THE COMMON GROUND OF ATHENS AND JERUSALEM
By James C. Edwards
January 16, 1984
The hope of any lecture is that it become an act of genuine thinking, an effort of mind which engages, in common attention to some reality, both the one who speaks and those who choose to listen; and since any such act of thinking is sheltered by texts and practices which reach far beyond that act's immediate circumstances, it is appropriate that we begin this lecture this evening by trying to acknowledge for ourselves this sheltering fabric of our thought, to acknowledge truly who and where we are, here and now, as we try to think together. But that is already clear, isn't it? We are in Daniel Recital Hall on the campus of Furman University, in Greenville, South Carolina, U.S.A.; and, in one way or another, we here are all friends of this University and of its truest ambitions and ideals. These facts are so obvious that they are likely to seem silly to state. But, having now stated them anyway, don't we therefore know well enough who and where we are? In one sense, the answer is yes, of course. We do know our names, our Social Security numbers, our family histories, our geographical location on the planet, and so on; we even know, in some sense, what we are presently "doing" here at Furman: teaching; learning; getting a degree; doing a job. But philosophy consists in refusing consent to the obvious, at least initially; the philosopher must return home, if home he ever has, so let us tonight not simply take ourselves and our lives for granted. Let us push back, if we can, from our ordinary self-understandings and try to set aside that lazy self-satisfaction which tells us we are already perfectly clear about all that really matters. Let us ask what it means to be here, speaking and listening as we do. Do we really know what we are "doing" here at Furman? I am afraid that we mostly do not know, and that is the burden of my lecture tonight.
I.
Furman University is a liberal arts college established and supported by an evangelical Christian body, the South Carolina Baptist Convention; and that fact in itself makes Furman a queer place, full of ambivalence and divided loyalties. L.D. Johnson, the man whose life we commemorate tonight with this lecture, found in that queerness both a source of personal energy and an agenda for his own work of Christian reconciliation. Some of the rest of us, however, have found it less fruitful. If I may be permitted a personal reference here, one of the joys of my relationship with L.D. was our running argument—never settled to the satisfaction of either party, incidentally—about the possibility of a truly Christian liberal arts college.
At first glance, the very idea seems incoherent: "Christian" and "liberal arts" apparently mix no better than oil and water. How can a Christian church, an institution which by its very definition must assert that the decisive truth about reality is already known and expressed, support a place of genuinely liberal education, an education which takes nothing for granted except to mind's power to know, and takes even this for granted only in a provisional way? Doubt, the sort of doubt which refuses to assent to anything upon the mere assertion of an authority, is apparently both the enemy of revealed religion (since how can there be revelation without an unquestioned authority which reveals?) and the necessary engine of liberal education (since without doubt to clear a space, how could there ever be room for any genuine thought?). One of the defining activities of a liberal education is inquiry, the search for the truth for the truth's own sake, and it is always an aim of such education to develop in the student his or her own capacity of inquiry. Liberal education is never just training, not even of the most sophisticated sort; built into the nature of such education is the recognition (or at least the deep suspicion) that the truth is not yet known, that it cannot merely be transmitted, but that it must, even now, and ever again, be newly discovered and appropriated. From the point of view of revealed religion, however, genuine inquiry is both pointless and dangerous. Since the essential truth about reality is already assumed to be known, to continue to seek it is pointless; and to persist in such questioning is likely to injure the faithful by weakening the authority of the dogma in which the essential truth is (allegedly) revealed to men and women. But the very notion of dogma, a notion apparently fundamental to any developed (Western) religion, is a notion rightfully anathema to the liberally educated inquirer. For such a one, there are no dogmas, nor should there ever be; there are only beliefs provisionally accepted as true, further grist for the mills of intellect and practical reason.
Thus there seems to be a deep incoherence hidden in the notion of Christian liberal education, the sort of education we profess to offer here at Furman. Apparently we must at some point choose between Socrates and Jesus for our paradigm; we cannot live both in Athens and in Jerusalem. Tonight, however, I do not wish to press this apparent incoherence, partly because its tensions are already so familiar to most of us, and partly because on this occasion it is more appropriate to focus upon community rather than division. While there may be profound, even irreconcilable, differences between Athens and Jerusalem, between Socrates and Jesus, between liberal education and Christian evangelism, there are also, I believe, some very profound continuities; and it is the neglect of these continuities which is for me the most disturbing feature of our University today. It is our blindness to the common vision of Socrates and Jesus which leads me to believe that we here at Furman do not truly know anymore who and where we are. We do not know anymore what we are doing as students and teachers together.
What is the neglected common vision of Socrates and Jesus? It can be put very simply: ordinary human life, as it is ordinarily lived, is not worth living. That, of course, is a very hard saying. To be told tonight that one's life is not worth living—for most of us here, myself included, certainly do live ordinary lives—is not a little unpleasant; and not a little puzzling, too, for what other sort of life is available to us? How could we not live ordinary lives, being the ordinary human beings that we are? And yet both Socrates and Jesus are one in calling men and women out of the world we usually know and serve. Let me remind you of their claims.
In one of his most famous remarks—you have heard it a hundred times, at least—Socrates flatly asserts that the unexamined life is not worth living; and the philosophical examination he requires for worthiness is very far from leaving us essentially unchanged, going on with our ordinary existence in the ordinary way. Quite the contrary: Socratic philosophy is a practice radically at odds with our life's usual structure of aim and achievement; it is not merely a sophisticated sort of mental hygiene performed to insure that the mind's parts are working efficiently in service of our aims. Philosophy does not issue in a technique of clear thinking which allows us to fix our goals and provide solutions to the difficulties we encounter in their pursuit. Indeed, true philosophy interferes with such "clear thinking," as all of Socrate's interlocutors soon discover. It is the enemy of rational efficiency, discovering new mysteries rather than providing neat solutions to practical problems. Bluntly put, the wisdom of philosophy is not an aid to our ordinary life of actions and ideals; it undercuts the very structure of that life.
At Phaedo 64A Socrates says that to do philosophy is to prepare for death, or—to translate the phrase a bit differently—it is to practice dying; it is to practice dying to the world in which we ordinarily live, the world of aim and achievement, the world of getting and spending, the world of frantic rush after trivial satisfaction, the world of cheap sentiment and shallow sensibility.2 Here is Socrates on trial before his fellow-citizens of Athens:
For I spend my whole life in going about and persuading you all to give your first and greatest care to the improvement of your souls, and not till you have done that to think of your bodies or your wealth. And I tell you that wealth does not bring excellence, but that wealth, and every other good thing which men have, whether in public or in private, comes from excellence.
The life here advocated, the life of excellence and the improvement of souls, was not the ordinary life of Socrates' Athens; nor, I am sorry to say, is it the ordinary life of our United States in 1984. And the Socratic criticism of that life goes deeper than mere moral distaste for the rabid consumer society. He is at odds with the very form of ordinary life, not just its particular moral content. Philosophy hopes for revolutionary reconstruction of our practice, not just new wine poured into the same old bottles.
Jesus, too, is a radical critic of the usual structures and ambitions of human existence; and, like Socrates, the form of life he advocates to replace them is a practice of dying to the world's ordinary standards. Here is a representative quotation from Mark's gospel:
And he called to him the multitude with his disciples, and said to them, "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? For what can a man give in return for his life? (Mark 8, 34-37, RSV)
The Sunday-school familiarity of these words should not blind us to their revolutionary intention. To speak of the cross is to speak of death; it is to speak of an unwillingness to resist one's own death at the hands of a world committed to business as usual. To take up one's cross, as Jesus here demands, is to prepare to die; indeed, it is more than that: it is to practice dying, to act out here and now one's death to the world's usual life. The world as we know it asks us, in Jesus' idiom, to try to save our lives; it encourages us to try to protect ourselves, to secure ourselves against disappointment and injury, to gain control—even if only temporarily-over the vicissitudes which threaten to frustrate our defining ambitions. The world as here understood by Jesus is the realm of what Nietzsche later calls "the will to power": to live is always to will to continue to live; it is to will for oneself all those circumstances which promise to "save" one's life, which promise to in-crease one's own power and scope of action in service of one's ideal.
But Jesus insists that to "save" one's life in this way is precisely to lose it. The will to power which defines our ordinary life in the world is the rejection of the cross, not its willing acceptance. Denying oneself means much more than merely denying one's greed, or one's pettiness, or one's cowardice. Denial of self is not just moral reform; otherwise, the Christian would be indistinguishable from the ordinary decent person, and the cross would not be a scandal to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. No, to deny oneself, to take up the cross, means to die to everything one has heretofore been, even to die to that moral ideal which had motivated one on one's best days. It is to die to the Law: not only the psychological Law of envy and self-aggrandizement, or the social Law of status and wealth, but also the moral Law of justice and benevolence. No-one who plays the world's games—even its best games, like moral or social refom—is denying himself as the Christian is supposed to do. No-one who resists evil, whether or not that resistance is motivated egostically or altruistically, has truly taken up the cross. The cross is not an event within life; with the cross the world does not alter, but comes to an end.
So, for all their profound differences, Socrates and Jesus are one in calling us away from the ordinary life of the world, ordinarily lived. Socrates calls us to the life of virtue and improvement of soul, while Jesus calls us to the cross; and these are not the same, of course (though I suspect they are closer than either Plato or Paul, both so typically second-generation, can represent). Nevertheless, we here at Furman University, a liberal arts college where students and teachers work under a seal which proclaims "Christo et Doctrinae," must try to exhibit a form of life which honors both philosophical wisdom and the cross.
III.
And do we? Remember, to ask this question is to ask: do we here at this University consciously share and encourage a form of life which rejects the will to power in all its forms? Have we here found an alternative to the life of increased self-consciousness and agency, one which "loses" such life rather than tries to "save" it. Do we, students and teachers alike, practice dying to the world? I am afraid that we do not. When I look at what we do here, most of the time, I see "education" in vigorous service to ordinary "life." I see an institution trying to serve its students and supporters by giving them what they want, not what—according to Socrates and Jesus—they need.
This University, like every other university I know of, seems to me a front-man for the culture which it functions; our standards, the form of life we live here and the form of life we encourage in our students, seem largely indistinguishable from the (best parts of) the Enlightenment dream. We value knowledge, power, agency, and individual accomplishment; we do not value poverty (whether of spirit or of worldly goods), ignorance, humiliation, or uncalculating sacrifice. Here at Furman we are conciously and (so far as I can see) happily preparing people for a fruitful life in what we blithely call the "real world;" we are not trying to die to that world. Thus our assumption seems to be that Socratic philosophical wisdom is a useful (or at least classy) adjunct to ordinary life as it is ordinarily lived, not a radical critique of that life which makes it abhorrent. Likewise, we seem to believe that the cross Jesus requires is a spiritual ornament attached to our ordinary pursuits, rather than the final death of those pursuits themselves.
Let me cite a few things about our University which convince me of what I have just claimed. Nothing I say here will be fully developed, of course; so I encourage you to follow out the arguments for yourselves. First of all, take an obvious point: our cur-ficulum. If one sits down with the catalogue, one will find course after course the intention of which is to prepare the student for a particular niche within the society as presently constituted. And I do not refer here only to courses which seem to be patently "vocational," though they are certainly there to be found; many courses whose titles seem to have little to do with doing a job or earning a living are yet basically designed to accomodate one to the life of this culture, rather than to challenge that culture at its fundamentals. Taken as a whole, our curriculum does not aim at a revolution in the student's sensibility. Rather, it aims to make of our students, in the words of our Statement of Purpose, "responsible citizens," that is, men and women equipped to become exemplars of the culture, not its radical alternative.
Intimately connected to our curricular pattern is our practice of grading. The criticism and evaluation of students' work by teachers is, of course, essential to education; but it is something of a mystery why wegrade that work as well, since a grade as such is not an instrument of educational evaluation but rather an instrument of ranking. I tell the student nothing of educational interest when I affix an 'A' to her paper. I may, of course, flatter her thereby, or make her parents happy; but whatever educational benefit there is, if found in my comments on her work, in my detailed examination and critique of her facts and arguments. The grade adds nothing of educational value. So why then do we grade? I suspect the answer lies in what a student told me in my office just last week. He was complaining about the gap between the grade he had received in a particular course and the educational benefit to him of the course itself, and I was encouraging him therefore to ignore the grade. Since it doesn't represent anything important to him, pay no attention to it. He said to me, "Yeah, but the man from IBM will pay attention to it." And of course, he's right. Do we grade our students for their good as students of the truth? Or do we grade them as a favor to the "real world" which requires them as fodder for its own continuance. I suspect the latter, and the ubiguitous and overwhelming presence of grades at our University seems to me an unmistakable indication of our bondage to that "real world" both Socrates and Jesus despised.
To cite a final indication of that bondage, I would ask us to consider our current financial and public-relations successes. We here at Furman tend to be very pleased when we raise lots of money from corporations and their puppet foundations; we tend to be very pleased when we are mentioned favorably in national magazines, right there between the advertisements for deadly cigarettes and $24,000 automobiles. We tend to think, "Hooray!" We must be doing something right." Certainly that ism/ instinctive reaction, along with gratitude to those who work as hard in our behalf. But then ! think, "By whose standards of 'right'?" Do intelligent corporations and individuals give rewards to their radical critics? Does the "real world" voluntarily support and honor those who are trying to die to it, and who encourage others to do the same? Did any foundations in Athens endow a professorial chair for Socrates? Did the religious establishment in Jerusalem open up its Cooperative Program to support Jesus' ministry? In Matthew's gospel Jesus says:
Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets which were before you. (Matt. 5,11-12, RSV)
If curses and persecutions by the "real world" are the usual and proper reward of the prophet, what should we say of our growing acceptance by that world? Has the preserving salt lost its savor? Has the philosophical gadfly lost its bite?
If so, and I myself cannot deny it, then we have sold our dual birthright for a mess of pottage. We are being true to neither the Socratic nor the Christian gospel, and liberal education has become nothing more (or little more) than the process by which the "real world" replicates itself in every new generation. Oh, to be sure, we may do a bit in a few courses here and there to challenge our ruling assumptions; but, by and large, it's business as usual here, with the "real world" of Enlightenment/American culture calling the shots.
Let me close this lecture by trying to forestall certain objections. First, and perhaps most obviously, one might object to what I have said tonight by defending the Enlightenment dream and thus defending the intelligent and morally sensitive from of the will to power which it encourages. In such a spirit, one might ask, "What is wrong with a university which is a spokesman for high culture and practical reason? Why should we not try to increase our self-consciousness and our power of agency, and thereby try to increase the quotient of satisfaction available to each individual? What is so wrong with the ordinary life we lead—or try to lead—as thoughtful and productive citizens of this enlightened republic?" These are good questions; and, since the criticism of Socrates and Jesus go very deep, I cannot give full answers to them here. Indeed, 1 will not try to answer them at all, but will instead cite a fact for us to consider as the beginning of such an answer.
Right now, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have in their possession more than 60,000 nuclear warheads—I repeat, more than 60,000 of these weapons of horrible mass destruction, poised and ready to fire.5 These weapons, along with their delivery systems and the contingency plans for their use hatched in Washington and in Moscow, place us right now, even as we calmly speak and listen, one step away from an abyss which will swallow up our lives, and the lives of our children and friends. More, that abyss, as near to us as a tyrant's whisper or a computer's malfunction, threatens to swallow human civilization as a whole; it even threatens to swallow the planet itself, considered as a habitat for plant and animal life. I ask us tonight, especially those of us tempted to defend our latter-day Enlightenment culture against the animadversions of Socrates and Jesus, I ask us: is our present peril just an error in the cunning of reason, an error reason itself will soon put right? Are those missies so painstakingly buried in Kansas and in the Urals an aberration of our enlightened idealism? Have we not been "enlightened" enough, not been "rational" enough, not been "good" enough? Will we find the grace to draw back from the abyss by application of even more of the same techniques which caused the abyss to open before us in the first place? Or, on the contrary, was it not our very idealism itself, our very pursuit of the good for ourselves and others, which put those missies in the ground? Was it not the Enlightenment notions of rational self-interest and intelligent resistance to evil which led us so unerringly to our obscene strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction?
I do not say that truthful answers to these questions are obvious. Perhaps those 60,000 warheads are a freak accident, a temporary deviation in the steady progress of reason toward Utopia; perhaps they don't teil us a profound but ugly truth about the consequences of our highest ideals. Or perhaps, on the other hand, they represent the end of the Enlightenment dream, the haunting Shadow of our defining will to power. But this much is clear: if one inclines toward the latter view (as 1 do), one will not be likely to want this University (or any other) to carry on educational "business as usual." One will not want it to prepare its students for the "real world" of ordinary life, ordinarily lived. On the contrary: one will want the University to explore the common ground of Athens and Jerusalem, ground which both promises and requires a radically different way of dwelling on the earth.
Finally, let me acknowledge two related ad hominem protests. 1 can easily imagine someone saying to me, "For all your rhetoric, you yourself are essentially no different from what you criticize. You are yourself, as we all are, a part of Enlightenment culture in its contemporary American expression; you are neither Socrates nor Jesus, neither philosophical martyr nor Christian saint, dying to the world." This is certainly true, and my lecture tonight is an attempt to remind you and myself of the inadequacy of where we all stand. If one waited until one were pure, to begin to think or speak, one would never think or say anything at all. And how then, locked into the purity of our silence, could we ever learn anything of one another?
In the same vein, someone might object to me, "You are an ungrateful child, biting the hand that feeds you. How can you presume to question an institution which once educated you and now pays your bills for books and groceries? Common gratitude, if not institutional loyalty, should incline you to praise, not to criticism." But such an objection rests upon a misunderstanding. As a graduate of Furman University, and as a member of her faculty for thirteen years, I do have special reason for gratitude, a gratitude which indeed I feel. But not every act of homage must take the object of admiration on its own terms. All of us know, in fact, that it is one of the chief graces of love that it often refuses assent to the favorite self-image of the beloved.
V.
It will not have escaped you that this lecture has its fair share—perhaps more than its fair share—of confusion, anger, and despair. Let me conclude, then, on a different note. Here is Thoreau writing in Wa/den, giving us a word for this winter's night, and for tomorrow morning: "Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our
business."6
Notes
1The L.D. Johnson Memorial Lecture, delivered at Furman University on 16 January, 1984. I have made no effort to eliminate the lecture style. I would like to acknowledge my pleasure and gratitude at being asked to contribute to this series.
2I am indebted to R.F. Holland for suggesting this translation of the Socratic phrase. See his essay, "Suicide," in G.N.A. Vesey, ed.. Talk of God (London, 1969), p. 74.
3This last sentence is a paraphrase of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1961), sec. 6.4311.
41 ignore here, for reasons of space, the role of grades as an aid to motivation.
5lt is understandably difficult to get hard data about the
size of our nuclear arsenal. The figure I use is due to Terry
Eagleton; see his Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis,
1983}, p. 194. More circumstantial, and more horrifying, detail
can be found in Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New
York, 1982), passim.. - -_ ;
6Henry D. Thoreau, The Illustrated Walden (Princeton,
1973), p. 98. Ca
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