A LIBERATION THEOLOGY FOR ALL As our Conference asks whether there is a natural link between radical theology and radical politics, PETER LUMSDEM, Catholic and libertarian socialist, offers his answer.
Peter writes: What follows is the text of a talk entitled “Be Not Afraid’’ given to a local group of the Catholic Worker and is an attempt to put Sea of Faith ideas into their language and tradition. Most Sea of Faith readers won’t have heard of the Catholic Worker, so some background is in order.
The Catholic Worker is the polar opposite to Sea of Faith, being theologically conservative, i.e. Roman Catholic, and politically radical, while SoF is studiously non-political. All my attempts to turn SoF into a First World liberation theology have been repulsed - with the greatest courtesy! It’s not hard to love such enemies!
The Catholic Worker is an American lay Catholic network born of the desperate social injustice of the Depression and portrays itself as putting into practical social action the teachings of the vapid and incoherent Social encyclicals. On this inauspicious foundation Dorothy Day, an ex-communist journalist, and Peter Maurin, a learned hobo, built an influential movement.
The current difficulties of the American hierarchy with Rome are a tribute to their effectiveness.
This shaky basis was skilfully buttressed with generous helpings of Tolstoy, Kropotkin, the ‘‘personalist’’ philosophy of Emmanuel Mounier (1905-53), Editor of the French journal Esprit, St Francis of Assisi and a soupcon of Marx, all held together with lashings of youthful idealism. Its espousal of voluntary poverty and anarchosyndicalism found a ready response in the warm hearts of American youth queasy with capitalist excess, and it mobilised Catholic opposition to the Vietnam war and support for civil rights.
The current circulation of its paper is 90,000 and it has about 100 local groups throughout the States running soup-lines, ‘‘Houses of Hospitality’’, credit unions, co-ops, and participating in non-violent direct action against social injustice and militarism. Rigorously anarchist, it has no charitable status, constitution, steering committee or annual conference! Truly a very different animal from SoF! If a union could be brought about between the two, the earth would surely move!
T gave this talk to the St Francis House in Chicago and it was circulated to other local groups with a covering letter which said that ‘‘the expectations raised by Marxism can be satisfied. They are legitimate and viable, and a Christianity truly sorry for its past errors will fulfil them. While history may well have halted, it is by no means at an end!’’. “‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’’; I take this to be the essence of the Lord’s message. The Good News I hope to bring you is that the Kingdom can return to being the centre of our lives, the bad is that we have to repent. I thought when I was on the Catholic Worker staff in the 60s that I had repented; had I not given up my profession, a considerable inheritance and my homeland, England? Had I not followed the Lord’s injunction to the rich young man? But then it came to me that I was treating my faith as a possession, and we know that no-one who has possessions will enter the Kingdom. I - as an orthodox Catholic - held that I had the truth and that others did not. It is my contention that to hold this is sinful and requires our repentance, and I will endeavour in this talk to show why this is so and what form our repentance must take.
I have taken my title from Emmanuel Mounier because he stands at the source of the Catholic Worker tradition. He struggled valiantly with the problem of faith in the modem world and I suspect it drove him to his early grave. He knew the arguments put forward by Nietzche, Bakunin and Feuerbach required an answer and implied this answer is to be found in the doctrine of Incarnation. *‘Alienation is indeed an expression of certain religious attitudes, but precisely of these attitudes of flight, those religions of pure spirit against which Christianity has protested from its very beginning. It is the very negation of the Incarnation and in this sense the very antithesis of Christianity’? (Be Not Afraid, Rockliff, 1951, p 102, emphasis added), Now these three writers are never mentioned by Peter Maurin and it’s worth taking a moment to speculate why.
The main reason, I think, was his personality which - unlike Mounier the tormented intellectual - was one of unclouded and unshakable faith. Also it was simply impossible to raise these philosophical questions while ‘True atheists are those who cannot see God in their neighbour’ {2 —) the shadow of Marxism lay across the Western world.
Now that has gone, we can return to them. But, working in that darkness, Peter, a practical man, may have laid the foundations for their solution.
But before leaving Mounier and proceeding with my main argument, there is something else. You will be surprised to hear that he has had some influence on Islam. The main theoretician of the Iranian revolution was not Khomeni - his contribution was the theory of the post-revolutionary state - but a writer called Ali Shariati.
He studied in Paris with Mounier and under his influence created an Islamic liberation theology, a short-lived synthesis of Marxism and Islam which destroyed the Shah. A reconciliation with Islam will be central to the renewed faith I am advocating and Shariati will form a bridge (Radical Islam, Tamis, 1989).
Fr. Coplestone, in his review of Be Not Afraid in the English Jesuit journal The Month (October 1951), attacked Mounier for attempting to overcome the matter/ spirit dualism, and while of course orthodoxy holds that matter is not evil, it clearly implies that it is inferior to spirit!.
This might also be described, in a quote whose origin I don’t know, as the returning to earth of the treasure wasted in heaven. Of course the ‘‘protest’’ mentioned in the quotation started long before Christianity. Prophets in Israel denounced the building of the Temple: ‘‘I have lived with you in a tent in the desert’’, says Yahweh, “‘what need have I, creator of the universe, of a house built by human hands?’’ (2 Samuel 7: 5-8; 1 Chronicles 17:4-7; 1 Kings 8: 27). It might seem perverse to the Catholic mind to describe the Reformation as continuing this process, but the strictures against the Temple can equally be applied to St Peter’s. But more profoundly, the Protestant ethic, by denying the efficacy of any religious practice not sanctioned by Scripture, directed human energy towards human ends. This laid the basis of the modern world of which Mounier bids us be not afraid.
He does this because he can see, with the Marxists, the potential of the modern world to fulfil the promise of the Kingdom. But between that fulfilment and us lies an abyss: while the modern world is capable of supplying all of humanity’s material needs, it robs humanity of God.
By making market forces its God it is rushing towards destruction; the death of humanity would seem to follow inevitably from the death of God. It has made the Faustian bargain: it has sold its belief in God for the material benefits of capitalism. There is no going back on this deal; the venom of fundamentalism is driven by despair at the finality of this transaction.
Now, it is the centrality of the Incarnation in Catholic Worker practice that offers us a way through ‘this impasse. I say practice advisedly because the faith of the ‘The expectations raised by Marxism can be satisfied. A Christianity truly sorry for its past errors will fulfil them’ Catholic Worker is wholly orthodox and _ therefore exhibits that fear of the modern world that Mounier says we must reject (cf Catholic Radical, Winter 1984). But the practice varies sharply from orthodoxy. The Catholic Worker builds no cathedrals, goes on no pilgrimages, does not espouse monasticism or clericalism, has no interest in novenas, rosaries or manifestations of the supernatural; all of its energies are directed to showing forth the presence of God within humanity. Dorothy Day has said that the true atheist is the one who cannot see God in their neighbour. What we need to say to the Church is that He can be found nowhere else.
Can the Catholic Worker renew its faith, and that of the whole Church? Can it work back from what it already does to a fully incarnational faith? I believe it can, for it will be a small step, but a huge step for humanity. True, it will open the floodgates of the modern world; it means assent to moral relativism and to the bleak Nictzschean vision; but the barque of Peter, once it jettisons the top hamper of illusion, will float gaily on these floodwaters and will provide an ark of salvation for humanity. The death of God will hold no fears for us because. we have found Him in ‘‘the least of these’’. If we are called humanists, refer to Matthew 25: nothing there about belief in God being necessary for salvation. We will be unmoved by the assertion of the post-modernist that there is no such thing as truth: for us all that is necessary is that human needs are met.
This renewal of our faith should lead us to rewrite our Eucharistic prayers. The ritual of the Mass is the core of our identity, the centre of our lives, and our purpose in participating is to deepen our commitment to the Kingdom. What is important is not the change in the bread and wine, but in ourselves; not that they become the body of Christ but that we do. God being a God of love gives Himself to us totally and irrevocably; we agree with Bakunin that by his death we live. In the Eucharist we go back to our dreamtime, to that upper room where the foundations of our world were laid down. We re-enact that event that tells us who we are. We also, at the same time, act out that future when all will be well, that situation where all will give according to their abilities and receive according to their needs.
When Karl Meyer signalled in the October/November 1971 Catholic Worker that he found the bonds of orthodoxy oppressive, what he considered most significant in Scripture was the passage in Philippians which speaks of Christ’s ‘‘self-emptying’’ of divine status. The theological term for this voluntary surrender of power is kenosis. You can see that it applies to the above understanding of the Eucharist, but it also provides a paradigm for our age. The idea that Christianity alone is of supernatural origin carries with it the implication that our way of life, capitalism, alone is true, that market forces are the only rational basis for human life. So J am advocating a unilateral spiritual disarmament, a liberation theology for the First World. If we repent of our arrogance in saying our faith alone is true, then others, Islamic or Capitalist, can follow. We should stop calling ourselves people of God, for this implies others are not. If God, out of love, gives up His power, then our culture should do the same.
Our world is not only the product of the Reformation but also of the Enlightenment, and we need to understand that its search for a rational ethic has failed. We may be humanists but we are not rationalists. For us a secular society is a contradiction in terms. People are surprised when they hear me advocating from my Hyde Park soapbox that atheists should participate in religious rituals. Ritual is the only basis for community. The function of ritual is the social creation of meaning and it is only by a collectively created agreement on what life is all about that human unity is possible. By market forces, as Marx said in a chilling phrase, all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and, he might have added, all love and community are extinguished. Only our faith, if it repents of its arrogance, can overcome.
One last request: we should look again at Feuerbach. His Essence of Christianity is a profoundly religious work and he himself - on his own terms! - denied that he was an atheist. If Marx had faced up to this challenge, how much human misery could have been avoided! As Shariati can be our bridge to Islam, So Feuerbach can be to the Marxists.
Although this way of looking at our faith may offer a solution to our present problems, it should not be seen as orthodoxy or as an ultimate solution to the problem of belief. It is provisional, only relevant to our present history. Future generations, if there are any, will have problems of which we can know nothing, and they will have to find their own solutions. We are in a hell of a hole right now and this is a modest proposal for getting out of it! On that downbeat note, I'll close!
Peter Lumsden is a social worker and a former member of the SoF Steering Committee.