A great agony of Christian thinking has been the ambiguity of the question how much importance should we assign to mankind, its destiny, and its works? A thousand small incarnations of this ambiguity have embroiled our thinkers in skirmishes with each other. I’d like to commentate on the possibilities for repentance and hope within this ongoing discussion.
But first, a preliminary aside regarding whether Christians should repent of such unresolved discussions altogether and what they have to hope for from such agonies.
The problem of “fruitless” discussions naturally stands in the gate of this entire series. I will be dealing with several of them. One is tempted to write off the history of ideas as mere wrangling—no less in the realm of “Christian” thinking. In answer to this attitude, I would begin by pointing to the word agony. I use agony, in this essay, in a technical sense. It derives from the Greek agonia, and in the Greek culture it stood as a pillar of their moral world. Agonia was the struggle for victory in public games, and as such it served a deeply eschatological purpose. To win in the public games was to become a hero, to achieve the most significant kind of immortality—the kind of immortality for which Achilles, for example, gave up physical immortality—the immortality of becoming an heroic memory. Greek communities were structured to encourage agon, the assembly for such contests, at many levels. In other words, communities were morally formed in order to create the platform for the eschatological hero, and one’s individual eschatological hope was to mount this pedestal oneself by excelling through agonia.
When I speak of the history of ideas as a history of agonies, I refer to a dimension of that history of which we ought to repent. The Christian community is decidedly not founded to allow for agonia. Instead, it is founded to allow for agape, the highest form of self-sacrificing love. Yet various aspects of the history of thinking, and not less of Christian thinking, suggest that it does not always occur within this Christian community. For example, too often intellectual discussions become political contests in which disciples of various dead thinkers pit the works and legacies of their masters against one another, as if they had come to form intellectual nation-states struggling for dominance over a psychic continent. Of this, and many other agonistic tendencies within our intellectual traditions, we should repent.
But to write off the history of ideas because of its agonistic features would be a mistake. That would be intellectual suicide. The ambiguities which form the context of discussion throughout history are the pretexts for thought itself. We do not think about unconsidered certainties or difficulties we deem irrelevant. We think about mysteries, about problems. The question before us should not be whether to participate in the transtemporal conversation about ideas, but how to do so. The inevitable life of thought is one scene where the prescribed and Christ-modeled human role of repentance and hope can be assumed. The hope of our wrangling is that through our fear and trembling, salvation may be worked out.
Returning to the subject at hand, the significance of mankind becomes a problem because of the theo-centric distinction of Christianity. Prof. Kagan, from Yale, in a series of lectures I’ve been listening to on my ipod about the history of Ancient Greece, presents the problem in its acutest (albeit one-sided, as we shall see) form. He takes the time to distinguish between what he calls the two main influences on western culture: the judaeo-christian and the Greek. Prof. Kagan points out that both the Iliad and the Oddyssey begin with words about particular human things—the one, about Achilles’ particular rage, the other, about the particular man Oddyseus. The Bible, on the other hand, begins with God. Moreover, Kagan continues, the Bible shows the original paradise of Eden to have been a place where man was created alone, and then eventually with just one woman, where he didn’t have to work but got his food easily and lived in peaceful recreation, where politics and society did not exist but God himself was the purpose of man’s existence.
To certain strands of Christian thought, that would seem to be a very accurate description. The theo-centrism of Scripture can be taken to imply an anti-humanism. Human government and culture can be viewed as the result of precautions against evil and the results of individual abberration. But this view isn’t particularly wholesome, biblical, or useful to the Christian community.
We find instead a much more complex prescription for valuing ourselves, our neighbours, and the world around us than Prof. Kagan’s remarks would lead us to expect. He was wrong, of course, in his depiction of the Bible’s Eden and of man’s solitude. Eden is described as a place where man is entrusted with a very large and important work; and the first family is depicted as originating from God’s perception that “it is not good for man to be alone.” In short, both human work (what has been somewhat excessively called the “cultural mandate”) and human political life (in an Arendtian sense of the word) may be found in the paradise of Eden. A number of strands of Christian thinking have embraced and expounded on this element within Scripture. The most healthful modern engagement with the subject that I can think of (without wholly joining the party of their disciples for agonistic purposes) comes in the wake of the neo-calvinist tradition of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd.
But these corrections of Prof. Kagan’s perception of a Christian valuation of human significance does not entirely erase the problem. It just removes the possiblity of resolving it in one direction. Following Christ does not give rise to a “religious” view of things, where “all that matters” is the glory of God viewed as an acosmic and ahistorical goal.
Instead, we are presented with a baffling conundrum in which, yes, the presence of God is the condition and prize of paradise, but the matrix for that presence is human culture. The conundrum is, of course, encapsulated in God’s final word on the subject: the incarnation of Christ. The glory of God becomes most evident and magnified in the darkest moment of human governing justice, when Christ is given the death penalty.
It seems, consequently, that continuing participation in the conversation about the significance of man and his works could benefit from two lines of repentance and two lines of hope.
First, we ought to repent of two idolatries. The best metaphor for these two idolatries that I can think of is perspective. On the one hand we find isolated anthropocentrism: man rendered god-size by the removal of the transcendant horizon of the true God; on the other hand we find isolated theocentrism: God rendered cosmos-consuming and -negating by the removal of the anthropic foreground. Isolated theocentrism is as idolatrous as isolated anthropocentrism, because while honoring a word, God, it has lost the actual self-revealed God who does not present himself as cosmos-consuming and -negating, but as continually acting only within the cosmos. Paradise cannot be either a perfected human society, or a “religious” trance. It can only be the City of the Lamb—unquestionably a city, unquestionably lamb-centered.
Second, we ought to hope for two things from the discussion. On the one hand, we can hope for an increased sense and understanding of the divine commisioning of humanity. We compete, but against ourselves, for a crown of righteousness, to be achieved in the concrete realm of human intercourse and culture. On the other hand, we can hope for an increased sense that the significance of humanity is a matter of grace in the deepest way. Man has no significance except as a participant in the Divine life.
