Читать книгу The Essential Agus - Steven T. Katz - Страница 27

In the perspective of Jewish ethics, we develop an immunity to ideologies. Soon after the peoples of Western culture stopped butchering one another on account of their different theologies, they started to use ideologies as fig leaves with which to conceal their collective aggressions. The term “ideology” implies an attempt to focus all the values of life upon one idea or ideal. Manifestly, that one ideal is elevated so high that all other human concerns appear to be inconsequential. The Absolute is transferred from metaphysics and religion to social life and politics; the fragmentary light of one ideal is substituted for the life of the All. This absolutization of politics is essentially a contemporary phenomenom. While liberalism and romantic nationalism competed for the loyalty of European men throughout the nineteenth century, it was only toward the end of that century that the competing ideologies became impassioned and all-embracing. In the twentieth century, this trend was continued with socialism turning into Bolshevism, nationalism into totalitarian fascism, or into nihilistic Nazism, and the ethics of self-realization into individualism, cynicism, or “Social Darwinism.”

For each, the goal was to “transvalue all values,” to restructure the whole of society in terms of a scale of values that is self-contained, hence, absolutely right. In the communist mentality, there is a solid logical structure that begins with a few axioms, explains all history, accounts for all deviations, and leads to the one party line. Its categories are part of a closed system of discourse that is impervious to the facts and arguments of the outside world. In the case of fascism and Nazism, the primitive values of “blood and soil,” power and glory, hierarchy and order, are foisted upon the natural feelings of ethnic kinship. The result is an attempt to imbue the technocratic Utopia of the engineer with the savage pathos of a primitive war of conquest. Modernistic science is placed at the service of an ethic that barely rises above the level of primitive times, when barbarian hordes burst out of the steppe to enslave or to exterminate a native population and to usurp its land. Social Darwinism, glorifying the free individual in his “struggle for existence,” is the secret ideology of most people in the democracies, though it is rarely espoused on public occasions.

Both communism and fascism arose out of the miasma of disillusionment and despair. Philosophy, or man’s search for truth, was to the communists, as to the fascists, an unreal self-delusion, because to the former there were only class-truths, and to the latter, there were only the myths of the “collective unconscious.” Similarly, religion, man’s quest for reality, holiness, and true values, was for the ideologists of both camps a panoply of propaganda, to fool the naive. The Way of Reason had turned into a shambles and the light of Religious Vision had failed. This was the sad experience of millions in the aftermath of the First World War. “God is dead,” Nietzsche announced. Spengler declared that the West was dying, and that only in the blind worship of force can the foundation be laid for the civilization of the future. To G. Sorel, the teacher of Mussolini, violence was the secret of creativity. Camus summed it all up when he spoke of the “cult of the absurd.” In our post-Christian world, Pilate’s question “What is truth?” is on the lips of millions.

Yet, the two ideologies contain a mock-image of the religious philosophy of the West. They substitute an immanent law of history for Providence, a predestination that operates with inexorable force, regardless of “good and evil,” in place of the free individual, and a Utopia in place of the “Kingdom of God” as the goal of all history. They assume that the course of history is driven by a transrational force, which can be sensed truly only by those who have been “converted,” or by those who were “chosen” for salvation. Between the “elect” and the “damned” there is an unbridgeable abyss. People are either absolutely right or absolutely wrong. They recognize only one satanic force, capitalism, or non-Aryanism, or individualism. This “monosatanism” is a caricature of the Judeo-Christian monotheism against which they rebel.

The communist-fascist ideologies may be considered as “heresies” in terms of the faith of Western man. The rebellion they incite is directed against the dignity of the individual, in both his historical facets, the Hellenic and the Hebraic. In the Hellenic world, the individual asserted himself as a philosopher, a man of reason, and, in the Hebraic world, man was given his charter of worth as the “image of God.” The dehumanization of man, which seems to be the inevitable by-product of the ideologies of the twentieth century, may be traced to the ongoing scientific revolution of our time. Yet, science in itself is neutral, and the humanity of man, his unique worth in the scheme of things, is basically a matter of faith. One aspect of that faith is philosophy, in its original and essential meaning, the quest of wisdom for its own sake. And the other aspect is the assertion of a sense of kinship between man, the Seeker, and God, the Creator.

Does one climb out of the abyss of nihilism by the ladder of reason or with the aid of religion? Both procedures are commonly followed as if they were independent of one another. Actually, there can be no vibrant humanism without the ardor of faith in the unique values of the human personality. Nor can a reassertion of faith be meaningful and relevant in our world today, if it does not accord validity to the rational, ethical, and esthetic ideals of man. We maintain that faith and reason are two phases of the rhythmic beat of life. For all meaning is in essence circular, the relation of a part to the whole and the whole to a part. The core-experience of religion is at once the search for and the assurance of meaning for the individual. It is therefore truth and trust blended together.

In our analysis, philosophy and religion are not antagonistic disciplines, but the two aspects of one endeavor. Religious experience is essentially paradoxical in that it is at one and the same time a feeling of possession and of privation. In relating ourselves to God, we sense our unreality, our unworthiness, our frailty, our nothingness. But, as this feeling deepens, we begin to sense our belonging to a high, overarching realm of meaning; we find that we are embraced by a structure of value and truth; it is in Him, the Absolute, that we live and move and have our being.

Thus, religion can only affirm the supreme worth of man’s spirit—the quest of truth, goodness, reality, and harmony, but it cannot articulate its insight without succumbing to human limitations and errors, failings which reflect the pressures, privations, and prejudices of the particular place or time. “The Torah spoke in the language of man.”³ Our living faith can only assert that God exists, not what He is; that His Will is akin to man’s, when man is most loving and self-giving, but it cannot give detailed specifications; that man is potentially Divine, not what he can do to attain this end. We have to recognize the distinction between the psychological kind of faith and its social manifestations.

Unfortunately, the spokesmen of religion have frequently arrogated to their rites and doctrines the seal of absolute certainty. They have elaborated the aspect of self-assurance into intricate theologies and ignored the corrective feelings of privation, at least insofar as the collective tradition was concerned. Hence, the bifurcation between Faith and Reason in the nineteenth century. The quest for truth was left to the philosophers, while the religionists contented themselves with religious feelings and the rhetoric of symbolism. Philosophers became professional “no-sayers,” to the riddles of existence, and religionists, “yes-sayers”; while the disaffected and the disillusioned reverted to the crass idolatries of primitive man.

In three ways, the creative tension in the human soul rebels against the modern idolatry of ideologies. First, it removes the Absolute from the realm of mundane affairs. Only God is Absolute, and all our human plans, designs, and programs are of relative worth and adulterated truth. Hence, it might serve to prevent the ideological mass stampede that is the perpetual danger in a society dominated by the agencies of mass communication. The conservative role of religion is probably more needed in our restless, revolutionary age than the dynamic role, just as on a crowded highway, good brakes are more important than good accelerators. Second, this dynamic equilibrium returns us to the source of all creative activity, the individual, for the image of God is revealed in him, not in the state or in any social class, nor in any institution. Third, it calls upon us to recognize the inner unity of religious faith and the rational quest. In substance it points to the dynamic progressive character of all that is human. We must never be content to stand still, as if perfection were already here. At any one time, the human advance is a slow and pedestrian affair, a walking along a way, while the Vision of Perfection lures man onward. “Seek Me, and live, saith the Lord.”⁴

Essentially, the ethic of religious humanism is a blend of two forces, the one symbolized by Socrates, the other by Amos. Both were path-breakers. They were alike, in a profound sense, though the father of classical philosophy represented the voice of reason, while the founder of literary prophecy spoke in the name of faith. Both Titans of the spirit conveyed to their contemporaries the psychic syndrome of doubt, a higher faith, and a continuous quest.

Socrates questioned the certainties of the teachers of his day—the dogmas of the traditionalists and the nihilism of the Sophists. Yet he “knew” that the quest of truth and goodness was not an illusion. He defended the faith that somehow goodness, truth, and beauty belong to the structure of reality. And he gave his life to prove the supreme worth of the quest of truth, for, as Plato put it, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Amos too exemplified a similar, threefold approach—doubt in the efficacy of the priestly ritual, faith in the justice of God, and the ineluctable duty to “seek” God, in order to live. To be sure, the pathos of prophecy is at the opposite pole from the serenity of the philosopher. So, to the prophet, the voice of God was as the terrifying roar of a lion, while to Socrates, the intimation of Divine guidance was conveyed by a “daemon,” the faint echo of a distant call.