What could Obama’s take on Iranian democracy, early-modern theodicy, and twentieth-century leftist thought have in common? Despite these wide variations in subject-matter, it seems to me that recent posts by Justin Reynolds, Alex Hernandez, and James Robertson nevertheless gesture towards a similar problematic. All three point to the profound tension which marks the relationship between human action in historical time, and the transcendent telos of the Christian salvation narrative. They point, in other words, to the thorny question of how much agency humans possess in the achievement of their own salvation.
In the case of the socialist models discussed by James, this tension strikes me as somewhat analogous to the conflict between historical determinism—the inevitability of the Revolution, according to the scientific laws of history uncovered by Marx—and the role of human agency in actually bringing the Revolution to pass. This seems very similar indeed to the problematic relationship between divine providence and human agency that emerges from Christian theodicy, as I suggested in a recent comment on Alex’s post. At first glance, it is hard to see the appeal of models such as these, which pre-determine the direction and outcome of history in such a way as to allow little room for the possibility of meaningful or effective human action. And yet, these appeals to the law-like structure of history—whether divine or Marxist—might also be interpreted ideologically, as a way to justify a particular course of action or to claim universal scope for a particular political program or religious narrative.
This tension seems even more problematic when it is extended to the question of salvation, and to the eschatological role of human action in the here-and-now. It is this tension which seems to underwrite the conflict Justin pointed out over the Christian notion of “bearing witness.” On one hand, Christians are taught to engage the world through a spirit of love, charity, and justice. On the other, they are taught that this world will ultimately pass away and are warned against reducing the Gospel to any particular political program for earthly well-being. On one hand, humans are treated as fallen beings stained with original sin, and on the other, they are held to be made in the image of God and to possess a transcendent destiny.
This strikes me as one of the most productive tensions within Christian theology, and one that particularly marks the Catholic tradition because, in contrast to the Protestant stress on “faith alone,” Catholic dogma endows human “works” with a role in salvation. As such, Catholics tend to err closer to Pelagianism—the heresy of denying original sin and affirming the agency of human free will. This question gained new weight for twentieth-century Catholic theologians obliged to renegotiate the temporal role of the Church in an increasingly secular political order. After finally relinquishing the dream of restoring a medieval-style theocracy, many Catholic integrists felt that protecting the Church’s spiritual authority required a total withdrawal from engagement with secular modern politica. Others were appalled by the way this apolitical stance could justify widespread clerical silence in the face of atrocities such as the Holocaust. Still others felt that such institutionalized forms of violence required not only clerical condemnation, but active political resistance, arguing that working towards human liberation from suffering was an indispensable precondition for the liberation from sin which would come with the advent of the Kingdom of God. The ambiguous wording of the pastoral constitution for the Second Vatican Council in many ways encouraged this theological diversity. While clearly warning that “earthly progress must be distinguished from the growth of Christ’s kingdom,” it also affirmed that “the earthly and the heavenly city penetrate each other,” and that “the earthly service of men” will “make ready the material of the celestial realm” (Gaudium et Spes, articles 39-40).
Far from being regrettable, this kind of inconsistent language seems to testify to the at once conflicting and inseparable relationship between historical present and eschatological future. It therefore raises a number of interesting questions for scholars. What kinds of political-theological models does such ambiguity produce under particular historical circumstances? What does it tell us about the dynamic relationship between heresy and orthodoxy within a religious tradition? What historical agency should we attribute to these theological forces, relative to their political, economic, or cultural counterparts? Does this distinction even make sense, or is it itself the product of a secular worldview? Most importantly, how do particular historical forms of secularization redefine the very nature of the political and the theological, as well as the relationship between them? If the theological tension I have outlined is in fact insuperable, then it certainly seems necessary to go beyond thinking the relationship between the theological and the political in singular, structural or analogical terms.
Sarah Shortall’s comment that Catholicism tends toward the Pelagian point of view is very interesting and provocative, but Catholicism really provides a far too complicated test case here, since, doctrinally, Catholicism was one of the great persecutors of the heresy, and Augustine, who may have been the closest the Roman Church came to a Protestant perspective before Luther, was surely Pelagius’s greatest adversary (the Church today still touts Augustine’s righteousness on this point). For a really good example of Pelagianism earnestly at work in the world today, one must go to Mormonism. (Sterling M. McMurrin has made the strongest case so far for seeing Mormon theology as essentially Pelagian.) To be fair, one should perhaps say that Mormons are “semi-Pelagian,” in that they agree with the claim that Adam and Eve’s fall was the cause of human mortality—a point on which Catholic theology insists still—but that this first sin did not cause all subsequent humanity to be born in a sinful state, requiring baptism, Christ’s sacrifice, and so forth. (Pelagius famously claimed that Adam would still have died had he never tasted the apple—common sense sort of guy, that Pelagius—and denied original sin as well). If we want to investigate a particularly robust working out of such contradictions between divine and human agency in current political theological circumstances, perhaps we should look at the LDS Church, which has supplemented divine gratia, fide, and scriptura with a a very this-worldly (and eschatological) belief in the American nation as one of the lost tribes of Israel, in a very patriotic dedication to this nation’s survival and triumph over time, and in the power of human endeavor to overcome any challenge humans may confront—including the end-times that some newlyweds prepare for by asking you contribute to the preparedness cellars for which they register (though not through Tiffany’s). I am guessing that this is not quite the sort of semi-Pelagianism Shortall is thinking of, but then, it may be that optimistically doing away with the idea of original sin may have some interesting unintended theological (even political) consequences—certainly Augustine thought so.
Thank you, Vince, for bringing up Augustine, since he represents such a critical figure for Catholic-Protestant doctrinal divisions. It’s interesting that you identify him as a Catholic since, as you hinted, he was very much appropriated by Protestants and therefore lost favour among Catholic theologians until he was rehabilitated by the “nouvelle théologie” of the 1940s. What’s especially fascinating is that those theologians responsible for the Catholic revival of Augustinianism in the twentieth century actually seem to donwplay his anti-Pelagianism, instead privileging his affirmation of the transcendent destiny inhering in all humans by virtue of their creation in the image of God.
As a corollary to this, I wonder how meaningful it is to label thinkers who predate the Reformation as specifically “Catholic.” What does a name like “Catholicism” mean in the absence of a “Protestantism” against which to define it? Someone like Augustine would no doubt have considered himself a “Christian,” but it is only retrospectively that he can be appropriated as “Catholic” or “Protestant,” producing very different reconstructions of his theological vision.
Indeed, Sarah Shortall is quite correct in insisting that Augustine is a complicated and much contested figure, for Papists and non-Papists alike. (I will try to avoid using the term Catholic!) But I still insist that the post-Reformation Roman Church, even today, is closely wedded to an anti-Pelagian position, the essence of which is the fact of original sin. Interestingly, a piece on Pius XII appeared this morning in The Wall Street Journal‘s “Weekend Journal” section (p. W9). The point of the article is to celebrate (what else would the WSJ do with Pius?) Pius’s “Humani Generis” (1950), which established the basis of the accommodation reached by the “Catholic Church” (as the WSJ calls it) with Darwinian evolution (the WSJ being as deeply attached to the science of natural selection as it is to the invisible hand of the markets and high-toned, Buckley-ite religious piety). But Pius at the same time insisted on, as a point of settled dogma, the reality of Adam as the mono-generative father of all humankind, and of Adam’s first sin as the basis of humanity’s inborn fallen-ness, for only in this way could evolution ever be reconciled with the doctrine of original sin—the core doctrine Pelagius of course denied. And Pius was not at all an outlier on this point. Yes, certain wily Jesuits (read, Protestants in lamb’s robes) such as Karl Rahner argued that Adam and Eve were metaphors (this is the version I got from the left-wing Jesuits who briefly reigned under Pedro Arrupe in the late 1960s and 1970s), but doctrinally Pius XII was not an outlier. In fact, that more human-faced Pope, John Paul II, fully reaffirmed Pius XII’s anti-Pelagian position in his 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. As far as I can see, you can’t be a Pelagian without getting rid of original sin, and you can’t be a “Catholic” in any sense at all unless you accept it. Augustine cast a long shadow, but it is his victory over Pelagius (not his proto-Protestantism, and certainly not his earlier Manichean sympathies) that the modern Papacy has upheld.
I would like to clarify that I in no way wished to suggest that Catholicism is Pelagian or crypto-Pelagian, and, in that sense, I am in total agreement with Vince Pecora. “Humani Generis” is a great example of the Church’s anti-Pelagian stance, but it is very important to see this as one (extreme) instance within a dynamic, rather than a fixed, theological line. “Humani Generis” was largely aimed against the work of Teilhard de Chardin, whose evolutionary theology did indeed come perilously close to the Pelagian position. The encyclical was therefore also read as a covert attack on Henri de Lubac, who was deeply influenced by Teilhard. That being said, de Lubac was subsequently rehabilitated at the Second Vatican Council and emerged as one of its most influential voices, with the result that documents like “Gaudium et Spes” seem to reverse much of the anti-Pelagianism of “Humani Generis,” as I noted in my post. De Lubac was subsequently made a Cardinal under John Paul II. My point is not to deny the Church’s anti-Pelagian stance, but to argue that the Church has had a much more ambivalent attitude towards this heresy, because it must distance itself from both the extreme anti-Pelagianism associated with Protestantism and the heresy of Pelagianism itself. This, I think, leads to a powerful and remarkably dynamic tension in Catholic theology, fostering constant reworking and wide variation in theological perspectives.
It’s also rather interesting that Pecora refers to Jesuits as “Protestants in lamb’s robes,” because it is precisely Jesuits like Teilhard and de Lubac who tend to tack closer towards Pelagianism. This, it seems to me, has everything to do with the Jesuits’ historic enmity towards the Jansenists, who famously stressed the fallenness of man and human impotence. In other words, if anyone can be accused of crypto-Protestantism, it’s the Jansenists.
Ah well, though I am of a certain age, I certainly did not go to school with the Jesuits when they were fighting the Jansenists––that was a long time ago even for me. Back then, they were good anti-Protestant soldiers for Christ. By the 1960s and 1970s, under Arrupe, they were infused with an ecumenical spirit much closer to high-church Protestantism, thus downplaying any literalist interpretation of Adam and Eve. (I think they remained true, however, to the interpretation of original sin held by both Protestants and Catholics). Curiously, in all this back and forth, Sarah Shortall never once mentions original sin. This seems odd to me in a conversation about Pelagianism, since original sin (and not, say, modern ideas of evolution) was––and still is––the crucial issue. Nor does she anything about the modern Mormon Church, which is truly Pelagian. It’s all well and good to remember that Jesuits opposed Jansenists centuries ago, but it is not that relevant today. The Jesuits under Arrupe found ways to be both very worldly and to admire the semi-Pelagian position of Teilhard––”men for others,” and all that––as well as the neo-Protestant position of anti-Papal Authority Catholic theologians like Hans Kung, whom we read carefully in our “Problem of God” courses. For the Jesuits of the Age of Aquarius––not the ones of long ago––the Pelagian and the Protestant were not really very opposed at all.