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05-18-2007 09:48 AM |
What is true and good?
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Contemporary society considers religion a private matter that individuals practice—or don't—at their discretion, it does not consider it a legitimate conversation partner for shaping the body politic. In "Religion and the Common Good," Charles J. Chaput, the archbishop of Denver, explains that the absence of religious discourse in the public square is a consequence of the idea articulated by Nietzsche that God is dead. He also attends to what the French Catholic author Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) wrote about the spiritual sickness that helped to produce, and was made manifest in, Nietzsche's belief. Bernanos discussed the de-spiritualization of society and the need to practice the Christian virtue of hope in a series of lectures he gave in the late 1940s, Chaput summarizes the themes of those lectures in his article. He writes: "The common good is what best serves human happiness in the light of what is real and true. That's the heart of the matter: What is real and true? If God exists, then the more man flees from God, the less true and real man becomes. If God exists, then a society that refuses to acknowledge or publicly talk about God is suffering from a peculiar kind of insanity."
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Tuesday, April 24, 2007, 9:01 AM
Sooner or later, every teacher hears the same old joke about the philosophy student and his dad.
The dad asks, “Son, what are you going to do with that goofy degree?” And the son says, “I’m going to open a philosophy shop and make big money selling ideas.” I smile every time I hear it, because nobody yet has figured out how to get rich off the Sartre or Kierkegaard or Friedrich Nietzsche franchise. Or that’s what I thought until a couple of weeks ago, when a friend of mine came back from a local bookstore with a bag full of Nietzsche’s Will to Power Bars.
You’ll remember that Nietzsche first claimed that God was dead. Then he went insane. Then he argued that he was God himself. Now he has his own candy bar. In fact, the wrapper not only claims to be filled with “chocolaty goodness” but also to be “the official nutritional supplement of the superman.” Unfortunately, the wrapper also urges us to “think beyond good and evil,” so I’m not sure it’s telling the truth.
The company that makes these candy bars is the Unemployed Philosophers Guild. It was started by a couple of academics who couldn’t get a job. The guild also makes a Franz Kafka finger puppet and a “Here’s Looking at Euclid” T-shirt. It also makes the Karl Marx Little Thinker beanie doll and Impeachmints, the anti–George Bush breath sweetener. In the words of the company’s founders: “It turned out that making smart, funny things proved to be almost as satisfying as probing eternal questions. . . . Although we still contemplate truth and justice, it is our enduring goal to fulfill the materialistic desires of the funny and sophisticated everywhere.”
I don’t know if Nietzsche himself would endorse these bars. Given his mental state at the end of his life, I’m not sure he’d care. But he did have a ruthless sense of humor. Nietzsche might enjoy the fact that he’s the kind of thinker young college men quote to impress young college women. He has some of the same rebel appeal that Milton gave to Lucifer and Goethe gave to Mephistopheles. He’s bold. He’s radical. And the fact that he also went mad adds just the right touch of drama. In other words, he makes a great cultural icon for Americans to eat as a candy bar, because most Americans will never read a word of what he actually said.
The trouble is, once upon a time, some people in Germany did read him. And they did take him seriously. And they acted on what he said. Ideas have consequences. When Nietzsche asks us on the back of a Will to Power candy bar, “Is man merely a mistake of God’s, or God merely a mistake of man?,” we Americans can swallow our chocolate along with our Starbuck’s and grin at the irony from the comfort of 2007. Sixty years ago, no one would have gotten the joke. There was nothing funny about the Holocaust.
In other words, ideas have consequences—which brings me to today’s topic. When Cardinal Rigali first invited me to come to Philadelphia to talk about religion and the common good, I accepted for two simple reasons. First, I’m tired of the Church and her people being told to be quiet on public issues that urgently concern us. And second, I’m tired of Christians themselves being silent because of some misguided sense of good manners. Self-censorship is an even bigger failure than allowing ourselves to be bullied by outsiders.
Only one question really matters. Does God exist or not? If he does, that has implications for every aspect of our personal and public behavior: all of our actions, all of our choices, all of our decisions. If God exists, denying him in our public life—whether we do it explicitly like Nietzsche or implicitly by our silence—cannot serve the common good, because it amounts to worshiping the unreal in the place of the real.
Religious believers built this country. Christians played a leading role in that work. This is a fact, not an opinion. Our entire framework of human rights is based on a religious understanding of the dignity of the human person as a child of his or her Creator. Nietzsche once said that “convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
In fact, the opposite is often true. Convictions can be the seeds of truth incarnated in a person’s individual will. The right kinds of convictions guide us forward. They give us meaning. Not acting on our convictions is cowardice. As Christians we need to live our convictions in the public square with charity and respect for others, but also firmly, with courage and without apology. Anything less is a form of theft from the moral witness we owe to the public discussion of issues. We can never serve the common good by betraying who we are as believers or compromising away what we hold to be true.
Unfortunately, I think the current American debate over religion and the public square has much deeper roots than the 2006 and 2004 elections, or John Kennedy’s 1960 election—or the Second Vatican Council, for that matter. A crisis of faith and action for Christians has been growing for many years in Western society. It’s taken longer to have an impact here in the United States because we’re younger as a nation than the countries in Europe, and we’ve escaped some of Europe’s wars and worst social and religious struggles.
But Americans now face the same growing spiritual illness that J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, Romano Guardini, and C.S. Lewis all wrote about in the last century. It’s a loss of hope and purpose that comes from the loss of an interior life and a living faith. It’s a loss that we can only make bearable by creating a culture of material comfort that feeds—and feeds off of—personal selfishness.
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Religion and the Common Good
By Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is the archbishop of Denver. This talk was delivered at the John Cardinal Krol Conference in Philadelphia on April 21, 2007. Full Article
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