imagination

The cherry tree next to our house has exploded.

Time to round out this rousing series:

Four Books I Think Are Relevant Here, Part 4: Towards a Politics of Communion - Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times by Anna Rowlands.

This was my attempt to make friends with Catholic social teaching, the basis of the See-Judge-Act method. 

It's an extremely good book and there's no way I can do it justice, so here again, I won't attempt to summarize. Here's a long excerpt from the introduction (emphasis mine):

   In 1968 Hanna Arendt wrote a short book on an eclectic range of twentieth-century figures. In homage to Berthold Brecht's poem 'To Posterity', Arendt titled the book Men in Dark Times. Her reference to the darkness of the times was not, as might be assumed, a gloomy claim that the twentieth century was the worst of all times but rather an attempt to write about the 'flickering light' of lives that throw the darkness into relief and therefore guide a generation towards some kind of real hope. She wrote defiantly: 'we have a right to expect some illumination.'
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   Arendt's book was ... part of her wider project to explore the grounds of a life that is truly public. She writes, it is 'the function of the public realm to throw light on the affairs of men by providing a space of appearances in which they can show in deed and word, for better or worse, who they are and what they can do.' She continues, 'darkness has come when this light is extinguished by "credibility gaps" and "invisible government", by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality.' Each of the people to whom Arendt dedicates a chapter is understood as a public figure, not because they held office or achieved rank (although many did) but because the manner in which they lived their lives as writers, philosophers or religious figures illuminated truth, contributed to creating a space in which they and others might appear to each other as dignified subjects and agents of history, thus sustaining what is truly and properly public.
   The third chapter of Men in Dark Times is, perhaps a little surprisingly given Arendt's well-known critique of Christian political thought, dedicated to Pope John XXIII. Its title - 'Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli: A Christian on St. Peter's Chair from 1958 to 1963' - derives from a Roman chambermaid who, as John XXIII lay dying, exclaimed to Arendt that somehow, in defiance of all (grittily low) expectations of the Church, a true Christian had briefly occupied the seat of St. Peter. How? Of course, the comically combined pessimism and optimism of this comment delighted Arendt. Roncalli emerges from Arendt's pen as a figure whose capacity for public illumination was rooted in a profound and difficult interiority. Whilst Arendt writes little about Roncalli's formal role in developing the Church's social teaching, Arendt was, I think, right to sense an echo of her own concerns in Roncalli's reflection on the historical and material dimensions of being in the world.
   In ways often misunderstood even by Arendt herself, this being in the world is also the heartbeat of the (developing) tradition of modern Catholic social teaching (CST). It is a tradition that aims to reflect on the material circumstances of being human in historical time. Arendt would construct her own account of truth differently to the papal social tradition - CST insists on the transcendent origin and destiny of the human person as the most important frame for all meaning and Arendt does not - but we can learn from her outsider perspective on the tradition.

The book goes on to explore the development of the core principles of CST, which "in formal terms...refers to a range of papal social encyclicals dating from 1891 onwards...and addressing a range of social and economic themes."  

The task of the papal social tradition is to shape a social imagination: to foster the questions about value, virtues and capacities that lie at the heart of the difficult issues we face.

I deeply admire Rowlands for her comprehensive expertise on the subject matter (religion and history and philosophy and politics oh my!) and the fact that she carefully abstains both from demonizing the Church and from glorifying it. She describes how successive popes in the late 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries - spiritual leaders of a sizeable chunk of the human race, of a community that stretches across political boundaries, class boundaries, and continents - have used their unique position to speak with a prophetic voice about the state of the world. Perfect? No. Admirable? Absolutely.

But if I was hoping to come away from this book with a burning interest in using the principles of CST in ethical analysis...I didn't. 

I got stuck here, for several days, as you may have noticed. 

I just don't know what I want to say about this. I read the book; it was excellent; it didn't help me with my motivation-to-write-the-paper problem. I see and appreciate this tradition but I don't feel like I can be a part of it.

Do I lack faith? Community? Respect for my elders? Trust in the institution of the Catholic Church? Trust in myself? All of the above, probably. But I do not lack pig-headedness, because I still haven't given up on this project.

Rowlands dedicates her concluding chapter to a discussion of the story of the Good Samaritan. 

In his interpretation of the Good Samaritan, Catholic priest and radical writer Ivan Illich challenges what he believes to be a problematic trope in modern interpretation of Luke's parable. He argues that, following the trajectory of modernity, modern interpretation has tended to flatten the passage, rendering it somewhere close to an abstract moral lesson in the general duties we bear to a generalized mass of fellow human beings: the passage is rendered as a lesson in moral and social cosmopolitanism or universal humanitarianism. 

Briefly, what if instead of the story being about how each of us should help our fellow humans in need, it is a story about how one particular man was moved to stop and help another particular man - even though the two were strangers, and cultural enemies to boot? What if what we call God's grace, or the Holy Spirit, or Love is that spark between the two men that led them to be neighbors to each other even though no logic, reason, or law dictated that they do so?

Illich argues that the core problem of spatial 'everyman' readings of the Good Samaritan is that they, like modern ethics more generally, pull us in the direction of anonymizing and abstracting our ethics from the interrupting 'thisness' and contingency of our real lives. In the draw to construct general rules such interpretation underplays how God tends to work in our lives. Our capacity to be stopped in our tracks, to change direction, to be confronted with grace which comes in unexpectedly interrupting, and often embodied, forms to us is an utterly temporal and particular experience. These are the ways that the kingdom becomes woven into our own lives and we part of its unfolding history.
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Against a logic of doing to or for others, of technique, mastery or self-possession, even communal self-possesion, we are offered a language of freedom: a communion established through receptivity, participation and reciprocal exchange. It is a recognition of our embeddedness, not indebtedness, that is the logic of such freedom.
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My openness to participation in this is crucial. [Simone] Weil is unsparingly severe in her view of the challenge of this process and suggests: turning my attention to the person that has been rendered a thing, or to a future that seems impossible, requires a creative attention that does not extend my own power but seeks to give existence to something outside of myself. It is a creative act of renunciation of the promise of power or mastery.
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The rupturing gift of Christian faith to the world is rooted in this vision of communion. It becomes possible only with communities that sustain this vision as a constant, timely practice. It cannot be reduced to principles, rendered as abstracted general rules for living or turned into blueprint solutions. It would be much easier if it could, but it cannot.

Rowlands concludes, in other words, that the gift of the Church's social teaching is not a method or a list of principles, but a call to participation.

In an age of cynicism and post-truth the Church's social teaching calls us to venture again into the space of imagining that some things are true, and we are wired to seek out that truth and to share it. If we choose to vacate the fullness of that social ambition - the restless search for what might be true and the ambition to secure it as our good - then others with intentions we cannot guarantee will fill that space. This dignified struggle is the basis of a politics of communion worth its name.

At One Spirit, we had to write our own ordination vows. Mine ended up being:

I vow to surrender to what is,

imagine what could be,

and embrace what is mine to do

in Love.

So...maybe I can't See-Judge-Act, but there's still hope on the imagining front?