labor, and can be rethought and regrouped in the forms of economic understanding. Capital also has as its goal a particular therapeutic manner, the health and well-being of a social body that cannot be subsumed under capital but must encompass the increase of the capacities of acting and thinking that capital subordinates to itself. 4. This anti-teleological function of the concept of substance/abstract labor is not maintained by Marx for long in his dialectic. Certainly the function of the subject cannot be attributed to capital, but it is displaced and given a different support, not that of abstract labor with its internal multiplicity and impersonality, but its bearer, that of the working class, the proletariat, the people of the people. The substance of abstract labor becomes subject in the determination that Marx always uses with the English term general intellect. One could thus see a final return of Hegel which interrupts Marx's return to Spinoza. The communism developed by the general intellect is the practical substitute of the Hegelian concept and imposes an anthropological version and anthropocentric teleology that Spinoza would not accept. What does the general intellect represent? It represents the capacity of the proletariat to organize the ensemble of forces defining the collective worker and the cooperation associated with it, under the direction of formation of the factory in the constitution of the unqualified worker, all representing the advance front of the progressive socialization of the social productive forces. Communism is not something that is imposed as a simple moral ideal, it is a product of the real historical process. However, Marx does not escape here the teleologism that he shares with majority of German idealism. The socialization of productive forces—that for Marx leads the process of the self-production of humanity realizing its immanent end and to which he attributes the function of the concept—is not realized at the level of society. It cannot in any way constitute itself as a causa sui. The human world remains a world of world of modal relations and interactions: if the effects of liberation can realize themselves at the level of the individual (by the knowledge of singular things) or at the level of collectivity ( by the democratic constitution of the multitude), these effects would not be made from a mode as a complete cause of itself under all points of view. The capacity of a mode to act and think, human individual or society, can be more or less adequate, but this adequation does not annul the difference that separates the mode which is produced by and in another which it requires to subsist and which is produced in and by itself and becomes a cause of itself. The identity of natura naturata and natura naturans cannot grant a mode the capacity to be cause of itself under all points of view: it permits it to do so under certain points of view and certain conditions which are sufficient for an ethical realization. Communism to the extent that Marx thinks in terms of the becoming concept of the collective worker exceeds the conditions and possibilities of action predicated on modes. To this structural impossibility we can add the consideration of an analytical one: modern society is not immense and singular enterprise under the order of the collective worker, it is, to say the least, a network of antagonistic enterprises in which on the contrary the process of work is fragmented to the point where it loses all material and ideal unity, a fragmentation that has been imposed by the imperative of capitalist society. Exploitation is not only maintained but it is generalized, it is only in compensation that the recomposition of labor process itself as something collective, cooperative, and associated that Marx believes leads the dialectic of the process of capitalist production. Spinozist realism is here irreducible. It does not limited us in taking the measure of the problem posed generally by Marx, it excludes, however, the solution envisioned from speculative teleology and it compels us to attempt to comprehend the modal form in which exploitation is reproduced. How can we form a new theory of the capacity for insurrection of the multitude subordinated to capital while they also resist it. What effects of liberation can still be manifested by producing new subjectivities which are embedded in real productive activities, not prisoners of unproductive ghettos ravaged by self-destructive violence, nor recluse themselves in the powerless rumination of a moral salvation? How can we escape forms of historical impotence? How can we avoid being reduced to the status of spectators of this impotence? Such are the questions posed by Marx and which are posed again today along with Spinoza and his critique of the teleological illusions of the general intellect, questions which have not arrived at the end of their road. But it is historically vain to ask Marx these questions: they are ours and it is up to us to answer them.
Karen Litfin on Gaia Theory, Global Ecovillages, and Embedding IR in the Earth System
This is the third in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
Many debates in International Relations concern struggles regarding what should be the autonomous limits and focus of the discipline itself. However, increasing environmental and climate concerns challenge the self-contained nature of IR on discrete political phenomena, because what IR considers it's exogenous context is threatening to destabilize the premises of the content of international political practice itself. While such concerns often lead to a securitization and politicization of the environment and climate in IR, some scholars argue we should work towards the exact opposite. In this Talk, Karen Litfin—among others—elaborates on the kind of theory in which IR is embedded in, rather than applied to, natural systems; discusses examples of social arrangements that try to translate that theoretical insight into practice; and engages with questions of secularism and mysticism that irrevocably accompany those efforts.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
The fact that we can today truly speak of something of a global economy, the central problem now is to formulate the political institutions that are commensurate to these globalized economic institutions. We have far to go on that project. It also means doing so within the carrying capacity of the earth—that is, politically configuring that global economy in such a way that it doesn't exhaust ecological resources. So I would say that the challenge, in terms of actual politics, is to find those institutions.
The challenge for the discipline of International Relations is to do the necessary thinking to facilitate that institutional transition, but few IR scholars even acknowledge that political institutions must attend to the carrying capacity of the earth. In general, the discipline of International Relations, Political Science and even most of social sciences more generally behave as if there are no natural constraints to our behavior. Yet our freedom to even be able to theorize about the international system is completely dependent upon a vast web of life, other people growing our food, and a whole technological infrastructure that we had nothing to do with creating. International Relations talks a lot about interdependence, but do we really take it seriously?
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
I've always been interested in science and technology. As an undergraduate, I studied physics and astronomy, but I didn't finish those majors because I realized, that if I graduated with those degrees I would most likely be working indirectly or directly for the military. I got politicized and I began to see that the political agenda drives the scientific agenda. This was in the 1970s and it was possible at that time that we were going to have an all-out nuclear war. I did not want to be a part of that.
I began to see that there is a dialectical relationship between science and politics. Because science facilitates the technological changes, which make the basic backdrop for politics, it's very important. For instance, the defense department was funding DARPA, which led—without them fathoming that at the time—to the development of the Internet—now a key site where global politics plays out.
Science also provides metaphors through which we understand politics. I did my Masters thesis on the mechanistic worldview and the devitalization of nature in the 17th century—that is, taking living nature out of our systematic theorizing. While others had written on this, I traced it back to the ancient Greek philosophy. A reductionist and mechanistic worldview underpins a lot of IR theory, as well most of our political institutions. We need to really start questioning that. Another way this plays out is that the notion of the global really had a huge jump when we got the image of Earth fromspace. The idea of Earth Day was really closely aligned to the fact that the image of the earth from space just had come out. Gaia Theory came about because James Lovelock was looking for signs of life on Mars. We were interested in extra-planetary life, but weren't looking at our own system or planet. So basically it turned all that science back on the Earth and said 'Oh my Gosh, we do have this kind of atmosphere that has the telltale science of life in it', which tells us that life is hoping to create the atmosphere. Then to have the human mind to conceptualize that is really huge. The idea that we are the Earth becoming conscious of itself is basically what science is telling us. These monitoring systems are one means by which we have the possibility of becoming conscious of that fact.
In terms of personal trajectory, when I started teaching International Relations back in the early 1990s, I started realizing that petroleum holds the whole thing together, the whole global system was held together by petroleum. (You could also say fossil fuels, but coal and natural gas don't power that much transnationally; it's really the petroleum.) Yet hardly anybody in IR talks seriously about petroleum—or energy or biodiversity or soil or the atmosphere. That's what I mean about getting to the material basis. But having said that, I think how we interact with the material basis is a reflection of our consciousness. So I'm not a material reductionist. Rather, I'm looking for a wholeness that understands our approach to material reality as being a reflection of our consciousness.
So this was why I have become interested in biological metaphors. I still think the leaning edge of human thought is understanding human systems as living systems. From this vantage point, we can begin to reshape our institutions in ways that mimic, sustain, and regenerate living systems. There's a long history of natural law and I don't exactly put myself in that camp, but I think there are ways that we need to understand ourselves as thoroughly embedded in natural systems and then move consciously from that place.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
To my mind, these are very different questions because, at least at many universities, becoming an IR specialist often entails ignoring some fundamental global realities. For one, even though most of humanity lives in so-called developing countries, most IR theory pays attention only to the Global North. Likewise, IR is fairly blind to the fact that the lifestyles of the Global North, if globalized, would require between three and six Earths, depending upon whether you are looking at Europeans or North Americans. Again, there is only one Earth! Fortunately, an important subfield has emerged with IR—global environmental politics—that is helping to rectify the situation.
The question I would prefer to answer is: what would a student need to know in order to understand the most pressing challenges facing the world system? To this, I would advise three things. The first would be to dive deeply into a broad and critical reading of the history of modernity, including the interpenetrating scientific, political, commercial, theological and industrial revolutions that characterize the modern era. The second would be to learn about the primary international institutions (the WTO, World Bank, IMF, EU, UN Security Council, etc.), and ask what is working, what isn't, and why? The third would be to do all of this learning while simultaneously learning to think systemically. Take at least one good course on systems theory; one that specifically offers a strong grounding in living systems, and start making connections. Why, for instance, do 'ecology' and 'economics' share the same root (oikos, Greek for household)? What would it mean to consider the international system as a living system and a subset of the Earth system? If we think this world system that we've created of a globalized economy and rudimentary international law is not a part of a living system, we are living in a big delusion. So to actually understand how living systems function, we need the literature on system theory that of course has been used in biology and ecology, but has also been applied a lot in the business world and organizational development. I think it's making its way into IR.
The world is full of technologies and technological systems (and getting more so each day). Could you elaborate on how this is relevant for IR?
I think that's a huge gap: IR doesn't pay nearly enough attention to technological systems—and when they do, it's generally from an uncritical and mechanical perspective. Even though much of the constructivist critique of liberal institutionalism is that the latter is overly materialistic, it actually isn't as if institutionalists talk about economics as if that were a material reality. Economics is a secondary human system overlaid on, but abstracted from, material systems. I think that IR needs to get really serious about understanding the actual material basis for politics. Climate change will probably be the issue that drives that.
So what kinds of technologies and institutions are we going to have to facilitate a global civilization? Now that's a worthwhile question! As I indicated, we now have a more or less globalized economy, but we don't have a global polis; we don't have the institutions that are commensurate to the economy that we have got. So the question is: can we sustain current civilization on the energy budget that is available to us and not wreck the climate?
Technological systems are driven by energy; energy is the master resource. Some energy analysts say that in order to have a global civilization, we need to have an energy return on energy investments of something like 5 to 1—meaning, for instance, that for each barrel of oil we put into getting more oil, we need to get five back. Right now petroleum is getting—depending on where you find it and how it's getting to you—somewhere between 15 and 25 to 1. That's the Middle East. It used to be 100 to 1 at the beginning of the 19th century. And now we are getting, say, 20:1. I've seen analyses of tar sands that put that energy source at somewhere between 3 and 5 to 1. Solar panels, if they work well, they are maybe getting 5:1. So the trend is worsening and we are starting to push that envelope of 5:1 energy return on investment. And if we exploit some of the new unconventional hydrocarbons—like fracking and, worse, methane hydrates—to their maximum potential, we'll fry the planet.
My question is how we can leverage existing technological, economic, financial and political resources to sustain a global civilization. I dearly wish more people were putting their attention on that question. The underlying assumption for most people is that business as usual can continue. Maybe, but not for long.
I'd like to throw in one little term coined by Stephen Quilley, an environmental sociologist: 'low energy cosmopolitanism' (read the paper here). I think this is a huge challenge for us. If it's possible to have a global civilization on the energy budget that we have available, it's going to be some form of a low energy cosmopolitanism, where we make some very conscious choices about what we are going to globalize. For instance, Germany probably wouldn't be importing grapes from Africa and none of us would be going on luxury vacations. We would be making a lot of conscious choices, but if we want to have a global civilization we have to be globalizing something, so what is it that we are globalizing?
How do you see the question of technological determinism when studying technologies?
This is really important to note, because if you just look at human systems as living systems there can be a kind of materialistic reductionism there. People who think like William Connolly, the new materialism understands that we should not be materialistic reductionists and that there is this wildcard of human consciousness. The fact of the matter is, we can assemble all the data we want but we don't know where we are going. But what we do know is that we've created a tremendously complex and complicated world that nobody can actually understand!
I think we need to address that question in a very specific way with respect of specific technologies, but if we stick to one example—satellites—I think the technologies do have certain properties embedded in them. I have written a feminist theoretical critique of earth observing satellites, where I argued that this kind of gaze from space actually does downplay or preclude certain perspectives. But as I thought about it more deeply, I saw very concretely that a lot of people are using those technologies to do what they want—not what the centralized political and scientific institutions that gave rise to the satellites wanted. So I would say the wildcard here is consciousness and human inventiveness, because that's what will shape how people deploy the technologies once there are on the ground.
For example, satellites were devised for spying and are certainly still being used for spying, but they are being used for so much else, such as Google Maps. I think some people might have been able to foresee that kind of development, but most of us didn't have a clue that this sort of thing could come about. Or that you could have indigenous people mapping their traditional lands in order to make land rights claims. So the wildcard really is human consciousness and that's why nothing really is deterministic. The greater the complexity in a living system, the more surprising its emergent properties. Seven billion human brains linked together in global technological and ecological systems are bound to yield surprises!
You indicated that you use biology and living systems as a reservoir for metaphors. Could you elaborate on that?
If I speak about living systems I usually do so through work called Gaia Theory. Looking through the lens of Gaia Theory, we would first understand that we exist within certain spheres such as biosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere. We have taken geological time and inserted it into human time by digging up fossil fuels. As a consequence, we have kind of checkmated ourselves and are now forced into having to think in geological terms. We have to start thinking in geological time scales, which was never the case before. If we are going to find a way of inhabiting this planet sustainably, particularly if we are going to have anything approaching a global civilization, we have to understand that we live within a living system and then go about the rather daunting but exciting project of developing international law and institutions that reflect that reality.
There is a whole subfield of earth system governance in which Earth system scientists, IR theorists and international legal experts are coming together to think through these questions. The literature on earth system governance starts from the premise that the Earth is a living system and draws heavily on earth system science, which draws heavily from Gaia theory. You cannot separate atmosphere, oceans, lithosphere, and biosphere: they are all intertwined as one big living system—and now humanity is functioning as a geophysical force on a planetary scale. That's the meaning of the Anthropocene, and it will require an entirely new way of going about politics and economics.
So how can we bring the concept of Gaia Theory into practical reality? Besides the emerging field of Earth system governance, we can also do this in a very personal way by beginning to really internalize what it means being a human being at this time. A few years back, I came to the point where I decided that I did not want to theorize about anything I could not live. That turned out to be a huge challenge. After I wrote the 'integral politics' piece (see links below)—and I really do love that piece!—I saw that I couldn't fully live it. It was so big. For me, one of the most important implications of Gaia Theory is that we are the Earth becoming aware of itself. That's a huge implication. If you merely think of it conceptually, it is wonderful mind candy; but if you actually take it to the heart and try to live it, it changes your life. I challenged myself to do this and, at some point, it occurred to me that there must be other people who have traveled farther down that road than I had—in other words, people who had radically changed their lives to reflect their growing awareness that human beings are the Earth becoming conscious of itself. So I found myself traveling around the world to ecovillages which, for me, helped to tie it all together. Why is somebody who's teaching international environmental law and politics wandering around the world visiting these little tiny micro-communities? Because these people are taking the radical implications of Gaia Theory to heart (even if they've never read about it) and collectively changing their material, economic and social lives. That's why I spent a year on the road living in ecovillages. It's a strange thing to be an IR theorist who doesn't want to theorize about anything that she can't live!
Bringing up the issue of how to live your research, could you elaborate on what kind of outlook is necessary to live in accordance to Gaia Theory?
So this leads to the importance of humility for me. The value of humility is that it comes naturally as a consequence of understanding. You do not have to value it in advance; it comes automatically from understanding ourselves as part of this larger living system. In my experience at least, as soon as you grasp that, you automatically have an enormous sense of humility and gratitude. Those two qualities just spontaneously arise from truly grasping that reality. Going back to ecovillages, I asked myself who is living in ways that can actually work for the long run. The result became the eponymous book. I wanted to see collective efforts and particularly larger communities that were generally at least a hundred people, because you can do a lot more collectively, than you can on your own. Some of these communities are reducing their ecological footprint radically. In some cases, we are talking about per capita reductions in material consumption and waste production of 80-90% as compared to their home country averages.
This is very big news—especially given that these communities are still tied to the larger system. They are not tiny isolated enclaves. For instance, they're still using the mass transit of the larger society; most of them have Wi-Fi and high-speed Internet. They're not living in caves and many of them are very much globally engaged. On a material level, they're much closer to living within the Earth's carrying capacity. So in that way, I was very interested in just seeing what are their physical systems. But I began to see that their physical systems were only made possible because of the degree of trust and reciprocity that they have created.
That entails doing a lot of personal work. Diana Leafe-Christian, who has written a number of books on communities, says that 'community life is the longest and most expensive personal growth workshop you'll ever take'. It's true! If you're willing to do the personal work and hang in there through the difficult times and conflicts, you can develop the kind of self that's willing to do some very deep sharing. I would add, though, that this level of sharing is done best when it is respectful of the individualism that we have developed. I don't think that communities should be running roughshod over individualism. There needs to be some balance of privacy and communal life. The communities that work well have figured out a way to do this. To my mind, the communities that work really well are the ones who are working on developing collective forms of consciousness. Which means actually I think going beyond the separative rational mind: it doesn't mean demeaning those qualities, it means using them, but using them in the service of something larger. As I said earlier, progressive change entails transcending and including. Individualism, for all its negative consequences, is a genuine historical achievement.
And I would say on a very practical level, one of the ways that they reduce their footprint is by withdrawing to some extent from the global economy. Having very low consumption and being fairly energy efficient and self-reliant, reliance on food self-sufficiency, but withdrawing from global society. To me, they are answering the question I raised earlier: What would a low-energy cosmopolitanism look like? And they are doing this not just because they consume less and live more simply but because by and large ecovillagers actually have a cosmopolitan identity. They might be growing their own food and composting their shit, but they're also tied into the global system. They're actively engaged in the Internet, sometimes attending global conferences and many of them are politically active on issues such as genetically modified organisms and nuclear waste disposal and human rights.
They are little nodes of positive examples, but they're very small. In fact, hardly anybody lives in an ecovillage, which is why the last chapter of my book is called 'Scaling it up'. I basically look at the underlying principles of ecovillages and talk about how these principles could be scaled up to the level of cities, regions, national government and international norms. I realize this is a big stretch, but I felt that as an International Relations scholar, I at least need to try it. The important misconception you run into that moment is the idea that sustainability needs to be expensive—the idea that somehow we can consume our way into sustainability. Actually, the most sustainable form of consumption is no consumption! Yet this is not what all ecovillages do. There is one community that I visited in up-state New York, in Ithaca, this is the same city that Cornell University is in, where two thirds of the residents have masters degrees or PhDs and their homes are worth more than the average in the area. They have a pretty middle class lifestyle, yet their average ecological footprint is about half the American norm. So they're not sustainable, but they are definitely moving in the right direction. They hired architects and have nice homes, which is a very different approach than that of most rural ecovillages.
In the Global North, the smallest footprints that I saw tended to be in the rural off-grid ecovillages that were more or less self-sufficient in food, energy, and water. In some of these communities, residents were living on as little as 25% of their average national incomes. This is impressive because it tells us that people in affluent countries can live well on far less money and with far less environmental damage than is considered normal in those countries.
Yet the fact of the matter is that most people today live in cities, so it was important for me to also look at urban ecovillages. Los Angeles Ecovillage, for instance, has a very small footprint because it is high-density and automobile use is discouraged. If you lower your transportation footprint by not driving or sharing vehicles, and if you grow your own food or rely upon locally produced food and have and passive solar construction and renewable energy for your buildings, you can dramatically reduce your energy consumption. You can have a much smaller footprint and still have a very comfortable life. People think that you need money in order to live. It seems that we need money in order to live, but actually what we need is food and shelter and transportation and relationships. So if you figure out ways of getting those things without money, you've made a huge step to getting out of the global economy. In a nutshell, that's what ecovillages are doing.
So are ecovillages all the same across the globe? Is it a new 'social form' emerging?
It is different in the developing countries and in the affluent countries, and I think it's important to clarify that at the outset. I visited a number of ecovillages and ecovillage networks in both developing countries and affluent countries. In the latter, there is a greater possibility for what I consider 'post-individualist' that both transcends and includes individualism. A very simple 'post-individualistic' approach to property rights, for instance, would be co-housing, where the land is owned in common and people own their own homes. But their private homes would be a lot smaller because so many amenities are shared. The common house would have a community kitchen, so that, depending upon how much people are willing to share, private kitchens can be very small. If there's a collectively owned guest space, then you don't need a guest room in your house. And if you do a lot of your socializing together, then you can do that in the common house. So your own house could be quite small but you would still have access to all the comforts of a private existence and more. The more people are willing to share, the more will be collectively owned. And that really does require trust, because it's a big problem if the relationships blow up and you have your finances entangled with those people! This is just one example of how property rights can coexist with the softening of boundaries between individuals.
The flipside of this is occurring in developing countries, where the post-individualistic arrangement that I've been making doesn't really apply. And this is important because that's where most people in the world live. There you have cultures where people already have much more of a collective orientation. So we really need to pay attention to what's happening there. Actually, in many cases, their developmental task is to become more individuals. And the question is: how do they become more highly-individualized rather than being subsumed by traditional moral codes—how do they that without over-consuming. In the west, we had a fossil fuel subsidy that enabled us to become highly individualized, as I said before, the only reason we can be having this interview is because somebody else is growing our food.
In developing countries, the real task is to find a way for people to become more individualistic without over consuming. And so this is why I was impressed by the model I saw in Sarvodaya, a Sri Lankan participatory development network that belongs to the Global Ecovillage Network. There, fifteen thousand villages are trying to apply ecovillage principles to create what they call a "no-poverty/no-affluence society." Their programs in micro-finance and women's literacy, for instance, give villagers—especially women—an incentive to stay in the village because they have a livelihood. And when people stay in their villages, they tend to live a lot more sustainably. As the women becoming literate, they begin making choices for themselves and therefore becoming more individualized. So it's a way of hopefully leap-frogging urbanization in order to sustain rural village life.
I should say that you can apply these principles anywhere you live, in cities as well as rural areas. I visited quite a few ecovillages in cities. One of the most important things that the Global Ecovillage Network is doing is training people, wherever they live, to apply ecovillage principles in their urban neighborhoods or wherever they find themselves. There have been some amazing projects coming up in the Brazilian favelas and in China. GEN has developed a course called 'Gaia Education' that's being offered all over the world and especially in developing countries. There's now a Global Ecovillage Network for Africa. There are basic principles of sustainability that, if you live in an ecovillage, you can apply more intentionally, but they are applicable everywhere.
In a way, 'Gaia theory' sounds very spiritual—and for that reason the Gaia concept was initially very much opposed by many physicists and climate scientists. In a way, Gaia theory entails a critique of modernist secularism and faith in technology; how do you see that in your work?
I have mentioned the critique of mechanization in the early modern era, but in fact the early modern scientists, such as Newton, were all looking for God. Now many of the hard sciences are moving in the direction of mysticism—I would speak of mysticism rather than spirituality—but it's not a mysticism that is simply a projection of the human psyche onto the cosmos; rather, it is empirically derived. I think that's a kind of postmodern development that would have been impossible in the pre-modern era. That's what I was saying about transcending and including, that the ideas that we have of who we are in the cosmos are so different as a consequence of modern science. We can transcend those ideas but also include them. From the Big Bang and the evolution of species, we came out of all of that! And implicit within this fact, if you take it deeper, is that there is a secret oneness to it all. I think that the lessons we have to learn politically and economically now are about interdependence. But if you take interdependence to its depths, it too implies a secret oneness. Most importantly for the current evolutionary crisis: that oneness is embedded in our consciousness and we can access that. That is the reason why I don't want to theorize about anything that I can't live; I'm working at that level as well.
It's interesting, because that also has implications for my teaching. I teach in a fairly direct way when I have living bodies and inquiring minds right in front of me and can engage them at a personal level. I give them my big picture view of politics as a subset of living systems and also being a kind of living system. I get them to inhabit that in themselves through doing contemplative and reflective exercises in the classroom. For instance, I'm teaching a class called political ecology of the world food system and we talked about the globalization of different food commodities and where chocolate comes from for instance, where it originally came from, who processes it, how much do the farmers get from all of that. I brought in raw cacao nibs, which most of the students had never tasted before. We talked about where these came from and how expensive they were even though cacao is not processed, because raw cacao is a something of a delicacy. Then I gave them this very highly processed chocolate without sugar and with alternative sweeteners in it. I invited them to really be present to tasting each of these things as I talked about them and I left some significant gaps of silence, they could actually be present to experience of themselves inhabiting the living system and now being the beneficiary of a world food system. How did we come to have cacao from West Africa and stevia from Paraguay in our mouths? What are sociopolitical and biotic networks that have made this possible? And can we allow ourselves to truly experience what it means to be the beneficiary of these living systems? And what of our own as living system? When I am in the classroom it is actually quite easy to teach what I call person/planet politics. I never teach anything as if it is just 'out there'. Whenever I teach anything, I want the students to inhabit it in their bodies, in their experience. And I try to do that as best as I can by living what I teach as best I can.
It is a little embarrassing, but I don't know how all of this applies to IR; I am just trying to do it as best I can in my own life, as it is presented to me. And I write about it and I publish things—I have a piece coming out on localism that basically makes the case for what I call organic globalism, which is a globalization that is premised upon the earth as a living system and international institutions being designed very consciously on that basis. I don't quite know what it looks like but I have a sense of its rightness. To be honest with you, I am better with that in the classroom that I am at the level of large-scale institutions. Because I am beginning to inhabit this in my own being and I can communicate it to students. Maybe the next challenge is to be able to communicate it at a larger level.
So isn't there a tension between living sustainably and participating in a globalized world that is hard-wired in terms of technology?
Consciousness does not at all preclude technology. For example, I think us having this dialogue is on some level contributing to a certain kind of consciousness and it's completely facilitated by technology. Without Skype we wouldn't be having this conversation. What's helpful to me, about what I call E2C2 (ecology, economics, community and consciousness) is that these are four lenses through which to view any phenomenon—and that includes technology. For instance, we can view our Skype conversation through the lens of ecology in terms of the amount of energy that's used. Economically, we might consider what is being produced and what its value is. It's probably a pretty good economic deal since you and I are virtually paying nothing for it! So economically it's a good deal. In terms of the communitarian lens, we are developing a dialogue that will hopefully be in a relational field with many other people, perhaps thereby also contributing to a certain growth of consciousness.
E2C2 offers four lenses through which we can look at technology; they are not mutually exclusive. For me, the question is: to what extent are our technologies beneficial in terms of each of the lenses. Denis Hayes, the guy who started Earth Day, said the basic principle of sustainability is that you leave your molecules at home and export your photons. This brings us back to the concept of low energy cosmopolitanism. It's a huge question: what are we going to globalize? If we are going to have a global civilization we need to have global communication. The Internet is a tremendous achievement in that regard, and could to function as a kind of global brain, though its roots are in its military applications and today it is primarily dominated by commerce. (And I understand that pornography is a big part of it as well.) Despite its limitations, the Internet provides an infrastructure that could enable us to be in communication globally, which is very important if you want to develop a global consciousness and a global civilization. But we need to understand that our technologies must operate within the limits of the Earth system. In other words, technologies—like all human systems—are also living systems.
Last question. So how can we relate this back to IR?
I think one of the ways this is happening is that some pockets of IR are actually returning to foundational concepts. For instance, Alexander Wendt (Theory Talk #3) has started this Journal International Theory. People are seriously looking at the bigger and deeper questions, so uniting more with political theorists for instance. This idea that we are coming up against real limits is a very frightening idea from the perspective of a certain idea of freedom rooted in liberal politics. We really need to rethink the meaning of freedom in an era of limits. My own feeling is that human beings are kind of hard-wired towards unlimitedness—but the world is now pressing us to interrogate this impulse. We don't do well with limits. But the fact of the matter is, we are not evolutionarily adapted to abundance, we don't even know what to do with abundance. We are squandering resources in the most absurd ways. So we really need to rethink what freedom is in a world of limits.
It's not all together a bad thing that we are facing these limits. Those of us who have at least the privilege of being well fed and reasonably comfortable, can actually turn our attention to this question of consciousness. Because this question of 'what is freedom' is a problem of human consciousness. Rather than turning our desire towards mastery—I think as human beings we have an innate desire towards mastery – rather than turning that desire onto the external world, we've pretty well mastered it; except turns out that we live in it so it's coming back to bite us and we are facing huge climate change most likely. When we shift the focus of this desire for mastery to our own psyches, then lots of things open up. And I don't think only people who live in industrialized countries need to do this or are doing this. One of the things I saw in my ecovillage book is that people living in developing countries are also quite aware of it and are doing it at the places they live as well. There is a global awakening, at least in small pockets, to the fact that we live within a limited Earth system and a serious inquiry into what it means to be a human being at this juncture between modernity and the Anthropocene.
Karen Litfin (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 1992) is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. She specializes in global environmental politics, with core interests in green theory, the science/policy interface, and what she calls "person/planet politics." Her first book, Ozone Discourses: Science and Politics in International Environmental Cooperation (Columbia University Press, 1994), looks at the discursive framing of science in the ozone treaties. Her second book, The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics (MIT Press, 1998), explores how state sovereignty is being reconfigured as a consequence of global environmental politics. Some of the topics of her recently publications include: the politics of earth remote sensing; the political implications of Gaia Theory; the relationship between scientific and political authority in the climate change negotiations; the politics of sacrifice in an ecologically full world; and holistic thinking in the global ecovillage movement.
Related links
Faculty profile at the University of Washington Read Litfin's Thinking like a planet: Gaian politics and the transformation of the world food system (2011 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Litfin's Towards an Integral Perspective on World Politics: Secularism, Sovereignty and the Challenge of Global Ecoloy (Millennium, 2003) here (pdf) Read Litfin's The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty (Global Society, 1999) here (pdf) Read Litfin's The Gendered Eye in the Sky: Feminist Perspectives on Earth Observation Satellites (Frontiers 1997) here (pdf)
Issue 55.1 of the Review for Religious, January/February 1996. ; Review for Religious is a fo,utm for Sb~red reflection on the liVed experience of all who ~nd that the CbnrCb!s rich heritages of spi~tnality support their personal and apostolic Christian lives. The articles in the journal are meant to be informative, practical, or inspirational, written f!,om a theological or spirirudl or sometimes canonical point'of view: Rcview for Rcligious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bi-monthly at Saint Louis University by thc Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Lot, is, Missouri 63108-3393. "l'elcphone: 314-977-7363 ¯ Fax: 314-977-7362 Mant, scripts, books for review, and correspondcncc with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Liudcll Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. 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ATable Set by Bold Dreamers Eileen P. O'Hea CSJ relates a planning weekend experience in the province life of a religious community that results in a communion consciousness. viewpoints 75 Turning Over a New Leaf: a New Year's Passage Robert S. Stoudt points the annual human phenomenon of making New Year's resolutions to a more efficacious process. 84 Reflections on Turning Seventy Mary Boyan OSU gives an example of how one "thinks old" and is happy to do so. departments 4 Prisms 87 Canonical Counsel: The Potest~s of Religious Superiors according to Canon 596 92 Book Reviews January-February 1996 prisms As Review for Religious begins 1996 and its fifty-.fifth year of publication, some new aspects will be evident. We are using color highlighting through-out the text. The cover color of each issue will carry through in the banner divisions, the running titles, and the pagination. We hope that just a bit of color through-out will be enhancing to the text and pleasing to the eye. 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There is a change noted amo.ng our advisory board members. We are welcoming a married couple, Jim and Joan Felling. Jim and Joan have been very active in parish life both in Canada and in the United States, particularly Revlew for Religious through their involvement with the Christian Life Community. Joan is presently president of the National Federation of Christian Life Communities in the United States. Their longtime interest in lay spirituality, their involvement in the Ignatian retreat move-ment, and their respect for the spirituality heritages which our journal reflects make them valuable additions to our board. As editor I want to express my gratitude for the contribution of Joann Wolski Conn to our board and wish her well in her continued teaching, workshop schedule, and writing. On the inside back cover I call attention to the new director for the Xavier Society for the Blind, Mfred E. Caruana SJ. As I acknowledge Father Caruana, I also want to reemphasize~the availability of each issue of Review for Religious on cassettes to the visually impaired. Readers can note the contact address on the inside back cover. Revie& for Religious also announces the publication of a new book, Ignatian Exercises: Contemporary Annotations. It is Book 4 in The Best of the Review series. Edited by David L. Fleming SJ., the book includes an original introductory a~rticle "Following Christ More Nearly: Discipleship in Ignatian Spirituality" and twenty-eight other articles on vision, conversion, examination, attitude, prayer, discernment, and adaptation. It is meant to be a rich resource book for Ignatian spirituality, and it makes a good com-panion volume to Book 1 6f The Best of the Review, Notes on the Spiritual Exercises of~St. Ignatius of Loyola. The cost is $12.95 plus a $2.00 shipping and handling fee. The book can be ordered only through our editorial offices in St. Louis, Missouri. An order form for the book can be found on the insert page at the back of this 'issue. I fiope that all our readers will enjoy the new look and feel of the new volume in this new year. David L. Fleming SJ JannaD,-Febrlla~7 1996 feature PAUL N. DUCKRO, RANDALL C. FLANERY, AND PHILIP R. MAGALETTA Healthy Eating in a Spiritual Context Of the many gifts given to human beings, experiencing a particular event through our various powers of sensation and then finding a depth of meaning in it besides is one of the richest. Events that on the surface are commonplace and repetitive offer strange and deep collaborations with the Spirit. It is from this perspective that the present arti-cle considers the matter of eating, and particularly healthy eating. Most obviously, of course, eating is a biological event in response to the cue of hunger. Eating sustains life by providing necessary nutrients and bulk. But eating is also behavior, a culturally defined activity and experience. There is in it pleasure, social interaction, and ritual for celebration or mourning. Our Scriptures contain many references to important meals. In Exodus 24:11 the encounter with God is itself an occasion marked by eating and drinking. The Gospels are replete with recollections of Jesus in Which eating or Paul N. Duckro, Randall C. Flanery and Philip R. Magaletta may be addressed at The Program for Psychology and Religion; Saint Louis University Health Sciences Center; 1221 South Grand Boulevard; St. Louis, Missouri 63104. This article sum-marizes the content of a seminar offered at Saint Louis University by Randall C~ Flanery PhD, Joseph Gillespie OP, Rabbi James Goodman, Dismas Bonnet OFM, and Paul N. Duckro PhD. The article incorporates freely the content presented by the speakers. In some cases unique contributions of a particular presenter are noted with initials: Review for Religious refraining from eating serve to illustrate realization of the reign of God among us. A ritual meal serves as the occasion for seeking and being brought close to our God; we hunger for the Feast that desires also to be incarnated in us. The Word becomes flesh. Meals, however, may also be occasions for spiritual discipline. Incredibly, this routine behavior, fraught with peril for excess or deprivation, holds also great promise for growth in mind and spirit. Our personal recollections supply many images of eating. For most of us, early memories of food involve parents, brothers and sisters, and our extended family. Eating together is a way of mark-ing both celebration and grief. Our brains record and continue to respond to aromas of food prepared in "the old neighborhood"-- °bread baking, boiling cabbage, simmering sauce, pie cooling on the window sill. The dinner table might bring sensations of full-ness or barely touched hunger, joyful sharing or painful recrim-ination. In these contexts, food takes on meaning that transcends its biological function. It may also serve as a reward for being good, a reassurance of love, a cheery note amid sfldness. The meal may become the means of.healing brokenness or masking it. Issues of control and dependence may be expressed in feeding and being fed. In many dysfunctional families (or religious communities), dining together is "the last fiction of civility," with the group act-ing out much unspoken pain in the practiced rituals of the meal. Early memories get acted out in the way we eat as adults. In reli-gious communities the great variety of personal histories interacts with the prevalent culture of the congregation and is reflected in the variety of ways meals are handled in local communities. Food may be served family style or in a cafeteria line. All may sit down together or each may eat apart. Meals may be'a time, to interact or a time to eat hurriedly. Information may be shared, or discus-sion may be only an unwelcome interruption~of the functioning of teeth, tongue, and throat, The atmosphere may be warm and quiet or cold and noisy. The particular history of the individual contributes mightily to his or her experience of a meal. Present events, however, also play their role. Eating may bear the weight of stifled needs for social intimacy and nurturance. A spiritual emptiness may also become the occasion for a determined effort to fill oneself with food. There is in all of us an empty place that longs for God and Januat~y-Februa~y 1996 Duckro ¯ Healthy Eating in a Spiritual Context cannot be filled with any ordinary substance. When we forget this, food can become an addictive substance, a pseudosatisfier. We stuff substances into an emptiness that is never satisfied by sub-stances (JG). When self-denial is the guiding paradigm for life, eating and desire to eat may become obsessive in an effort to satisfy the deprivation. Many of us have learned from others an ambivalence toward physical pleasure and nurturance. There is conflict in bal-ancing self-care and care of others, Enjoying the body may be seen as an obstacle to transcending the body. The instability resulting from such conflicts leads to eating too much or too lit-tle or to alternation between the two extremes (PD~. Culture, too, contributes to the experience of food and its consumption. In North American culture, it is widely held that the" shape of the body is an exhibition of the value and character of the person. Implicit in this beliefoare the following thoughts: that the body is a pliable entity that can be made to conform to any expec-tation, given sufficient effort; that one should exert such effort to shape the body according to the current perceptions of beauty; and that failure to do so indicates that one is either lazy or irre-sponsible, lacking in virtue (RF). Such personal, social, cultural, and spiritual elements con-tribute to the eating experiences of individuals and communities. The elements interact to form our habitual approach to eating. How we~handle or manage them is a function largely of our atten-tion to them. Thei'r effects and the responses we make to them, automatically or consciously, may be biological, behavioral, cog-nitive, affective, or social. These effects and various typical responses to them are. detailed in many sources and serve to focus the clinical treatment'of problematic eating patterns. This article focuses on the spiritual dimensions of healthy eating patterns, Every major faith tradition has developed its own laws regard-ing.' food and eating. In many religions, eating is in itself incor-porated into ritual, transforming it from the mundane to the sacred. Eating is also an occasion for discipline, often in the form of fasting. In the Hebrew Scriptures, fasting is prescribed as a symbolic act of humility and prayer, done in remembrance of God and as repentance for sins. Fasting also prepares people for a great new undertaking. Detachment from the physical makes room for the spiritual. The Christian tradition builds on these considera-tions, adding an emphasis on chastening the 'body. Fasting Review for Religiot¢.¢ becomes a means of purifying the mind and body and of pro-moting an openness to God by linking one with the suffering Christ. Refraining from food also means that the money saved can be given to the poor (DB). In our modern world, these ideas continue to influence the meaning of fasting as a discipline. Christians become more truly "bread for the world" as members of the body of Christ when they limit expenditures for their own food and use the money to provide food for the poor, experiencing in hunger a solidarity with the poor and learning to receive the fruits of the earth without taking them for granted. These experiences are particularly important for those who live in the midst of many resources and in relative comfort (DB). Fasting should not become an end in itself. The desire to suffer can be as much a trap as any other desire, distracting from detachment's true goal, which is to clear the pathway toward authentic love (JG). Severe fasts can focus the mind on the body as much as gluttony can, and even more. Fasting is most likely to lead beyond itself when it is done in moderation and tailored ~to the individual. The goal is to foster a balance, a spirit of detachment, and thus to reduce conflict and ambivalence regarding food. Encountering food consciously is a significant aspect of making progress toward this goal. Severe fasts can focus the mind on the body as much as gluttony can. The Inner Way We describe this conscious encounter with food, with the act of eating, and with attendant phenomena as the inner way, This inner way is a facet of the mystical in each of the major faith tra-ditions. Called by many names (mindfulness, remembrance, aware-ness, contemplation), this way essentially demands cultivating the experiente of the presence of God in all things, although the words and images u_.sed to describe such experience vary ainong religions. The emphasis is on the present moment. In this simple awareness of what is, self and object are transformed; essence is revealed. At table, mindfulness blesses and transforms both the food and the act of eating, elevating the common physical act of eating to holi-ness in the mysticism of the everyday. God dwells where one lets God in (JG). When people do their eating contemplatively, they Januaty-Febt'uaty 1996 Duckro ¯ Healthy Eating in a Spiritual Context Food alone, is never "enough"; we eat and are hungry again. find God in their hunger, in the sensations associated with the food, and in those with whom they eat. As Martin Buber says, "One eats in holiness and the table becomes an altar." The inner way also releases us from the repetitive cycles of compulsiveness and addiction. Awareness wakens us from the soporific state from which compulsivity has grown and stands in opposition to the compartmentalization, denial, rationalization, minimization, and automatic behavior that sustain it. In contemplation we are moved by awareness of self and nonself toward conscious choice. ° In a very real sense, most of us have spent much of our waking lives asleep. Many dys-functional patterns of eating originate as if in a dream. They develop gradually, unrecognized by the doer. Hunger of an emotional, social, or spiritual nature is quieted with food, but only temporarily. The hunger must be satisfied more and more fre-quently. When people eat rapidly, the signs of satiation are passed by like highway billboards, seen only in a blur until we are stuffed. Fears of aging, of ugliness, or of sexuality are confused with tak-ing in food and then placated by near starvation. Almost imper-ceptibly the appearance of the body and the regulation of food intake become the primary focus of attention, distracting us from the greater aspects of reality (PD). Applying the inner:'way to the promotion of healthy eating requires developing the habit of awareness with regard to hunger and eating. Htinger becomes a sensation for a person to experience before acting on qt. Desires arising from hunger are to be visual-ized and sorted out in the larger context of health, community, society. Eating is a multifaceted event to be experienced in all its elements, deliberately and slowly. There are the textures, smells, colors, temperatures, tastes of the food itself. The origin of the food might be considered--those who grew it, delivered it, pre-pared it. Buddhist monk and author Thich Nhat Hanh finds "everything in the universe in one tangerine." He recalls that the tangerine began within a tree, on which the fruit appeared and from which someone picked it. "Eating mindfully is a most impor-tant practice in meditation. The purpose of eating is to eat." Those with whom one eats--the congruence or incongruence between sharing this sacred feast and the state of the relation- Review Jbr Religious ships--might be experienced as well. In awareness while eating, we are awake to the food, the self, others, and the Other. A contemplative stance regarding eating is always helpful in bringing this common behavior to fuller experience, experience of life in God. It moves the individual, in itself and in synergy with clinical treatment, toward the goal of moderation in eating. Awareness changes the preconceived notions of how much food one needs to feel satisfied. The concepts of "enough" or "full-ness" are revisited. Food alone is never "enough"; we eat and are hungry again. Food, in the context of the total experience of din-ing, can be part of the experience of "enough," having all that you really need. The practice of full awareness is a discipline. The goal is not fully attainable, and it is the journey rather than the destination that is of importance. Continuing the journey day after day requires the use of behavioral, cognitive, and spiritual tools that facilitate a contemplative attitude vis-?i-vis hunger, food, and eating. Becoming Aware Eating is a richly multidimensional experience touching almost every aspect of life. M.EK. Fisher, quoted at length in the introduction to C.L. Flinders's Enduring Grace, says it well: "It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others . There is commu-nion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk." ~ The ideas we have considered--the biological, social, and spiritual dimensions of hunger, food, and eating--need to be applied to everyday life and are, of course, especially relevant to persons who have some dysfunctional habit regarding food or their body image. Sometimes a dysfunctional eating pattern reaches the point of illness, in itself or in the form of an associ-ated affective disorder, and may call for clinical treatment. When eating becomes illness, the consequences may be even life-threat-" ening. In such cases it is prudent to seek medical and psycholog-ical diagnosis and treatment. We focus here on the gains that are possible when the expe-rience of hunger and the act of eating are made more conscious. (We refer to this heightened consciousness either as awareness, JanuaO,-Febr~ta~y 1996 Duckro ¯ Healthy Eating in a Spiritual Context mindfulness, or a contemplative stance with regard to everyday life.) There is much to be gained in developing this contemplative stance, regularly interrupting the automatic habits that have been formed with regard to food and opening up the mysteries of body, mind, and spirit that lie hidden there. In developing awareness, one lays the only foundation for real choice. A contemplative stance in life depends not so much on mov-ing physically away from our usual world as it does on learning and using a fresh perspective on the familiar. It may even be that this learning is best done in the place where the familiar may be found. Awareness is, ~first of all, being present to what is happen-ing now. Eating has behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and social elements that are often ignored when we are caught up in a dys-functional pattern. Persons who to even casual observers appear obsessed with eating may be almost completely unaware of the fact. They wolf down food, violendy avoid it, or alternate between the two. Efforts to suppress the appetite make of it an insistent stranger and even an enemy, causing the house to be at war with itself. Paradoxically, conscious awareness of eating leads, not to preoccupation with food, but to a real integration of food, eating, and body image, to the benefit of the spiritual journey. The indi-vidual becomes more aware of the other hungers sometimes mis-taken for physical hunger, of the other fears that sometimes lie hidden beneath overt fears of being fat or self-indulgent. Approaching the Meal ¯ A primary method for increasing awareness with regard to eating is to get oneself to calm down before meals. The most commonly suggested method is a breathing exercise. This method is easily learned, even by busy persons ,and those who do not take easily to meditation or contemplative prayer. Breathing is in itself a well-rehearsed and automatic act, seldom given consci6us atten-tion in everyday life. It is a rich .experience, however, when given one's full attention, and breathing for relaxation is much more powerful than one might expect such a simple act to be. As the body relaxes, the mind becomes receptive and even the most rigid defenses begin to yield. One sees more clearly and can stop'cling-ing fearfully to illusions of control or predictability. The technique of breathing for relaxation is simple, but not commonly practiced. The goal is effortless deep breathing, breath- Review for Religious ing with the diaphragm, not dramatically expanding the rib cage or elevating the shoulders. Rate and rhythm vary, but the move-ment is toward slow rhythmic breaths, just enough to sustain the body in its current metabolic need. Flexibility is important, allow-ing for adjustments in rate and depth of breathing as needed, avoiding rigid adherence to some "right" way. Taped relaxation exercises may be useful in learning the actual technique so that it can be applied easily and discreetly, even at table. Imagery Breathing for relaxation before eating helps one to be fully present to the meal. Many things are happening at that moment: internal sensations of hunger and reactions to the food and also to the company. You bring with you the context of your day, past or anticipated, with its various emotions, You likewise bring the many habits that you have formed about the process of eating, all ready to be put into motion automatically. Selected use of imagination can enhance the value of the breathing exercise for awareness purposes. The images can vary widely, depending on the need. A few examples may show how this simple adjunct can facilitate relaxed breathing. An image of )qtllness directs attention, to what is alre, ady there. It reminds the body that what is felt as physical hunger may have roots in the psy-chological or spiritual. One is moved to feel more clearly what is already present and satisfying, as well as what is longed for. In turn, food is allowed to be just what it is. As the food is ingested, satiation will be recognized more quickly and accurately, pre-venting the uncomfortable sense of being "stuffed." One knows what is "enough." Thich Nhat Hanh suggests imagining your-self as a mountain lake, deep and still. There is a comfortable sense of fullness as you become this lake in which is contained all of the sky above it. Try this for a moment. As you breathe in, say, "I am a lake," and as you breathe out, "deep and still." In coming to fuller awareness of emotions like frustration, disappointment, or discouragement, an image of flexibility and resilience may be useful. To borrow again from Thich Nhat Hanh, consider a flower along your path, fresh and supple, swaying in the smallest breeze, yet always coming back to face the sun. Imagine yourself as that flower, moved by the smallest breeze, but not broken. See in your reaction to the day a sensitivity that you can Januat.~-Febtvlat~y 1996 Duckro ¯ Healthy Eating in a Spiritual Context turn to good, responding even to the quietest whisper from the mouth of God. As you breathe in, say, "I am a flower," and as you breathe out, "fresh." Images that evoke joy have a place in any setting, but they are also very useful as you prepare to eat. Tony de Mello SJ offered a subtle prayer idea: "BEhold God beholding you., and smiling." It can be used as an image eliciting joy. With each inhalation say, "I see the face of God," and with each exhalation, "smiling at me." Smile back, in your heart and on your lips. In this spirit of joy, remember all those who made the food in front of you pos-sible. Remember those who share your table. Anticipate the tastes of the food and also the fullness you will feel. Areas of Change We have discussed a process for becoming more aware or mindful of the act of eating. Awareness is the foundation for choice, allowing for the possibility of change in what has become repetitive and automatic. As you increase awareness, you will encounter many phenomena. The rest of this article considers some of the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings you may encounter. We will emphasize the forms of these phenomena that best serve a conscious and healthy approach to eating. Each time you choose to practice becoming more aware, select one of these areas for special attention. Behaviors Eating slowly has several advantages. By doing so, you are more likely to recognize feeling full before you have overeaten. The message of fullness takes some time to form in the stomach and be recognized in the brain. If you are very busy taking in food, you are likely to miss the earliest indications, and; by the time you do get the message, a considerable amount of food will already be in the "pipeline." Eating slowly also helps make the meal a sensory experience, permitting some attention to be given to the taste, texture, appearance, and aroma of the food. Particular behavioral practices can help make the slower pace of eating seem more natural, even when you are not fully aware of yourself. Develop the habit of letting go of your utensils between mouthfuls, chewing thoroughly before swallowing, and Review for Religious pausing to converse or think throughout the meal. When eating alone, try making of the meal a purely sensory experience, chew-ing, smelling, and of course savoring various items with deliber-ate attentiveness. You may find much to enjoy in what was previously an automatic and essentially neglected activity. Before any meal, your preparation for it offers an opportunity for choices leading to healthier eating. If it is your lot to shop for food for yourself or your local community, shop from a list and avoid shopping when you are very hungry. If you do, you are like-lier to choose foods that really are appropriate and desirable rather than foods that rely on impulse for their appeal. Planning meals is preferable to throwing something together. If you plan when you are full rather than when you are "starving," the chances are that you will have a balanced meal, both in quality and quantity. However, even taking a little time to plan just. before cooking is not wasted. Cooking can itself be a mindless or a mindful activity. Take time to look, smell, and taste (a little), bringing these sensations to your mind and your mind to the sensations. For those with busy schedules, some com-promises are in order. Carrying a low-calorie snack may forestall a desperate (as opposed to planned) run to the candy machine; planning what to eat and drink before a cocktail hour begins may curtail mindless grazing. The challenges are great for those who travel frequently, but even there planning for your nourishment may keep you from reach-ing a state of agitated exhaustion or a sense of deprivation. Food choices are important; what you eat affects how you feel and how healthy your body will be. Although dietary advice from medical science is sometimes frustrating in its fickle incon-stancy, you can follow some basic guidelines. Most of us in the United States get more fat than we need; choosing low-fat foods, avoiding fried foods, trimming or skimming fat can compensate. Seeking vitamins in their natural forms (foods) rather than in the latest dietary supplement is a reliable strategy; vegetables, fruits,. and grains have proved themselves over many centuries. Physical exercise complements a healthy eating pattern. Regular aerobic exercise is desirable, but even consciously increas-ing the amount of activity required to complete our daily tasks Before any meal, your preparation for it offers an opportunity for choices leading to healthier eating. Janua~y-Feblvtaty 1996 Duckro ¯ Healthy Eating in a Spiritual Context is helpful. Parking farther away rather than circling to get close to the door, taking stairs rather than waiting interminably for the elevator, walking a mile to our nekt appointment rather than driv-ing and hunting fifteen minutes for a place to park are just a few examples. A body with more muscle and a higher metabolism makes more effective use of what we eat. Thoughts and Feelings Consider your attitude toward your body. For many people, the body is experienced almost as "notself." Appetites like hunger may be viewed as "enemy," the body an object to be controlled or modified or concealed because of your feelings of shame about this or that feature of it: A particularly destructive way to expe-rience your body is to see it as a public and decisive measure of your self-worth. Achieving a particular physical appearance or following a specific dietary regimen becomes a testimony to your quality as a human being. It can even become a moral question. My body identifies me as a morally superior being or, conversely, publicly demonstrates my inferiority. From these premises, fail-ure to achieve the desired body image or follow the ideal diet can overshadow many positive qualities and can lead to a pervasive sense of inadequacy, a mood of depression. A healthier alternative is to cultivate proactively a true appre-ciation for your body, valuing it for its varied qualities, seeing in it the image of God. Contemplation of its complexities and the many functions carried out each moment, making your very phys-ical life possible, is a wonderful way to become reacquainted with this aspect of yourself. Be aware of your reaction to each part or function. Ask yourself how you came to feel this way. Review your history with this part or function. Remind yourself of the good it has done you or others. Consider what harm. you may have done or continue to do to it. Think of yourself in ~relationship to each part, imperfect but all yours, and consider how you wish to relate. Self-esteem is possible when we not only see what we might be, but also love what we are. In addition to attitudes toward the body, consider your atti-tudes toward foods and eating itself. We carry decided, but often unconscious, judgments about what we eat, when we eat, and why. At any given time certain foods are labeled "bad" or "good" for us. The judgments may be deeply ingrained and long-standing, or Review Jbr Religious they may change in harmony with the whirling carousel of inedia reports on the latest killer food. Ideally, we begin to develop a continuum in our attitudes toward foods to replace this dichoto-mous thinking. Any food can be more positive or negative depend-ing on many things, including the amount, our physical condition, available exercise, and (not least) our authentic desire for it. Our eating also has a decided pattern or rhythm to it, even if it can only be described as chaotic. Our hunger may be dichotomized or blended with other motives. We may experience ourselves only as "starved" or "stuffed." Such sensations bring with them a sense of urgency, requiring some immediate response. Try these two exercises. When you feel starved, wait five min-utes with the sensations. As you sit with them, transform them from a drive to ingest food immediately to an experience that will enhance the taste of the food you are about to enjoy. If you reg-ularly feel stuffed, stop eating for a few moments halfway through your meal. As you converse with those around you, observe your sensations for a few moments and see how close you are to being full. Hunger may reflect desires other than pleasure and the bio-logical need for sustenance; food may become medicine for lone-liness or a stopper for anger. In this way, eating may become a coping response for emotional distress, tension, or deprivation. The effort to soothe the disquiet with food may bring short-term relief. Long-term, it simply misses the mark and brings with it additional undesired consequences'. In this: dichotomizing or blending of physical hunger with emotion, we lose touch with the ever changing quality of our desire for food itself and increase our chances of eating too.much or too little. Being in communion with our feelings gives us the opportu-nity to perceive more clearly the multifaceted nature of our hungers. In so doing, We are better able to recognize that we are physically full even while we remain hungry emotionally or spir-itually. Each of us has a natural physiological regulatory mecha-nism that directs the sensations of hunger and satiation. (Dysfunction of this system appears to be possible, but is a sub-ject for another time.) We can, however, become deaf to its mes-sage: "Enough." Other hungers can be expressed indirectly in the desire for more food. Slowing down enough to listen, we may yet hear its still, small voice faithfully calling. As with most aspects of the self, the best response to non- Jantmt3,-Febt'uaty 1996 Duckro ¯ Healthy Eating in a Spiritual Context food hungers is not to suppress them, but to become more aware of them. Using a diary,or some other way of becoming alert to our sensations, thoughts, and feelings regularly throughout the day is a reliable way to learn what food we truly need and what hungers of ours reflect emotional drives. A careful review of thoughts and feelings associated with specific eating practices, especially habits that. are extreme (too little or too much), can be revealing. We may learn that consumption beyond basic nutritional needs is routinely preceded by unpleasant interpersonal events such as conflict, or negative internal states such as anger, loneliness, and deprivation. Food can come to be used to alter such unpleasant feelings or as a substitute for an unfilled emotional or spiritual need. A particularly common response to emotional deprivation includes filling oneself with food rather than seeking out emo-tional succor from family and friends. In the extreme, this can develop into a form of compulsive overeating. When recognized, emotional or spiritual needs can be addressed more directly-- loneliness, with a call to a friend; agitation, with a walk; bore-dom, with a purpose; shame, with apology and forgiveness. Social Discussion of the elements of eating must include our imme-diate social environment. Human relationships and eating are closely connected; our word companion derives from the Latin "bread with (someone)." Eating alone may be necessary and can be beneficial, but dining is enhanced by good company. Good com-pany is defined not simply by the goodness of the fellow diner, but als0 by the goodness of the relating that is done over the meal. Opening yourself to the other person interacts synergistically with your efforts to open your senses to the food, your mind to your behaviors, and your heart to constructive thoughts and feelings. In his instructions for making the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola suggests that solitary retreatants imagine Jesus dining at table with his disciples as a model for their own behavior when they are again eating in the company of other people. Conclusion In this article we have discussed various intellectual insights, behavioral practices, and emotional, cognitive, and social factors Review Jbr Religious that promote healthy eating. We have used the development of a contemplative awareness of eating as a unifying theme for the various specific suggestions. Contemplation is not a practice reserved for extended periods of silence or done only during retreats far from the pace of daily life. It is a practice for every day. One of the most beautiful images of the contemplative grasp of things in everyday life is the holding of a bird within cupped hands. Held too tightly, the bird is crushed; too lightly, it flies away. When this image is applied to eating, the need for strict rules or limits falls away. One is called simply to be present to the eating and to choose consciously. Awareness extends even to being pres-ent to our~inattentiveness. When we do find our-selves eating mindlessly or thinking dichotomously, we should, as Tilden Edwards says, not be quick to judge. Rather, we gently smile, notice what we are doing, pray for help and guidance, and "subtly loosen [our] bonds to inattentive appetite." From Jack Kornfield, psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher, comes another image of the gen-tle persistence required to learn mindfulness: train-ing a puppy. When the puppy inevitably wanders away or becomes distracted, it does little good to yell, scare it, and have it wet the floor. It is much better to lift the puppy gen-tly off the floor and bring it back to the task at hand. Made conscious, the mundane act of eating emerges from the mist of the commonplace and takes on new meanings. Four points will serve to summarize what we have been saying in this article. First, eat intentionally rather than automatically. Slow down. Start with breathing. Bring to the experience images of the mental state you desire. Enter the experience in all its dimensions--sensory, emotional, cognitive, social, and spiritual. Practice sometimes being conscious of each step in eating, even a single bite or swal-low. Follow your arm as you lift the fork, your hand as you grasp the glass. Second, be aware of the many people who contributed to the food before you. Feel gratitude for the growing of the grain, its processing and shipping. Remember those who prepared and served the food that day. Take note of the many events interwoven with this single meal as you look about the table or dining room. Eating alone may be necessary and can be beneficial, but dining is enhanced by good company. ~Tamtaty-Februaly 1996 Duckro ¯ Healthy Eating in a Spiritual Context Consider the miracle of your being able to taste and enjoy, to eat until you are satisfied. Resolve to make this satisfaction possible for more people and to become yourself bread for others. Third, bring to consciousness your thoughts and feelings regarding the food, your hunger, your body. Be sure you really want such thoughts,0and address them directly if they are trou-blesome. Unduly harsh self-criticism or self-deprivation only fur-thers any dysfunctional pattern of eating that might be present. If you feel on the brink of starvation, wait a moment and see whether you really are about to faint. If you find yourself despising your body for any reason, breathe, relax your muscles, and feel your spirit permeating your body. Fourth, whatever you do, do it patiently and lovingly. The alJproach to mindfulness itself must be mindful, with tolerance for the very gradual and sometimes erratic awakening to which human beings ~usually seem prone. (Think of the ambivalent desires you may have experienced as you awake early on some winter morning. Persistent movement in the right general direc-tion is all that counts.) In this way we may find that, like other activities of life, eating can in itself be part of the prayer without ceasing. Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection was a cook for his abbey. He had many opportunities to find God in the prepara-tion, cooking, and serving of food. We might recall him and share his desire to "worship God the oftenest I could, keeping my mind on his holy presence and recalling it as often as I found it wan-dered from him." References Edwards, T. Living Simply through the Day, New York: Paulist Press, 1977. Flinders, C.L. Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Hanh, T.N. The Miracle of Mindfidness. Beacon, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1975. Lawrence of the Resurrection, Brother. The Practice of the Presence of God (D. Attwater, trans.). Springfield, Illinois: Templegate, 1962. ReviewforReligious ANDRI~E FRIES Transformative Leadership: Key to Viability "Now on that same day two of the disciples were going to a village called Emmaus . . . talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus him-self came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, "What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?" (Lk 24:13-17). Jesus is our model for viable religious leadership. The Emmaus story gives us insight into his style of leading. He approaches the disciples with questions and leads them to reflect on and retell their experience. Through further questioning, he assists them in realizing how their expe-rience enfleshes what the prophets foretold. Jesus ulti-mately leads them to recognize God in their midst and sends them with burning hearts to share the good news with others. This article seeks to show how we can pattern our leadership after Jesus on the Emmaus journey, focusing on the importance of leadership to an institute's viability. What is our story of leadership? What is happening to us along the way? What questions does our experience raise? How are we being called to respond, as individuals and as conferences? Andr4e Fries CPPS is general superior of the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood (O'Fallon). As president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) she made the presen-tation which is the substance of this article at the August 1995 assembly. Her address is 204 North Main Street; O'Fallon, Missouri 63366. leadership ~anuat~-Febrttaty 1996 Fries * Transformative Leadership We, too, have been on the way these days, listening ponder-ing, talking and discussing transformative leadership for the new millennium. Leadership is especially important for us in these times. As leaders we must address the very question of the future viability of our institutes. Since my years of service at the Tri- Conference Retirement Office, I have been intrigued by the ques-tion of what is necessary for a religious institute to be viable. Clearly, financial resources are not the sole determinant of this viability, but what other elements are needed? My reflections cen-ter on an insight highlighted during a November 1994 "Think Tank on the Viability of Religious Institutes" co-sponsored by Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), National Association of Treasurers of Religious Institutes (NATRI), and the Tri-Conference Retirement Office (TCRO). This "Think Tank" used an interdisciplinary approach to explore the question of viability. An interdisciplinary team reflected with the leaders of institutes that had directly addressed institutional viability. The team discovered that the quality of leadership is the single most impor-tant factor in an institute's viability, whether that was a sense of clear direction for the fitture or an increased corporate depression resulting from still unresolved questions of viability. Five cases were presented; in each we saw that the caliber of the leaders significantly impacted the results. If a high quality of leadership is the indispensable key to ongo-ing viability, is the reverse also true? Is weak leadership a pre-dictor that viability will be lost? These are serious, sobering questions, and the stakes are high for the future of our institutes and of religious life. What is Our Story of Leadership? Each of us has lived through a radical redefinition of leader-ship in our religious institutes. A friend of mine recently said, only partly in jest, "I wish I had been provincial in the days when a sister brought the superior tea in the afternoon and ironed her wimple." Even the terminology superior seems jarring today, since our experience of leadership has shifted from a hierarchical to a relational model. As ambiguous as this relational model may be when we are faced with the daily challenges of leadership, the transformation we have experienced in religious leadership is con-sistent with the model Jesus gives us in the Gospels. In the Review for Religious Emmaus story, Jesus leads the disciples out of confusion, despair, and paralysis to zeal for mission, not by lecturing them on what to do, but by asking questions, making connections, and helping them to discover the way in mutual dialogue. This leadership paradigm shift is not unique to religious life. We do not. live in a vacuum. We are called to leadership in a world radically different from that of our founders. We live in the "information age," and in our post modern world more than ever before "information is power." Everyone has access to an overwhelming amount of information. No longer do only the leaders have the infor-mation essential for decision making. As a result leaders of religious institutes are no longer perceived to have superior informa-tion, thus not retaining the credibility to make decisions in isolation from membership and other collaborators in mission. United States culture seems riddled with suspicion and disdain for our elected leaders, This is the age of the talk show: Everyone has an opinion; everyone is an expert; and, there are no taboo subjects. Distrust of leaders is in the very air we breathe. Religious are not exempt from its influence. The plethora of contemporary writing and research on lead-ership is quite consoling. We can learn much from the new insights on leadership, some coming from unlikely sources. For example, Margaret Wheatley in Leadership the New ScienceI applies findings of science, namely quantum mechanics, chaos, and frac-tal theory, to the ambiguity and the complexity of situations which leaders face. Overwhelming amounts of unrelated information produce chaos; however, the relationship of all this information creates a new synergistic energy out of the chaos. Quantum physics posits that relationships, not things, are the basic build-ing blocks of matter. Physicists have discovered that chaos always conforms to a boundary within which information interacts as the primal, creative force. Systems fall apart by design so they can renew themselves according to an invisible organizing pur-pose. The disequilibrium of chaos creates new possibilities for evolutionary growth. God truly does hover over the chaos! Toffler proposes that the information explosion requires a Transformative leadership calls us, as leaders of religious institutes, to be eager learners, inviting our members to learn with us. Januaty-Febtv~aty 1996 Fries * Transformative Leadership well developed intuition in order to cut through the complexity and discover relationships and connections. A leader must not only understand each piece of information but also be able to make the intuitive leap and connect seemingly unrelated infor- ~nation.2 Peter Block believes that the ability to articulate these con-nections clearly is what gives the leader influence and power. Block claims that the balance of power between the leader and the group is the issue.3 Interdependence means that the leader and the group are connected in a way that balances the power between them. Wheatley claims that the power in organizations is the capacity generat.ed by relationships (note 3, p. 38). The leader's task is to share information in a way that provides clarity, highlights connections, and promotes dialogue. Peter Senge in The FiSh Discipline develops the theory of the learning organization. He believes that the key function of lead-ership is to facilitate vision-driven, value-based learning in the . group. "Leaders are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand com-plexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models--that is, they (leaders) are responsible for learning.''4 Unfortunately few women have written specifically on lead-ership. However, feminist insights provide a model of leadership in which relationships are paramount. In the feminist model, information and power flow in a circular rather than hierarchical motion. Relationships are dynamic and synergistic, respectful and creative, inclusive and purposeful. As Max Dupree writes, "Leadership is an art, something to be learned over time., more a weaving of relationships than an amassing of information.''5 Transformative leadership calls us, as leaders of religious insti-tutes, to be eager learners,0inviting our members to learn with us. The art of leadership is to engage others in the mysterious chaotic dance of the journey, a dance of interdependence and fidelity to God's ongoing call. What Questions Does Our Experience Raise? On the way to Emmaus, Jesus led by asking 'questions, help-ing the disciples to make connections with the scriptures to dis-cover the true meaning of the events they had experienced. What can we learn by relating our questions to our experience Review for Religious and the information available so we lead in a way that fosters transformation and viability? It seems to me that leadership ques-tions are particularly challenging for us in three areas: (1) mean-ing and mission, (2) community and relationships, and (3) leadership and structures. Meaning and Mission I sense in the members of our institutes a profound search for meaning, a sense of dis-ease coming from the feeling of"drift-ing" in these times of incredible change and challenge. Sandra Schneiders IHM wonders if this experience is akin to the dark night of the soul, a dangerous and purificatory process from the known to a radically new experience of God.6 However, there are no easy answers to the essential identity questions--"Who are we?" and "What are we called to do together?" We struggle with a desire to participate in a clear cor-porate mission, yet our members feel called to meet new needs often beyond our present institutional commitments. This uneasi-ness about our corporate mission is especially poignant in the face of our aging membership and dwindling resources. We have no models for leadership in a time of diminishment. We know that we can no longer define ourselves by what we do, by our works. Yet what is the reality that we can grasp and own together, now, as this religious institute? We yearn for a sense of uniqueness, yet we seem to have more diversity within many insti-tutes than among institutes. Our members embody diversity, even pluralism, in basic val-ues and beliefs. The information age and the availability of mul-tiple opportunities for learning have resulted in different ecclesiologies, theologies, styles of worship, and community liv-ing among our members. This is uncomfortable. How can we get our arms around this in a meaningful way? Leaders hfive a respon-sibility to facilitate each individual's vision so together the group can create a corporate vision which inspires a strong sense of cor-porate mission. We need to lead through this diversity. The ultimate test of leadership lies in the ability to address the question of the institute's own viability. The question "Are we dying?" lurks in the heart of many of our members. The uncer-tainty subtly eats away at enthusiasm for mission, even at the esprit de corps of the group. ~anuaty-Febtwaty 1996 Fries ¯ Tran~Cormative Leadership The question of viability is never answered once and for all. The answer we had yesterday is not the answer for .today, and probably wil.l not be the answer in another twenty-five years. However, we are entrusted with leadership today. How can we raise the viability questions of today, questions that revolve around the availability of a future pool of leaders, of a critical mass of members for mission and of sufficient financial resources to sus-tain our needs, assist our'members' personal growth and support our mission? If there is not reasonable hope of identifying future leaders, of responding to real needs in mission, of providing for the sustenance and enrichment of members, our institute may not be viable. How can we lead if the institute is not viable cur-rently or in the immediate future? On the other hand, how can we lead to enhance our viability into the future? Wheatley writes that the only route out of chaos is for lead-ers to give voice and form to the search for meaning (note 3, p. 13 5). Charlotte Roberts believes that leaders must give voice to an organization's emotional tension, anxiety, fear, and frustration, and then shift the attention to vision and core identity.7 1 believe that unless we assume leadership in addressing these questions of meaning and purpose as well as in gaining greater clarity, focus and ownership of our corporate mission, any attempts to address viability will be superficial. Community and Relationships Community life in apostolic institutes is under incredible pressure. No longer do we have the luxury of predictable, similar schedules and horariums. We serve in partnership with laity as professionals in a culture where professionalism is a demanding endeavor. We serve in a world harried by time pressures and, like many families, we rarely have the luxury of a meal together, much less of quality time for prayer and community. Many of our active members are part of the "sandwich generation" with obligations to elder parents as well as to community and ministry. Time is a very scarce resource! The individualism of our culture also challenges us as leaders. It is probably naive to believe that many of us will ever com-pletely escape the strong influence of individualism. It may be more realistic for us as leaders to build on the strengths our mem-bers have developed as a result of individualism. Theoretically, Review for Religious the good of the individual contributes to the good of the whole, creating synergistic energy for both. The challenge comes in bal-ancing these two sometimes competing goods in specific situa-tions. How can we as leaders assist our members to recognize and deal with the "hot buttons" set off when the rubber of indi-vidualism hits the road of communal good? How do we encourage new models of community that realis-tically address these very real situations and promote practical opportunities for authentic community life? Leaders are respon-sible to foster community structures oriented to accountability for values and mission. We must discover new models and sym-bols of community that capture our imagination and transform our energies. Jesus, our model for leadership, transformed the fatigue and distress of the disciples on the way to Emmaus into new energy and eagerness to share with the others in commu-nity. Jesus' example suggests that leaders must constantly search for what enables individuals and groups to reach their potential. Another challenge comes from the movement to offer oth-ers partnership in our spirit and mission. Associate programs and relationships have been a source of life for many institutes in the midst of dwindling vowed membership. However, the purpose of associate programs is not to assuage our sorrow by compensating for our lack of vocations, but rather to share our spirituality and mission with others as a faith community. In our desire to be collaborative, open, and inclusive, we may be blurring the distinction between vowed members and associ-ates. The boundaries of membership seem diffused, even leaky at times. Without clarity of who we are together as vowed mem-bers, it is difficult to define the identity of the associates. We seem to be clear that associates participate with vowed members in spirituality and mission. Tensions arise, however, when some of us believe that associates should participate in our internal forum, having equal access with vowed members to decision making about our lives together without having the same accountability to live the consequences. How can we reclaim a clear sense of corporate identity, meaning, and mission if the very concept of member-ship is fuzzy and uneven? Clearly there are many unanswered questions about the impact of associate programs as we move into the next millen-nium. Perhaps as Margaret Brennan IHM suggests, our associate members are a sign that we are on the verge of discovery of new ]anualy-FebrttaO, 1996 Fries * Tran~lCormative Leadership forms of religious life.8 If we are moving to a new form, let us not drift into the future, but consciously choose to broaden the meaning of membership. Leaders need to raise these membership questions because their implications impact dramatically on meaning, purpose, and mission, and thus on the future of the institute. As Wheatley writes, "A leader's task is to focus on the overall coherence of the organization, which requires one very important thing: genuine attention to the core identity.''9 Leadership and Structures The predominant form of governance in religious institutes today is one of broad participation. We have labored long and hard to design structures that provide for the participation of each member. In our eagerness to provide opportunities for each member to participate in decision making, we have tried all sorts of structures and group processes. This has produced many bless-ings, significant bonding, and a deeper understanding of.issues, but it also is fraught with the danger of overload for both leaders and members. All too often this participation contributes to our being co-opted into a culture of hectic busyness, a culture in which con-templation, ongoing formation and health suffer, and in which burnout is all too common. Participation is a mixed blessing-- but we are learning from our experience. What are we learning? We are being more selective about which issues or questions are best dealt with by the total mem-bership and which are best left to leadership. The process of dif-ferentiating between these two categories is critical. One of the most important moments for group participation is that of choos-ing which issues are so important for the future that an inclusive group process must be developed. There are very many issues competing for our members' energy and attention. The critical choice is: Shall the whole group participate in many decisions and thus risk dealing only on the surface, or go into depth together on a few issues where the questions connect at a deeper level? If the membership reaches consensus on which issues are key for the group participative processes, leadership is freed to address the many other issues facing the institute, Leaders are empowered to lead, to move forward on other issues. It is essential to trans- Review for Religiotts formation, to viability, that leaders actually lead. There is indeed a time for everything under the sun, a time for participating and a time for empowering, a time for consensus building and a time for risking new frontiers. Another challenge in some institutes is to find a pool of persons willing to serve as leaders. Why is this? Some cite tensions in deal-ing with the church as too de-energizing. Others question if lead-ership can be an effective ministry in today's climate of equality and participation that seems to disempower leadership. Leadership may be seen as para-lyzed, fearful to make decisions because of the expectations of the members to be con-suited, or.the complexity of the issues and ambiguity of this time of transformation. Still others withdraw from a leadership nomina-tion fearing that a long absence from their professional life would make reentry into that ministry difficult if not impossible, especially in our culture of ageism and sexism. If having a pool of available leaders is essential for an institute's future viability, we need to face these serious challenges and find ways to encourage and develop future lead-ers. We must witness that leadership is an attractive life-giving ministry rather than a burden to be endured. If we portray leader-ship as a challenging and rewarding~ ministry, we can make a dif-ference in the willingness of others to serve as lea~ters in the future. Another structural question impacting leadership is the grow-ing preference for a team style of leadership with or without a designated team leader. I cannot imagine being in leadership today without a team. We continue to learn that team leadership is an area of great promise and equally great challenge. But tea,n is an ambiguous, concept, and is interpreted in many ways. During a job interview at a Fortune 500 company, a hotshot project man-ager was asked if he was a "team player." "Yes," he replied, "the team captain." l0 Leadership theorists recognize that collaborative relation-ships-- those marked by mutual learning and shared creation-- are at the core of innovation. A team strticture provides an Leaders need to raise membership questions because their implications impact dramatically on meaning, purpose, and mission, and thus on the future of the institute. .]anttat.'!,-Febrt~aD, 1996 Fries ¯ Tran~Cormative Leadership environment in which this learning and creativity can be fos-tered." Because of the time required to build a team, opting.for team leadership may mean delegating some tasks to other staff. In some cases th~se may include relating with sponsored institutions, col-laborating with others, dealing with administrative tasks and pro-viding services for individual members and local communities. For effective delegation, authority must be commensurate with respon-sibility, and accountability clearly defined. Without these clear boundaries, there may be overlap of "turf," "end runs" bypassing staff and appealing directly to leaders. Ultimately this leads to inef-fective administration. Additional staff necessitates the allocation of both financial and human resources from other institute priorities, such as mis-sion and enrichment of members. It is impossible to have "your cake" (the team) and "eat it too." (conserve the resources), To attempt to do both will totally frustrate team members with impossible expectations and responsibility overload. For most institutes, balancing the value of a team approach with other pri-orities is a challenging issue. Members wonder why it takes so many more persons to administer what fewer did with larger membership. Another issue in the team model is that roles and thus respon-sibility can be unclear. Sometimes we are tempted to posit that all team roles are equal in leadership responsibility and in ultimate accountability. This raises the question if there is value added by having a designated team leader? Surely each team member shares leadership.'It is not an either/or question of either have a team or have a designated leader. In my experience, having both opens the possibility of a more effective creative team leadership. Doris Gottemoeller referencing St. Paul (Ga 3:27-28, 1 Co 12:4-11), calls us "to hold in perennial tension two poles: equal-ity and diversity, or unity and distinctiveness of function or roles."'2 Mary Catherine Bateson writes "the ethical impulse of American culture is toward symmetry., asserting that a given kind of difference (of roles) is, or should be, irrelevant. When we call symmetry equality, it is both our best and our worst.pas, sion." ,3 Richness and newness come from the synergistic interplay of the symmetrical and asymmetrical, from diversity and differ-entiation in gifts and roles, from the leadership exercised by a team with distinct but complementary roles. Review for Religiolts Peter Block concludes that the key issue is how the desig-nated leader chooses to relate to the team (note 5, p. 31). An effective team uses a collaborative style with consensus decision making. The leader does not centralize the power or the point of action. In the feminine image of the circle, the wheel moves around a hub to keep the rim from flying off in all directions. Analogously, I believe the designated leader has an added dimen-sion of responsibility to provide a safe environment for the whole team to "create visions; where inquiry and commitment to truth are the norm and challenging the status quo is expected.''~4 The team leader keeps diverse energies connected, unified, and mov-ing in the same direction. Yet the momentum comes from within the whole team. Another rationale for designating a team leader is that our publics perceive the designated leader as the one who is ulti-mately responsible. "The buck stops here," as we say in Missouri. Given the reality of public accountability for the group's action, must the leader always do the will of the group, be that the con-sensus of the team or of the membership? This is a difficult issue, but one that touches on the integrity of the leader and of the team and the delicate balance of the value of communio with the prophetic. How Are We Being Called To Respond. As Individual Leaders By now, I'm sure that you are quite aware that transformative leadership is an impossible responsibility unless we realize this is not our work, but God's. A leader today must be above all a per-son of spiritual intensity. Jerry Brown's reflections address the qualities and skills as well as the. personal supports needed by spiritual leaders. (see pp. 34-35 in this issue). I can attest from my own experience that leadership is impossible without God's grace. The grace of office still exists, perhaps not in the form we once learned. I experience the grace of office as the spurt of stamina that comes when I feel that I can't take or do one more thing, the courage to act in the face of fear or opposition, the surprising words that come out of my mouth in a complex situa-tion, the strength to persevere in the dying of the paschal mystery with hope for the resurrection, Fries ¯ Transformative Leadership A leader is challenged: 1) to be a learner, a person centered enough to listen, to hear, to read, to ponder, to dream, to make connections, to dialogue, to change, to hold fast; 2) to be a,communicator, clearly conveying a sense of mean-ingfulness, connecting the present with the past and future, and building enthusiasm for ,blazing new trails; 3) to be a unifier, a symphony conductor who artistically draws forth the music of each person, blends the tones, keeps the rhythm and orchestrates the crescendos and diminuendos; 4) to lead, making decisions that courageously balance the purpose of the institute with the good of the individual member, all for the sake of mission; a leader takes risks'and keeps asking the deeper questions; 5) to he enthusiastic about the ministry of leadership dur-ing this time of transformation so as to encourage others to be available for l.eadership; 6) to do as Jesus did on the way to Emmaus, be visible, sup-porting, listening~ questioning, exploring implications, shar-ing information, making~connections and breaking bread with companions on the journey. As Leadership Conferences In addition to what we can do as individual leaders, what can we ask of our conferences? I suggest three Practical directions, and invite you to add your own wisdom.' I challenge our conferences to: 1) create a program and process to mentor leaders, 2) aid leaders in dealing with the issue of viability, 3) assist in developihg a pool of future leaders for religious institutes. Summary and Conclusion I pray that our sharing will continue to "open our eyes," so we may recognize Jesus' continuing presence in us, with us. With our hearts burning within us, let us go forward with enthusiasm to proclaim "Jesus is truly risen and is among us." Notes 1 See Margaret J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Learning About Organizations from an Orderly Universe, (New York: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 1994), p. xi and Chapter One. Review for Religious ~ Alvin Toffler, Power Shift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the~ 21st Century, (New York: Bantam Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, 1990), pp. 175, 178, 195. 3 Peter Block, Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest, (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishing, Inc., 1993). 4 Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice oft& Learning Organization, (New York: Bantam Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1990), especially Chapters 1, 9-12. s Max Dupree,.Leadersbip is an Art, (New York: Dell Publishing, 1989), p. 3. 6 Cassian Yuhaus CP, editor, The Challenge for Tomorrow's Religious Life, (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1994), p. 12. 7 Charlotte Roberts, "Building a Learning Community," a workshop held 23 June 1995 based on The Fifth Discipline Field Book, (New York: Bansta Mm aDrgoaurbelte'd Bayre, nDnealln P IuHbMlis,h "inAg WGrhoiutep ,L Iingch.,t 1a9n9d4 S).till Moving": Religious Life at the Crossroads of the Future" from The Challenge for Tomorrow's Religious Life, p. 103. 9. Margaret J. Wheatley, "Quantum Management," Working Women Magazine, October, 1994. ~0 Michael Schrage, "Manager's Journal," Wall Street Journal, 19 June 1995. ~ Peter Senge, note 6 in Leadership and the New Science. ~2 Doris Gottemoeller RSM, "A Vision for the Church of 2010," Address given at Heronbrook House, England, May, 1995. Available in Origins (USCC, Washington, D.C.), Vol. 25, no. 9, pp. 149-152). ~3 Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Life, (New York: Penguin Group, 1990), Chapter 6. 14 Peter Senge, in Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-hlterest, note 5, p. 172. Plain Speech and Mystic Grammar I tend to small things, through you, with you, in you, and look for small things by and from and of you. The small, small things. Prepositions are my best words, sheer relation. Michele Cruvant Janua~y-FebrnaO, 1996 GERALD L. BROWN The Call To Spiritual Leaders: Beacons of Hope Tcvisionary theologian, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, hbishop of Milan, recently noted that religious leaders have to face three types of problems, "internal problems, external problems, and transcendent problems or transcendent questions." By internalproblems Cardinal Martini means struggles we face daily within our own organizations, such as attracting vocations, setting priorities, constructing strategic plans or handling con-flicts in community. Religious leaders will find their own way of overcoming or mastering these problems. However, much more important is that, when dealing with these internal problems, we need to "give space to the second and third type of problems." Externalproblems are "the great issues common to all human-ity." Cardinal Martini mentions war and peace, violence among peoples and groups, defense of human life, sickness and hunger, the great immigrations, problems of ecology, and tensions in soci-ety between social or ethnic groups. He urges us to approach pressing external problems as religious leaders, as men and women of faith, "grtunded in God's revelation." We are not called to be politicians, government leaders, lobbyists, or social engineers. However, Martini insists that transcendent problems are "our real and main concern" as religious leaders. He means: the main themes of all religions: God, salvation, prayer, adoration, faith, and hope, forgiveness, life after death, justice, charity., every other question, no matter how Gerald L. Brown SS, provincial of the Society of the Priests of Saint Sulpice, presented the reflections in this article as the president of the Conference of Major Superior of Men (CMSM) at the August 1995 assembly. His address is 5408 Roland Avenue; Baltimore, Maryland 21210. Review for Religious important it might look, depends ultimately on these tran-scendent questions and themes. Inevitably, we must deal with internal issues and confront external problems in secular society. But, above all, we must be concerned with the transcendent questions and themes which "all people need to face." They belong to the essence of being men and women in this world, even if some secular societies place some restraint on publicly discussing them. Last year, my presidential address kicked off a national campaign, the "Shalom Strategy," a project which is part of a larger campaign to promote human rights. I dealt with one of today's most painful and frightening external prob-lems, the violence we all experience in the homes, streets, and institutions of our society. Of course, the problem of vio-lence is also internal. Our own commu-nities have room to grow in mutual respect and tolerance. In calling the Conference to action, I appealed to a survey of our members that showed our desire to network when tack-ling complex and urgent social problems. We cannot operate alone or in a vacuum--the stakes are too high, the issues too complex. This sense of realism matched the sobering message of Nygren and Ukeritis that consecrated life will not survive as a social insti-tution in the church unless we address certain unmet human needs corporately and collectively and learn how to move beyond the necessary maintenance of our communities to the corporate mis-sion of transformation within society. However, if our efforts as a Conference are paying off, (and they are; we are moving, and we are learning), it is because, on the deepest level, we are addressing what Cardinal Martini calls "tran-scendent problems," in this case, the hunger for inner peace and communal harmony, the need for dignity, respect, and a place in building God's reign and, above all, the yearning to know, on every human and institutional level, God's all-embracing love. Indeed, before all else, in our campaign for human rights and for a peaceful world, we are touching the deepest longings of the I want to talk about a spirituality for the religious leader, a way of life that enables us to hold in creative tension the internal, the external, and the transcendent. Jantlat.3,-l:ebt'ttat~y 1996 Brown ¯ The Call to Spiritual Leaders human heart. In countless and measurable ways, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) does the same. Building on Cardinal Martini's provocative insights and on our combined efforts as Conferences, I want to take a step further, to talk about a spirituality for the religious leader, a way of life that enables us to hold in creative tension the internal, the external, and the transcendent, a way that can fuel our corporate and col-lective efforts at social transformation. I will move through two stages: (1) What spiritual qualities and skills are needed in today's religious leaders, and (2) How are these qualities and skills developed and nurtured? Another way.of putting these two questions might be: What kind of person do w~e want to be, and how do we pull it off?. I. Qualities and Skills for Spiritual Leadership There are five signs of an authentically spiritual leader. Such a personis vitally aware, relational in vision and style, honest and principled, able to live comfortably with tensions and obviously in love with God in the Spirit of Christ Jesus. I draw from the Nygre~n/Ukeritis study on outstanding leaders, from books and articles on spirituality, leadership, and spiritual leaders and from my own experience as a :leader who learns from other leaders. Before I begin, let me offer a caution. None of us will do equally well all that I suggest. Listen to my remarks with human, compassionate ears and take what I say as ideals towards which we all must strive. The inspiring leaders I know are persons with heightened awareness. They see and hear more. They notice more keenly than others the needs and motives of the groups they lead and are more open to the graces of people they serve. They read the signs of the times objectively and with empathy, what Wordsworth calls seeing '~into the life of things." Moreover, these leaders tend to see God everywhere, "in the living geometry of a flower, a seashell, an animal . . . in the love and gentleness, the confidence and humility, which give beauty to the relationships between human beings" (Aldous Huxley). They see God in noise and quiet, in light and dark, in the poetic and the mundane, in the giggles of children at play, in the silent stares of Review for Religiom" the homeless begging in the streets or in the dulled eyes of func-tionaries aimlessly on the move. Above all, they sense the God who dwells and speaks within. These leaders are vitally aware persons in touch with "the deep heart's core," to use the words of Yeats. As a result, they influence others more through their being than through their accomplishments. ¼re all know people like this. Relational Vision and Style This fine-tuned awareness helps spiritual leaders see them-selves as connected. On the level of vision, they live in the present, shaped by the past, poised for the future. They know it takes a vil-lage to raise a child and that we are mysteriously one with our brothers and sisters in other religions, cultures, and places respon-sible for our sacred earth and for all living creatures and things. An old Mayan saying hints at the connectedness of all reality: When the people are happy God is happy, and the trees begin to sing. On the level of style, they are compassionate, nonjudgmental, and accepting. They acknowledge their own limitations and give others the benefit of the doubt. They are approachable, yet do not allow the personal crises of individuals to keep them from their primary task as leaders. They are collaborative in manner, working to arouse consensus toward common vision and mission, in the process learning how to lead from those who are led. These leaders are.loyal members of a church they recognize and accept as both holy and flawed, sinful yet redeemed. They seek alliance with those individuals in the church and in broader society who are committed to personal and social transformation. Courageous Integrity Aware and connected, the most effective transformational leaders live their ministry with courageous integrity. I have come to admire immensely those men and women who are forthright and honorable in speech and in action without alienating or los-ing the respect of others. This is not easy in a pluralistic church with competing theologies and spiritualities or in groups that have become too diffuse, needing to be challenged to a renewed sense of corporate mission or to a dignified acceptance of dimin-ishment unto death. Brown ¯ The Call to Spiritual Leaders William Butler Yeats said, "The real leader serves truth, not people." I am not sure we need to set apart people and truth in this way, but I see the point he is making. There is today the ten-dency to keep quiet when we should speak out or to move impul-sively without serious research or thinking through the consequences. Temptations to please the group at all costs or to rush to closure on issues needing more time are clear and present dangers in times of polarization and complexity. Succumbing to either temptation does violence to truth. Courageous leaders with integrity know when to be quiet and to listen and when to share honestly and with love what they believe is best for the good of the whole. They neither lose their souls out of fear, nor fight battles that do not need to be fought. They serve both people and truth. In the language of Paul, they feel called to serve Christ first and Christ living in his people. Living Comfortably with Tensions Aware, connected, and courageous, the transformational leader also knows how to live comfortably in an "age of tensions." The theologian and diocesan priest James Bacik calls for a "dialectical spirituality" that understands the tensions of our age and makes them fruitful. He gives a few examples of dialectical tensions that touch the lives of contemporary religious leaders: Christianity and human developme.nt, the Gospel and culture, the cross and flag, individualism and small group movements, the traditional and the new, fixity and change. We need not collapse the tension between these contrasted pairs. They can all coexist and enrich each other. As Christians who live the dying and the rising of the paschal mystery, we should be more comfortable than most with paradox and complementarity. Madeleine L'Engle wisely and whimsically made the point: "We cannot seem to escape paradox; I do not think I want to." In my judgment, we need, more than ever, leaders who see the both/and dimensions of life and negotiate com.fortably with social, political, and theological dichotomies, leaders who live what Bacik calls the "dialectical virtues." Leaders must be, at the same time, committed and open, reflective and spontaneous, enlightened and simple, hopeful and realistic. Leaders need to hold in creative ten-sion the mystical and the prophetic, the individual and the com-munal, the universal and the particular. Virtue lies not in a balanced middle which does not exist, but in creative interpenetration. Review for Religious Spiritual leaders who live such dialectical virtues hear God speaking in many languages. They experience God in peace and in pain. They learn from negative as well as positive experience. They live with all sides of their personalities, including the dark, and, in it all, know that God protects the world. Love of God in the Spirit of Christ Jesus This brings me to the final mark of the transformational leader. The most effective religious leaders are aware, connected, courageous, and sophisticated. But, even more, they are men and women in love with God and not afraid to show it. They experience God in their ministry, and they can talk about it. In their inner being, they feel called by Christ to leadership and try to lead as he would lead, in justice and in truth, with compassion, humility, and love. With Jesus, they seek holy wisdom and listen for the prompting of the Spirit. In my address at the Synod on Consecrated Life, I ~poke about the need for spiritual intensity, for men and women, especially leaders, who are on fire with God's transforming love, who live dynamically in the spirit of the founding impulse and who communicate an enthusiasm that is contagious. To~vard the end of the Synod, we all listened in respectful awe to brief remarks by one of today's saints, Brother Roger of Taize. He lived what I have described. Speaking with eloquent simplicity about our world's need for reconciliation, his inner self radiated holiness and inspired at least one person to greater efforts for world peace and forgiveness. He spoke with a faith illuminated and a hope empowered by the resurrection of the crucified one. In summary, the transformational leader is aware, relational, courageous, comfortable with inevitable tensions, and on fire with God. This person tends not to neglect the transcendent when deal-ing with internal and external problems and is more likely than the typical leader to work with others for social transformation. The most effective religious leaders are men and women in love with God and not afraid to show it. II. Supports for Spiritual Leadership Now, acknowledging that we are all on the journey, none of Brown ¯ The Call to Spiritual Leaders us perfect, all of us from time to time overwhelmed and exhausted, we explore ways of feeding and supporting such a leader. Nygren and Ukeritis point out that the typical leader can become out-standing. We can help ourselves and be helped by others. A bishop I know says that many diocesan priests are on the verge of great-ness and never make it. They are not alone. What can move us towards greatness? There are six ways of keeping ourselves alert, connected, at peace with ourselves and our world, centered with integrity and alive to God, or at least moving in the right direction. These six ways all take time. We need to make time for reading, for new experience, for friendships, for prayer and contemplation, for spiritual direction and mentoring, and for support from our peers. Reading We need to read. Reading helps us to be more aware of our world, more connected to the sufferings of people, more alert to truth, more alive. As provincial and president of CMSM, I feel obligated to keep abreast of current affairs through newspapers and journals. As a voice for my community and for the wider church, I feel chal-lenged to keep up with recent church teaching and new currents of theological thought. As a pastoral leader, I am attracted to books on church life and ministry, on spirituality and on leader-ship. As a human person, I make time for novels, poetry, and other experiences of human creativity. When I do not have sufficient time to keep up with one or another of these areas through reading, I contact trusted col-leagues and friends who do have time and who are willing to engage in conversation. New Experience From time to time, moreover, we leaders need to risk new experience. We need to create new road maps in order to walk new paths. For example, we know that the best way to learn about incul-turation is to make ourselves fully vulnerable to the gifts and lim-its of another culture. By analogy, we can say the same thing about almost every issue of great importance, such as poverty, mental ill-ness and violence in our streets, or community living and pastoral planning. The best way to learn is to risk being open, to stretch ourselves, to get our hands dirty. To use another example, why not Review for Religious measure our own vision, programs, and methods by entering, touching, and learning from the experience of other communities and leaders? If the unexamined life is not worth living, it is also true to say that the unlived life is not worth examining. Friendships We also need to make room for those who choose to love us. One of the greatest dangers for religious leaders is to lose contact with close friends. Sadly, friends are often the first to be forgot-ten when setting calendars. We need to ink them in, for they are our lifeline, our refuge, our source of love and support. Truly good friends keep us honest. They are willing to lay down their lives for us, and they call forth from us an equal response. Making friends a priority can be a great challenge for many of us even if we do manage to make time. How do we confront close friends in community? How do we initiate new friendships out-side the community without the venue of hands-on ministry? How do we keep connected and in balance the many relation-ships in our lives? Facing these challenges head-on and creatively is worth the effort. Without healthy friendship, we wither and die. Prayer and Contemplation Above all, we need to build in time for prayer. I am most cen-tered and at peace as a leader when I make time every day for personal, private prayer, especially contemplation. When I do, I am generally more effective as a leader, listening in a more relaxed, focused way, keeping my priorities straight, not easily thrown off balance by crisis. I feel more connected to my brothers and sisters throughout the world, all loved by the same God, and see social situations as Christ might see them. In the process, I come to realize what Merton describes: "We can find ourselves engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained: the happiness of being at one with everything in that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanations." In a wonderful way, everything becomes prayer. At times I cannot pray contemplatively or my prayer fails miserably. No matter. No need for guilt. God is present even in the market-place of my busyness and in my failures. In these inevitable times, I can make my heart available to God as I work privately or inter-act with others or struggle helplessly. As Bernanos's country priest Brown ¯ The Call to Spiritual Leaders wrote in his diary at the end of a conflicted, but fruitful life, "Tout est grfice." Everything is grace. True spiritual guides are a treasure beyond price. We need to search and to find. Spiritual Directions and Mentoring Of course, in all this, it is easy to deceive ourselves as leaders. Frequently, we need spiritual companions who can help keep us honest about our motivations, our ambitions, our fears, and our drives. We need to be clear about the direction of our lives. What do we truly want for our-selves and for our com~nunity? What is God's will for us? How do we discern the difference between God's voice and competing voices? Where is God truly speaking and through whom and what? True spiritual guides are a treasure beyond price. We need to search and to find. We can also be helped in our daunting task of leadership by more experienced mentors who have gained the competencies and skills we ourselves want to develop. Mentors can review with us our personal goals as leaders, our modus operandi, and the systems that support or fail to support our ministry, and they can point us to the right workshop, book, or consultant. In a sense, what Ernest Hemingway had to say about writers can be applied to religious leaders: "We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master." Even the most gifted men-tor would admit there is still much to learn. Support from Peers Finally, there is a related topic which in my opinion has greater significance than ever. I enjoy thoroughly those moments in regional meetings when we leaders sit down to share our sto-ries with each other, to pray with and for each other, and to know that we are understood. However, these sporadic occasions of grace are not grace enough. A few years ago in Baltimore, several religious leaders, both men and women, met twice at my home to set up a support group in the style ofJesu Caritas. For many reasons, mainly schedule con-flicts, we did not follow through. I have always regretted this. We leaders need the spiritual support of each other. Only another leader can counter the narcissistic verse, "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen," and transform it into the spiritual from which it arises. Review for Religious If this presidential address were to stimulate a new campaign, I would push for promoting support groups among religious leaders in every region of our country. We have so much to learn from each other. We can be the face of God to each other. Salt and Light Two metaphors from scripture summarize this article. They are salt and light. Transformational leaders are called to give zest and flavor to the work they do and the people they meet, to improve the quality of human existence and to help preserve it from d~cay, to be active in the world as transforming agents of grace. Therefore, they cannot lose their saltiness. They need to keep alive and help others to keep alive. Leaders are also called to bring light to every dark corner of human living, to be the torch that brightens gloomy hearts, that leads the way out of confusion, that reveals people to each other. And they are called to pass on the flame to another generation. In June, during the meeting of the Bishops' Conference, Eugene Kennedy wrote an eloquent tribute to Cardinal Joseph Bernardin who lay in the hospital recuperating from operations for cancer. With the announcement of his illness, darkness shrouded this city like a noon eclipse. In that moment, however, light, unfiltered by ceremony or great event, came from within Bernardin himself. By it, we can see him, ourselves and what counts in life with the clarity of revelation. Bernardin "has never been afraid of the dark and, in his company, neither are we." What religious leader would not want to be this kind of light, the light of Christ to the world, a beacon of hope in a dark and wounded world? Though we feel inadequate in the face of such a challenge, we need not fear, for Christ has chosen us to be spir-itual leaders for our times. We need only to surrender ourselves to mystery. I will end with one quote from Dorothy Day and another from Teilhard de Chardin, two heroes of the modern age who probed internal, external, and transcendent problems with a vision that provoked social transformation. Dorothy Day's words help us to tie together our struggles for peace, for light, for life: If our cause is a mighty one, and surely peace on earth in these days is the great issue of the day, and if we are oppos- ~anuaty-Febrttat.3, 1996 Brown ¯ The Call to Spiritual Leaders ing the powers of darkness, of nothingness, of destruction, and we are working on the side of lig.ht and life, then surely we must use our greatest weapons--the life forces that are in each one of us. To stand on the side of life we must give up our own lives. Finally, Teilhard de Chardin evokes the ultimate purpose of all leadership: The day will come when, after harnessing space, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire. Resources Conversations with colleagues and friends helped ,most to shape and to clarifi! my thinking. The following books and articles were some of the works which created an environment for reflecting more deeply upon my own experience as a religious leader. Bacik, James J. The Gracious Mystery: Finding God in Ordinary Experience. Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1987. Beckett, Wendy Mary. "Simple Prayer." The Clergy Review (February, 1978): 1-3. Calonius, Erik. "Take Me to Your Leader." Hemisphere, (April, 1995): 39- 42. Carozzo, Carlo. "Mysticism and the Crisis of Religious Institutions." Concilium, (April, 1994): 17-26. Champlin, Joseph M. with Champlin, Charles D. The Visionary Leader: How Anyone Can Learn to Lead Better. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1993. Ciorra, Anthony J. Everyday Mysticism: Cherishing the Holy. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1995. Conference of Major Superiors of Men. "1993 Survey of Membership: Executive Summary:' November, 1993. Gardner, John W. On Leadership. New York: The Free Press, 1990. Instrumentum Laboris. "The Consecrated Life and its Role in the Church and in the World." Vatican City, 1994. Judson, Sylvia Shaw. The Quiet Eye: A Way of Looking at Pictures. Washington: Regner~ Gateway, renewed, 1982. Kennedy, Eugene. "Bernardin Still a Beacon for Community." Chicago Tribune, Section 4, "Perspective," 18June 1995, pp. 1, 4. Kurtz, Ernest, and Ketcham, Katherine. The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Journey to Wholeness. New York: Bantam Books, 1994, paperback edition. Review for Religious Martini, Cardinal Carlo Maria. "Hope and Religious Leadership in a Secular Society." Chicago Studies, Vol. 33, no. 2 aAugust, 1994): 132-137. McGrory, Brian. "Chicago Cardinal Faces Illness with Serenity." The Boston Globe, 3 July 1995, pp. 1, 5. Nouwen, Henri J.M. Here and Now: Living in the Spirit. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1994. Nygren, David J. and Ukeritis, Miriam D. The Future of Religious Orders in the United States: Transformation and Commitment. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1993. Oliva SJ, Max. Free to Pray/Free to Love: Growing in Prayer and Compassion. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1994. Sanks, T. Howland. Salt, Leaven, and Light: The Community Called Church. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992. Sofield ST, Loughlan and Kuhn, Donald H. The Collaborative Leader: Listening to the Wisdom of God's People. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1995. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Wallis, Jim. The Soul of Politics. New York and Maryknolh The New Press and Orbis Books~ 1994. Wicks, Robert J., editor. Handbook of Spirituality for Ministers.New York: Paulist Press, 1995. A Wreath of Queens Sainted, in sparklets of bright stained glass, Their heads are wreathed in royal jewels: Meek Elizabeth, child Princess Of Hungary; staunch Margaret who rules Britain's unruly Scots; and mother of Constantine, The Empress Helena; jewel-ringed hands Wreathe in sisterhood the Byzantine, Celt, and Slav; their countries turned holy lands Under their godly reigns, God's people fed And clothed, God's earthly kingdom spread In the light that wreathes each queenly head. Nancy G. Westerfield Janualy-FebJwaO, 1996 JAMES H. KROEGER Bridging Interreligious Dialogue and Conversion ecumenism Mission theology today is greatly enriched by the field experiences of dedicated missioners. A personal experi-ence helped shape my views of conversion, mission, and interreligious dialogue. During the Lenten season of 1990 while I was a vis-iting professor in Dhaka, Bangladesh, I had a "graced moment," a "defining experience" in my missionary aware-ness and perspective. It has remained seared in my con-sciousness and has forced me to ask many foundational questions about mission and my own commitment. It involves a Bangladeshi beggar woman. I saw her on the road, in front of the large walled compound of a wealthy family dwelling. I could not clearly see her face because she was several hundred feet ahead of me. Her tattered clothes covered a malnourished body; she was alone, although other beggars were walking ahead of her on the road. I was proceeding along the same .path, leisurely taking a late afternoon walk. Suddenly a luxury car approached with its horn blow-ing. The driver probably wanted the beggars to disperse and also wanted the gate of the compound ope.ned by the servants. The woman appeared startled as the car turned James H. Kroeger MM worked as a field missionary in the Philippines arid Bangladesh for over two decades. Currently, he serves as the Asia-Pacific Area Assistant on the Maryknoll General Council. His most recent book is Living Mission (Orbis Books). He may be addressed at EO. Box 303; Maryknoll, New York 10545-0303. Review for Religious sharply in front of her and the gate swung open. Within seconds two large dogs emerged from the compound and jumped at the woman, knocking her to the ground. She screamed and cried both from fear and the pain caused by the dogs nipping at her. I stood frozen, horrified at the sight. A well dressed woman promptly emerged from the chauffeur-driven car. She ordered the driver to bring the car into the com-pound; the dogs were called to return inside; the servants were commanded to close and lock the gate. And, the beggar woman? She was left alone on the ground--outside the gate (see Heb 13:12). I stood helpless, gazing at this appalling scene. Only the other frightened beggars came to the aid of the woman. Only they showed mercy and compassion. I stood at a distance and wept at this scene of crucifixion. I admitted to being a guilty bystander. My fears and inadequacies had left me para-lyzed. I had not one taka coin in my pocket to give; I could not offer one word of consolation in the Bangla language which I did not speak. I did not approach the woman for fear of misinterpre-tation that a foreign man would touch a Bengali woman in pub-lic in this strictly Islamic culture. I simply wept in solidarity. I wept long and hard. In succeeding years, I have frequently returned to that scene and prayed to God: "Do not let me forget that experience. Allow it to shape my life and mission vision. Permit it to remain a 'defin-ing moment' in understanding my mission vocation. May it enrich my insights into the nature of mission and the place of dialogue and conversion within the church's missionary activity." Embracing a Broken World My experience on the road in Dhaka, Bangladesh with the beg-gar- woman no longer allows me to view people as faceless victims. All Christians, especially missionaries, are called to embrace the world's suffering humanity, to recognize the existence of crucified peoples, and to strive to take them down from the cross. The suffering inherent in human existence necessarily impacts the situation of mission. The traditional dialogue partner of mis-sioners has been the follower of another living faith; while this engagement remains true today, particular attention is focused on humanity's concrete experience and suffering. All human life has a paschal configuration; its pattern con- Janua~y-Febrmny 1996 Kroeger ¯ Bridging Interreligious Dialogue and Conversion Missionaries seek the conversion of people they encounter. tinually moves through death to renewed life. Life's paschal paradigm (universally shared by all people, although varying ter-minology may be used) sees people struggling to move through darkness to light, through captivity to freedom, through suffering and brokenness to wholeness.Paschal dimensions are characteristic of all life situations; contemporary mis-sion and dialogue find their point of insertion in human-ity's experience of life and death realities. Catholic theology asserts that the .Spirit of God is present and aetive within the lives of all peoples. The Second Vatican Council forcefully stated that as Christian believers, "we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery" (GS §22). This quote is used three times in the mission encyclical Redemptoris missio (RM §§6,d0, 28). John Paul II uses the phrase repeatedly in his writings; it is probably one of his guiding missiological principles. This text affirms the action of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of all people. The universal work of the Spirit serves to enlighten people's experience of their paschal realities of dying and rising; life itself, including suffering, has the possibility of opening all peoples to experience God's salvation through the paschal mystery. Note that the text declares unambiguously that there is only one way which leads to everlasting salvation, a way which is valid for Christians as well as other believers, and that is association with the paschal mystery. The redemptive grace of Christ is avail-able for all who in thei~ own way and even without knowing it obey the law of the paschal mystery and take it as a guiding norm for their consciences and lives. This astonishing assertion has important consequences for the dialogue and conversion that con-temporary mission pursues. Christian faith is, at heart, a paschal faith. Thus, if all reality has a paschal paradig'~n and if all life is shaped by rhythms of life through death, then Christian mission will continually find ele-ments of this very mystery hidden in the lives, cultures, histories, and religions of peoples of diverse faiths. Missioners repeatedly experience the unique ways that the Holy Spirit brings people into direct encounter with the paschal mystery and with God's salvation in Christ. The cross of Jesu's is the paramount Christian symbol, because Review for Religious it reminds Christians of the centrality of the paschal mystery in their faith lives. All church missionary activity will focus on the paschal nature of life, of faith, of salvation. Mission is always cru-ciform, always signed by the cross. Crux probat omnia. Naming Conversion in a Perspective of Dialogue The literature on diverse elements of the conversion process is extensive. This article, however, focuses primarily on the the-ological dimensions of conversion, viewing conversion as that ongoing transformation of persons by the power of God, specif-ically through the action of the Holy Spirit. Missionaries seek the conversion of people they encounter. Conversion demands a radical shift in a person's apprehensions and values, accompanied by a similar radical change in oneself, in one's relations with other persons, and in one's relations to God. Such a total transformation is nothing less than the work of God's grace and the action 6f the Holy Spirit: At the center o(this con-version and transformation is a personal, loving God; all becomes focused on God's love poured out in the person of Jesus through the paschal mystery. The paschal mystery becomes the integrating focus of all evangelization, dialogue, and conversion. It is foundational because all life has a paschal paradigm. The passion of human experience is to be the ground in which .the. seeds of new life, hope, resurrection, and ultimately salvation germinate and bear fruit. This paschal nature of all life and' experience (poignantly illustrated by my personal experience with the Bangladeshi beg-gar- woman) cofitinually provides openings for a deep :missionary encounter, authentic dialogue and conversion, find fruitful trans-o formation into the mystery of God's love. Levels of Missionary Conversion Mission experience reveals three interacting levels of con-version int6 the paschal myg~ery. The first conversion is centered on the person of the missionary. The second is a call to all persons of faith and good will to embrace a paschal perspective in their lives and consciences. Final!y, the third conversion takes the form of an invitation for people to freely join the paschal community of the Christian church. ffanuaty-Februaty 1996 Kroeger ¯ Bridging Inter'religious Dialogne and Conversion I. Conversion of the Missionary. Christian missionaries begin the conversion process in their own lives and attitudes. They seek to personalize the fact that, in the words of John Paul II, "the church~s vocation and missionary commitment spring from the central mystery of our faith: the paschal mystery" (WYD 1993:2). They embrace the fact: "The paschal mystery of Christ's cross and Resurrection stands at the center of the Good News that the apostles, and the church following them, are to proclaim to the world" (Catechism 1994:571). Evangelizers accept that every missionary begins by entering a personal process of conversion (EN § 15). Before crossing any bor-ders of culture or religion to announce the paschal mystery, mis-sionaries seek their own transformation into the same paschal mindset of Jesus (1 Co 2:16; Ph 2:5). To the extent that any mis-sionary embodies the suffering Messiah's self-transcending way of the cross, that person achieves authentic paschal conversion. Paschality becomes the measuring ~od for all missionary endeavors. H. Conversion to a Paschal VVorldview. From the paschal per-spective operative in their own lives, Christian missionaries and all peoples of faith soon recognize the paschal communalities of their shared existence. All peoples--whether Christian, Buddhist or Muslim--share,the vicissitudes and challenges of existence in a broken world. It is precisely within this shared human existence and mystery that the Christian missionary announces paschal per-spectives of life through death. The missionary is definitely invit-ing his or her dialogue partners to a deeper God-experience. This is a true spiritual conversion, but not necessarily conversion to Christianity. Such a heart-to-heart encounter is a direct effect of the Holy Spirit's action in bringing peoples through their own life situations into a sharing of the paschal mystery. The fundamental act of faith and conversion is within reach of all human beings. They can encounter God in the paschal mystery. For the Christian it will be explicitly Christological. However, the identical experience, although often in an inchoate and unarticulated form, is contin-ually available to all peoples whatever their particular religious affiliation. It is important to note that as Christian missionaries we will often find.our own explicit paschal faith enriched by the implicit paschal faith of our Muslim or Buddhist friend. IlL Conversion to the Cb~istian Faith Community. All persons are called to conversion to God. In the course of this process a free Review Jbr Religious decision may be made to leave one's previous spiritual or reli-gious situation to direct oneself towards another. In this conver-sion process, freedom of conscience is sovereign. Admittedly, mission also has explicit Christian conversion as its goal. Christians nourish in their hearts the clear desire to share their full experience of the paschal mystery and faith in Christ with brothers and sisters of other religions. Missionaries sensitively aim at guiding peo-ple to explicit knowledge of what God has done for all men and women in Jesus Christ and at inviting them to become disciples of Jesus through becoming members of the church. Note the triple dynamic of conversion operative in this missionary process: 1.) the converted missionary centers his or her life on the paschal mystery; 2.) the Christian missionary calls other people of faith to dis-cover the paschal paradigm of life and to adopt paschal values in their lives, con-sciences, and service; 3.) based on a free decision inspired by the Spirit, others are directly invited to join the community of the Christian church, where they can fully practice their .paschal mys-tery- centered faith. The paschal nature of life, faith, and redemption serves to integrate any dialogue and conversion process. Awareness of and participation in the paschal mystery often unfold in the lives of people in an evolutionary and progressive manner. The mission-ary finds the paschal mystery operative and recognizes conversion both outside and within the church. This wide, inclusive view of mission adds further meaning to the reality of the missionary church as the "universal sacrament of salvation" (LG ~48; AG §1). Missionaries sensitively aim at guiding people to explicit knowledge of what God has done for all men and women in Jesus Christ. Additional Mission Corollaries I have strongly affirmed the validity of centering mission, dia-logue, and conversion within the framework of the paschal mys-tery. This approach is a paschal missiology and challenges all missionaries to become paschal evangelizers in their own lives and through their involvement in the church's missionary activ-ity. In the context of today's broken world, the enormous afflic- Janttat3~-Februat."F 1996 Kroeger ¯ Bridging Interreligious Dialogue and Conversion tions and sufferings of humanity, and the need to maintain escha-tological hope, paschal missiology appears particularly insight-ful, necessary, and relevant. The insights flowing from a paschal-mystery-centered missi-ology are numerous; I mention these twenty corollaries only briefly and highlighted their relationship to paschal mission per-spectives. 1. Paschal mission emerges from the unity of all humanity in its sharing of the common paschal experience of rising through dying. Peoples of all faiths face questions of suffering as well as the mystery and meaning of life. 2. Paschal mission uses an inductive approach based on expe-rience to understand the church's call to mission. The church is urged to be active in "reading the signs of the times and of inter-preting them in the light of the Gospel" (GS §4); human suffer-ing and brokenness constitute a missionary challenge today. 3. Paschal mission strongly affirms the active presence of the Holy Spirit in the world, both in and beyond the boundaries of the church. The Spirit is constantly directing people to a God-encounter through their sharing in the paschal mystery. 4. Paschal mission embodies the virtue of Christian hope based on the firm belief in the resurrection. Eschatological hope, not suffering, is the integrating perspective of Christian mis-sionaries; that hope continually breaks into the world through missionary witness, service, and dialogue. 5. Paschal mission clearly allows missioners to be people of ,integrity. Their proclamation begins with their own paschal expe-riences and links them with people who share identical experi-ences~ Mission is not something superimposed upon reality; mission emerges from the commonly shared realities of mission-ers and their dialogue partners of various faiths., 6. Paschal mission demands a radical conversion of the mis-sioner to the values of a crucified and risen Lord; mission begins only when personal transformation has been initiated. Only the converted missioner can authentically call others to conversion. 7. Paschal mission requires the integration of contemplation into missionary praxis. No one can authentically address the pas-sion of humanity without possessing a deep contemplative faith; one must live into the paschal mystery. - 8. Paschal mission emphasizes that the work of the mission-ary involves both listening and speaking. Listening for the Spirit's Review for Religious action within the hearts and lives of people is a prerequisite for speaking of God's paschal love and saving deeds. 9. Paschal mission lays bare the sinfulness of today's world which is often enslaved in materialism, consumerism, individu-alism, greed, and pride. A paschal mentality challenges both per-sonal and social sin; it demands true conversion. 10. Paschal mission respects the free will and personal con-science of everyone; at the same time it is a call to conscience for generous people (Christians and other believers) to be committed to addressing the sufferings of humanity. 11. Paschal mission easily enters into dialogue with the fol-lowers of other religions. All religious traditions face identical human questions and mysteries. Dialogue enables peoples of faith to mutually explore and respond to questions of life and death. 12. Paschal mission connects intimately with today's chal-lenges of peace, justice, development, and ecology. It invites all of us to live in solidarity with our neighbors and to be prepared to suffer and die so that others may live. Again, such a paschal lifestyle demands profound conversion. 13. Paschal mission can be lived in all cultural contexts and sit-uations. As a missionary approach, it easily finds an inculturated home among diverse peoples. Paschal mission is also clearly trans-cultural. .~ 14. Paschal mission aims to be a holistic approach to mission, integrating the personal and social, the human and divine, the material and spiritual. It is an incarnational approach to being in mission. 15. Paschal mission emphasizes humble and self-effacing approaches to missionary activity; it consciously seeks to avoid any pitfalls of paternalism or colonialism. Missioners, believing in the beauty and truth of their message, seek to offer it with gen-erosity, sincerity, and authenticity. 16. Paschal mission is at heart a scripture-based missiology following the teachings and example of Jesus who came "not t? be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mt 20:28) 17. Paschal mission embodies an emphasis on witness and even a willingness to endure suffering, persecution, and martyr-dom. Contemporary missionaries knowingly and willingly embrace vulnerability because in Christ God reveals the divinity precisely in weakness rather than in power. Januaty-Febtvuoy 1996 Kroeger * Bridging Interreligious Dialogue and Conversion 18. Paschal mission is at heart a soteriology. Following the paschal path in mission brings both missioner and people into a direct experience of salvation in Jesus Christ, who "bore our sins in his own body on the cross; . . . through his wounds [we] have been healed" (1 P 2:24). 19. Paschal mission integrates well with the sacramental dimension of the church. All Christians are missionary by virtue of their baptism into Christ's death and resurrection (Rm 6:3-4). The Eucharist is the paschal meal that celebrates the death and resurrection of the Lord until he comes (1 Co 2:23-26); the Eucharist remains the "ongoing sacrament of mission" for Christians. 20. Paschal mission transforms the individual missioner into an attractive and credible witness. Missioners of the calibre of a Mother Teresa manifest the transforming effects of the paschal mystery in their lives, and all people of faith welcome such authen-tic witnesses. I began with a narration of an encounter, between a mission-ary and a Bangladeshi beggar-woman. That defining experience has produced much depth reflection on the .nature of mission, dialogue, and conversion. This missionary remains filled with gratitude for that God-given experience of grace. More reflec-tion needs to be given to the wealth of insights that can still emerge from viewing mission and dialogue through the optic of the paschal mystery. Relying on God's grace, this missionary looks forward to meeting that Muslim Bangladeshi beggar-woman once again in the resurrected life with Christ the Lord in the Kingdom. I am confident she will be there! References Cited Ad gentes (AG); Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994); Evangelii nuntiandi (EN); Gaudium et spes (GS); Lumen gentium, (LG); Redemptoris missio (/O4); World Youth Day Address: John Paul II, November 21, 1993 NOTE: Copies of a lengthy, academic treatment of this subject can be obtained gratis by writing to James H. Kroeger MM. Review for Religious DENN1S J. BILLY A Visit to Taiz Nr~t long ago I made my way through the rolling hills and pened vineyards of southern Burgundy in eastern France to a place recognized both far and wide as one of the world's great spiritual centers, the monastic community of Taiz& Founded in 1940 by Roger Schultz, a young Swiss theologian, the monastery began as a valiant attempt to restore monastic practice to the Protestant faith and soon blossomed into a truly ecumenical ven-ture that has since attracted members from Catholic and Protestant backgrounds alike from over twenty countries. Located atop a small hill in the vicinity of Sfione-et-Loire, not far from the ramshackled ruins of 'Cluny, the great center of Benedictine monasticism that has helped to carve much of the spiritual and temporal landscape of medieval Europe, Taiz~ represents a vital resurgence of the monastic spirit, the likes of which had not been seen in Western society for many, many years. Known for its sim-plicity of life, its calming musical rounds, and its warm hospital-ity to strangers especially the young, the community of Taiz~ has succeeded in blending old and new and the concerns of past and present in a way that has awakened the deep spiritual sensibilities of our anxiety-ridden world. No wonder it has become a verita-ble Mecca for many of those who wish to satisfy the latent pains of humanity's deep spiritual hungers. Hunger and Dust Taiz~ rustic environment does not encourage visits from the weak and feeble of heart. Those who enter its ground must be Dennis J. Billy CSSR published "The Abbey of S~nanque: A Journey of the Heart" in our September-October 1995 issue. His address is Accademia Alfonsiana; C.P. 2458; 00100 Rome, Italy. Billy * A Visit to Taizg prepared to forego many of the comforts of home they normally take for granted. The basic necessities are provided, to be sure, but not much else. The wooden barracks, the earthen trails, the open-air refectory, the simple fare of lentils, bread, juice, and fruit--all remind the weary traveler that one comes to this holy place for one purpose and one purpose only--to search for God. The young, in particular, are attracted by Taiz~'s austere regimen of life. Since 1957 they have flocked there by the thousands for sojourns of various lengths to feed their souls on its simple fare and sound spiritual sustenance. They come, in part, to escape the materialism and confusion of the tension-filled world they have left behind; in part; to understand the meaningoof their difficult and often bewildering journey through life; in part, to fathom the unchartered depths of their inner yearning for God and, more importantly, of God's own intense and deeply compassionate long-ing for them. Two things in particular struck me when I arrived there tired and hungry on that sun-dried autumn day: (1) the dust from the trails that had been kicked up by thousands of visitors (it appar-ently had not rained for some time), and (2)the extremely long lines.at meal time (even simple fare needs time to be distributed to such a large crowd). These two details have come to dominate. my impression of Taiz& Together, they tell of the great success of this extraordinary experiment in monastic living and show how it now stands at the crossroads of Europe's long and rather cir-cuitous spiritual journey. Hungry~pilgrims, covered with dust, wait to be fed lentils and bread, hungry, but happy--and more. than willing to wait their turn. Given its Spartan fare, its cramped quarters., its vulnerability to the elements, and its many other physical restrictions, Taiz~ .seems much like a plain, ordinary, at times even uninviting place. So why, one might ask, does anyone go°'there? Certainly not for the food or the primitive shelter it offers. Certainly not to walk the heavily rutted trails or to inhale the dusty air that envelopes them and sticks to their clothes. Something else has surely drawn them. In Praise of God That something else can be found in the Church of the Reconciliation, the spiritual center of the Taiz~ community, where day after day pilgrims join the small gathering of white-robed Review for Religious monks in raising their hearts and voices to God. The Taizd office combines different styles of liturgical music into a simple but elo-quent offering of praise. Great care is taken not only to train vis-itors in the various rounds and harmonies that form the backbone of the liturgy, but also to utilize the talents (musical or other-wise) of everyone present. The results impress even the most detached of observers--and with good reason. A typical celebration Will find a thousand or so silent pilgrims sitting quietly in prayerful expectation for the monks to process in silent devotion and move to their posi-tions at the prayer stools that line the choir space down the center of the church. At the end of the procession, Brother Roger takes his place at the head of the commu-nity and gathers around him as his special guests any children who have come there for the service: "Let the children come to me . The kingdom of God belongs to such as these" (Mt 19:14). The pregnant silence gives way to antiphonal praise, usu-ally in the form of a simple round that has been carefully rehearsed the day before: "Ubi caritas et amor . " The harmony of voices fills the church and transforms its simply built and purely functional sur-roundings into vibrating and. living move-ment of Spirit. Suddenly the music ends, and silence once more reverberates throughout the interior spaces of the. soul, All eyes are focused on the large flowing red and orange banners in the front of the sanc-tuary that present the participants with simple yet powerful sym-bols of the spiritual Pentecost they have all come to receive. The small voice of a child then calls out in the wilderness of the heart. "Prepare the way of the Lord" On 1:23). A lesson from Scripture follows as the moments continue to brush with eternity, and the community of believers experience their oneness in Christ on a level never known to them before. Another round of chant; more silence; another lesson from Scripture. One's consciousness of time quietly recedes. The hour passes quickly and it is time to conclude. The pas-sage from the life of the Liturgy to the Liturgy of life takes place Given its Spartan fare, its cramped quarters, its vulnerability to the elements, and its many other physical restrictions, Taizd seems much like a
Issue 28.1 of the Review for Religious, 1969. ; EDITOR ¯ R. F. Smith, S.J. ASSOCIATE EDITORS Everett A. Diederich, S.J. Augustine G. Ellard, S.J. ASSISTANT EDITOR John L. Treloar, S.J. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS EDITOR Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Correspondence with the editor, the associate editors, and the assistant editor, as well as books for review, should be sent to REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS; Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; Saint Louis, Missouri 631o3. Questions for answering should be sent to Joseph F. Gallen, S.J.; St. Joseph's Church; 3~i Willings Alley; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ~9~o6. + + + REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Edited v¢ith ecclesiastical approval by faculty members of the School of Divinity of Saint Louis University, the editorial ottices being located at 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; Saint Louis, Missouri 63103. Owned by the Missouri Province Edu-cational Institute. 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Manuscripts, editorial cor-respondence, and books for review should be sent to REvlr:w rOa R~L~GIOUS; 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; Saint ~ouis, Missouri 63103. Questions for answermg should be sent to the address Gf the Questions and Answers editor. JANUARY ~969 VOLUME ~8 NUMBER t REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Volume 28 1969 EDITORIAL OFFICE 539 North Grand Boulevard St. Louis, Missouri 63103 BUSINESS OFFICE 428 East Preston'Street Baltimore, Maryland 21202 EDITOR R. F. Smith, S.J. ASSOCIATE EDITORS Everett A. Dlederich, S.J. Augustine G. Ellard, S.J. ASSISTANT EDITOR John L. Treloar, S.J. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS EDITOR Joseph F. Gailen, S.J. Published in January, March, May, July, September, Novem-ber on the fifteenth of the month. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS is indexed in the Catholic Peri. odical Index and in Boo/~ Re. view Index. Microfilm edition of REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS is available from University Ml. crofilms; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. HILARY SMITH, O.C.D. Qgiet Prayer for Busy Busy religious today seem to be shying away from more contemplative approaches to prayer. The references to quiet and recollection in the older spiritual books are considered now to refer back to a time when every-one's approach to God was modeled on that of cloistered nuns and monks. Yet, outside the religious life people as diverse as Walter Kerr and about the importance of some we are to maintain our sanity. I think it might be helpful the approach to God through Harvey Cox are writing kind of quiet periods if at this time to see that recollection and periods of quiet is neither an approach suited only for monastic congregations nor simply a far out, naturalistic fad in-dulged in by flower children. I think it might be profit-able to examine the approach some of the busy fathers of the Church used in treating of prayer to show that traditionally the effort to find God through recollection was not a practice limited to people in monasteries and cloistered convents. It is interesting to see what a lofty concept of prayer some of the busiest fathers of the Church recommended to their equally busy congregations. While the fathers did speak of prayer as asking God for things, just as preachers a few years ago did, they did not hesitate to talk or write about prayer as a simple raising of the heart to God, as recollection. This might be expected among the monastic Fathers such as St. Basil. But I think it is significant that the more active fathers--bishops, teach-ers-- should tell their congregations--the same people they warned about fornication and drunkenness--about the higher kinds of prayer. It will be helpful, before looking at the works of the fathers, to establish a fairly clear idea of the notion of praye~ that we will be looking for. What we hope to find are suggestions on the part of the fathers that their ÷ ÷ ÷ Hilary Smith, O.CJ3., lives at 7907 Bellaire Boul-evard in Houston, Texas 77096. VOLUME 28, 1969 ÷ ÷ ÷ Hilary Smith, O.C~. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS congregations of working men and housewives practice what we would call today, or at least would have called a few years ago, "mental prayer." In St. Teresa of Avila's classic definition, mental prayer "is nothing but friendly intercourse, and frequent solitary converse with Him who we know loves us." 1 This definition of prayer is broad enough to include methodical meditation and even vocal prayers said well, but I believe that it shows that the essence of mental prayer is not a systematic arrangement of considerations with a concluding resolution. Rather mental prayer consists essentially in "tratando," dealing with God, in a friendly way. St. Teresa presents a more specific method of mental prayer, sometimes called the prayer of active recollection. "It is called recollection because the soul collects together all the faculties and enters within itself to be with its God," St. Teresa says in the now quaint sounding language of faculty psychol-ogy. It is with this specific form of prayer, active recollec-tion, that we shall be especially interested. It is impor-tant for us today to understand that this approach to prayer was not peculiar to St. Teresa or to the medieval monastic tradition. It represents a traditional Christian approach to prayer recommended to busy Christians long before men and women with education and leisure were almost all found in monasteries and convents. I hope that the following few remarks of the fathers on prayer will show that the early fathers, not haunted'as spiritual writers a few years ago were, by the spectre of Quietism, did not hesitate to recommend to their congregations a form of prayer that we might think to be too lofty or too mystical. One. very good example of a father of the Church addressing himself to ordinary lay people yet recommend-ing a lofty prayer of recollection is St. Gregory of Nyssa. He was almost certainly married, since in his treatise on virginity he says that he regrets that he himself is pre-vented from attaining to the glory of this virtue. Al-though it is true that he lived in a monastic community for a while, he is most famous as the active bishop of Nyssa, a post he held for eight years., In his works es-pecially in his commentaries on the Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes, he has in view the needs of the average Christian. Although he is inclined to the asceticism of the desert, he is not a desert father living in isolation from the world around him--a world that seems in many ways similar to our own--but rather a man living in the .1 St. Teresa, Way of Perlection, in The Complete Works o/ St. Teresa, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1950), v. 2, p. 115. world, steeped in its culture and interested in all it has to offer.~ In his treatise on the Lord's Prayer, St. Gregory de-scribes his idea of prayer: "First my mind must become detached from anything subject to flux and change, and tranquilly rest in motionless spiritual repose, so as to be rendered akin to Him who is perfectly unchangeable; and then it may address Him by this most familiar name and say: Father." a St. Teresa's description of the prayer of recollection in her commentary on the Lord's Prayer is closely parallel. She says: "The soul withdraws the senses from all outward things and spurns them so com-pletely that, without its understanding how, its eyes close and it cannot see them and the soul's spiritual sight becomes clear." 4 We must be careful to understand that neither St. Teresa nor St. Gregory is describing some form of mys-tical prayer. St. Teresa is careful to explain that what she is describing "is not a supernatural state but depends upon our volition; by 'God's favor we can enter it of our own accord." 5 Thus St. Teresa distinguishes this recol-lection from what the students of mystical phenomena called "infused contemplation." St. Gregory is not so explicit, but he gives us to understand that the mind lifts itself from created things and places itself at rest in God. There seems to be no question here of God effect-ing something extraordinary in communicating with the Christian. Less to the point is St. Gregory's definition of prayer in general. He says: "Prayer is intimacy with God and contemplation of the invisible." n Though not so graphic as the earlier description, this definition shows St. Greg-ory's lofty concept of prayer; and, found in a treatise written for laymen, it shows that he was not afraid of presenting his lofty ideas to ordinary people. Another early Christian writer who recommends a contemplative type of prayer to ordinary men and women is Origen. His treatise, De Oratione, one of the first Christian treatises of prayer, was written as a reply to questions raised by his friend and patron, the married deacon Ambrose. Although Origen does not describe a kind of active recollection as clearly as St. Gregory, he does indicate that married folk, such as Ambrose, need not confine their praying to the recitation of vocal pray-ers or to asking God for favors. His description of the preparation for prayer brings to mind St. Teresa's defini- = St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Lord's Prayer. The Beatitudes, trans. Hilda C. Graef (Westminster: Newman, 1954), pp. $, 8, 15, 19. 8 Ibid., p. ~8. *Peers, v. 2, 115. 5 Peers, v. 2, 110. 6 St. Gregory of Nyssa, p. 24. + ÷ ÷ Quie~ Prayer VOLUME 28 ~.969 5 4- Hilary Smith, O.C.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 6 tion of prayer as a friendly converse with God. He says that by the very way one disposes his mind to prayer, by the very attitude with which one prays, "he shows that he is placing himself before God and speaking to Him as present, convinced that He is present and looking at Him." 7 Further on he says: "When praying let us not babble, but let us speak to God"; and, "When we pray in this way [in secret] we shall be conversing with God." In another context, in his Contra Celsum, Origen speaks of approaching God in a similar, contemplative-like way. Celsus has complained that the Christians do not worry about the cult due to the national idols, nor do they erect temples for their own worship. Origen answers in a beautiful passage where he says that Christians carry the image of their God within themselves. Every Chris-tian, he says, "strives to build an altar and carve a statue himself, keeping his eyes fixed on God, keeping his heart pure, and trying to become like God." s Again in De oratione, Origen recommends that Am-brose find a quiet place in his home to pray: "If you want to pray in greater quiet and without so much. dis-traction, you may choose a special place in your own house, if you can, a consecrated place, so to speak, and pray there." 0 Origen might well have been speaking to today's busy sisters. Another Church writer known for his work on prayer is Tertullian. Scholars say that Origen very likely drew many of his ideas on prayer from a Greek translation of Tertullian's De oratione. Some idea o[ his realistic recom-mendations to busy people on prayer may be drawn from this remark in his treatise on marriage and remarriage. He has been speaking of the value of continence as an aid in attaining union with God. Then almost equating prayer and union, he says that "men must need pray every day and every moment of the day." This may seem like only a paraphrase of the command "Pray always," but in the context it can be considered as an elaboration of Christ's command. Tertullian does not take Christ's words to mean that we should be constantly petitioning God for help, but rather that Christians should be con-stantly united to God in prayer through much the same kind of converse or treating with God that St. Teresa recommends. One last remark, this h'om St. John Damascene, may serve as a summing up ot what we have seen in St. Greg-ory o~ Nyssa, Origen, and Tertullian about the possi-r Origen, Prayer. Exhortation to Martyrdom, trans. John J. O'Meara (Westminster: Newman, 1954), p. 37. Cels., 8, 17, 18; quoted in Jean Danielou, Origen (New York, 1955), p. 35. Origen, Prayer, p. 43. bility for a contemplative approach to prayer for busy people. It is true that at the time he produced his little work, Barlaam and Joasaph, he was more of a monk than an active preacher, but he says that he is summarizing the ideas of the fathers before him. He says that the fathers define prayer as "the union of man with God," "angel's work," and "the prelude of gladness to come." He asks: "How shalt thou converse with God?" and an-swers: "By drawing near him in prayer." And he ex-plains: "He that prays with exceedingly fervent desire and a pure heart, his mind estranged from all that is earthly and grovelling, and stands before God eye to eye, and presents his prayers to him in fear and trem-bling, such a one has converse and speaks to him face to face." lo Better known, and at the same time a perfect example of a man who was busy, prayerful, and ready to recom-mend prayer to his congregation was St. Augustine. The ditficulty in discussing St. Augustine's approach to prayer briefly is that he has said so much about prayer. I have selected a few passages in which he seems to be speaking especially to busy people and in which he seems to be dealing with what we would call mental prayer, and more specifically with the approach to mental prayer that we described above as active recollection. Shortly after his conversion, before his baptism, Augus-tine retired for awhile to the country where he might have the leisure for prayer. We know from his Con-fessionsix that at this time he began to pour out his soul to God using the words of the Psalmist. But his corre-spondence with his friend Nebridius reveals that at the same time he was trying to withdraw from the noise of the world to find God in the depths of his soul; that he was, in our terminology, practicing mental prayer. His withdrawal was not a flight into the desert or monastery. He still considered himself and Nebridius as "busy people." The recollection he recommends to Nebridius is a practice made easier by the.solitude and leisure he is enjoying for a time in the country, but it is a practice which he says will be helpfullin the midst of activity. First he tells Nebridius of the advantages of adoring God in the "innermost recesses of the soul." He promises him that this recollection brings with it a "freedom from fear," and "an inner peace which permeates our human activity when we return to activity from our inner shrine." Finally, he tells him: "You, Nebridius, are free 10St. John Damascene, Barlaam and Joasaph, trans. Gr. Wood-ward and H. Mattingly (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1937), p. 295. ~ St. Augustine, Contessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1943), p. 185. + + Quiet Prayer VOLUME 28, 1969 Hila~J Smith, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS of fear only when you are inwardly recollected." lz From the Very beginning of h.is life as a Christian; St. Augustine shows, an attraction to solitary converse with God. His own prayer and the advice he gives his busy friend Nebri- ~lius furnish an interesting contrast to the prayer for-merly described in convent spiritual 'reading books. There is no question in St. Augustine's mind about re-pe~ iting many vocal prayers or following-some well-or-ganized meditatiOn plan. A few ~ears later, now a priest, St. Augustine con-tinued his exhortations, .encouraging a ~ontemplative approach to prayer, in The Lord's Sermon 'on" the Mount. He comments on Christ's words: "But when you pray, enter into your chambers." The chambers, h~ says, are our hearts.' We must close the door on things without, "all transitory and visible things which through our fleshly senses noise in upon us while we pray." Then there takes place a turning of the heart tO God; and this very effort we make in praying calms the heart, makes it clean and more capable of receiving the divine gifts. He says: "It is not words we should use in dealing with God. but it is the things we carry in our mind and the direction of our thoughts with pure .love and single affection." These ideas, coming as they do early in St. Augustine's life as a Christian, and very much like, in spirit, the teachings of the neo-Platonists on contemplation, may seem more like Platonism than Christianity. In fact, it might be argued that most of the people cited thus far, including St. Teresa, were influenced by.Platonism. It is not within the scope of this paper to discuss the influence of Platonism on Christian mysticism, nor is the question of great practical import. If authorities on prayer have found that they could effectively approach God in a way that resembles the approach of some philosophers to peace or wisdom, then the marvelous thing is not that some Christians are using a pagan philosophy in their prayer, but rather that there is such a universal inclina-tion in human nature to withdraw from the hustIe and bustle of the world from time to time and turn to loftier things. This inclination was recognized by the pagan philosophers and far eastern mystics, but it can find its best realization in a Christian context in which a personal God comes to live intimately with those who are really dedicated to Him. Later in his life, St. Augustine kept hi~ lofty concept of prayer, although, as a result of his struggle with the Pelagians, he seems to make more mention of prayer as petition. He has to explain that no one can receive ~St. Augustine's Letters, trans. Sr. WilIrid Parsons, S.N.D. (New York: 1951), v. 1, p. 157. grace simply by asking for it, but rather we ask because we have been moved by grace. Nevertheless, his classic definition of prayer in the ninth sermon on the Passion shows that he is not limiting the prayer of his congrega-tion to vocal prayer or meditation. He defines prayer as "the affectionate movement of the mind towards God." In the Enarratio in Psalmum 85, we find the idea ex-pressed above by St. Teresa that prayer is converse with God. St. Augustine says: "Your prayer is conversation with God. ~Nhen you read, God speaks to you; when you pray, you speak to God.'.' As St. Augusdnffbecame more and more imbued with the theology and language of the Bi, ble and more forgetful of Platonism, his thoughts on prayer at6 expressed more in Biblical metaphors than in philosophical abstractions. He had told Nebridius to turn away f(om created things and try to converse with God in the center of his soul. His descriptions of this contemplation of God are not too unlike the instructions of the neoPlatonists on the contemplation of true wisdom. In his later years, St. Augustine continues to instruct Christians on~ the importance of dealing With God through the heart, not just with the lips, of worshiping God in spirit, in truth, not simply in an external way. But now he presents his teaching more in the words of Christ, St. John the Evangelist, the Psalms, and less in the language of Plodnus. He frequently cites Christ's directive about praying in our own chambers, and he explains that the chambers are our hearts,is He quotes Jesus also on not using many words when we pray;14 He likes to point out that the Psalmist who so frequently calls or shouts to God is crying with his heart: " 'You have heard, Lord, the voice of my prayer. You heard when I shouted to you.' This shout to God is made not with the voice but with the heart. Many, with their lips ¯ sil.ent,~ shout with their hearts; others, making a great deal of noise with their mouths, have their hearts turned away and can ask for nothing. If then, you are going to shout, shout from within where God hears." ~ St. Augustine, then, all through his life recommended to his congregations a lofty form of prayer. He did not think it unrealistic to suggest that his people, who Were not cloistered nuns or monks, should strive after a prayerful, contemplative awareness of God's personal presence. Very likely he had achieved a contemplative union with God himself in the midst of his bu~y life and knew that it was possible for others. The modern, harried religious should not feel that his own contemplative aspirations are at all unrealistic. Rather he should see taEnar, in Ps, n. 5; Epis. 130. 14 Sermo 80. 15 Enar. II in Ps. 30, serm. 5. ÷ + ÷ VOLUME 28, 1969 9 ÷ Hilary Smith, O.C.D . REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS them as an important aspect of the Christian tradition in which he lives. Another great, active Church father with lofty ideas about prayer is St. John Chrysostom. He also defines prayer as a "conversation ~vith God." a6 He explains the first verse of Psalm 140, "Lord I shouted to you and you heard me," as the cry of a deeply prayerful man. The Psalmist here, he says, speaks of "an internal shout, from a heart of fire. He who thus shouts with his heart, turns to God with his whole heart." Always interested in the affective nature of prayer, he makes an important dis-tinction in explaining verse one of Psalm 5: "You hear my shout." The shout, he says, is not "an intonation of the voice but an affection of the mind." 17 To indicate the lofty nature of the kind of prayer he has in mind he says that it is a duty which we have in common with the angels. To pray with the proper rev-erence we must remove ourselves from worldly things and place ourselves in the middle of the choirs of angels. Although St. John Chrysostom has special praise for the life of monks he is anxious that everyone should give themselves to prayer, "both civil servants and private citizens, both men and women, both the elderly and the young, both slaves and freemen." as And he gives special instructions for busy housewives who would like to spend some time in quiet prayer. He reminds them that unlike their husbands "in the middle of the forum or before the tribunal, stirred up by external things as by heavy waves," housewives should be able to sit down for awhile in the privacy of their homes and recollect themselves. In this way they are like those who go out to the desert, bothered by no one: "Thus the housewife, always remaining within, can enjoy a permanent tran-quillity." Obviously St. John Chrysostom had the same notion of a housewife's life as many men today--and his ideas were probably received with the same disdain. But we are not citing John Chrysostom so much for his socio-logical data as for the importance he attaches to a con-templative form of prayer even for housewives. He ex-plains that even if she is forced to go out to Church or to the baths, once she has acquired the habit of recollection she need not be perturbed. What is more, the prayerful, recollected wife will be able to quiet a restless husband and help him forget the worries and cares of the forum.19 If we remember that St. John Chrysostom recommends a certain amount of solitude and prayer for everyone, ~ In Cap. X1 Gen., Horn. 30 n. 5. a7 Exposit. in Psalm. 5, n. 3. rs Homil. encomiast, in S. Meletium, n. 3. a~ In Jo. homil. 61, nn. 3, 4. we can profit from his commentary on Christ's prayer away from the crowds. St. John is not suggesting that everyone flee into a desert, but rather that everyone imi-tate Christ by leaving the noise of society for a little while to be able to pray and thus to return strengthened and fortified. It is thus that St. John explains the words of St. Matthew: "After he had dismissed the crowds he went up into the hills by himself to pray." ~0 "Why did Christ go up into the mountain? That he might teach us how appropriate is the wilderness, is solitude, for calling upon God. He thus frequently sought the wilderness and spent the night there that he might instruct us that we ought to seek out tranquil times and places for prayer." ~x St. John insists that the solitude necessary for prayer is not the physical solitude of the desert. Christians can pray everywhere because "God is always near." We can pray "in the bath [St. John seems especially interested in the possibility of prayer here] on the road, in bed, before the judge." ~ He says that it is not necessary to be rich or a philosopher to pray, but that even manual laborers can pray "as in a monastery: for it is not the comfortable-ness of a place, but an upright life that brings us quiet." ~3 St. John's insistence that everyone can pray everywhere at any time is b:.sed on two principles: First that God is always near to us, actually living in us as in a temple: "The grace of the Holy Spirit makes us temples of God so that it might be easier for us to pray." ~4 Secondly, we can pray always because in prayer, "the mouth makes no sound, while the mind shouts." Religious should understand, then, that aspiring to a more simple, contemplative approach to prayer, even in the midst of a highly active life, is not at all unrealistic. In fact it is more in keeping with the Christian tradition and the aspirations of human nature than the formalized meditations stressed so much in religious houses in the last two or three centuries. It is an approach to God long fostered by some of the most active fathers of the Church and recommended by them to their equally active con-gregations. .-o Mt 14:23. -~ In Mt. homil. 50. m Homil. de Canan., n. 11. ~ Ad llluminand. Cateches., I, n. 4. =4De Anna, serm. IV, n. 6. + 4- Quiet Prayer VOLUME 28, ]! VINCENT P. BRANICK, S.M. Formation and Task ÷ ÷ + Vincent P. Bran-ick0 S.I~I., is a mem-ber of the Maria-nist Seminary; Regina Mundi; gri-bourg, Switzerland. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS A dilemma confronts those charged with the forma-tion of religious today. A program of formation which encourages the spontaneity of the religious, one which minimizes regulations and concentrates on personal re-sponsibility seems to be the only valid method of forma-tion today. This is true not only for houses of formation but also for active community life where growth in per-sonal identity and in a way of life must continue. But in such a program of formation severe difficulties of vocation often arise. Self-doubt replaces original enthusiam. Scep-ticism challenges the very viability of religious life. And many leave. I believe these vocation difficulties are neces-sarily connected with this type of formation. In such programs administrators engage and direct the critical spirit of members to the interior structures of the life. Focusing on the life of the individual and the com-munity, this criticism strives to minimize the regulated activities and increase the optional elements of daily life. By allowing a religious to choose for himself the details of his life, the administrators hope both to develop per-sonal autonomy and help the younger member to identify himself fully with the life of the community. Seldom, however, do these great hopes materialize in a more vigorous religious life. In fact where superiors implement these reforms most whole heartedly, the greatest difficulties seem to arise. The critical spirit focuses on the interior structures of the life, and the agonizing questions begin. To what minimum should we limit our regulations? What is the basic concept of re-ligious life from which we can derive these minimum regulations? Can the present superiors be trusted to define religious life as it should be? Can a member rely on anyone but himself to conceive the definition and regulations of the religious life he is to lead? This distrust, self-doubt, and aggression generated by this type of criticism is isolating religious in an extreme individualism and is draining away real enthusiasm. The difficulty, however, is not with the criticism in itself, I believe, as with the notion of regulation implied both in this type of critical questioning and in the defensive at-tempts to answer. The basic difficulty consists in a loss of the practical sense of rule, in attempts to deduce rules from a defined concept of religious life rather than from a practical selection of religious tasks. Without an appreciation of objective task as the coun-terpart of rule, the efforts to criticize and modernize our programs of formation are developing an ex.ag.ger.a.ted self-consciousness. Our great emphasis on minimizing rules and developing autonomy is throwing out of bal-ance the dynamic but delicate dialectic of human life ¯ between self-consciousness and self-forgetfulness in task, between subjectivity and objectivity. "Responsibility," "fulfillment," and "freedom," the key words of today's personalism, pertain to subjective states of an individual, just as "minimum regulation" and "optional time" pertain to the subjective or interior conditions of a community. These terms indicate a re-flection of the subject on himself. As developing from this reflection, they are abstract and formal, belonging to a secondary thematic. As categories of human life they are certainly valid; but when taken out of their relation to a concrete activity in a concrete situation, they are deceiving. When considered outside of this relation, these terms appear very precise in. idealistic simplicity. They are ideals and in their simplicity, they evoke a radical response, a response that is immediate and totally absorbing. Men die for freedom. Priests leave their Church for fulfillment. But when these categories are not separated from their context in life, their simplicity is lessened by the com-plexity of daily business. Their radicalness is tempered by respect for the values of concrete situations. The re-sponse to these ideals can still be radical and totally ab-sorbing, but in a way that is more realistic, persevering, and in the end more effective. The objective and concrete counterpart of these sub-jective and reflex categories is task. Task is the creation of values that can be shared, values not simply of an individual subject but of a public world, where many can partake. Yet, task is more than a man's material work. It includes also his duty to worship God, his duty to be thoughtful and thankful of truth and beauty, because such duties are eminently public, even when accom-plished in silence. Task is the outward going service of that which is not self. By emphasizing task as the necessary correlative of subjectivity, we respect the nature of the human subject. Man is no't an enclosed container but an outward thrust to another. Human subjectivity is basically intention-ality. The self becomes self in becoming other. Here we 4. ÷ Formation and Ta~k VOLUME 28, 1969 + ÷ ÷ V. P. Branick, $.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 14 have the fundam.ental human paradox--a man finds himself through his interest in another, a man achieves personal autonomy by binding himself in love of the other, a man can reflecton ideals only when engaged in tasks. Only the altruistic love of a task can preserve and intensify personal autonomy in the unavoidable restric-tions imposed by daily choices. Choosing some goal or some means to a goal always restricts and limits, whether a person simply accepts, another's choice or whether he chooses for himself. A decision always ex-cludes a multitude of alternatives. But a person who loves his task in no way loses autonomy by this restriction. In his love he concentrates himself in the positive core of his decision, locating his life in the values he wants to accomplish. Without that love he remains scattered over all the alternatives so that the restriction of the al-ternatives becomes a restriction of self. For example, one who loves the task of community prayer can accept the restrictions of a community schedule. One who loves his task of witnessing to eschatological values can accept disengagements from some elements of the commerce of civilization. In these loves a person seeks the fulfillment of what is not himself, and by so doing he develops in and through the unavoidable limitations. Fulfillment by love of task is such a common occur-rence that we tend to overlook it. We find it in the suc-cessful professional man, in the loving parents of a fam-ily, in the dedicated missionary. Conversely, we are struck by the lack of autonomy in the person concen-trating on his own stature in a type of adolescent self-consciousness. The person concentrating directly on achieving his autoflomy is the person least capable of finding it. By centering his attention on himself he can-not maintain the intensity of his normal thrust to the outside without which he cannot live as a mature free man. The man without a task is a tragic figure. The soul searching into which he is forced only aggravates the loss of identity he suffers. He is caught in a closed circle until another comes to him and appeals for his cooperation. In our present appreciation of personalism, the notion of task has faded from importance. Task appears as an impersonal category, something to do rather than some-one to relate to. But in no way are task and person op-posed. Rather the two notions are inseparable in the understanding of human relations. A task has signifi-cance only in view of the person who will benefit from it. And relating to a person implies concrete action that is more than purely symbolic gesture. To limit our cor-poral activities in interpersonal dynamics to mere signs of interior attitudes is to attempt an angelic community and to end up in a gross sentimentalism. Our interper-sonal relations are not simply encounters between spirits. Human community demands the creation of values through corporal work as a medium of com-munication. Task as an impersonal category is an in-dispensable presupposition for a truly human person-alism. A human community receives its unity and its identity from its common tasks. No community can exist on its own substance. A community which concentrates only on interior community life will never attain the well being of its members. The cohesion and dynamism of a com-munity results from a common advancement toward a goal which transcends the community. The convergence of the members with each other results from the con-vergence of all the members on a common goal. In selfless striving for this goal, the members find them-selves united. Their mutual confidence rests on the con-fidence each has that the other' is striving for the com-munity goal, or at least is not surreptitiously seeking his personal advantage to the detriment of that goal. Dis-unities are constructive only if they occur in the context of a greater dynamic unity. If the members agree on their general task, their different ways of conceiving the specific work enter into a productive dialectic. Even adamant differences about the means to accomplish a task are not divisive in the context of agreement about the end. But where members disagree on the basic task of the community, where they dispute the primary pur-pose of themselves as a group, there can be no dynamic coherence. No amount of dedication of the members to each other as individuals can supply for this lack of dedication to a common task. No matter how much the members love each other as persons, they cannot function together. In such a group, accord can exist only by agree-ment not to work together. That is, accord can exist be-tween individuals, but not between members of a func-tioning community. After saying all this about the dependence of the in-dividual and. communitarian subject on its tasks, we cannot stop here without risking a onesided distortion. All I have said is open to the totalitarian interpretation that individuals and communities should uncritically accept and dedicate themselves to tasks handed to them from the past. This is not true. A continuation of the analysis of the relation between self and task indicates why this is not true. Our objective tasks are not fully intelligible in and by themselves. These tasks depend on the subject just as the subject depends on the tasks. Every task presupposes a certain readiness in the subject. Ira man is not ready to meet objective realities by a Formation and Task VOLUME 2B, 1969 15 V. P. Branick, $.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS certain sensitivity or openness to them, he will never recognize them when he comes across them. And with-out this recognition the objective task can never exist. An educational task exists only for an educated person. A religious task exists only for a religious person. Only by knowing his own religious demensions can a person articulate and thereby give reality to an objective reli-gious task. Besides depending on a subject's recognition, a task also depends for its existence on a subject's freedom in accepting or rejecting it. A task exists only as someone's task, and only in a person's free decision can a task be-come his. The automaton cannot create a task for itself because it cannot freely identify its good with the accom-plishment of the task. A free decision is thus necessary for the existence of a task, and such a free decision pre-supposes a subject who has already achieved.a degree of selfhood or autonomy. This dependence of the object on the subject holds also for communitarian dynamics. The recognition and free acceptance or rejection by a community of its task presupposes a level of coherence and self-understanding already .existing in that community. A task could never draw a group if the group could not direct itself through a group decision. We seem to have an unbreakable circle here. The autonomy of the subject presupposes a thrust toward its objective task, but this thrust presupposes the au-tonomy of the subject. In reality this mutual dependence exists more as a dialectic or oscillation between self and task, by which the subject grows in maturity and his work grows in precision and importance with each turning of the self to his task and from task to self. At the beginning of this dialectic lies, on the one hand, the basic openness of the human spirit, and, on the other, the original call of reality which can only be the direct appeal of God Himself. Task, as this dialectic reveals, has a role in human life which is at once relative and absolute. Any given task will be relative because it depends on the subject who can therefore criticize and change it. This dependence of the task on the recognition and decision of the subject refutes a totalitarian submission of the person to his work. The autonomy which the task confers on the subject is the autonomy l~y which he can dominate the task. But because this autonomy is indissolubly linked with task as such, task is absolutely indispensable to human existence. We cannot change or criticize our need to work as such. And this absolute need to give ourselves to task is present in a concrete way in any given task no matter how temporary or contingent it is. In all its provisional and contingent character, the task at hand remains the source of dynamism for the human dialectic of growth. In fact, the mature development of task requires a very delicate balance between self-reflection and outward-going service, between critical detachment and dedicated engagement, between autonomy and abnegation. Today in many areas of religious life, I believe, we have upset this delicate balance. The sudden wave of self-criticism which religious life has undergone has over-weighted the subjective pole of the dialectical balance. Individuals and communities have almost locked their sights on themselves in a direct concentration on their subjective fulfillment. The surging experience of the need to criticize and modernize the communitarian tasks is failing to issue into a more intense outward dedica-tion. This need to criticize and modify tasks has resulted primarily from the advances of Christian theology in the last twenty years, advances which in a way climaxed and received great publication in the Second Vatican Council. Modern theological insights showed the great horizontal expansiveness of Christian life, the great variety of ways in which Christianity can be :lived. The former theologies. tended to picture Christian life in a rather narrow ver-tical plane which allowed variety only in terms of hier-archic positions. The various tasks of Christian life dif-fered from each other because some were more perfect than others. This gave an absolute character to de-cisions in the selection of concrete tasks. In this narrow but precise view of Christian life, the various tasks of religious orders--their ways of prayer, their apostolic works, their degree of cloister--all seemed direct deduc-tions from the gospel following necessarily from a totally unlimited acceptance of Christianity. By showing the horizontal expansiveness of Christian life, modern theology has changed this view. We can now see many ways of acting and working as Christians, each way with a dignity proper to itself, a dignity that is not simply a limited edition of that belonging to a more perfect task. Modern theology has not depreciated the basic tasks traditional to religious life; but it has rela-tivized them by presenting them in the context of other tasks, thus showing that the acceptance of a task results more from contingent decisions than from absolute de-ductions. There are pressing needs for so many tasks that no necessity binds a community or an individual to one or the other. Seeing for the first time the contingent and provisional character of their tasks, many communities and individ-uals are experiencing a real crisis of identity. The tra-ditional tasks on which they built their identity seem 4- ÷ 4. Formation and Task VOLUME 28, 1969 ]7 ÷ ÷ ÷ V. P. Branick, $.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ]8 to have been depreciated because they have been rela-tivized. For people who tend to think always in ab-solute categories, this relativization of traditional com-munitarian tasks is anguishing. Many religiou.s have become worried about their fulfillment and autonomy through such tasks. This worry often leads to a search to reabsolutize the community tasks, finding a modern task that is the task of the Church today. Although opening new possibilities and purging re-ligious life of obsolete structures, this intense concern about personal antonomy and this criticism of all tasks at hand is impeding the turning outward toward work in self-dedication. By fixing attention on tile subject, this critical self-consciousness is obstructing the oscillation between selfhood and task and in this way is diminishing the general vitality of religious life. Houses of formation are especially susceptible to this loss of vitality becanse it is there that the dialectic be-tween religious identity and religious task must begin. Equipped with neither the subjective identity of a re-ligious congregation nor an understanding involvement in its present tasks, candidates arrive usually with simply a willingness to enter. At this moment of entrance only a vivid presentation of tasks can engender enthusiasm, a presentation of tasks which the person sees worthy of his dedication. Concentrating on such tasks a young religious will gradually develop a self-possession in the style of the congregation that will make him fully responsible for its works, that will allow him to live without thought of external pressure, that will enable him to criticize and modify his tasks. But if on entering religious life or during the years of formation, he sees in the administrators a paralyzing hesitation regarding tile most basic tasks, if his program of formation turns his attention constantly back to him-self in questions of autonomy, fulfillment, and minimali-zation of rules, the dialectic of growth can hardly begin to operate. There is certainly no facile answer to the problem of developing religious enthusiam in a time when all tasks of religious life are being revaluated. We cannot simply ignore the severe doubts that do in fact exist in the minds of administrators. But the present hesitation to present concrete tasks to religious is serionsly hampering the possibility for formation. A rehabilitation of religious task must take place on two levels. The first level is that of the Church as a whole. On this level we can recognize a permanence and uni-versality of tasks. In the life of the Church there is a permanent need for some people to pray in a way that disengages them from personal participation in the eco- nomics and politics of our world, just as there is a per-manent need for others to ~ray in a way that involves them person.ally in economic and political progress. These needs derive from the very nature of Christianity. On this universal level we can articulate a theology that shows the beauty and depth both of the traditional and. o~ the new tasks of the Church. Such 'a theology of the functions of the Church can present these tasks in such clarity that they engender enthusiasm and initiate self-dedication. The second level is that of the particular congrega-tion. On this level we must learn to understand the co,,n~tin, gent and limited nature 'of the congregation'~ en-traiace into the universal work'of the Church. From the expansive range of ecclesial tasks, each with its own theology and permanence, a" congregation must decide on specific tasks to assume. This decision is necessarily contingent on historidal and p~rs~nal ,circumstances, but this contingency need not prevent an intense adherence~ to the tasks. The decision by a congregation will be based on its continge~tt capabilities, as a result of a his-tory of insights and ~pecializatiops, but in that decision a congregation enters into theuniversal dimensions evangelization. A chosen task may not be the most cen-tial, the most perfect possible task of the Church today, but by accepting it with its limi(ations, a religious con-gregation can take its part in the whole work of the Church in all its depth and beauty. The only alternative' to this is a perfectionist idealism that paralyzes all forts. Although in the actual appropriation of a task the two levels blend together, each operates according'to its own rules. The first level is theological and universal; the second, historical and contingent. Formation to task takes place on both levels. It educates to a vivid aware-ness of the universal tasks of the Church and to an ac-ceptance of the contingent communitarian decisions by which a society shares in these tasks. By focusing attention on the fulfillment and spon-taneity of the individual, many programs of formation today run contrary to the needs of both levels. The tasks of the Church are being obscured. Relieving the anguish-ing needs of the people of the world, bringing all men to an intimate knowledge and love of Christ, worshiping God as a community~these tasks of the Church are being displaced by concern for personal development. At the same time, the emphasis on minimizing rules and foster-ing spontaneity is blurring the need to accept the con-tingent communitarian decision of a task and the struc-ture of authority that makes the communitarian decision possible. Certainly we should be pruning away obsolete Formation and Task 19 rules, rules which are no longer associated with a task. But the effort simply to minimize rules for its own sake is equivalent to the effort to minimize community tasks. For a religious dedicated to the community work, the minimization of rules is not a burning issue. The dis-tinction between what is regulated and what is optional is of secondary importance. Rules appear as means of coordinating community effort, as expressions of what the community expectsof an individual, how he can contribute to the community functions. Since contribu-tions to the community functions may vary in a contin-uous range, from indispensable activities to actions which have little relation to the community work, the categories of "regulated" and "optional" are simply in-adequate to divide the day. Endless discussions about the precise limits of regulations indicate that the ques-tion of task has not yet been resolved. Formation must begin and end with mission, a selec-tion and a confiding of tasks, an education of people to the realities of these tasks that evokes their love for the good to be accomplished through these tasks. Trying to educate people to self-direction without at the same time giving them tasks will always tend to a loss of self-giving. Educating people to love and know tasks, allowing the tasks to draw people will inevitably result in a develop-ment of responsibility and self-confidence. The dynamism of task is the only atmosphere conducive to human autonomy. ÷ ÷ V. P. Branick, S.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 20 JOSEPH FICHTNER, O.S.C. Religious Life in a Secularized.Age Vatican Council II, in its decree on The Appropriate Renewal of the Religious Life, analyzed our renewal as a twofold process and laid down two generic principles for the pursuit of that renewal.1 The first principle takes us historically backward, the second forward. The first principle is a continuous return to the gospel of Christ as a basic norm of the religious life, and the second is an adjustment or adaptation to the physical, psychological, cultural, social, and economic conditions of our day. But at this point already one should ask the question: Is not religious life caught in a false dilemma when it at-tempts to return and renew itself at one and the same time? 2 How can it move backward and forward simul-taneously? Is it possible for religious to draw their in-spiration from the gospel as well as adjust themselves within the context of a secularized age? The decree underscores the return to the gospel ideal first of all; this is why a concerted and communal effort is to be made to catch anew the gospel inspiration as a rule of life and conduct. Yet the gospel presents reli-gious with no stereotype of their life that is always and everywhere valid and that they can turn to when-ever they find themselves in religious straits. In order to re-evangelize we have to ask questions of the Bible out of our own concrete, contemporary life, because the religious life experience of 1969 presents us with prob-lems. The problems are compounded because we have till now developed only the embryo of a new style of life which shows very indistinct features of further growth. XN. 2. "E. Schillebeeckx, "Het nieuwe mens- en Godsbeeld in conflict met her religieuze leven," Ti]dschri]t voor theologie, v. 7 (1967), pp. 1-27. I have followed to a large extent the development of ideas in this article. See also Soeur Guillemin, "Renovation de l'espHt et des structures," Vie consacrde, v. 38 (1966), pp. 360-73; she covers much of the same ground from a more practical point of view. Joseph Fichtner, O.S.C., is a faculty member of Crosier House of Studies at 2620 East Wallen Roadi Fort Wayne, Indiana 46805. VOI'UME 28, 1969 - ~oseph Fichtner, O~.C. REVIEW F.OR.RELIGIOUS We are asking questions, therefore, which the past Christian generations could not have asked since they did not live in a secularized age. The gospel cannot reply to questions not put to it; nor does it await questions from us which were already put to it by generations past.,'It is inconceivable that we should inquire .intb the Sc'riptures from the same van-tage point, say, as Sts. Jerome and Augustine had to do for .their respective communities whose members did not take vows but simply pledged themselves to persevere in their religious purpose. The medieval monks interpreted the Bible in a much different way than we can, and they tended to encapsulate the religious life into a profession of the three vows, a notion retained by canon law in its definition of the religious state.3 The former tendency was to regard the religious experience as a form more or less of flight 'from the world, of self-denial; renunciation, the exclusive service of God. We must strenuously reject the identification of the evangelical community life with the fo~ms it has taken in a given period and locale. Perhaps~- though you will have to judge this for yourselves--the change with the times and places is harder for the woman religious because of her naturally (and in other respects advantageously) conservative spirit. The past.historical ~onception of religious life hardly coincides with the demands made upon'human life by a secularized society.4 If we are to research the gospel for goals and guides to present,day religious .life, then we will have to approach it with an open mind, not with the m~ntality of our forebears, founders or foundresses, most of whom lived in a pretechni.cal, preindustrial, pre-democratic age. We may e~,en, have to rephrase our. ques-tions once. we listen to the cadences of God's word. The gospel may. echo. to us the question whether we have been tuned in to the secularization process critically, whether our life context offers any guarantee of human values. The times we live in, with their alternate possibilities of. good~, and evil, do not simply call for an unqualified adaptation. .-Hence what the decree aims atis that religious.evaluate their world in the light of the gospel. Some kind of eval-uation has already.been done for the Church at large in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World; here the world is seen from a threefold view-point-- as created, as fallen and sinful, and as loved and redeemed.5 Religious life itself has to be reinterpreted 8 C. 487. ' ]. Bonnefoy, A.A., "Presence au monde ~an.s une vie religieuse," Vie consacr~e, v. 39 (1967), pp. 353-67. ; . ~ 8 E. Pin, $.J., "Les insfituts religieux apostoliques et le ~hang~- ment ~ocio-cultuel," Nouvelle revue thgologique, v. 87 .(1965), pp. 395-411. by means of a confrontation between the two, gospel and world. Without such a confrontation, the attempt either to re-evangelize or to adapt is empty and meaning-less; it is sold short by too much evangelization on the one hand and too much humanization on the other. The only way to arrive at a confrontation of the two is to examine human experience today in the light of the gospel and to understand the gospel from the viewpoint of contemporary human experience. Man today looks upon the natural world as the raw material out of which he can create his own world. The supremacy he feels over the things of the world is chang-ing his view of himself too as part of this world. Through his own scientific work he finds himself able to live a more human life; by humanizing the world round about himself he is discovering more human values. One of the values that he has freshly uncovered and that have prompted him to make the world more hu-manly livable is his freedom. Freely and creatively he would carve out of the world a home where the human community can exist in justice and love. He is filled with an indomitable desire to build a better world where men can live together in the solidarity of justice and love. But the humanization of the world by means of science and technology has also created, by way of a byproduct, the danger for man to render this world uninhabitable. The Great Society has been so organized by man that it has well nigh done away with other human opportunities such as the contemplative side of life offers him. He is forced almost to flee from the world in order to have the time and place for that contemplation which does not only regard the things of God but respects the dignity otr his fellowmen. Man risks the danger of treating his fellowmen as things and of overpowering them, of using and abusing them as he would the things of nature. If he loses his respect for his fellowman, he is liable to manip-ulate him, exploit him, and usurp his rights to human achievement.6 Of all the human qualities young people wish for themselves and expect of others the most out-standing are personal right, authenticity, trust, under-standing, loyalty, and honesty. They reject any and every sort of depersonalization. Man can so dominate the world socially, economically, and politically, that he runs roughshod over his fellowman. So the same scientific and technological progress can be both a boon and a threat to a more human existence, depending upon the use to which man puts it for his fellowman. The whoIe secuIarization process that has fallen into human hands has affected man's stance toward religion, 6S6eur Marie-Edmond, "Qu'attendent les jeunes filles de la vie rcligicuse communautairc?" Vie consacrde, v. 39 (1967), pp. 40-50. + Religious LiIe, Secularized Age VOLUME 28, 1969 23 ÷ ÷ Joseph Fichtn~r, 0~.~. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS though primarily it is a social event that of itself need not lead to any irreligiosity. It does, however, set man upon the pinnacle of the temple of this world; it puts him into a relationship with the world which he never yet experienced. This change of relationship and his own understanding of it is bound to alter his view of God. While formerly the Church was the means of bringing his attention to God as He operated in nature, history, and society, now that man has asserted his creative power over the world, he has at the same time contrib-uted to its desacralization. God would seem to be left out; man comes to the fore. As a result the conclusion we can easily reach is that secularization and desacralization are pagan, heathen, or anti-religious. But the fact of the matter is that this proc-ess has both Christian and non-Christian elements and hence cannot be accept.ed unqualifiedly or uncritically. If anything shakes the younger generation, it is their fear for the destiny of a world so insecure in its secular struc-tures. To give the secularized world its due, we must ac-knowledge it with faith as God's creation to which he gave an autonomy and secularity. Our belief in His act of creation implies that the world be left wholly other than God---creaturely, human, worldly. 0nly if we recog-nize the world for what it is can we catch some insight into who God is, as Someone unworldly, transcendent, uncreated. The more we tend to sacralize the world, the less transcendence do we attribute to God and the less likely are we to worship Him alone. Acceptance of the world and everything worldly from a divine point of view means setting the world free for man; to secularize it is to allow it freedom, a created autonomy. In a sense, then, the secularization process follows from Christianity itself as a consequence of its refusal to commingle, confuse, or fuse God with the world. Chris-tianity has no intention of divinizing or Christianizing or baptizing the world from within, but rather of keeping the world humanized through the retention of its essen-tially human values. Christian secularity is precisely this, that Christians in a spirit of faith discern the dif-ference between the concrete Christian and the pagan elements which make up the world and allow it to be itself. Grace makes it possible for Christians to prepare for Christianization, that is, to secularize and humanize the world by means of a faith outlook. The Gospel does not sterilize the heart of man, emptying it of an appre-ciation of all earthly and human values; rather it opens to him the same full human perspective which Christ had in assuming and recapitulating humanity. Sin alone dims or eclipses the possibility of that perspective. This is the kind of world, its history and culture, in which we must situate the religious life, and this is the same world in which we can ask the appropriate ques-tions of the gospel for the inspiration of the religious life experience. A false understanding of the world will in-evitably lead to a series of false questions. It will incline the religious to view nature, the world, man, negatively, and argue for a flight from the world. The old concept of God.has undergone a change along with the old concept of the world. But the death-of-God theology has evidently failed to come up with a new con-cept of God. In the. past Christianity was always con-vinced that God is inaccessible and ineffable. Faced with the radical inability to express themselves about God or present him to their fellow Christians, theologians and mystics resorted to an apophatic or negative theol-ogy. They admitted to knowing less about who God is not than about who He is. Oftentimes God was popularly conceived as one who intervened in the world; such repre-sentations of Him in the ordinary theological manuals reflected the social and cultural milieu. The experience of faith in God was colored by the social and cultural context necessarily, but 'this did not render it less authen-tic than the experience of faith in our own cultural situation. 'If our era is less sure of and less concrete in its con-cepts of God, it is because we have turned God into a big question mark and into a popular conversation piece. Perhaps there has been more conversation about Him since his "death" than there ever was while He was still considered "alive." We would like to unmask all the former illusions about God and do away with all the pseudo-gods of the past, but in getting rid of all such idols we have not clarified or facilitated the making of God in our own image. By raising the problem of God in our own day, we are likely to forget our own human condition which threatens to falsify the truth about God. In searching for Him we run the risk of creating other idols .than those we just finished demolishing. One of our approaches to God which hides some of His reality for us and which we may be guilty of in the religious life is to think that we can dedicate our-selves to him directly and exclusively. This approach may be devoid of any real, concrete content, a sort of chase into empty space, a flight after some utopian ideal. The only way remaining for us to express ourselves about Him has to derive from our experience within this world and within this era of salvation history. God speaks to us through men, their world and history; this is the hearing aid by which we can listen to His voice. There r.eally is no opposition between God's word in Holy 4- Religious Lile, Secularized Age VOLUME 28, 1969 ÷ ÷ ÷ Joseph Fi~htner, O$.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Scripture and the authentic religious life experience of today, for the Scriptures provide us the norm whereby we can be faithful listeners to His word as it appeals to us in today's life experience. The latter feeds our under-standing of God, concretizes it, and gives content to our belief in God. To overlook this fact is to retrace our steps to the days when Christians felt it their duty to separate or alienate themselves from the world. We have no criticism to offer of their religious posture, be-cause it had meaning for them, but it leaves us without a real living God. Today we have the idea that to try to approach God directly and exclusively, without any worldly and human medium, is an unchristian illusion. We are inclined, if not theoretically then practically,, to distinguish between a Christian and a pagan secularity. We believe we come in contact with the living God in and through and with our fellowmen. This does not mean that as Christians we do not respond to God immediately and personally, but that our relationship with Him is real and concrete be-cause mediated through worldly and human realities. Christ experienced the immediacy of God's presence in Himself, in and through His humanity. He willed to be-come God in human form. In like manner we encounter God in the immediacy and mediacy of that image and likeness of Him which is man. What is immediate and what is mediate are not mutually exclusive but are linked together in our relationship to God. Against this modern background the religious life must examine the Scriptures to seek the solutions for the problems facing it. Sacred Scripture contains a number of evangelical counsels that simply are irreducible to the three classic vows the medieval monks or nuns pronounced. In fact, the gospel refers to only one counsel,7 one which was not expressly imposed or urged upon the early Christians.s It teaches that the perfection of love is attainable by all Christians, whatever their state of life, without their having to keep the counsel of celibacy.'° All Christians are called to an observance of the commandments and the other evangelical counsels in order to attain the per-fection of love. The one counsel alone is left to the free choice of every Christian and is the evangelical source from which the religious life has grown. Essen-tially, therefore, the religious life is a freely willed Chris-tian celibate life. This life is lived mostly in a community because few people freely will to live it in solitude.~0 7 Mt 19:10-2. s 1 Cor 7:25. ~ 1 Cor 13. ao Soeur Marie-Edmond, "Qu-attendcnt les jeunes filles?" The personal choice of this style of life is motivated by the gospel and makes sense fo~ alifetime only in virtue of the same~ The force of this motive is borne upon those young people who because of the instability and.change-ability of our age fear giving themselves to any style of life demanding continuity and stability. One who is will-ing to spend his entire life ~s a Christian celibate does.so because he is sensitive to the grace of 'God .cifll'ing. him in thegospel. He feels himself responsible to" God-who so strongly affects him that He becomes the source"of his religious life. But ~he particular form or structure of the religious life inspired by the gospel is ~as such a human project and a human construct. The whole human side of this life has developed in the course of history and is bound up with its vicissitudes. It,has t6 face the challenge of changing customs and cultures in older to survive arid renew itself. .We misunderstand the gospel message if.we base bur choice of a celibate life on a gupernatural motive alon~, as if we conceive the delibate life as a ctfoice between the natural good of marriage and .the supernatural good.of celibacy.11 Dedication of a celibat~ life to God has both immediate and mediate aspects about it, just a~ marriage itself. A couple united in Christian man'iage have an immediate duty toward God though they may mediate their love for Him through each other and thdy mayex-periefice tension and conflict in a way similar to what religious feel when they try to mediate their love for God through the world' and their fellowmen. The reli-gious life therefore has no immediate relationship to God without a worldly and human mediacy. Sometimes the immediacy of the religious life is more apparent, .'for instance, when religious live and work in community~ pray, celebrate the liturgy; at other times, in the apos-tolate, the mediacy of such a life comes into starker relief. Christian ~elibacy has also a human meaning, a natural value aside from its supernatural value, for otherwise, no matter how religiously or supernaturall~? motivated it is, it will somehow be left hanging in the air. Essen-tially it does not consist in a.chgice between God and 'a life partner; rather it is a positive choice of aw~y k)f life having natural and human meaning for those who have the iniier ability to embrace, it. Their choice, when you analyze it thoroughly, does not come down to one be-tween God and creature or between God and the world of man, but it is one which springs from the wholenes~ of his being. Celibacy of its nature permits the celibate to concen- ~ Schillebeeckx, "Het nieuwe mens- en Godsbeeld," p. 12. 4- +- +. Religious Ei~e, - Seculhri~ed Age VOL'U~E 2~, 4" 4" 4" Joseph FichOtn.Se.rC, . REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS trate upon a certain life value and to dedicate to it his entire life. He freely accepts celibacy because he is con-vinced this is the only way, special as it may be, for him to be totally expendable. The value he has discovered within himself so fascinates him that he is willing to remain unmarried to achieve it; he places himself at its service; he considers it a part of an authentic life. Christian celibacy, moreover, adds to the natural value a religious, charismatic value, especially if men and women would concentrate their whole life upon its value because they would be witnesses to the world of their conviction. Within the Church their witness to the value of celibacy is a more easily and understood sign. It is seen to be a means some men and women take for the sake of the kingdom of God. Religious give to the world an irreplaceable witness of a supratemporal element alive and at work in it. In a sense they transcend history, manifesting a supernatural value and significance--point-ers to a life beyond the present. The better they can serve mankind in this way of life, the better they are able to serve the God who founded His kingdom among men. Religious men and women will show to the world the. authenticity of their life only if they commit them-selves totally to it, convinced that their expendability makes their style of life worthwhile. Others may sacrifice marriage for the sake of a tem-poral career--scientific, social, political, cultural; but Christian celibacy on the contrary entails sacrifice for the sake of a religious value. In both instances there is a sacrifice of a human value, but in the latter a trans-cendence of the religious self becomes evident. The sacrifice points to a transcendence--men and women are willing to give up marriage not for some secular good but because they want to give evidence of the religious dimension of life.x2 The religious sign value of celibacy too easily fades out or is lost among those who engage solely in a secular career, good and beneficial to society as it may be. More than ever in the past religious must be a sign of the transcendence of God in the midst of a secularized world, even when at times this sign may appear to be nothing else than a protest against a world gone pagan. They give eschatological witness of a life that overcomes the temporality of this worldAa Christian celibacy has essentially a close affinity to the other evangelical counsels, poverty and obedience, in that they too contain positive human and religious values. Heretofore the general tendency has been to re-gard the counsels or vows too negatively and isolatedly. = Karl Rahner, "Reflections on the Theology of Renunciation," Theological Investigations, v. 3, pp. 47-57. 18 Lk 20:34-7. When a problem arises, we are prone to isolate it and to forget it may have far-reaching and entangled roots (the race problem provides a good example in those who advocate job opportunity for a cure-all). Perhaps we lose sight of that unity of purpose which brings all counsels together--the following of Christ in His kenotic life; and especially the unity of the person living a trinity of counsels. Like Christian celibacy, poverty and obedience are questionable because in our time and culture they seem to lack any positive value. Today's trend is to stress the need of getting rid of poverty and of accentuating free-dom, and thus to outdate them. The question then arises how are we religious to retain the positive, human values of the two at a time when they are considered caricatures or illusions of reality. For example, how are we to evaluate poverty in a society characterized by mass production, mass consumption, white-collar work, a so-ciety preferring to poverty a prosperity that promotes health, welfare, and education programs, and leisure? Religious poverty makes sense only if it is in keeping with the real poverty existing among peoples today. Its inherent demand is that we live on a similar basis with the poor and at the same time, precisely because we have pledged ourselves to be poor, join in the effort to better the lot of the poor. Religious poverty must square with the economical situation of society and must take into account the level or standard of living. Young reli-gious are filled with a sense of sha~'ing rather than econ-omizing (as formerly) material, intellectual, and cultural goods--a spirit more current with the times. A balance has to be struck between the means and the end of the religious institute which, in any case, will require a special moderation in food, clothing, recreation, and a determination to earn a communal living by hard work. In addition, various kinds of social work performed by religious may lend themselves to social progress. Religious community life can no longer model its authority upon the medieval feudal system. Religious authority that appeals for obedience in the name of God's will is old-fashioned; it dates back to that old era of the divine right of kings. It leads to a confused idea that superiors must reign and their opinion must prevail under the pretext of deriving their authority from God. On the other hand, wherever like-minded people are ¯ gathered into a community, however much they may be motivated by love, they will still have to hold to the inte-grating factors of authority and obedience. Faithful re-ligious do oblige themselves to observe the will of God. Such a spirit of obedience is all the more sensible when Religious Li]e, Secularized Age VOLUME 28, 1969 ~9 ÷ ,÷ ÷ Joseph FicOht~n.Cer., REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ¯30 it believes God speaks His will not only through the superior but within a life situation, within a community living together with love, friendship, dialogue, for the common good, and from within one's Own conscience. This type of obedience is not a blind following of the .superior's will rather arbitrarily determined or unex-plained, nor the keeping of meaningless, minute, mean commands, a routinized life without any commands at all, a perfunctory performance of duty without any pro-fessional competence, but an open-eyed observance of God's will as it is made known within an entire life situa-tion. The American practice of obedience functions best in an equalitarian atmosphere; Americans will not tol-erate supremacists in their midst; they are. used to bu-reaucratic (in the good sense of the word), consultative government. The religious life then consists not first and foremost in a negation, the exclusion of positive human and religious values, but in a special Christian, meaningful way of life. This life does entail the sacrifice of such values as wealth, marriage, independence which most Christians freely choose and cordially treasure. By the mere mention of the words "sacrifice" or "renunciation, we are likely to turn off people who think such practices .dwarf the human personality or stifle its spirit.14 Renun-ciations, however, are emphatically no evasion or escape f.r.om the world. The paradoxical fact about them is that they detach us to some degree from the world so as to allow fuller involvement in other ways.15 Religious do not directly choose to sacrifice earthly and human values, but they do choose a Christian way of life full of other and superior values accepted in a spirit of faith, hope, and love. Tertullian once re-marked: "Every choice implies a rejection." ~0 In choos-ing a kenotic way of lift Christ did not sacrifice human values m~rely for the sake of supernatural values; His prefere, nce was for a way of life out of various, meaning-ful messianic possibilities. Among other things His was a predilection for a celibate life because it left him free to establish the kingdom of His Father.17 Religious likewise are inclined toward a style of life which does not drive them from the world but enables them to orient their life, energy, and competence toward the world's future. Theirwhole thrust is to take the world with them to God, and this is the reason for their willingness to accept sacrifice or renunciation along with that a4 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, n. 41; Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, n. 46. ~ K. Rahner, "Reflections." 16 Apology, 13, 2. ~"~ Lk 9:23. faithful and unconditional service they would give to God and their fellowmen. The loving service they offer concretizes that self-emptying which contradicts an egotistic spirit. The love they dedicate to God and to the world of men expressly calls for self-criticism, sacrifice, and self-emptying. If there is any emerging feature of the new-style religious life it is the conviction of its' mem-bers that they have to be present in and open to the world. The fact that the religious life is a matter of lifelong choice makes it difficult for people of our times to recog-nize its value and meaning. They are quite well con-vinced, and rightly so, that man is so built as to be un-able to appreciate the unknown dimensions of a human act binding him for a lifetime. Human psychology is so complex that for one to make such a binding decision wonld oftentimes be irresponsible, lighthearted, an act tmcharacteristic of the human will. This attitude is exemplified not only in the modern outlook upon the religious life but upon marriage too. Can man morally commit himself to an obligation that, humanly speak-ing, seems to be contradictory to his very nature? No matter how free and knowledgeable his act may be today, he cannot foresee tomorrow--he may react differently to his choice once he is put into hard circumstances where he is likely to experience his failings. To validate and give meaning to his decision, his only alternative is to entrust himself to Christian hope. That this modern mentality has a glint of truth about it, there can be no doubt. But there are values which for the moment we cannot, certainly not [ully, appreciate or approve, which nonetheless surpass the momentary situation and are imperative for the integrity of man. They have an enduring value; they hold good in any and every situation (with some exceptions) which man has to abide by if he is to be true to his own nature. In the matter of the counsels and their public pro-fession, the vows, we are dealing with a choice that in the first place is not ethically binding, it is not necessary, it is not a matter of commandment. So why should anyone be obligated to keep his choice for a lifetime if he has freely willed it in the first place? Man has an intrinsic right to freely change his mind, to decide tomorrow against his decision today. But this human vacillation is obviously giving the world much trouble. The value of following the counsels for a lifetime lies not in a freedom of choice alone but in the free and faithful acceptance of a way of life. It evidences how a religious finds it pos-sible and meaningful to dedicate himself for life despite his failings and mistakes; he accepts a lifetime of service. Fidelity too, and not only freedom, is a basic human + Religious Lile Secularized VOLUME 28, 1969 REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS quality, .substantiated by both the nature of man and his history. The will-to-fidelity must have meaning therefore; it is not a mere will-o'-the-wisp; it is the expression of the human self once and for always. Despite the fact that man can point to the vicissitudes of history and to the uncertainty of the future, that he can personally leave himself open to various possibilities for the sake of ex-periment, to see how he reacts to them in the process of maturing, still his human limitations tell him that he cannot experiment or vacillate in his decisions forever. His human limitations force him to make that decision to which he can devote the totality of his life. This is what psychologists have called the "fundamental op-tion," which has its correlative reality in a fidelity to grace and is motivated by a single love, the following of Christ. The fidelity, and integrity of a life of the counsels springs from our efforts, gradual and constant, to per-sonalize them, unify them, liberate ourselves thereby from the selfish impulses which may dominate our lives. Fidelity and integrity are ours to the extent that the counsels permeate us; taken together they add up to a complete style of life. I dare say one reason for religious discontent stems from the failure to bring the three counsels within the focus of the one fundamental option. The saying, "Divide and conquer," applies here: the more divided and disrupted a life, the greater the loss of personal energy and the less resistance to difficulties.18 To be a full man is to be faithful to the true self. It is by totally giving that each of us becomes totally him-self. The full Christian is one who gives a faithful re-sponse to that divine fidelity which never fails him unless he proves faithless to himself. The basic human reason for the inviolability of the religious life is the fundamental option, and not the pub-lic vow from which the religious can be dispensed. The religious who opts for the celibate life is a living em-bodiment of the counsels, particularly celibacy; they do not exist in the abstract or in vows or in constitutions. In making a lifelong choice man wants to be true to himself and thus to bind himself in the service of a basic value. This value is an enrichment to both the religious him-self and to his community. The value, as it were, me-diates between the person and the community, recip-rocally helping the person to serve the community and the community to respect and draw benefit from the per-son by warding off some risks of instability. In its wider scope, the value of a religious community extends to the unlimited horizons of the Church and society. When See Summa theologiae, 2-2, q.44, a.4, ad 3. a person publicly announces his fundamental option to live a celibate life in a religious community, he makes an appeal to the community to help him be a full man and a full Christian. He is helped negatively when the com-munity does not interfere with or hinder the realization of his fundamental option--the development of his personality under grace; he is helped positively when the community has a concern and care for his life ful-fillment. The binding force of a vow is derived immediately from the option one makes of God but mediately from the religious community and the Church in which the religious pronounces his vow. The religious .vow has a quality of reciprocity between the religious himself and the community of his profession. Between the two there exists a sort of two-way street of right and responsibility. In our sociotechnic world there still is much need of the other-directed spirit, of teamwork and a measure of con-formity and mutual respect to obtain the same goals. The religious cannot oblige the community onesidedly, nor can the community willfully or lightly discharge its duty toward the religious. Just as the religious can prove unfaithful to his community, so can the community fail the religious particularly if it does not renew or up-date itself. The human and Christian quintessence of the reli-gious life consists of a special concentration upon a lifelong value by means of a freely willed Christian celibacy. Whatever is added to this quintessence is of human creation and consequently is historically con-ditioned. The evangelical inspiration is subsumed into a variety of concrete forms and structures and institu-tionalisations, all of which are bound up with historical experiences and cultural patterns. None of them has eter-nal value, not even the form(s) the founder or foundress gave to the gospel message. Whenever the evangelical inspiration is found wrapped in a new life experience, its particular value can be questioned and criticized by the psychologist, sociologist, economist, hygienist, anthro-pologist, and others interested in the practical life of man. They compel us to rethink the religious life as it is time-honored and -bound in our constitutions. It is a fatal mistake to identify the latter with the gospel in-spiration. The Council fathers of Vatican II were not unmindful of the fact that religious institutes periodically revise their constitutions in order to adapt themselves to time and place. Surely in calling for a radical overhauling of the religious life they were thinking of the social and cultural revolution we are passing through, when slight and detailed changes and modifications are not enough. + + + Religious Li~e, Secularized Age VOLUME 28, 1969 33 + ÷ Joseph Fichtner, 0.$.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS There is much room for consolidating, deepening, and trimming. The crisis we face is deeper and graver than we know; it is clearly evidenced by the revolutionized concept of man and God in our secularized age. If the religious institute as we know it is to survive, we must make a heroic effort to restructure and revitalize it. It does not need a heart transplant, but it will need a series of blood transfusions. Needless to say, the religious institute that cannot or will not adapt will sing its own requiem. The gospel inspiration of the religious life offers no guarantee that the various traditional forms or structures have to endure forever. A religious institute may well have served its purpose and should go out of existence or coalesce with a more viable group. The life experience today is so new, so revolutionalized, so secularized, that in a sense all re-ligious institutes can be considered old which do not reinterpret the gospel in the light of the new life situa-tion. We have to bear a crisis so severe that only a radical restructuring of the religions institute will tide it over: This restructuring has to be more than an offscouring of antiquated practices, making our life easier or more sociable. It has to arise from a thorough re-evangelisation which asks questions of itself and of life as religious live it in a secularized society. Nobody can accomplish this tremendous task but the community itself, and especially its young members who are not baffled by the new life experience becat~se they have been born and raised in it. But one can hardly insist enough upon the duty of the entire community, young and old members, to enter into the restructuring phase. This is not a task divided between the young members pushing ahead with a crea-tive spirit and the old upholding the canons of ortho-doxy. Both have to be patient and indulgent. Nor is it a summoning of an endless series of meetings and discus-sions where members reflect upon their life, haggle back and forth over community life, the apostolate, the struc-tnre of authority, and what have you, yet in the mean-while make no effort at experimentation with new forms and are fearful of groping toward a reincarnation of the religious life. Who does not feel stymied by an inconsist-ency between thought and action, plan and life? Given plenty of room for experimentation, for pilot projects, not necessarily in every monastery or convent but here and there where local needs require it and the proper authorities are willing to assume the ultimate responsi-bility, where everybody enters enthusiastically and not merely tolerantly into the experimentations, thus mani-festing their loyalty to the institute, the religious life will blossom out anew, perhaps in an unsuspected way-- at least under the mysterious, unforeseeable guidance of the Holy Spirit. ANDRI~E EMERY Experiment in Counseling Religious When* I began working at the Hacker Psychiatric Clinic in 1961---on the staff of which I am the only Catholic, unless I count one doctor, who although baptized Catholic does not consider himself a member of the Church--the general opinion of the staff would have paralleled the oft-quoted but not sufficiently validated statement that many more religious than lay persons were mentally ill. At that time they thought, I guess, that most if not all religious must be at least a little crazy.~ In the past seven years the climate of opinion in our clinic has changed, not as a result of apologetic dialogu-ing but through every day, pragmatic experience. Today, if one were to ask our staff for an opinion, they would probably say that the problems of religious were rather similar to those of lay people but that on the whole the religious seemed to be more insightful, more intelligent, and more motivated toward resolving their problems. O£ course, except for the very ill, who constituted merely a fraction of our religious clientele, intelligence and moti-vation could be presupposed; otherwise they would not have asked for psychiatric help. The Hacker Clinic is not a subsidized agency but a private clinic with some 20 professionals on the staff, most of them psychiatrists (M.D.'s). Because of its private character, patients who seek help there are mostly middle-class, financially independent or well insured, and thus comparable to the well-educated and, sup-posedly, well-socialized religious. In the past three and one half years 156 religious--73 men and 83 women-- and 6 diocesan priests were seen in our clinic. I, personally, spent more than 3500 hours interviewing these men and women. Since each person * This is the text of a talk given on August 8, 1968, at the Ameri-can Canon Law Society's Workshop on Renewal at Notre Dame, Indiana. 4- Andr~e Emery, area director of the Society of Our Lady of the Way, is a sociologist and clinical counselor residing at 127 South Arden Boule-vard; Los Angeles, California 90004. VOLUME 28, 1969 ÷ ÷ admitted to our clinic undergoes a full evaluation, which includes testing and psychiatric consultation and in-volves interviews with at least three different profession-als, and since some religious were seen in therapy not by me but by other members of our staff, the total hours spent by our clinic with religious and priests could easily be three or four times this number. I did not include in my 3500 hours time spent in workshops, conferences, seminars, personal interviews during educational ven-tures, nor time spent evaluating aspirants before they were accepted into a community. Thus the 3500 hours, and some, were devoted entirely to direct clinical inter-views, either for evaluation or for therapy. The 156 religious seen in the past three and one half years--118 of whom were finally professed--represent 34 communities. Of the finally professed 66 were religious sisters, 5 were religious priests, 31 were major seminar-ians, 14 were teaching brothers, and two were members of a secular institute of men. One religious priest was on leave of absence, one woman religious was exclaustrated, and three were dispensed from perpetual vows shortly before coming to the clinic. Of the remaining 38 religi-ous, 21 had temporary vows--5 men and 16 women-- and 17 were novices, of whom 14 were men. Only about 10 per cent of these patients were diag-nosed psychotic and approximately another 10 per cent as severely neurotic. The majority merely had problems, probably not very different from those who did not seek our help. The median age of all religious men and women and diocesan priests whom we saw was 28 years. The median age of the men was somewhat lower than this figure, be-cause of the relatively large number of seminarians and novices among them, and that of the women was some-what higher. Only 19 per cent of the women and 8 per cent of the men were over 40 years of age. The services rendered by the clinic varied. 78, fewer than half of the total, were simply evaluated by us. Of these we recommended therapy or counseling for 37, but to our knowledge only in ten instances was our recom-mendation followed. The other 27 did not receive the recommended help. At present, there are 10 men and 10 women religious in therapy in our clinic, 7 of them for less than a year, 13 for more than a year, and there were 64 others in therapy who are no longer coming. 22 hospital patients were visited daily; the majority who were outpatients were seen once or twice a week, and a few follow-up cases were seen once a month. All were seen in individual therapy, but 15 were also in group therapy. Priests and brothers attended group sessions with lay men, the sisters had their own group. 86, or more than half of all the religious and priests seen by us in the past three and one half years, told us that they wished to leave the religious or priestly life. Had we had longer contact with those whom we have merely evaluated, the number might have been even larger. We did not ask them directly about this and not all volunteered unasked-for information in the first in-terview. Exactly half of those who mentioned leaving did leave, most of them shortly after evaluation and without hav-ing been given an opportunity for further counseling-- or perhaps not desiring it. Ten who were in therapy in our clinic left their communities after therapy was in-terrupted against their wishes or against our recommen-dation. Of the 74 whose therapy with us was not interrupted, only four left--three during therapy and one after mu-tually agreed termination of therapy. These figures speak for themselves: problems can and should be solved rather than run from. After listening carefully to a relatively large number of religious men and women, I asked myself the ques-tion: Are their problems similar or different from those that weigh down our other patients? We cannot separate our personal growth and our in-dividual crises from the historical development and con-temporary crises of the group with which we are identi-fied. There is no human being who is free from the influence of the society into which he was born and in which he has been raised. While we sift perceptions and experiences through our personal physical and psycho-logical apparatus that is very particularly our own and give them special emphasis and slant, our apperceptions, our symbols, our values, our conflicts, our likes and dis-likes, the very traits that we think of as most personal, most expressive of our individuality, are suprapersonal. They are consensual with the culture in which we are rooted; at least they must be such if we are to be con-sidered "normal" and not "odd" by our contemporaries. This was brought home to us rather early in our ex-perience with religious patients. At that time some of our non-Catholic staff still expected to find intolerable conditions triggering if not causing the acute problems of religious. (Off the record, I have seen conditions in religious houses of men which I, or most any woman, religious or lay, could not have tolerated, and I am sure that some men, in turn, would feel the same way about our houses.) But to come back to the clinic: Not more than half a dozen of our religious patients described without corn-÷ ÷ ÷ Counseling Religious VOLUME 28, 1969 37 4. Andr~e Emery REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 38 plaint, external circumstances in their convents that seemed intolerable to us. The remarkable thing was that. the communities from which they came were all foreign in their origin and rule and also in their membership. The conditions described would have seemed intolerable to most American religious, too; yet the religious who lived under these conditions, including our foreign-born patients, did not find it particularly intolerable. And so we had to face the fact that our judgment of what was tolerable or intolerable was made from' the point of view of national culture, which was the same for American doctors as for American religious from active congrega-tions. Taking this basic dependency on the culture group for granted, we cannot be astonished that many of the basic problems of religious men and women in the United States do not seem to differ greatly from those of other American men and women. The growth of Western civilization, together with its stratification and specialization, has created models of shifting, sectional, and contradictory prototypes, from Ronald Reagan to Martin Luther King Go Malcolm X. Ours is a mobile society, multi-valued, materialistic, outer directed, as the sociologist would say, easily brain-washed by mass media, advertisements, fads, and. ffish-ions. It is peer-group oriented rather than hierarchical and, at present, is plagued by rebellions, which while not necessarily more violent than those of the past are cer-tainly more ubiquitous. Change and not stability is the epitome of this kind of society even in human relationships, as the steadily in-creasing divorce rate dramatically shows. That time, and thus change, is a human dimension was already recog-nized by Heraclitus 2500 years ago. But the rate of change is not constant; some structures change slower than others; and there are periods when the same entity, be it matter, living being, or human society, slows down or accelerates. The period in human life when change is most evident is adolescence. Yet Erikson, who is perhaps the best known psychologist of this country, calls this period "moratorium"--delay of adulthood, which the young person needs to integrate earlier childhood experiences and to learn to conform to the larger society which will soon replace his immediate family environment. In our Western world--and, particularly in the United States which is considered the apex of it--this morato-rium on adulthood has become extended far beyond the period of physical and sexual maturation and," thus, adolescent problems he.avily "interlace and aggravate the problems that young adults, as a matter of course, must face. It is not that our young who marry or enter religion are much younger in age than were those in former generations, but their readiness to assume adult respon-sibilities, particularly continuing responsibilities, seems to be less. Young and not-so-young religious who were born and nurtured in our culture are no less exempt from this extended moratorium and its consequences than are their married counterparts. Is it really--as we often hear---~the hierarchical struc-ture of religious communities that keeps religious im-mature? More immature than their lay counterparts? We did not find religious more immature or more frequently immature. But, obviously, those who did not wish to assume responsibility, for whatever reason, had a better excuse, a ready-made rationalization. Still, the child wife, the happy-go-lucky husband are not rarities either. The impulsive adolescent who marries or enters religion, having "fallen in love," will back out quickly, and this will be less traumatic for the religious than for the married. But those who cling to the idealized image con-structed by their immature motivations and resist facing reality---even a reality not inferior to their fantasy, just different--will experience severe crises, in marriage or religious life alike--one, two, five, ten years after their initial commitment. The fantasy wears away bit by bit, leaving them numb, empty, and somehow feeling cheated. I was told with great feeling by a 25-year-old mother of four that she had just discovered that she was not a teen-ager any more but "mommy" and that she did not like it a bit. As a matter of fact, she did not know whether she liked children at all. And I had to listen to a very angry, very depressed young superior of 28, who "just wanted to do a good job," but whose ambition was thwarted by the non-cooperation of several sisters, in-cluding one severely mentally ill, and who found that she could not maintain the unruffled, cooly kind exterior that earned her the early appointment to office. The pedestal broke, both under the community where "such things could happen" and under her who could not live up to the fantasy ideal. But to go a step further: Not only does our culture extend the moratorium on adulthood, it openly vaunts that adulthood is not worth aiming for. We have a cult of youth--the historical development of which, though relevant, cannot be presented here. Youth has ceased to be regarded as a transition period in which adult living is learned, in which adult identities are crystalized. It has become an aim, an identity, a subculture, emulated in some ways by the broadest segments of society. Who wants to be an adult today? (And who wants to be a + + ÷ Counseling Religious VOLUME 28, 1969 39 A~dr~e JEnt~ry REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS religious superior?) The model wears a miniskirt not only on her hips but in her (or his) head. At the same time, in strange contradiction but with unavoidable logic, we have put terrible responsibilities and burdens on young shoulders, probably more so than did any former generation. One of the main characteris-tics that differentiate human from animal life is time binding: the ability to transmit experience from one-generation to another. To demand from young people that they learn all the answers "on the go," pragmati-cally, by experimentation, to pretend that in the few years of their lives they could and should discover or duplicate the accumulated experience of mankind is sheer hypocrisy, or what is worse, delusion. The im-mature cannot become mature in human society with-out guidance. To quote Erikson: "By abdicating, by abrogating responsibility, the older generation deprives the young from forceful ideals which must exist for their sake--if only so that they can be rebelled against." Ra-tionalizing our inconsistencies and vacillations, our cow-ardice and lack of principles, with the excuse that it frees them from dependency does not help the young to grow. Is the peer society of the street gang superior to the authoritarian family still found in urban minority groups and in farming areas? If we elected (or, God forbid, appointed) only religious under 35 years of age into all offices, would that really guarantee a better gov-ernment than when we acted according to a different cultural pattern and gave the offices only to the old and supposedly "wise"? Are the younger more tolerant, do they show more empathy, more Christian virtue than the old? Or the other way around? No. The generation gap is legitimate only as an ado-lescent phenomenon--as a pause (though a very active pause) in which the young person has left childhood behind and has not yet reached adulthood. Otherwise the gap is mostly semantic: personalities clashing because they do not use the same symbols, same words, for the same concepts. Interestingly, now it is the old who are expected to learn the jargon of the young and not the other way round. I still smile when I remember a recent conference attended by some 200 people where no one was less than twice 16, and most three times that age and more, and where we had to sing Ray Repp songs during Mass--which in my opinion are both poor music and poor theology--just to show that we were "with it." To this point I have spoken only of a basic social fact--I don't like to call it problem--that affects both lay people and religious in our culture and which is at the root of many symptoms that we encounter in the clinic. There is an important facet of the present confusion that (oncerns religious and priests in particular. At a recent discussion in our clinic I was asked whether I could specify the ideal, the model of a religious--his own concept of his role or identity. I had to admit that had I been asked this question ten years ago, or even five, I would have thought it answerable--but not now. Incidentally, I have asked this same question of several major superiors and received just as vague a reply. It becomes more and more clear that the theology of religi-ous life still needs to be written. Up to the time Pope John opened the windows of the Vatican, we have had--and to some extent we still have--a subculture of religious institutes, distinct though related to othe~ subcultures of the Catholic Church. In the United States the religious subculture was colored by Irish-French, or rather 'French-Irish Ca-tholicism. This religious subculture, this cultural island, was well defined, stable, hierarchical, in contrast to the mobile, multi-valued, peer-oriented culture that sur-rounded it. It had not only a particular philosophy but also its own symbolism and language--understood only by the initiated but understood by all of them much in the same way. Because of its confidence-inspiring stability and the idealism of its teachings, it greatly appealed to many: to the searching, to the young who wanted to cut the apron strings but still needed support, to those who needed status, or those who wished to leave behind materialism, competition, and self-seeking. In a sense it was all to all: it provided security and challenge, asceticism and freedom from cares, opportunity for self-development and oppor-tunity for self-sacrifice. Or so it seemed. As we have been a nation on wheels for some time, not only the present generation of religious but at least two previous ones had to do quite a bit of adjusting to this distinctly delineated structure when they left their families of origin. Perhaps the children of foreign-born parents found it easier to adjust--perhaps not. It de-pended on how much they introjected or, conversely, rejected the values of their primary group. But whether first, second, or fourth generation of Americans, all who entered attempted to adjust to religious life as they found it. I said, attempted to adjust, because our early up-bringing cannot be completely eradicated and conflict patterns will persist. Many of our seriously ill patients were older men and women: some chronically ill with symptoms of chronic frustration in attempted adjust-ment; some acutely ill, with primary processes breaking through the surface of more or less successful controls exercised for years. Adjustment to the religious life, however, has not been 4- Counseling Religious VOLUME 28, 1969 4] ÷ ÷ ÷ A~tdr~e Emery REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS entirely a one-way street. Needs and values which the individual member brought from his primary culture had also an effect on the religious institutes. These slowly changed, became more American in character, sought some kind of equilibrium with the broader society around them. Still, on the whole, they remained distinctive. Thus, the young person who entered might have found it more or less ego syntonic, more or less cor-responding to his personality and early upbringing, but rarely found it completely so. The religious way of life always demanded sacrifice, self-denial, rejection of some earlier values. At the same time it offered sufficient re-wards to enable the individual to exist in it. And then, if I may say so without offending, after Vatican II we suddenly changed horses mid-stream. The point here is not whether the change was for the better or for the worse, and most of us hope and trust that it will be to the better; nor am I questioning the need, in some respects the overdue need, for change. I merely wish to underscore the unavoidable problems that arise from such a massive and headlong change. For the sake of illustration, imagine that you are a teacher, nurse, or drill-press operator and on short notice you are told that your job description and the require-ments for employment have been redefined and that the procedures as well as the rewards have been changed. Moreover, not only are the old role definitions super-seded, but you are told that you must get new directives and guidelines--except that you are not sure from whom or what. Would you not get upset? As one of my patients said: "Formerly we knew that if we got on the boat that went in the right direction and didn't get of[, we were ok. Now we are made personally responsible to get where we are going, but no one has yet thought it through how to get there." Under such circumstances it is understandable that severe conflicts develop. You will say that most of the changes were thoroughly discussed and dialogued, that they were not sudden, that opinions were polled, votes were taken. No one's good will and integrity are being questioned. But even if experiments Were discussed beforehand, did we evalu-ate them thoroughly afterwards? This conference is an attempt to do so. Just how long is it that we have been discussing them? Two years, three years, five years? If we cannot integrate complex childhood experiences during the normal years of adolescence and must extend the moratorium, just how long do you think we need to sift and integrate the huge mass of divergent opinions, rules, roles, and behavior that has been sprung on us in the recent past? A frequent consequence is panic, and not necessarily among the old timers who now have an excuse to remain passive, to leave the initiative to the young, and, if they cannot resist temptation, to sit back and criticize. It is more often the young who panic, because the responsi-bility is too great. Hence exodus of many young progres-sives. Willy-nilly, they accept re.sponsibility for them-selves, but not for the groupl And one cannot blame them; the rules of the game are equivocal and they do I . not know what will prove rewarding. When the religious role is merely a thin veneer on the .I personality, under the abrasion of uncertainties and clashes it wears off. Religio6s ,,who s'eeme,d, to be well adjusted now revert to tlaeir real selves--and since public disapproval has diminished--leave the subculture with which they were not fully identified. It is only lately that we have come to recognize that ¯ I keeping young religious isolated for long periods in the exclusive company of their peers, even for the sake advanced education, did not help them develop ~rich human qualities and did not foster community spirit. They tended to remain a sepa, rate group which out of psychological necessity had to f, ancy itself better and dif-ferent from others, inside and outside the community. The unreality was further inflated when the young sisters were assigned, strmght from school, into positions which their lay ¯counterparts ~could achieve only .after many years of hard work. We liave seen the young Ph.D. who was made a full professojr right after she received her degree leave the community when she encountered the first serious obstacle; the[ young R.N., supervisor without ever having been a rookie nurse, getting doctors, staff, and patients into turmoil land feeling "defeated for good"; the young priest, promiiing member of his order, going literally on a sit-down strike because he could not do all that he expected from hi~nself and from others. Into this group belong also t~e men and women whose delayed adolescence led to so-cAlled "late blooming" and who leave religious life because of real or purported .I sexual oroblems. In our experience, there were far fewer of .these than generally assumed, at least among the women religious. Here I must stop and quali[y~ what I have just said. In the last two months 78 case histories accumulated on my desk, of clients not seen by us in the clinic but about whom I was consulted by a non-sectarian adoption agency. These are cases of seventy-eight ex-religious, most them college graduates, many with advanced degrees, who left their convents 6 to 18 months ago and who are expecting a child out of wedlock. They are mostly in their middle thirties, and most of the fathers of the child ÷ ÷ ÷ Counseling Religious VOLUME 28, 1969 Andr~e Emery REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 44 to be are members of underprivileged minority groups. Not one was a victim of rape. Practically all said the same thing: our community did not change fast enough with the times; our community is not involved with the poor and underprivileged. We wanted to get dose to people in a personal apostolate (none of them were trained social workers); we wanted to live with them in the inner citymand get involved. And so they did. A few of them stated that they were advised by priests to leave the celibate life and get married. But, one of them added bitterly, they never warned her how few eligible men there were in her age bracket. Not knowing these women personally, I cannot judge how many had serious sexual problems, for which this certainly was not the answer, and how many were naively following fashions or using broadly preached but not sufficiently thought through slogans to excuse their im-mature acting out. As regards the quoted advice, it seems to be freely given to both men and women religious, as if marriage were a cure for sexual problems, to be used on prescriptionmwhich incidentally doesn't work rather than a sacrament and a responsible human relationship requiring maturity and mutual respect from the part-ners. ~Arhile some of the foregoing is a regrettable but pre-dictable reaction to stress, enhanced by a cultural incli-nation to buy what is advertised or what is in fashion, irregardless, there is an additional psychological com-ponent in the existing confusion among the religious. When a person searches for a new identity or new iden-tification, by definition he ceases to act in the role of a mature adult. He regresses to quasi-adolescence, to turmoil, indecisiveness, influencibility, impulsive acting out. We have seen this syndrome frequently in refugees and adult immigrants when they tried to adjust to their new country and its culture. The search for new mean-ing, new relevance, new identity in the religious life, whether to the better or worse, per se increases the turmoil caused by other individual and social factors. Perhaps the present quasi-adolescent upheaval of the religious is unavoidable, and hopefully it will lead us into a more and better integrated religious adulthood; but it is painful for those who go through it and more often than not embarrassing for the onlooker. Having become aware of widespread immaturity in comtemporary society and of its consequences, we are now inclined to fall into another pit. We are tempted to demand the impossible: that the girls and boys who enter our institutes, seminaries, convents, be mature. Per-haps maturity could be demanded if we would up the entrance age by some 20 years, in the hope that someone else would give the young the necessary guidance and would develop their personalities for religious life. We cannot stock novitiates and seminaries with sure bets--we have to take chances. We cannot screen out all who are immature, because if we do we abdicate as religious educators, as adults who take the responsibility for nurturing and forming the young. And certainly we should not screen out anyone on the basis of one test, given in absentia and scored by someone who never saw the applicant in person. On the other hand, we should not let young religious take perpetual vows when there is a serious question regarding their suitability. Severely neurotic persons, not to speak of psychotic or potentially psychotic ones, should not be burdened hy commitments which they will not be able to keep. But, when a professed member of a community be-comes disturbed or mentally ill, do we have a right to say that he should never have entered, that she never had a vocation, that they should be let go if at all possible? Are only the perfect seated at the banquet of the Master? Father Orsy last night said that St. Peter would not have been canonized--I don't think he would have been ac-cepted into a novitiate. Are our disturbed brothers and sisters very different from us but for being harder hit by suffering? Who is my neighbor? Only the under-privileged in the inner city? These troubled men and women in our communities are our closest neighbors. They are our poor: we have accepted them, we formed or tried to form or deform them, and we must bear their burden if we are to be called Christians. There are great differences in attitudes toward disturbed religious in their communities. Trying to get rid of them, with the shallow excuse that they never had a vocation and never should have been accepted, is injustice, even if there should be some truth in it; sending them from house to house or cramming them into the motherhouse is no answer to the problem either, and neither is the plan to live in an apartment with chosen friends the solution. When I said good-bye to the chief of our clinic, he said: "You will make a theological point, won't you? [He meant some reference to religion.] After all, you will be speaking to religiousl" I am tempted to belabor for a couple of minutes the often heard remark that no one wants to commit him-self today--which is true to a certain extent. But more often than not we found that persons, religious or lay, are desperately hungry for commitment. They want to give themselves to something or someone. They so very much want to entrust themselves to some group or indi-vidual. But they have not learned to trust because they Counseling Religious VOLUME ~'8, J.969 + ÷ Andr~e Emery REVIEW'FOR R'EL'~G IOUS ,t6 have not found anyone really trustworthy in their young years. Therefore they want and need some tangible evi-dence of appreciation, something in exchange--love or ~uccess--and they want a way out if things do not work out. Their needs are unfulfilled childhood needs; their reservations are rooted deep down in bone and marrow. The concept of commitment is not easily reconciled with such reservations--certainly not Christian commitment which must be an adult act of self-giving. I know that the saints and particularly the mystics are not "in" now, but rarely have I found a better description of the "perfec-tion of charity" (if I may use such an antiquated term) than in one of St. Catherine of Siena's mystical dialogues when she heard our Lord say." I have placed you in the midst of your fellows that you may do to them what you cannot do to me, that is to say, that you may love your neighbor of free grace without expecting any return from him. Someone asked how to tell whether a tree brought good fruit? We are too often inclined to think of success as good fruit. From where did we, Christians, get this notion anyhow? Of instant success as a must? Or even as hard-earned reward of the just? Christianity always was a losing cause, at least in the short run. Few apostles have reaped where they have sown. There was a small item in the Los Angeles morning paper the day I left home. I cut it out because of its deep significance for us. The follow-ing is an excerpt from it: The finest sermon he ever heard, said Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, was just three sentences long. It was delivered by Miss Kathleen Bliss of the Church of England, before the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches last year. In a very brief closing service we had sung the ancient hymn, "Veni Creator Spiritus". Dr. Bliss then read from the Gospel of Luke in the 4th Chapter, the account of Jesus returning to Nazareth and entering into the Synagogue and opening a book where it read, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering the sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to pro-claim the acceptable year of the Lord." ,, Then Dr. Bliss spoke her three sentences. Our hymn was a prayer in which we dared to ask for the presence and guid-ance of the Holy Spirit. We never know whether He will come or what He will do to us if He comes. I remind you that the scripture account which we have just heard goes on to tell us that Jesus' neighbors in Nazareth then tried to kill Him." .There is another variation on the success theme that is even more disturbing than the naive expectation of in-st~ int reward. In our work with religious we frequently came face to face with a man or woman, capable, tal-ented, "who was deeply angry, resentful, depressed, be-cause he or she was not omnipotent. Some wanted to change others, some wanted to change themselves, some sought external success, recognition, others the persdnal satisfaction of achievement, or, occasionally, material goods. None of them faced "this carnal reality," the limits of human existence, in themselves and outside. They wanted something and therefore it had to be. If it did not happen, they went on a "strike" or they became negative, withdrawn, maneuvering-~each according to his personality. Passive-aggressive? Not always. But what-ever the pathology or the character structure, with one's "third ear" one perceived the echo of the ancient pro~nise: And you will be like God--all knowing, all powerful. When the promise did not come true, there came forth the even more ancient answer: Non serviam. I will not serve. Familiar? Some years ago it was thought that emotionally dis-turbed and mentally ill people were often preoccupied with religion. Actually, in certain crisis periods of life, such as 5-6 years in childhood, in adolescence, in the so-called change of life, when approaching death, people become preoccupied with basic human problems: life-death, love-hate, God or the void. There is a certain logic in that people should turn to God in periods of suffering and turmoil--though sometimes this might be expressed in the form of cursing. I might have misunder-stood one of the earlier speakers, and if I did, I apolo-gize, but it seemed to me that she said that the suffering and the dying are always completely self-centered. Not always, as many concentration camp cases have shown, to mention only extreme instances. When an individual is deeply rooted in a culture that recognizes the tran-scendent, and if his childhood trust was permitted to grow into adult faith, even if he experienced shorter or longer periods of emotional fatigue (to use an euphe-mism) in high and low periods of life he will return to God. This is why I was deeply shaken by the fact that of the 161 religions and priests to whom I have listened for several thousand hours, only two, one priest and one brother, mentioned God. No matter how much I would like to shun it, how can I avoid asking the question: What tragic lack in us, Christian parents of the present generation, religious men and women, teachers, nurses, social workers, catechists, what tragic lack in us has buried God so deep that even the suffering and the troubled cannot reach Him today? Indeed, there is a need for renewal that goes far beyond adaptation. + ÷ ÷ Counseling Religious VOLUME 28, 1969 ANDREW J. WEIGERT Social Dimensions of Religious Clothing Andrew J. Wei-gert is a faculty member of the De-partment of Soci-ology and Anthro-pology at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana 46556. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS The Catholic experience as presently interpreted in America is undergoing many changes.1 In the midst of such widespread change, there may be a danger in under-valuing certain sociological dimensions of clothing in the case of the religious orders, both men and women, and to some extent for the diocesan clergy as well. The prob-lem is no doubt most pervasive in the religious orders of women. At the same time, there seems to be some un-clarity and lack of simple sociological principles to in-form the discussion and aid in the decision making. A folk adage has it that "the cowl does not make the monk," but the resistance offered to changes in religious garb from certain quarters makes it apparent that some may think differently. Nor is such resistance always to be attributed to unthinking conservativism. It may be based on a well founded respect for the "reality" and social, power of appearances. These realistic bases for questioning the advisability of change for the sake of change deserve respect and should be distinguished from various traditions which grow around uniforms (for example, saints appearing in a certain habit) as attempts to legitimize and sanctify a uniform for all times, places, and social orders. The present discussion of religious clothing will focus around two value orientations which are taken to be more or less conflicting: witnessing for other-worldly (transcendent) values, and identifying with this-worldly (immanent) values. In order to witness for other-worldly values, an individual must be recognized as standing for such values; and the sign, for example, a uniform which cannot be identified with contemporary cultural styles, which enables him (throughout this paper, the him will refer to the "religious," both male and female, with all wish to thank Sisters Rosina Fieno, C.S.J., and Mary Margaret Zaenglein, I.H.M., for criticizing .an earlicr version of this paper. II due respects to the latter) to be recognized as a witness also sets him apart from non-witnessing persons. Simi-larly, in order to be identified with this-worldly values, an individual must be recognized as belonging to the group which shares these values. Social recognition, as mediated by clothing, is a cognitive process whereby the viewer classifies and labels individuals according to his interpretation of their tailored appearance. An in-escapable social-psychol0gical dimension of every social order is the necessary visual "giving off" of information about his place and identity in that society which each individual proffers in his appearance. Stated aphoris- ~tic.ally, a member of society cannot not "appear," tha