The Liberation Of Man

Paulos Mar Gregorios

Where is man going? Wherever he goes, he better start where he is. The last third of the twentieth century is where he seems to be. The second half of this century has certainly so far at least, been the half-century of the liberation of man.

Will it also be the half-century of man's attainment of freedom? For freedom is surely more than liberation. It includes man's becoming man. Liberation only places us on the threshold of freedom.

Since mid-century liberation has taken five forward steps, and thus brought mankind closer to the threshold of freedom.

Our half-century began with political de-colonialization. The Philippines, India, Burma, Pakistan, Ceylon and Indonesia were among the first to break loose. Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Soekarno, and others became the symbols of a new hope of human dignity for all. A decade or so later, Africa followed suit. Emancipation brought a wild excitement and a new vitality to the repressed people of the dark continents. 1500 million people broke their political chains, and marched with a new confidence into the wide arena of world reality.

In the light of continuing economic enslavement, political emancipation proved a heady wine that brought on the headaches that often go with the sobriety of the morning after.

And yet this step of emancipation soon led to the second -- the awakening of negro self-consciousness in the Afro-American peoples. The sit-ins and the bus boycotts snow-balled to become Black Power and the defiance of white superiority. It was again the Son of Man waking up to snap the shackles that bound him.

The third movement begins to break another bond -- that of Socialist dictatorship. Yugoslavia pioneered. Hungary tried to break her fetters, but was mercilessly rebound. So did Czechoslovakia in more recent times. But the real liberation is going on in another quarter -- in the realm of ideas.

It began perhaps in 1956 with the revolt of the Polish and Hungarian marxist writers. Gomulka's apparently effective repression of the revolt in Poland was however not by any means the end of the story. Polish writers continued to insist even on 14th March 1964, on the point made by the Young Marx in l842: "the free press is the manifestation of the vigilance of spirit of a people, the expression of their self-confidence, the link that relates the person to the State and to the world".

The letter of the 35 Polish writers against censure led only to further intimidation and repression.

The writers have refused to give up. In other socialist countries, including Russia, open letters from writers began to appear. The new martyrs of literature become the heroes of the socialist underground.

In February 1968, the Polish writers again spoke up when the Government forbade the continuing performance of the play 'Dziady'. The extraordinary session of the Writers Association Conference on February 29th saw a bold resolution against Government censure received with furtive but widespread applause. Many senior writers spoke out with unprecedented audacity against the “creatures in dotage" who suppressed the dignity of Polish literature. M. Gomulka, whose formal education did not go far beyond the primary level, soon took repressive measures against the intellectual rebels, charging them of anti-soviet and anti-Party activities.

There is a new vitality in the literature of the communist societies, which because it is an upsurge of human freedom, cannot be ultimately repressed.

One is not naive enough to think that all who revolt against communist dictatorship do so in the cause of authentic freedom. Many may be already too much attracted by the successes of the bourgeois west which they would like to emulate. But there is no doubt that the two great historic structures denying human freedom -- the Roman Catholic Church and the Communist Party -- are both having earth-tremors which forebode at least an eruption if not a major quake.

A fourth and perhaps most significant chain that is being broken is that of the authority of the older generation. Youth in revolt has never been so radical and so powerful. Student rebellions were first introduced into politics in the present writer's memory, by the Quit India Movement in India in l942. Students were encouraged by political leaders to protest against colonial oppression. Now that protest has grown in a quarter-century to proportions that alarm the political leaders as much as university administrators. 1967-68 has seen student protests in Argentina, Belgium, Berlin, Brazil, Britain, Colombia, Congo Kinshasa, Czechoslovakia, France, West Germany, East Germany, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria,
Pakistan, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, and U.S.A.

The most significant of these may be the American, the French and the Polish-Czechoslovakian protests. The events in France that began with the student revolt at the University of Nanterre on March 22nd, 1968 are regarded by the French as the most important political development since 1571, if not since 1848. Students are taking to the barricades again in their fight against an oppressive establishment. May 11, 1968 saw Paris rocked to its bottom by student revolt. It is a revolt against the magistral authority of the Professor and the Administrator, a demand for freedom for the student to choose what he should learn and how he should live while in university.

The last bastion of authority has been the Roman Catholic Church. The authority of the Pope as Pastor Universal was considered beyond question by intelligent Roman Catholic theologians until a few years ago. Even after the Vatican Council Pope Paul VI had managed to assume an authoritarian role which seemed to go against the spirit of the Council. When however, he boldly with incredible audacity, spoke up in his Humanae Vitae against the practice of artificial birth control, the world-wide reaction to it seems to promise a new upsurge of intellectual and moral freedom within the bosom of the Catholic Church. Catholic bishops and theologians are now openly encouraging disobedience to papal authority.

These five revolts against authority -- against political colonialism, against white supremacy, against socialist dictatorship, against the intellectual establishment, and against ecclesiastical authority -- are far from consummated. Only when these movements of our half-century attain full force and courage can we say that we are reaching the threshold of freedom. We are still in the negative phase of freedom -- that.of liberation from bondage.

Even at that point there are issues still to be clarified. There is an intellectual task to be accomplished before mankind can march forward to the attainment of freedom. As the French say, in 1789 the people took the Bastille. On May l3, 1968, they "took the word" (la prise de parole) in the "capture" of the Sorbonne by student radicals. The days of detached academic neutrality are over, they claim. Mankind through a limited number of pioneering youth, is swung into an upsurge of the poetic consciousness. Words now come from the heart, charged with feeling, not numbed with cerebration.

For the moment this poesy, this creative use of the word, remains a cry of protest more than a picture of the future. But in that seed of protest are the genes and chromosomes that shall determine the future in large part. Four aspects of this protest are well worth heeding.

Law and Order

First there is the protest against the absolutization of law and order. At its more superficial level, the three candidates of the American Presidential election of 1968 had all to use this guarantee of law and order as their central platform in appealing for the votes of the American public. And it is not merely in economically well-established societies that we see this inordinate regard for law and order even at the expense of the claims of justice and dignity. In less developed countries like India, where the forces of linguistic and communal parochialism threaten to rend the hard-won unity of the nation, the cry for a strong police seems to sway the public.

At a more sophisticated level, people like Professor Andre Philip, of France, have been arguing that revolutions belong only to the past, and if in the underdeveloped countries some people are still dreaming and talking of revolution, they will soon be cured of it when they become more advanced like European Societies.

He seems to argue that the technological era does not permit wholesale revolution, but can only promote piecemeal change. First there is the element of cost. The machinery of production has been put up at such great cost, and to ask for it to be overthrown by revolution is foolish, according to Prof. Philip. (73) Secondly, technology in itself implies a built-in machinery for change. And our technological society will therefore need no revolutions.

How utopianly bourgeois a dream that is! The way in which bourgeois love of comfort and therefore of law and order, distorts human reasoning seems simply incredible. whatever be the cost, when men are being destroyed in their freedom and dignity by a system, that system has to be overthrown, for no system is as valuable as man. To bring in the issue of cost is perhaps symptomatic of what is happening to human values in western society. However much built-in machinery for change a technological society may have, the use of such machinery is in the hands of those in power. The oppressed cannot simply wait till those in power feel well disposed enough to do some research into their problems, and propose some remedies at minimum cost to the holders of power.

This absolutization of a particular system of law and order is one of the great idolatries of western liberal and conservative alike.

Planned change within the given structure of law and order, sometimes romantically termed "change by constitutional means", does take place in all societies whether in Russia or America, Cuba or Korea. To cease to change would be to ossify and die.

But constitutional change cannot always unseat a class from the throne or power. In many Latin American countries, for example, it is becoming increasingly clear that the political machinery is completely controlled by the economically dominant class, often allied to North American investors. North American exploitation of the economy of Latin America favours this ruling class while it progressively impoverishes the masses. Those who control economic and political power cannot be expected to introduce the necessary changes by constitutional means which would in effect deprive them of their power. To Justify such a political and economic structure in the name of law and order is to reveal a bestial insensitivity to the sufferings of the oppressed and exploited.

The Christian faith affirms that the present structure of law and order is a human creation, and is not to be absolutized. It should be questioned, examined, and if found to be an oppressive idol, should be overthrown, even if that brings the roof of the temple over our heads. This is the spirit of the student protest.

Law and order as a structured pattern of living indeed seems to be God-given; but no particular system is. Even the revolutionary and the guerrilla has his own law and order. No society can long survive without some form of law and order.

The particular system of law and order in which we live, if found inadequate to the needs of fostering human freedom and dignity, will have to be overhauled. An alienated system of law and order, over which man is powerless and which continues to dictate to him against his own better Judgement, certainly has become demonic.

Violence

A second intellectual error persists in our societies in relation to the issue of violence and non-violence.

By violence we mean the use of excessive strength against the will of another to produce injury or damage to person or property.

The word ‘revolution' creates many negative reactions in peoples‘ minds mostly because of its association with violence. But revolution need not imply broken skulls, machine guns and blood-baths. We speak of the industrial revolution, the technological revolution and the cybernetic revolution, when all we mean is a radical change in the means of production and distribution. These revolutions entail a chain reaction of sweeping change in human social relations and living conditions.

What most men fear seems to be political revolution. Here we mean the application of force to change the seat of power against the will of those in power. Not all political revolutions are violent in character. The Greek military Junta took over power in 1967 with a minimum of skull-breaking and blood-baths. It was a revolution, even if the Junta in power remains a reactionary force in most respects.

But the application of excessive strength to cause injury or damage to persons and property need not always be clearly visible. Damage can be done to human persons by a system which on the surface appears non-violent. Such damage is more subtle because we can more clearly see and more readily react against physical damage to human bodies and property than we can against damage to the dignity, freedom and humanity of people. The excessive power used is not physical but economic and technological.

Most of our present systems of political and economic organization are oppressive and destructive of human dignity. Violence is endemic, built into the system, wherever big business or the landed aristocracy concentrates power in its own hands and uses that power to control the government of the people. Wherever Justice is denied to the week, wherever the dignity of man is violated, wherever people are forced into the slums or reduced to sub-human standards of living, in such societies violence is entrenched in the system itself. Constitutional change may be inadequate in such cases to deal with the problem in its fundamentals- Violent revolution or the forcible overthrow of those in power against their will may be the only means available for redressing the violence endemic in the system.

To refuse to support such revolution on the ground that violence is not Christian involves us in the dilemma that by our very refusal we are supporting the systematic violence. We are in such a case confronted with a choice between two evils. Here a sensitive Christian conscience finds it difficult to make an easy decision that would keep his hands clean.

The Christian, however, cannot be so naive as to think that simply by choosing to apply violence against the violent system, one has found the solution to the problem. Violence has its own nemesis, as we so well know these days. It is not possible to use hatred and violence as tools of regaining self esteem and dignity, without having a price to pay. It is much cleaner to die as a martyr in the course of a revolutionary struggle than to win that struggle and ascend to the seat of power.For in the very application of violence to others, one becomes changed within oneself. One does violence to one's own dignity in the process of applying forgiveness.

The prophets of the Old Testament were sometimes violent in their denunciation of the oppressor and the exploiter. God himself is violent in his retribution of Justice as we see it in history.

The Christian revolutionary has to exercise severe self-discipline in order to be fit to enter the revolutionary struggle. Certain elementary principles have to be observed.

He should be pure in his motivation. He does not enter the struggle either to escape from the complications of his own personal life, or to wreak a personal vendetta on individuals or the class in power which has done him wrong. His motivation has to be a participation in God's compassion for the oppressed and the downtrodden, and a genuine desire to see a Just society in which even the erstwhile oppressor, properly chastened, can play his part in dignity.

He cannot seek power for the sake of power or for lording it over others. He has to share the poverty and suffering of the oppressed, and to sacrifice his own property and comfort for the sake of the revolutionary struggle. This is where the Christian liberal often becomes a hypocrite -- in the inconsistency between his profession of solidarity with the poor and his practice of a level of living not within the means of the poor.

Even after coming to power in a victorious struggle, the Christian has to continue to be unsparing of himself, and to remain disciplined, willing to undergo hardship for the sake of building up a society of Justice. He refuses to accept privilege and comfort as the prize for his unselfish efforts. He continues to be a cross-bearer to the very end, always willing to forego his own interests in the interest of the people whom he serves.

The decision to enter a revolutionary struggle thus involves for the Christian a momentous decision to walk the way of the cross to the very end, expecting neither comfort nor applause in return for his sacrifice.

One thing seems clear. We are essentially wrong if we assume that we can walk into the heaven of freedom without a struggle. The smooth comfortable passage to a utopia through technology and constitutional Government is a bourgeois liberal dream which has no Christian content. The whole Gospel is the message of a continuing battle with the forces of evil. The principalities and powers ranged against the Prince of Peace will not be conjured away by Parliamentary speech-making, democratic electioneering and technological Jugglery. They are determined to stay entrenched and give battle till the end when the day of the Lord shall dawn.

The Urban Paradise

A third mistaken assumption underlying much of our thinking as Christians is that the kingdom of God is some form of an urban technological civilization, a 'secular city‘ spread world-wide.

Our age is already being called, among other things, the ‘post-city age‘. The traditional city is fast disappearing. Our pragmatic approach to life had once thought that a world-wide net-work of interconnected cities would be the cure for most of our social ills. "The City is dead -- Long Live the City" is the title of a publication in 1966 of the Center for Planning and Development Research at the University of California, Berkeley. The city is a spatial entity, spatially organized. But communications have been developing so fast, that geography is almost being overcome. The urban-rural distinction is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. A kind of national urban society seems to be emerging in most western countries as well as in Japan. We may be on the way to building a planet-wide cosmopolis. Some form of an inter-national community has already begun to take shape. Many regard themselves not as permanently belonging to any particular city or nation, but as citizens of the world sharing in a cosmopolitan culture. The planet is their city and nation. These men are already the ordinary men of tomorrow, when the world will be just one great city.

Rarely does one hear a questioning of this line of optimistic thinking. The society of the girded loin, a nation of universal conquistadores, we are out to build a brave new world, where we shall all live happily everafter. In this urban technological paradise we will all be "free" - i.e. able to say "I am my own man" and "I can do my own thing". This unusual blend of universal-technological collectivism and a stupendously romantic individualism often form the substance of our notion of salvation.

"What we have perfected is technology, and it is technology on which most men, most places, most times, rest such vague hopes as still stir. It is now in or almost in our hand to feed lavishly, clothe, and render ‘literate’ the world, to live in virtually instantaneous, ubiquitous 'communication', to annihilate nearly all physical distance, to command more energy than we can use, to engineer mood and perhaps perception at will, to write such genetic prescriptions as we wish, to make such men as whim may dictate. The universe capitulates. We are everywhere triumphant. But a premonitory smell of cosmic Neroism is in the air, and the cry of ‘stop the world; I want to get off‘ has become, whether absurd or not, pervasive and insistent". 74.

Not as pervasive and insistent as one wishes, you may like to say to the Dean of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California. Most intellectuals, especially theologians, continue to be naive and utopian in their hopes of the secular city and the technological paradise Mastering facts by research, planning, programming, engineering, executing, evaluating, feedbacking, renovating, we merrily march our way to progress, only to find that we have lost ourselves along the way.

And that is what the "hippie" is protesting against. Freedom does not come by the mere external control of reality. The hippie knows it almost as well as did St. Gregory of Nyssa in the hth century. One has to "find one's head", to he, to make sure that one is, even when one has stopped doing and started resting.

Man cannot be, just by doing, and by doing it for one's own advantage and by doing what others expect of us or force us into doing. In our search for freedom, we have to seek more than the control of external reality. we cannot afford to lose ourselves in the process of gaining mastery of the universe.

"For what benefit is it to man if he gains the whole cosmos while
losing his own soul? Or what can he provide as substitute for his own soul? Mt. 16:26

"Being one's own man" calls for more than "doing one's own thing". St. Gregory of Nyssa had already made clear that any mastery of the universe unaccompanied by a mastery of one's own self, cannot lead to true eleutheria of freedom. Only when the hegemonikon, or the ruling element within ourselves, is in full control of our minds and bodies, do we genuinely taste freedom. It is this aspect of freedom which is now in danger of being neglected even by theologians. The sub-conscious, unconscious and conscious elements of fear and anxiety, guilt and aggression, boredom and purposelessness need to be overcome in order to regain authentic humanity. The kingdom of God is much more complex than the Secular city and the urban-technological paradise.

A Necessary God?

A fourth prevailing misconception in much of our theological reflection relates to our attempts to find a relevant doctrine of God. The God of the gaps, of the "necessary hypothesis" is of course dead or dying. There is a new tendency to affirm that God is nothing more than simply the destiny of man. Hegel had suggested that God is becoming, that he is in process of evolution, within the time-process. This is now translated into more secular terms to suggest that it is man who ultimately becomes God. A Marxist atheist like Roger Garaudy would say that what Christians call their God is nothing but the exigency in man to become born as truly man.

In theology itself man-language and God-language are becoming quite interchangeable, the former tending to replace the latter. The difference between many so-called "atheists" and some so-called "believers" is, in Garaudy's happy phrasing, simply that for atheists there is no externally guaranteed promise of human fulfillment, while for believers there is such a promise.

If the freedom of man requires that he be liberated. from subservience to an external God, there are two possibilities. For secular man it is man's accepting full responsibility for his own existence and for the shape of the world. For many Christians, it is to have God as the depth or ground of our own being, so that it is God in us, operating through our thought, will and action, who finally shapes the destiny of man.

It is in this attempt to capture God within human immanence that there lurks a great danger for human destiny. Here we are in a sense pushed back to Schliermacher's immanent God and the resultant superficial liberalism. We need to maintain the otherness of God and divine immanence in some form of dialectical tension, not conceptually resolved, but maintained in a cultic milieu. Without that cultic acknowledgment of both divine otherness and this union with us in the Eucharist, we become reductionists and at that point become sub-Christian, which means also sub-human.

We cannot achieve any adequate conceptual formulation of this dialectic between the otherness and the "in-us-ness" of God. The only adequate vehicle for maintaining it is in the Eucharistic act, which itself should not be reduced to some facile notion of a Lord's supper where the "lord" gives a banquet to all comers. It remains a mystery, and its character as a mystery, which brings the otherness of the trans-temporal and the trans-logical to the historical and the conceptual needs to.be maintained through proper discrimination. Else it is reduced to the level of the banal, as the Bible has already been so reduced through its indiscriminate use by all according to the whim and fancy of each.

To maintain the dignity and majesty of God against his despisers and would be tramplers of his glory is a pre-condition for maintaining the dignity and majesty of Man. When God becomes reduced to the level of empirical or even transcendent man, then empirical man's dignity and freedom can be too easily trampled upon by other men.

Liberation Theology and the Vatican Instruction

There has been considerable furor, especially in the Roman Catholic Church, about the assessment of "Liberation Theology". The Pope's views are contested by people within his own church. Even Cardinal Ratzinger and Cardinal Casaroli have given expression to conflicting viewpoints, indicating disagreement in the Vatican itself.

This is perhaps as it should be. There should be debates and disagreements in each church so that the people can be exposed to differing aspects of the question.

In the case of Liberation Theology, those who are generally opposed to it are people who have stakes in the present established order. The Vatican, at least one part of it which handles power and property, would naturally have an interest in keeping investments in the world Capitalist economy safe and productive. Liberation theology is rightly perceived as a threat to the World Capitalist System, especially in a Roman Catholic area like Latin America, where Christian theology has considerable influence on the minds of people.

The usual Capitalist argument, whether openly or by implication, against Liberation Theology is that it is tainted with Marxism. And Liberation theologians are anxious to defend it from this charge -- mainly for the sake of public relations and better relations with the Vatican. With the present Pope especially anti-Marxism seems to be a most essential credential for being a Christian. The Vatican "instruction" on Liberation Theology, has one whole chapter on "Marxist Analysis". Its main point is that "atheism and the denial of the human person, his liberty and his rights, as at the core of the marxist theory". In that statement there is a good example of how truth and falsehood can be mixed together. There is no doubt that atheism is a central tent in Marxist ideology. But no one who has some idea of "Marxist theory" can say that "the denial of the human person, his liberty and his rights, are at the core of the Marxist theory". That is not a fact. People who say so, do it out of malice or ignorance. Marxist theory certainly exalts the human person above all else. There is no denial of his liberty or rights, but only a radically different understanding.

Notes

73a. Rheinische Zeitung. July 1832. See also the issue oi January l§§3.
73. See his article The Revolutionary Change in the Structure of European Political Life. In Z.K. Mathews Ed. Responsible Government in a Revolutionary Age, New York and London, 1966 pp. 115-129
74. John R. Seeley, Remaking the Urban Scene: New Youth in an Old Environment, in Daedalus Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fall 1968.