False Gods Research Articles

Essays in Phenomenological Theology ed. by Steven W. Laycock and James G. Hart

BOOK REVIEWS 727 is what is added to the performance. It has a presentational quality-a kind of epiphany of meaning. The moral character of the act cannot lie in the intention or in the consequences. The author rejects the distinctions of act, intention, and circumstance as separable components of the phenomenon of moral acts. He opts for an interrelationship in such a way that intention is only intention when actualized. Intention cannot really be separated from actions. Performance actualizes intentions and actions characterize the performer. These make their marks on the world. The author believes that his approach establishes what he calls the moral category which is concerned with presentation since it establishes a relationship between agents and target. A moral theory based on the category of choice is utilitarian or consequential; one based on judgment is deontological. Because neither concentrates on the moral action itself, they are both incomplete. With his theory, the author believes he provides the answer to the ambiguities of moral actions, thus eliminating the need for theories that permit evil effects in order to achieve the good, such as the principle of double effect and the theory of ontic evil of Fuchs, J ansens, and Keane. He applies his analysis of choice and theory of moral categoriality to an analysis of the virtues, and the being of human agents. This work is challenging and novel. It breaks new ground in phenomenological studies and overcomes polarities and dichotomies which characterized older and more venerable moral theories. These theories have tried with difficulty to reconcile anomalies of freedom and necessity, good and evil, and means and ends in problematic instances. Robert Sokolowski offers a new way of looking at moral actions which will have a profound effect in academia and pastoral practice. St. Jerome's College Waterloo, Ontario Canada WALTER BILDSTEIN Essays in Phenomenological Theology. Edited by STEVEN W. LAYCOCK and JAMES G. HART. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Pp. 219. $12.95, paper; $39.50, cloth. Readers of this volume will find a collection of essays that represent a spectrum of approaches to phenomenology and to phenomenological theology and that draw inspiration from thinkers as varied as Confucius, 7~8 BOOK REVIEWS Plotinus, Aquinas, Dumery, Hegel, Ricoeur, and Derrida, as well as from Edmund Husserl. Those readers who are unfamiliar with phenomenological theology will most likely expect the collection to answer the question, What is phenomenological theology, and what is the relationship between phenomenology and phenomenological theology~ Some of the contributors do attempt to address this question, but their answers vary, from the modest claim that phenomenology can provide descriptive guidelines to the theological task to the more ambitious claim that phenomenology can provide an ontological/phenomenological proof for the existence of God and synthetic a priori statements concerning his nature. Iso Kern, in "Trinity: Theological Reflections of a Phenomenologist ", makes fairly mod.est claims for phenomenology as far as its ability to make theological statements is concerned. He states that phenomenology is not theology, because it describes and does not postulate. Nevertheless, he believes that "metaphysical postulates can be raised" on the basis of its description (p. 36). Phenomenological description for Kern takes the form of a delineation of three dimensions of human experience-nature, sociality and self. He correlates these dimensions of human experience with the Chinese awareness of their cultural tradition as determined through "The Three Doctrines", Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. He also correlates these dimensions with the Christian concept of the Trinity. According to Kern, metaphysical philosophies and religions, in their attempts to articulate a non-transitory, unconditioned metaphysical cause for human existence, must be cognizant of these three irreducible dimensions of human reality and reflect this triad or else risk being distorted and one-sided. Thus phenomenology can prepare the way for true theology by clearing away the false gods which are created through absolutizing relativities, such as would be the case if any one of the three dimensions of human existence were to be absolutized. Charles Courtney's discussion of "Henry Dumery's Phenomenology of Transcending " makes similar claims for phenomenology and phenomenollogical theology. According to Dumery and Courtney, phenomenology cannot make judgments concerning reality or...

Brave New World and the Rationalization of Industry

B R A V E N E W W O R L D A N D T H E R A T I O N A L I Z A T I O N O F I N D U S T R Y JA M E S SEXTO N Camosun College Rationalization: “ the methods of technique and of organisation designed to secure the minimum waste of either effort or material. They include the scientific organisation of labour, standardisation of both materials and products, simplification of processes, and improvements in the system of transport and marketing. . . . [T]he judicious and constant application of . . . rationalisation is calculated to secure . . . to the community greater stability and a higher standard of life.” World Economic Conference, Geneva, sponsored by the League of Nations, 1927, defined in L. Urwick, The Meaning of Rationalisation, 1929. l^ iear the passage which Huxley took as an epigraph to Brave New World, Nicolas Berdyaev speaks of socialist Russia as a satanocracy where the indi­ vidual is subordinated to the collectivity. He asserts that human and spiritual values are being sacrificed to the false god of materialism, that life’s centre of gravity has shifted to economics, and that man has been converted to a mere economic category.1 Much of Berdyaev’s thought is a footnote to the Grand Inquisitor chapter of Dostoevski’s Brothers Karamazov, which sets in opposition two views of human nature: wholly materialistic man (homo oeconomicus) versus “ soulencumbered ” man. But interestingly the Grand Inquisitor’s materialist vision of man is congruent with that of Henry Ford, whose My Life and Work is the bible of Brave New World. There Ford states, “The average worker . . . wants a job in which he does not have to put forth much physi­ cal exertion — above all, he wants a job in which he does not have to think.” 2 He then goes on to say that the minority of creative thinkers, those few who would be appalled by repetitive, routine work, should look for a more vital pastime than mere music or painting: [Hjigher laws than those of sound, or line, or colour; [apply in the field] of industrial relationship. We want masters in industrial method — both from the standpoint of the producer and the product. We want those who can mould the E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x ii, 4, December 1986 political, social, industrial, and moral mass into a sound and shapely whole. We have limited the creative faculty . . . for too trivial ends. We want men who can create the working design for all that is right and good and desirable in our life. . . . It is possible to increase the well-being of the workingman . . . by aiding him to do more. . . . If he is the happier for using a machine to less than its capacity, is he happier for producing less than he might and consequently getting less than his share of the world’s goods in exchange?3 Huxley saw that the common denominator between Fordism and social­ ism was uncritical veneration of rationalization. Mark Rampion in Point Counter Point (1928) points to the sameness of Bolshevik and Capitalist goals, and incidentally, he uses the same infernal imagery as does Berdyaev. The squabbling between Bolshevists and Fascists, Radicals and Conserva­ tives was really a fight to decide whether we shall go to hell by communist express train or capitalist racing motor car, by individualist ’bus or collectivist tram running on the rails of state control. The destination’s the same in every case. . . . They all believe in industrialism in one form or another, they all believe in Americanization. Think of the Bolshevist ideal. America but much more so. America with government departments taking the place of trusts and state officials instead of rich men. And then the ideal of the rest of Europe. The same thing, only with the rich men preserved. Machinery and government officials there. Machinery and Alfred Mond or Henry Ford here. . . . They’re all equally in a hurry. In the name of science, progress and human happiness!4 In the years 1928 and 1929 Huxley reveals the probable...

The Politics of Theater: Play, Deceit, and Threat in Genet's The Blacks

Every premiere production of a Genet play - indeed, every instance of Genet's appearance on the literary or social scene - has been an occasion for heated controversy, scandal, even outrage. The first production of his fourth play, The Blacks, in 1959 was no exception. At once, the conservative critics were roused to express the kind of horror and rage that had seemed hysterical even in 1891, when its target was Ibsen's Ghosts. The Blacks, wrote Gabriel Marcel, is "the rejection, the spitting forth, the vomiting of everything that has constituted the honor and dignity of the Christian West.” Another critic compared watching the play to being "bashed on the head," adding, "Blasphemies faIl like huge turds on the altars of Faith and Fatherland.” Many saw Genet as an irresponsible iconoclast, "smashing true and false gods indifferently.”

Dr. Limiter: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Shaft

THIS IS A SPEECH ABOUT SPEECHES like this. Every year about this time, the rains come, the ground thaws, and educators recite orations on the state of learning in the land. Right now, in cloistered banquet halls across the country, other faculty members are re-assuring the faithful that they have chosen wisely. The world may worship false gods, but humanists speak of true gods and their duty is to go forth and deliver the people. This liturgy will be performed after last suppers for another month until the calendar of higher education celebrates the most holy of its holy days, commencement. On that solemn day, the laity, the clergy, and the novitiates, all in appropriate vestments, will doze peacefully in the mid-morning sun as some bishop of the academy or the state sanctifies the ordination of yet another class of disciples, many of whose diplomas say B. S. On such honorable occasions, I am reminded of the impulse to giggle that used to attack me as I sat bolt upright in the front pew of my father's church. I knew that to giggle in worship was wicked and that to do so would invite the wrath of both my earthly and heavenly fathers. But oh how I did giggle. That impulse attacked me again as I began preparing my remarks for this evening. Instead of Goethe, I thought of Groucho; instead of honorifics, I thought of horsefeathers. Rather than stifle this impulse I decided to make it my subject. That is, rather than speak to you tonight about the seriousness of our calling, I decided to cop a title from Kubrick to suggest why such speeches may have gotten us into the mess we are in. According to reliable sources, the present outbreak of seriousness began after we learned that the Russians also possessed a Doomsday machine. As Vice appeared ready to destroy Virtue, we Americans dug in for the apocalypse. We built interstate highways to facilitate the movement of troops, bomb shelters to guard our families against the poison of radiation, and walls of conformity to protect ourselves from our fears and uncertainties. When the fifties became the sixties, the morality play became a tragedy. The early years of the decade could have been plotted by Aristotle as good men and good deeds were destroyed by the bullets fired in Dallas, Memphis, and L.A. In the aftermath of assassination, flawed extremists insisted that a righteous reckoning was imminent and that the chosen had to declare their com-

Suffering in Sunnite Islam

It has been noted by various writers that Islam, in contrast to Judaism and Christianity, has paid little attention to the problem of theodicy, understood as the problem of showing how the suffering of good men is to be reconciled with the love of God for men. One important strand of Old Testament thought is that God sends suffering as a punishment for sin, and this may be either the sin of the individual or of his society, or even of his ancestors. 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.' The sufferings leading up to the Exile were seen by the prophets as due to the nation's worship of false gods in previous generations and to some extent still continuing. Job's friends insist that his sufferings must be the result of some sin which may have escaped his notice, and urge him to examine himself for this sin and to confess it. The conclusion of the book is that

False Gods of a New Religion

False Gods of a New Religion

Niebuhr as Thinker and Doer

The vivid and more than life-sized image that many of us shared of Reinhold Niebuhr as thinker and doer is still alive, but dimmed by events and the passing years. As one set of problems follows another, his manner of grappling with them seems very near, yet very far from practice. To read him again is to rediscover how inseparably for him philosophy and action were joined, how durable and lasting are his insights and judgments, and how strongly his writings hold up decades later. What sets him apart is a style and temper toward current problems that remain unique. Whatever the problem, he either starts with a general proposition or moves from the particular in that direction. It is the principle or complex of principles that is important to him, not the once-and-for-all solution. Indeed, he could never escape the conviction that false gods and absolutes were man's most virulent social disease.

Alberts Bels: In search of man

For quite some time, growing segments of Soviet Latvian prose have revealed a thematic shifting from topics of collective import toward subjects that focus on the individual's concerns. Collectivity becomes a negative dimension, and sometimes it is the superior individualthe artist, the writerwho is spotlighted against the opaque crowds of Soviet babbits. Sometimes the anonymous heroes and nonheroes of small everyday tragedies capture the empathie regard of the writer. Persistently implicit there is a protest, low-keyed, to be sure, against the iniquities that technocracy and prosperity, with their attendant moral ills of ruthlessness and avarice, have wrought on the individual. There is also a plea for understanding and compassion for those who, expelled from the mainstream of affluence, languish in the backwaters of mute misery. There is subdued indignation at the efficiency expert and the aggressive manager who continue to perfect the system whose malignant growth dehumanizes man. Indictment of civilization is as old as civilization itself, but in Soviet Latvian literature the litany of the regress of progress seems to be modulating from concern to anger. Man must be saved from himself. He must cease to worship the false gods of efficiency and opulence. These themes, sometimes projected in the images of the great myths, amplify, with variable intensity and artistry, the works of Luginska, Kaldupe, Jakubāns, Liepiņs, Zigmonte, and others. But perhaps their fullest development is found in Alberts Bels, a writer of protean multiformity, whose prose vibrates with restless meaning. Bels' literary career was quite auspiciously heralded by his first collection of short stories, Hs Pats Līdzenumā. Perhaps it would not be too far-fetched to liken him to Maupassant for his thematic interests, plots, and most conspicuously for his trenchant irony which, coupled with wit and compassion, probes for essences in the games of gregarious living. Indeed, it would not be difficult to notice thematic parallels between Maupassant's La Parure (The Necklace) and

Toward a Renewal of Culture

This writer suggests that the school has a moral impera tive to face up to society's problems and to exercise its unique capability for being the custodian of values. He discusses the three false gods of success, scientism, and efficiency.

Naming and Language in Our Mutual Friend

IN The Form of Victorian Fiction J. Hillis Miller states one of fundamental assumptions of Dickens and other great Victorian novelists is that each man finds himself from his birth surrounded by a transindividual mind, identical with words he learns, surrounds him, embraces him, permeates him, from first day of his life to end.' ' Miller goes on to say that, in his role of omniscient narrator, each Victorian novelist must identify himself in some way with this collective consciousness. Within a complex, social novel like Our Mutual Friend, however, this useful general concept needs further refinement, for here Dickens uses his role of narrating voice to expose dehumanizing effects of just such an identification with social voice. The narrating voice of novel stands apart from transindividual consciousness of society it describes; Dickens' narrator becomes, again to quote Miller, the community mind become aware of itself, liberated from its worship of false gods of money and work.2 The omniscient power of transindividual mind as Dickens portrays it within Our Mutual Friend thus becomes one of critical moral concerns of novel. Rather than force for furthering human unity and communication, transindividual mind within novel has become an amoral and inhuman force made up of words are cut off from feelings and experience because

Was Homer a Liar?

...une tradition à la fois antique et directe, ininterrompue, orale, deformée, méconnaissable et vivante.M. ProustThis is a deliberately provocative title, chosen in an iconoclastic moment, when I was annoyed by reading yet another book, in which the author prostrates himself abjectly before the altar of Homer the historian. The worship of this false god has reached such proportions that every writer on Mycenaean Greece devotes a great deal of space to what Homer says, and spends page after page trying to reconcile the Homeric account with the archaeological evidence. The idea that Homer can tell us about the Mycenaean Age dies hard; it is time to administer the coup de grâce.

Degrees: Who Needs Them?

we should rethink an idea that is fast becoming an undisputed premise of American life: that a degree is a necessary (and perhaps even a sufficient) precondition for success. I do not wish to quarrel with the assumptions made about the benefits of orthodox education; I want only to expose its false god: the four-year, convertible, all-purpose, degree-bearing college, aimed at the so-called college age population and by now almost universally accepted as the stepping-stone to and jobs. Adding two degrees to the American Dream of two houses, two cars, and two children will not improve the quality of that dream nor the quality of those degrees. A recent television documentary called What If the Dream Came True? was a poignant reminder that the American is apparently not up to meeting the fundamental problems of our lives. This thoughtful reportage of the lifestyle and reflections of a typically wealthy suburbanite family, in which both parents were the products of our best higher education, seemed to reveal the possibility that American style is, if anything, more likely to mold one to fit the technological culture (the presumptive villain of the piece) than to release one to cope with it in fulfilling and meaningful ways. College for this family (although was hardly its major theme) was quite patently a one-stop affair on the road to a series of job and housing moves, none of which produced for the protagonists a sense of well-being or satisfaction. Yet this is reputedly an accurate report of what life is like for the American successes. And while it is becoming fashionable to rail at the hardware materialism that is rampant in the Dream, it has not yet become chic to call into question the software, by which I mean the degrees. Yet if we continue to deify degrees, to assume that we can produce better men for better living through collegry, then we will (unwittingly, to be sure) alienate many youths, destroy many universities, denigrate many socially useful types of work, and reverse our commitment to establishing a more egalitarian society. More specifically, what is wrong with the current college-work cycle are the following anomalies: We are selling to the youth group of America as a take-off pad for the material good life for which we are already infamous in that population circle. College is literally advertised and packaged as a means for getting more money through jobs at the same moment that Harvard graduates are taking jobs as taxi-drivers. This is a seriously irresponsible promotion in many ways. It is a perversion of the true spirit of a university, a perversion of a humane social ethic, and, at bottom, a patent fraud. To take the last point first, the economy is simply not geared to guaranteeing these presumptive jobs; the colleges are not geared to training for such jobs; and the ethical propriety of the entire enterprise is very questionable. The current emphasis on degrees is also subtly but irrevocably denigrating the actual and potential fulfilments inherent across a broad spectrum of work. In other words, we are by definition (rather than by analysis) establishing two kinds of work: work which is labeled by having a degree requirement tagged to it; and all other nondegree work which, through this logic, becomes automatically low level or dead-end.

Christ's Nativity and the Pagan Deities

ABSTRACT In reading the Nativity Ode, the sense of loss that we feel at the disappearance of the pagan gods is genuine, but it does not interfere with the unity of the poem. For the coming of Christ is also presented in a paradoxical manner: the Prince of Light comes to us in darkness, the all-powerful God in a “house of mortal clay.” We should therefore not be surprised that the arrival of Christianity, which will eventually make all life divine, has as its first result the banishment of what men had thought of as divine—the false gods. The ambivalent attitude towards the pagan gods is thus continuous with the paradox of Christ; and the poem, although complex in bringing together contradictory feelings, is unified in tone.

MORAALPROBLEMEN

SUMMARY Idolatry is a sin against the virtue of religion because by it divine honour is offered to a false god or to an image in which the godhead is either thought off as present or at least as represented. The sin of idolatry really occurs, either as „idolol.atria materialis” or as „idololatria formalis”. The various forms of honouring God, however, which are found amongst pagan peoples should not be considered as idolatry because they often are founded on a real belief in God. The authors of the handbooks, it would seem, brand all these forms of honouring God more or less as idolatry. This is clearly shown in the fact that they distinguish between „idololatria perfecta” and „idololatria imperfecta” as subdivisions of the „idololatria formalis„. The „idololatria perfecta” while being the result of a subjective opinion, would, according to them, nevertheless be considered a sin of idolatry even if it be a sin of lesser quality than the „idololatria imperfecta„ is. Would not it be better to omit this dist...

Reviews

E. Parmalee Prentice, Breeding Profitable Dairy Cattle. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1935. 261 pages, 10 illustrations (5 in colors). Price $2.50.Many readers of Poultry Science may wonder why a dairy cattle breeding book is reviewed within its pages. However, to those who are familiar with the author, E. Parmalee Prentice, and the classical work that its underway at his Mount Hope Farm (Williamstown, Massachusetts) with the breeding of high production strains of poultry as well as dairy cattle, the answer is quite apparent. The book points out several of the pitfalls of breeding and selection into which many dairy breeders have fallen, and the wise poultry breeder would do well to heed the warnings of the author and avoid worshipping the false gods at whose altars many poultry breeders as well as dairy breeders have bended their knees.Poultrymen will be especially interested in Chapter 7 “Breeding for .

THE VALUE OF ANATOMY

The interesting address by Sir Berkeley Moynihan on The approach to published in the British Medical Journal of October 8th, 1927, emanating as it does from such an authoritative source as the President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, commands the serious attention of those of us who are engaged in the teaching of anatomy. His strictures on the present day teaching of anatomy, supported as they are by Sir Arthur Keith, the distinguished curator of the same institution,1 surely constitute a challenge to all anatomists. Unless someone attempts to meet the charges they will pass for true, and the temple of anatomy will be destroyed and false gods may be set up in its stead. It is not quite clear whether the distinguished President, when he advised a limited study of anatomy, was directing his advice only to those who wished to specialize in surgery, or whether he wished his remarks to apply as well to the general undergraduate approach to the surgical side of the medical qualification. The mere fact that he addressed his words to undergraduates, and to those who are responsible for their teaching, leads one to believe that they were meant to apply in this case also, and that he is on the side of those who would restrict the opportunities for the study of anatomy. I venture to think that his views will not meet with the approval of all surgeons, but it is as an anatomist that I wish to challenge them, because I think that there is a great danger of the position of anatomy in the medical curriculum being still further jeopardized. It is already wedged in, in many schools, between the clamorous pre liminary sciences, that precede it, and the actively growing clinical subjects, such as bacteriology, that succeed it. The gravamen of the charge against anatomy would appear to be that anatomists do not teach sufficient func tion, for it cannot surely be maintained that they neglect this entirely. I do not think that it is fully realized what an enormous amount of knowledge of function is presented by anatomy without acknowledgement. An accurate know ledge of the attachment of muscles makes the functional result of their contraction obvious. Nay, more, as the surgeons must adinit, this is almost the sole means of explaining the displacement of the parts in a case of fracture, and a consideration of the relative anatomical position of the structures is the guide in treatment. So it is with the joints, the action of which is determined by the shape of the bony surf aces involved, and by the position of the ligaments, such as the hinge ligaments. There is no need to repeat platitudes . about the nerves and blood vessels. Suffice it to say that we seem to have inherited too easily a vast tradition of knowledge, which, like the art of walking, we do not appreciate till there is a danger of our losing it. The case must be different with regard to such organs as the kidney. The anatomist seems to me to have done his duty when he has located its position and relations and described its structure. It remains for someone with an

Zoroastrianism

The religion whose adherents call themselves “Worshippers of Mazda,” the Wise God, and which we commonly name after its founder Zoroastrianism, is in many ways of peculiar interest. It is the only monotheistic religion of Indo-European origin, as Judaism is the one independent Semitic monotheism. Zoroastrianism is, further, eminently an ethical religion, both in its idea of God and of what God requires of men. It presents itself as a revelation of God's will through his prophet. His will is that men, renouncing the false gods, should serve the Wise Lord alone, obey his word, and contend on his side for the defeat of evil and the triumph of all good in nature and society and in the character of the individual. The prophet warns men that the day of the Lord is at hand, an ordeal by fire in which God will separate between those who serve him and those who serve him not, and of the endless blessedness or the unfathomable misery beyond. God has his allies not only among men but among the hosts of spirits; to the hierarchy of good powers corresponds a hierarchy of evil. In the endeavor to clear God of the responsibility for evil, Zoroastrianism recognized a powerful head of the evil spirits, a devil. But it had firm faith in the final triumph of good and the end of all evil. When that day shall come, all the dead will be raised to stand at the bar of God in the grand assize and receive the just recompense of reward. The main features of this eschatology were adopted by the Jews and adapted to the premises of their own religion; through Judaism it passed to Christianity, where it was fused with elements of diverse origin; from Judaism and Christianity, and to some extent directly from later Zoroastrianism, Mohammedanism inherited it. The orthodox beliefs about the hereafter of the world and the individual entertained by the nations of Western Asia, Europe, and America, are thus ultimately derived in no small part from Zoroastrianism; only in the farther East, in India, China, and Japan, does another system prevail.

An Elucidation of the Geometrical Principles of Gothic Architecture”

Architecture, as the eldest sister of the arts, naturally claims attention from the members of a Polytechnic Society. It has ministered alike to the necessities, the comforts, and the luxuries of mankind. The architectural remains of the nations of antiquity (the unchanging testimonials of their former greatness) oppose, in the strongest manner, the reckless conclusions of the atheist. Could we possibly conceive the entire removal of every relic of former days, what a blank would the page of history present! The writings of the poets, the historians, and the philosophers of old, would appear as so many visionary and Utopian productions; but the architectural remains which an all-wise God has permitted to exist so long after the removal of the nations by which they were reared, tend, in a remarkable degree, to corroborate the prophetical and historical part of holy writ, and to explain the writings of heathen authors. It may be truly said that the Acropolis of Athens, and its beauteous structures, vouch for Pausanias, the pyramids of Ghiza for Herodotus, while Rome owes its most lasting celebrity to architecture. “Flinging back our thoughts upon the past,” we cannot contemplate the ruin of empires without noticing the peculiar character of the remains of their former architectural greatness and splendour. In Assyria, Egypt, Greece, and Italy, we look in vain for the dwellings of the former inhabitants. Of the gigantic works erected for warlike purposes but few remnants exist; but of temples reared, whether to the true or false Gods, ...