“Work is necessary, and it’s good in its place: as a means to an end, the end being to provide the necessities of life. From the time of the Greeks to the rise of industrialism that was the idea — work was a means to an end. But when work was over was the time of true human life: time for family, friends, community, for the life of the mind and the life of the spirit.
At the zenith of the Middle Ages… it was held that sloth and restlessness, ‘leisurelessness’, the incapacity to enjoy leisure, were all closely connected; sloth was held to be the source of restlessness, and the ultimate cause of ‘work for work’s sake’. It may well seem paradoxical to maintain that the restlessness at the bottom of a fanatical and suicidal activity should come from the lack of will to action…
Our culture feels in its bones that ‘hard work is good.’ Aquinas, the great medieval philosopher, propounded a contrary opinion: `The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than in the difficult. Not everything that is more difficult is necessarily more virtuous; it must be more difficult in such a way that it achieves a higher good as well as being more difficult.’
The tendency to overvalue hard work and the effort of doing something difficult is so deep-rooted that it even infects our notion of love. Why should it be that the average Christian regards loving one’s enemy as the most exalted form of love? Principally because it offers an example of a natural bent heroically curbed; the exceptional difficulty, the impossibility… of loving one’s enemy constitutes the greatness of the love. And what does Aquinas say? ‘It is not the difficulty of loving one’s enemy that matters when the essence of the merit of doing so is concerned, excepting in so far as the perfection of love wipes out the difficulty…’
The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless… he refuses to have anything as a gift. We have only to think for a moment how much the Christian understanding of life depends upon the existence of ‘Grace’; let us recall that the Holy Spirit of God is Himself called a ‘gift’ in a special sense; that the great teachers of Christianity say that the premise of God’s justice is his love; that everything gained and everything claimed follows upon something given, and comes after something gratuitous and unearned; that in the beginning there is always a gift—we have only to think of all this for a moment in order to see what a chasm separates the tradition of the Christian West and that other view [of classical Greece].”
“When remorse calls to a man it is always late. The call to find the way again by seeking out God in the confession of sins is always at the eleventh hour. Whether you are young or old, whether you have sinned much or little, whether you have offended much or neglected much, the guilt makes this call come at the eleventh hour. The inner agitation of the heart understands what remorse insists upon, that the eleventh hour has come. For in the sense of time, the old man’s age is the eleventh hour; and the instant of death, the final moment in the eleventh hour. The indolent youth speaks of a long life that lies before him. The indolent old man hopes that his death is still a long way off. But repentance and remorse belong to the eternal in a man.”
“There is no simple congruity between the ideals of sensitive individuals and the moral mediocrity of even the best society. The liberal hope of a harmonious ‘adjustment’ between the individual and the community is a more vapid and less dangerous hope than the communist confidence in a frictionless society in which all individual hopes and ideals are perfectly fulfilled. The simple fact is that an individual rises indeterminately above every community of which he is a part…
There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them. It is possible to soften the incongruities of life endlessly by the scientific conquest of nature’s caprices, and the social and political triumph over historic injustice. But all such strategies cannot finally overcome the fragmentary character of human existence. The final wisdom of life requires, not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”
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From the conclusion of chapter III (“Happiness, Prosperity, and Virtue”) of Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History.
There’s a suggestive moment in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America during which the high-strung Louis Ironson is airing a breathless litany of complaints to the serene but naive Joe Pitt. “You believe the world is perfectible,” Pitt interrupts, “so you find it unsatisfying. You have to reconcile yourself to the world’s unperfectibility. Be in the world, not of the world.”
A thank you to reader Brenton Dickieson for recommending Irony to me (via Twitter, no less). It had been on my radar since I first heard it quoted at length by Chris Hedges in a debate a few years ago, but I wouldn’t have gotten to it so soon unless it had blipped once again on my screen. That last paragraph, with its measured repetitions and corresponding, collective incitements, is among the ten or so that I’d include in a collection on human striving and ambition. Our unyielding desire to cling to the teleological — or the belief that there is some idealized future for which present sacrifices or sins may be justified — gets us into so much trouble, as Niebuhr nods to in his initial mentioning of communism. This fact can lead you in a host of alternate directions, from nihilism to resignation to denial, but Niebuhr effortlessly dispenses with such jerks of the philosophical knee. Don’t forgo personal ambition, the great theologian reminds us; don’t give up on striving for the good society, and don’t relent on living a virtuous life. But make sure you realize and keep in mind that each of these goals has its limit — its temporal, spatial, and interpersonal limit — and that forgiveness is ultimately what redeems both the injustices of others and the inadequacies of oneself.
One of my favorite movies is Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition. There’s an unforgettable early scene in that unfairly forgotten film, where Michael Sullivan (played by Tom Hanks) has just been lamenting to his adopted father John Rooney (played by Paul Newman) the recent rebelliousness of his eldest son. After listening, an amused Newman stares out the window and responds. “Natural law: sons were put on this earth to trouble their fathers.” It’s a brilliant line, one which — for better or for worse — the fathers and mothers of my friends, from early on to late college-y age, would hear now with a slight smile of recognition, as I would hope they’d read this poem.
I took the picture at my friend Peter’s farm near Keswick, Virginia.
“Action is, in fact, the one miracle-working faculty of man, as Jesus of Nazareth, whose insights into this faculty can be compared in their originality and unprecedentedness with Socrates’ insights into the possibilities of thought, must have known very well when he likened the power to forgive to the more general power of performing miracles, putting both on the same level and within the reach of man.
The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether… It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.'”
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A surprising pronouncement from the end of the fifth chapter (“Action”) in Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition.
It’s striking how frequently Jesus and Socrates are compared or counterposed, especially in works of philosophy. Perhaps this trend stems from the fact that each figure works as a respective stand-in for Tertullian’s Jerusalem-Athens paradigm, though there’s probably more to it. One of the more worthwhile recent musings on this matter came from Cornell West, who when presenting his testimony spoke of a historico-philosophical question which he found particularly interesting: “I sometimes wonder why Jesus never laughed and Socrates never cried.”
“I’m a Jesus-loving blues man in the life of the mind.
I’m a Christ-centered Jazz man, which means that I do try to take, quite seriously, the endless quest for unarmed truth, understanding that a condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. So I don’t even think about trying to be true unless I’ve tried to enact and embody a sensitivity, even a hyper-sensitivity to the pain, the suffering, the hurts, the wounds, the scars, the bruises of people.
That deep compassion that you not only talk about, but that you embody…
Just. Bear. Witness. Be a sermon rather than give one. You don’t even need to talk about humility; just be humble. You know, a couple of months ago in the States, we had a sustained discourse on civility; and you know, I thought – why don’t you just be civil? Why do you have to have this sustained discourse? Just be respectful, that’s all.
It’s like the conclusion of a practical Aristotelian syllogism.
It’s action.
It’s not just a proposition. It’s not a sentence. It’s not a theory. It’s a mode of being in the world; it’s a way of life to be embodied, enacted.
But since I was young, I have been shaped by the legacy of Athens, by Socrates’s preoccupation with questioning: the unexamined life is not worth living.
That meant much to me as I was growing up on the chocolate side of Sacramento, going to the book mobile, and reading Plato and Kierkegaard for the first time.
I’d read Kierkegaard, put on some more Curtis Mayfield. I’d read Plato, and listen to Sly Stone — who actually did play organ in my church, Shiloh Baptist Church, every first Sunday. Northern California Mass choir. He grew up in Vallejo. Slyvester. Stewart. Genius that he was, and he could play that organ before he became Sly Stone.
But also the legacy of Jerusalem. And of course we want to acknowledge our precious Jewish brothers and sisters – it’s Passover tonight, the first night.
And there is for me no Christian faith, there’s no Jesus, without that prophetic Judaic tradition that deeply shaped me in a fundamental way.
The idea that each and every person has a sanctity. Not just a dignity the way the Stoics talked about, but a sanctity, a value that’s priceless. There’s actually a value that has no price — no market price…
There must be some standard that gets beyond the everyday culture, the everyday life, civilization, fleeting empires, changing regimes, to keep track of that sanctity, which is the ground of our equality… Our notions of equality somehow have to be anchored in that which cuts across the grain deeper than fleeting cultures and changing nation states and contingent civilizations and empires.
And these legacies of Athens and Jerusalem, for me have been brought together best in the black cultural expressions – the best of the black cultural expressions – that said, in the face of 244 years of white supremacist slavery, that somehow, we were going to love our way through that darkness, and not succumb to a hatred of the slave master even as we loathe the barbarity and the bestiality of slavery itself.
And that’s what those negro spirituals are about; I come from persecuted Christians in the land of religious liberty…
How do you look terror in the face, and still muster the courage to love?
Refuse to succumb to revenge, and drink from the cup of bitterness, and say, somehow, we’re going to hold on to love and justice, and not revenge and hatred. We’ve always known that hatred is the coward’s revenge against those who intimidate you. Always cowardly.
How do you learn to be courageous – and love wisdom, love justice, love neighbor, and love enemy?
And I am that kind of Christian.
I really do try to love my enemy. Not of course try to do it on my own, at home. A little too difficult, I need grace for that. It doesn’t make any sense – whatsoever – of talking about loving your enemy if you don’t have some connection to a power greater than you.
It’s the most absurd thing in the world, given the fact that our world is shot through with hatred, envy, player hating, backstabbing, domination, subjugation. These are the cycles of history –
And how, somehow do you break it? Even if you only break it in one life, in one community!
It’s got to be through love…
I was at the prison this morning, at Wagner. A brother asked me a question, it moved me so deeply. He said, “Brother West, I’m locked into bad habits, and I can’t break loose.”
And I said, “Brother, you’re not the only one. All of us are wrestling with that in some way.”
He said, “Oh not you… I saw you on television, looks like you got it together–”
I said, “No, no.”
I told you I’m a Christian. That means I’m a sinner, I’m just a redeemed sinner. I’m just trying to love my crooked neighbor with my crooked heart. That’s the best I’mma to do.
It’s true that I’ve been transformed. I was a gangster.
And after my transformation, I still have gangster proclivities, to this day. Wrestling with it all the time…
And I live in despair. Not every day, but I wrestle with it.
It’s like the 32nd chapter of Genesis. Jacob wrestling at night with the angel of death. He emerges with a new name, wounded though. God wrestler.
And a blues man and a jazz man is always a god wrestler. And I’ve got some questions that I don’t fully… grasp.
In terms of the depth of the suffering in this world.
But the fundamental ground of my life is to be faithful unto death, and to attempt to live a life of love and compassion to the best of my ability.
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Dr. Cornel West’s impromptu testimony, given at Princeton University, where he is a professor of philosophy and African American studies.
To really get the full force of West’s testimony, you really have to watch him speak —
— it’s one of the most captivating monlogues of this sort that I’ve ever seen.
The entire exchange between Dr. West and Radhanath Swami is fascinating. This is part two — West’s testimony and a Q&A — but Radhanath’s part (linked here) is worth watching as well.
This exchange was titled “East Meets West: A Dialogue Between Cornel West and Radhanath Swami,” and though I have never, ever seen an inter-faith exchange that was ever worth anything, this is an exception — and better than that: it’s brimming with mutual respect, intellect, engagement with the world, and humor.
