Christianity And Society: The Critique Of Ideology

Augustine

Christianity and Society

The Critique of Ideology[1]

"Things are seldom what they seem," crooned Little Buttercup, full of a revelation that would transform the society around her. Augustine would have agreed. No a priori reason compels us to think that appearances, depending directly on the subjective experience of the observer, give any very coherent picture of reality. The perceptions that record these appearances have no compelling independent authority. On this point Christianity shares the ground with other philosophical and religious traditions. It holds that there is such a thing as real being, and even that the world of appearances is directly related to the world of real being. But it claims that human perception and reason is for now impotent to deduce the exact nature of that relation, although human beings do not cease to create patterns that claim to define the relation. In short, human beings live in a dream world from which they can be liberated into reality only with help from outside. Hence, revelation.

Revelation is at the center of Augustine's thought, for it functions in the order of knowledge as grace functions in the order of action, and right knowledge and right action are impossible without revelation and grace. Hence at every turn in Augustine we observe that the formal patterns according to which he interprets the world of appearances derive directly from his understanding of the way God's Word works in the world. So Christian Doctrine is the necessary preliminary to everything else in Augustine. When we consider his view of what we may somewhat whimsically call "macrotheology," this is especially true. To understand the relationship between Christianity and society is nothing more and nothing less than to open the question of the relation between competing interpretations of the nature of reality. Human societies that evolve without Christianity differ among themselves about the meaning of sense-knowledge and the nature of reality; but Christianity, wherever it appears, makes special claims on the credence of nations. Civil societies form themselves as the visible manifestation of commonly held principles. Taken at this level, Christianity presents a radically different set of ideas about the nature of the world and the way men ought to live within it.

Whether a "Christian society" as such has ever existed or can ever exist is irrelevant. What is important is to understand how the Christian perspective intrudes upon the complacencies of the world-views with which it comes into contact. In Christianity through the centuries there is a constant tension between the actual order of society and the principles Christianity proposes. What Christianity offers is an interpretation of social reality that claims to come completely from outside human society (as revelation) and that sets itself up as an insistent critic of the natural views of fallen men and women. Christianity, as a social organization, is a constant reproach to the secular world and a constant challenge to custom and mores (even when custom itself carries the Christian name).

In theory and in practice, Augustine had words to describe this situation. In theory, his familiar distinction between letter and spirit served him well. The letter represents hard, empirical reality (or at least the world of appearances masquerading as such), things the way they definitely seem to be to the unaided understanding. All of life, without benefit of divine revelation, is a literal narrative, devoid of meaning and value, only an interaction of atoms in the void. But in the presence of revelation, meaning and value take shape under the power of the spirit.

In this way, deep faith and radical nihilism can be located at opposite ends of a spectrum. Between the two lies a whole range of forms of belief and nonbelief. Christianity can take two approaches to those who occupy the middle ground. All vague stirrings of belief can be treated as well-intentioned motion towards God and embraced in the all-enfolding arms of a generous church; or the same failures of total faith can be treated as apostasy from God and consigned to the outer darkness. Paradox again: Christianity takes both positions simultaneously. Christianity must remain, as one recent observer has said, "radically open to all truth and to every value," for the presence of the spirit cannot be denied in any of these stirrings. At the same time, Christianity itself is meaningless unless it gives unyielding witness to the power of grace and total commitment to the truth of revelation. So radical is the Christian claim that the latter position is the one that usually predominates in Christian discourse.

Because Augustine never ceased to challenge the ideologies of the secular world with the Christian message, he insisted on drawing the line between letter and spirit (between, that is, fantasy and reality, between the world-asappearance and the world-as-reality) as high and as sharp as he could. Even those in this world who see the message of the spirit with rare clarity are still not fully assimilated to the reality the spirit betokens. Only death can free them from "the body of this death" (Rom. 7.24) and bring them home to authentic reality and true being, to God.

Thus even members in good standing of the visible church were still themselves more on the side of the sinners than of the blessed. They are separated from those around them not by any final distinction (that must await Judgment Day) but by the intermediate distinction that is the result of grace working in their lives. The boundary between the saved and the damned in this world, as long as people live, is completely permeable. The church does not seal itself off from the world around it, but remains permanently, vulnerably, open to it. Those outside can still come in at any time--and those inside can fail, and fall, at any time. (This way of putting the Augustinian case leaves aside the difficult subjects of grace, predestination, and perseverance that must be faced when the relation of Christ to the individual soul is taken up. For the moment, we can speak in social terms, with no window into individual souls.)

The implications of this view for our attitude towards natural society are simple but staggering: The mass of humanity lives in a fantasy world. Human societies, created by sinful men and women, are all based on mistaken notions of the nature of reality and are merely dream castles. Societies constitute themselves to bring about results that are impossible. Misery, discord, and death are absolute constants in human experience, despite all the advances of civilization.