First Things RSS Feed - Thomas Albert Howard

The Dangers of Hindu Nationalism

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0500

On January 30, 1948, the Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in New Delhi with three bullets fired at point-blank range. It was but a few months earlier that the religious massacres tied to the partition of India and Pakistan had occurred. Hate and anger lingered. As many as 500,000 had been slain and millions displaced. Godse and his ilk felt that Gandhi had betrayed India by his inclusivist vision. They advocated, instead, a two-nation and two-religion theory: a staunchly Hindu India as a counterpart to Muslim Pakistan.

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The Reformation at Five Hundred

Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0400

On October 25, many churches will once again observe “Reformation Sunday,” commemorating the day in 1517 when Martin Luther is said to have nailed his Ninety-Five Theses concerning theological reform on the door of the Castle church in Wittenberg, Saxony. This event continues to be regarded as the birth of Protestantism. We now stand just three years out from the five-hundredth anniversary, which will be marked worldwide in 2017. Churches, institutions, and individuals shaped by what began so many centuries ago face a daunting question: How in fact ought one to commemorate the Reformation five hundred years after the fact?

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Protestant Reformation Approaching 500

Mon, 13 May 2013 08:58:25 -0400

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Two Deaths

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

As I write these paragraphs, a friend of mine is treading through his last twenty-four hours of life on this earth. Tomorrow morning he will be executed, after thirty years in solitary confinement in one of our state prison complexes. I have never met him. But somehow, perhaps ten years ago, he got hold of my name and began to write to me. Since then, we have corresponded regularly. His name is Robert. His letters are written with a ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper. Here are some excerpts from these letters. I will leave his punctuation and spelling intact.

“Hi, Tom I pray you all are in good spirits . . . . They gave me a date for my execution of 2-29-12 . . . . My Faith, trust is in our Lord Jesus Christ. What His will is, that is what will happen . . . ?. another inmate [also named Robert] is to go on 3-8-12 I have known him for many years & he is also a Catholic. Please add him to your prayer list. You are all in my prayers . . . . Your Friend, Brother In our Lord Jesus Christ.” Or again: “I have some very nice officers watching over me. I follow what the rules say.?.?.?. I’m just taking it easy, watching TV some, playing cards, praying. His will be done! . . . you are in my prayers.”

Then this, two weeks before his execution: “The Lord is helping me to get through each day peacefully.?.?.?. His love is real and true as is His word is true. Joshua had many trials to go through and the Lord was there with him as He was with Moses.?.?.?. Yes He loves each of us totally, completely. Yes, even the ones who have gone astray (do evil, think evil). He is right there ready to forgive them, except them into His Family. They need only to confess, repent, of their sins, accept Him as their Lord, Saviour. They will be part of His family .?.?.?. You are wright. He is our rock, stronghold, our salvation. We do need to pour out our hearts to Him, love Him with all our heart.?.?.?. New cell #3G17 (death watch cell).”

And ten days before his execution (tomorrow as of this writing), we find this: “Thank you for the scripture Ps 91 . . . . I give Him thanks for all He has done, will be doing for me.?.?.?. There are two of us on death watch now. Robert is a good-hearted man .?.?. he knows the Lord to.”

At this point, I set aside my manuscript for the night. It is now the morning of Robert’s execution. He is now dead. Or, if not, his last minutes are ticking away. Requiem aeternum dona eis Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

How did it go, this last night? Was he wakeful in his death-watch cell? Did he have company”a kind guard? Family? Robert had no family. A counselor? I have often wondered what state-certified counselors say to someone like Robert. Tell him that it’s fine to express all of his feelings? That it’s OK? That it’s a simple and painless procedure? Tell him to say anything he feels like saying?

Once when I was working in the emergency room at Massachusetts General Hospital, I overheard a staff counselor tell the young mother of a small girl who had just died on the treatment table, “You can say anything you want.” Good God, I thought. Is this the best we can do? I sat down on the floor next to the woman and we said the Our Father, she in Spanish, I in Latin by way of harmony.

And how does one get from one’s cell to the place of execution? A little procession? Along concrete corridors with rattling keys, shuttling locks, and clanking doors? One assumes a priest must be there. And how do one’s own thoughts run? A total blank? Terror? Calling on God? Perhaps even finding solace in recalling “I am he that liveth and was dead?” Does one climb onto a gurney for the lethal injection? Or sit down in the chair? Does anyone say a prayer? Is he asked for a final word? The most critical moment in one’s life, next to one’s birth, lurches along caparisoned with inanities.

The death of another Christian has juxtaposed itself in my mind in connection with Robert’s death. Last year, Archduke Otto, heir to the Habsburg thrones and to the erstwhile Holy Roman Empire, died. But for the seismic political changes over the last century, he would have been emperor.

The requiem mass was held in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, celebrated by the primate of Austria, Christoph Cardinal SchÖnborn. All possible crowned, ex-crowned, or putatively crowned heads of continental Europe were present. The pageantry was titanic. Cardinals in heavy gold-filigreed black copes and gold miters; bishops in violet cassocks and zuchettos, lace surplices, and miters; priests in black fiddleback chasubles; great clouds of incense; choirboys singing Michael Haydn’s Requiem ; noblemen from all the noble families of the Habsburg Empire in white tie and black mourning dress, most with blue ribbons and medallions; and great files of attending men in knickerbockers, white hose, and sumptuously plumed felt alpine hats.

Robert and Otto. The murderer and the archduke. Nobody and Somebody. Worlds”centuries”galaxies apart. The one, ignominiously and anonymously huddled off the human scene; the other, sent to his rest with catafalque, gold pall, glass hearse drawn by black-plumed horses, and a procession of prelates, princes, and the public. Both men were Catholic, and there any similarity would seem to end. But when the body of a royal Habsburg is taken from the cathedral for burial, the solemn procession makes its way to the Habsburg tomb. An official knocks loudly on the sepulchral doors with a staff.

“Who desires entry?” says a voice from inside the doors.

“Otto of Austria; once Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary; Royal Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria, and Illyria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow; Duke of Lorraine, Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma . . . Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia and Istria . . . Grand Voivod of the Voivodeship of Serbia . . . [the pedigree goes on].”

“We do not know him.”

A second knocking.

“Who desires entry?”

“Dr. Otto von Habsburg, President and Honorary President of the Paneuropean Union and quondam President of the European Parliament, honorary doctor of many universities . . . [again the august list].

“We do not know him.”

A third knocking.

“Who desires entry?

“Otto, a mortal and sinful man.”

“Then let him come in.”

Both men in penitential weeds. Both pleading the paschal mystery as their only warrant for entry into the presence of the Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, and thence into the kingdom of the king of all kings, where irony ascends to mystery, and mystery to adoration.

Thomas Howard is a retired English teacher.

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Germanizing Protestantism

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Founding the Fathers: ? Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America
by Elizabeth Clark
University of Pennsylvania, 576 pages, $69.95

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The Dialectic and the Double Helix

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

While a graduate student in history in the 1990s, I once asked a German friend what she found most remarkable about the United States. She recalled the experience of an evangelical woman telling her about the daily “prayer journal” she kept. This would in itself be unusual for a German, my friend explained, but what further struck her was that the woman logged her entries on a home computer more advanced than any my friend had seen in Germany. The marriage of evangelical piety and cutting-edge technology seemed unmistakably American to her but somehow at odds—worrisomely at odds—with what modernity was supposed to look like.

That story came back to me a decade later at an academic conference when a Scandinavian scholar rose to complain about the pronounced religiosity of American life. Educated Europeans understand, she said, that Sigmund Freud was simply right: Religion is a childish illusion, and clinging to it a form of neurosis. America’s intermixing of religion and politics, she continued, could only be regarded as a historically neurotic phenomenon, a stubborn holdover from less enlightened times.

As many have noted, religion is a major reason for America and Europe growing apart. “To Europeans,” wrote the editors of The Economist , “religion is the strangest and most disturbing feature of American exceptionalism.” Such transatlantic disaffection invites historical perspective. Even as the absence of a feudal order and established church have shaped American institutions and political habits, the dialectic of a feudal order and established churches and of secularist rejection of religion has structured European attitudes toward the United States, particularly toward the American experiment in religious freedom and toward the seemingly unabating religious vitality that this system has produced.

Although the American and French Revolutions have often been seen as together forming “an age of democratic revolution,” in religious matters the transatlantic disparities overwhelm the similarities. The political theorist Hugh Heclo has used the arresting image of a double helix to capture what he sees as the specifically American “denouement” to the puzzle of reconciling Christian religion and civil authority.

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Maritain’s America

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Since its founding, the United States has elicited much curiosity and commentary from European intellectuals. Oscillating between paternal interest and fraternal rivalry, Europe’s ambitious scribes have braved the Atlantic, written sprawling books, instructed us in manners and morals, and measured our development against Old World benchmarks. Sometimes this interest has been positive, sometimes ambivalent; often, especially in recent years, it has been negative and condescending.

The French, in particular, have commented prodigiously on America. From Talleyrand and Tocqueville to Jean Baudrillard and Bernard-Henri Lévy, French thinkers have left lasting guideposts of interpretation, if not always on the actual America of Iowa City and Cleveland then at least on the symbolic America, that golem of soulless modernity.

As the process of post–Cold War European unification unfolded, hostility to this symbolic America unfortunately helped define the new European identity. Where then might one turn to find a more measured view from abroad? The French philosopher Jacques Maritain provides an interesting starting point. His picture of the nation, as glimpsed in Reflections on America (1958), offers a sympathetic treatment of the United States, one that deftly mixes historical insight and theological reflection.

Such a treatment by a French Catholic did not appear likely in the middle of the twentieth century. As an expression of political modernity, the United States long stood under a cloud of suspicion for devout Catholics, who in the nineteenth century tended to associate liberal ideas with the French Revolution’s anticlericalism. Moreover, Catholic misgivings cannot be isolated from more-general Old World elite hostility toward an upstart nation. This hostility waxed and waned through the nineteenth century, reaching a high-water mark in the early twentieth century as the United States’ industrial clout grew. The politically polarized interwar years saw a high volume of anti-American literature published in Europe. Georges Duhamel’s French bestseller, America the Menace (1930), expressed a typical loathing of commerce, crowd culture, and entertainment in America. Three years before Hitler ravaged Europe, Duhamel saw in the United States nothing but the brutalization of conscience, the standardization of culture, and the debasement of civilized values.

Unlike many commentators, Maritain and his wife Raïssa actually lived in the United States. He fled war-torn Europe in 1940 for what was to be a brief exile. As things turned out, he accepted academic appointments in New York and Princeton and wound up living in the United States until 1960 (punctuated by three years as French ambassador to the Vatican after the war).

In Reflections on America , European elite criticism of the United States is never far from Maritain’s mind. When unwarranted, he contravenes it; when justified, he presents it shorn of the more general antipathy toward America. Throughout, he speaks in a transatlantic voice, neither American nor European. Still, he exhibits the affection of a grateful refugee and divines in the American constitutional order elements of what he sought to articulate theoretically in Things That Are Not Caesar’s, Integral Humanism, Man and the State , and other works of political philosophy.

That Americans lack any sense of history was a refrain among European critics. Maritain did not categorically dispute this charge, but he gave it a more nuanced valuation. He saw “openness to the future” as a salutary consequence of America’s historical conditions. In Europe, recent calamities amounted to an “overwhelming historical heredity,” a “sclerosis,” and openness to the future did not necessarily mean that Americans lacked historical awareness.

Maritain was struck by the ongoing vitality of America’s founding era. A living past, instead of an exhausted one, and a palpable sense of a future amenable to human initiative appeared to him to have inoculated Americans from continental ideologies claiming “historical necessity.” Accordingly, he posited a “root incompatibility” between the American people and Marxism. “For Marx,” he elaborated, “history is . . . [a] set of concatenated necessities, in the bosom of which man slaves toward his final emancipation. When he becomes at last, through communism, master of his own history, then he will drive the chariot of the Juggernaut which had previously crushed him. But for the American people it is quite another story. They are not interested in driving the chariot of the Juggernaut. They have gotten rid of the Juggernaut. It is not . . . in mastering the necessities of history, it is in man’s present freedom that they are interested.”

Maritain sought to rebut the frequent charge that Americans were peculiarly given to materialistic pursuits. He did not deny that untoward attachments to consumer goods characterized the postwar industrialized world, but he wondered if Americans, in some respects, were the least materialistic among the wealthy nations. The reproach of materialism did not derive from empirical evidence, he felt, but drew its strength from an Old World elitist tradition of “confusing spirituality with an aristocratic contempt for any improvement in material life.” This elitist critique-perfected “among certain high-brow Europeans with large bank accounts and delicious wine in their cellars””exerts such a powerful moralistic appeal that “you yourselves [Americans] are taken in by it.”

In the spirit of Tocqueville, Maritain replied by calling attention to the “infinite swarming” of private charities, foundations, and schools. The enormous creative energy of the American private sector, in generating wealth and giving it away, constituted for him an epochal boon to human flourishing. While he admired America’s largest foundations, “born of freedom and immune from state control,” he equally praised the philanthropic spirit of average Americans—something that might help explain what Arthur C. Brooks of Syracuse University has called “the huge transatlantic charity gap,” with Americans giving away, per capita, considerably more than do their European counterparts.

In his political thought, Maritain esteemed modern democracy for its potential to express the Judeo-Christian belief in the dignity of the individual. For him, the United States added something significantly to the theological underpinnings of democracy: immigration, a nation conjured up by peoples once persecuted, rejected, and humiliated. The cultural memory of past suffering coupled with a chance to make good in a New World had deposited “a reminiscence of the gospel in the inner attitude of people” and a resolve that misery and want need not be the accepted lot. “Here lies a distinctive privilege of this country, and a deep human mystery concealed behind its power and prosperity. The tears and suffering of the persecuted and unfortunate are transmuted into a perpetual effort to improve human destiny . . . . [T]hey are transfigured into optimism and creativity.”

Maritain championed the American experiment in “voluntary” religion: a new thing in history, he believed, and distinct from many European church-state arrangements. In Integral Humanism (1936), he had argued for a secular polity in which people of diverse religious backgrounds worked for the common good, albeit in a constitutional framework inspired by an implicitly theological sense of natural law and the dignity of the individual. He felt this to be a proximate reality in the United States.

As he expressed it in Man and the State (1951): “A European who comes to America is struck by the fact that the expression ‘separation between Church and State’ . . . does not have the same meaning here and in Europe. In Europe it means . . . complete isolation which derives from century-old misunderstandings and struggles, and which has produced most unfortunate results. Here it means . . . a distinction between the state and the churches which is compatible with good feeling and mutual cooperation . . . . There’s a historical treasure, the value of which a European is perhaps more prepared to appreciate, because of his own bitter experiences. Please to God that you keep it carefully, and do not let your concept of separation veer round to the European one.”

While America’s religious settlement represented a dramatic departure from the Old World, Maritain regarded the whole of its constitutional order truly as a novus ordo seclorum . But he did not locate its origins strictly in English common law or Enlightenment thought. It reflected the older classical and medieval conceptions of natural law and a flourishing polity. His line of reasoning here strikingly parallels that of John Courtney Murray’s in We Hold These Truths (1960). Not bonds of necessity, but the decisions of free men, Maritain maintained, characterized the good state for Aristotle and Aquinas. Theirs is a community based on virtue and reason, and “implies a will or consent to live together . . . . Nowhere in the world has this notion of the essence of political activity been brought into existence more truly than in America.” Since he located his own political thought in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, the United States appeared as the fortuitous historical approximation of realities that he had long theorized about.

Accordingly, he felt that the United States had a special role to play in the postwar world. Nowadays, when many educated American Christians are inclined to equate political theology with prophetic jeremiads against liberal democracy, the language of America’s historical role might appear dangerously providentialist. And due caution is in order, given the abuse of providentialist claims in American history. But, as an outsider to America and a trenchant observer of Europe’s political convulsions, Maritain cannot be easily brushed aside.

He insisted on the “the obvious fact” of America’s uniqueness. This was not a nation based on race, language, and geography but on a proposition that diverse peoples could live in freedom and preserve, in a modern secular order, a vital residuum of the classical-Christian natural-law tradition as a guarantor of human dignity. Upholding this dignity”the dignity of the least among us”constituted America’s historic vocation, even if this meant, as in the civil rights movement, “a perpetual process of self-examination and self-criticism.” This might not constitute a high calling, understood as producing great culture or art. Chicago is not Paris, Maritain admitted, but “there is one thing that America knows well”: “the value and dignity of the man of common humanity . . . . In forms so simply human that the pretentious and pedantic are at pains to perceive it, we find a spiritual conquest of immeasurable value.”

Maritain connected this “spiritual conquest” to what he had earlier called a “new Christendom”—not the coercive medieval order, but a progressive world system of democratic states, appreciative of the historical influence of the gospel on modern freedoms. At pains to make clear he was advocating a way forward, not the restoration of the deservedly obsolete, Maritain reiterated that he was “far from saying that today’s American civilization is a new Christendom, even in outline. It is rather a combination of certain continuing elements of ancient Christian civilization with new temporal achievements and new historical situations.” To bring about this new order in the postwar world, the American experiment was pivotal. “If we want civilization to survive,” he wrote during the darkest period of World War II, the “American spirit” must help lead the way in creating “a world of free men penetrated in its secular substance by a real and vital Christianity, a world in which the inspiration of the gospel will direct the common life of man toward an heroic humanism.”

Maritain recognized that his proposition would be mocked by pro-socialist, anti-American voices in postwar Europe and obscured in America by unsavory forms of patriotism. He also candidly recognized that the religious element in American civilization could degenerate into impermissible forms of civil religion, instrumentalizing Christianity for “national or temporal interests.” He adamantly opposed this, insisting that Christianity was essentially otherworldly; when it touched the realm of Caesar, it did so as a salutary leaven, not as a fundamental substance.

But he also worried about Europe’s secularist drift, a growing animus toward any religious leaven. “Europe’s problem is to recover the vivifying power of Christianity in temporal existence,” Maritain had presciently written in the 1940s, for without this power the machinery of democracy might go on, but the individuals in it will be stripped of the transcendental justification of their dignity.

In light of his assessment of Europe, it is telling that Maritain worried about the obsequiousness with which American intellectuals looked to the Continent for intellectual direction. The “cultivated American,” who is “anxious to have America criticized,” listens with “special care and sorrowful appreciation” to “any [European] writer who bitterly denounces the vices of this country.” This did not augur well for his ideas. Still, to American audiences, he pled for “the need for an explicit philosophy” that would extrapolate American political arrangements and sensibilities into a philosophical ideal, the centerpiece of which was the inviolability of human dignity.

To be sure, those concerned about the life of the mind on these shores might justifiably ask whether taking Maritain at his word, once again, risks indulging our craving for continental tutelage. But why not make a virtue of our national docility? The reign of Marx, Sartre, and Foucault has passed. Derrida is dead. The age of Maritain—has its hour come round at last?

Thomas Albert Howard is an associate professor of history and the director of the Jerusalem & Athens Forum at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts. He is currently at work on a book, America, Europe, and the Transatlantic Religious Divide .

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America in the European Mind

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500

In recent years, there’s been no shortage of commentary on European anti-Americanism and the divide between Americans and Europeans on a number of issues—religion, most of all.

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