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Full text of a paper given to the Dawson Centre, Hobart, Tasmania, by the Most Rev. Peter J. Elliott, Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus, Melbourne

29 November, 2019

ST JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, A PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

John Henry Newman was born in London in 1801 and he died in Birmingham in 1890. On October 19^th 2019, Pope Francis canonized him.

When he was young his prosperous family endured hard times, but John Henry’s father ensured that this brilliant son received a good basic education and he was able to enter Trinity College, Oxford when he was sixteen. Already he had passed into the first steps of his “pilgrim’s progress”, the journey of Christian faith.

He recounted his religious development in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, published in 1865. As an adolescent, after briefly toying with atheistic rationalism, he was drawn into the Evangelical stream of Anglicanism and a closer relationship with Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Saviour.  Yet he later affirmed that, from the age of fifteen, dogma was “the fundamental principle of my religion”

His spiritual guide was a Calvinistic Evangelical, Rev. Walter Mayers, but by the age of twenty-one Newman had moved away from the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.  Yet he always carried with him a love of the Scriptures and incredible knowledge of them, evident later in his sermons, marvellous examples of Victorian prose, delivered with a silvery voice. He was a refined preacher, reading from his notes. In his Parochial and Plain Sermons we come across paragraphs that take up a whole page, punctuated meticulously to make sense, an art we have lost is this age of the “sound bite”.

At Trinity College, he failed an exam, a surprise to everyone, but this lapse was caused by emotional sensitivity. Fifty years ago in Oxford, I used to visit and assist Mrs Gullick, an old lady who was related to Newman. All she could remember was the family scandal that John had failed an exam! This did not impede an academic career, for he later became a fellow of Oriel College.

However, we must never forget that this Christian pilgrim was called to be a pastor. After he was ordained in 1824, John Henry became curate of the small Oxford parish of St Clement and devoted himself to the care of the people. In the two years he spent there he raised money for a new church, later built away from the noisy highway that crosses Magdalen Bridge.  He was remembered as a diligent Evangelical pastor. But John Henry was gradually moving beyond Evangelical views.

In Oriel College he found himself at the heart of a circle of friends later known as the Oxford Movement or Tractarians. The latter title was derived from “tracts” or booklets known as the Tracts for the Times that this circle wrote and published. These scholarly men were striving to revive Catholic continuity, beliefs and practices within the Church of England.

From 1833 they affirmed the apostolic identity of the Church of England and opposed an “Erastian” outlook, which regarded the Church as essentially a state department, the religious wing of the Establishment. John Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey were key figures in the Tractarian circle and later led the “Anglo Catholics”, but the greatest mind was Newman.

While their booklets were eagerly read in many vicarages, the Tractarians were bitterly opposed and rejected by the Protestant Establishment. At the same time, John Henry’s studies in the Eastern and Western Church Fathers were steadily leading him away from Anglicanism and towards the Catholic Church. This tendency reached a crisis point in Tract Ninety, where he attempted to reconcile the Protestant Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England with Catholic doctrine as taught by the Council of Trent. He was denounced and hounded, forced to resign his living, Saint Mary’s University Church and the little parish of Littlemore.

Our disappointed and bruised Christian pilgrim had entered a phase of his journey when he had to search his conscience, work out his bearings and reset the compass. But where was he going? Newman’s pilgrimage was at a decisive stage.

He retreated to a humble property at Littlemore where, with friends of similar views, he led a kind of monastic life. During this time of prayer and study, at the beginning of 1845 he started to write his critical work, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, where he set out a credible theory of how doctrine develops within the Church across the ages. But, by recognising and describing that process, he had come to see that the only Church where this happened and continues to happen is the Catholic Church.

He ceased to use the official government term “Roman Catholics” and now he wrote of the “Catholics”. That marked a massive emotional wrench and a struggle, for he did not want to become a Catholic. These inner struggles he later described in his autobiographical novel Loss and Gain, which also shows us the religious issues of the times, with wit and entertaining satire. But he had to surrender because the “stern monitor”, conscience, was calling. On October 9^th, 1845, Blessed Dominic Barberi, an Italian Passionist missionary priest, received John Henry into the Church with some close friends. He then went to Rome to study for the priesthood.

After ordination as a Catholic priest, Fr. Newman returned to England and set up the community of priests known as the Oratory of St Philip Neri in a house near Birmingham, significantly named Maryvale. The Oratorians then moved into Birmingham. They were eventually based in Edgbaston Road where they built up a busy parish, and developed their special charism of rich liturgy and fine music, with evangelistic preaching and attentive sacramental ministry.  The Irish poor flocked to them. In London, another convert, Fr. Wilfred Faber, set up the Brompton Oratory.

Before long, as a persuasive public champion of Catholicism, Fr Newman was guiding many converts to the Catholic Church. That only made him less welcome at Oxford, but the Irish Bishops invited him to found a Catholic University in Dublin and his essay The Idea of a University came out of that project.  Unfortunately, the project collapsed and a deeply disappointed John Henry bore the brunt of the failed enterprise, which years later was taken up by others.

In his sixties John Henry found he had lost favour in Rome, suspected over his alleged views on the teaching Church and then because he expressed caution over the wisdom of defining the dogma of papal infallibility, a project dear to the heart of Blessed Pius IX. Here he differed from a fellow convert, Cardinal Edward Manning and provoked the mischievous hostility of Mgr Talbot, an unbalanced English prelate who slandered him in Rome.

Newman accepted this teaching, once it was defined in 1870 by the First Vatican Council. But the dogma was denounced by Gladstone, who like so many at the time misinterpreted it as brute papal political power. When Newman tried to explain the subtlety of papal infallibility in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875), he also declared that he would toast conscience before toasting the Pope.

Conscience was a central factor in own life and in his theology and philosophy. But conscience, he asserted, in his time had been superseded by a counterfeit, “the right of self-will”. How apposite are those words for us today.

His battered reputation was restored when the new Pope, Leo XIII, created him cardinal in 1879.  When he died in 1890, Cardinal Newman was respected throughout the English-speaking world, not only as a theologian and philosopher but as one of the finest writers of English prose, poetry and hymns. Most of his poems have dated, except for the gems that later became hymns.

Having set out his life’s journey, I concentrate on major themes in his daily life as a Christian pilgrim.

A Man of Faith and Prayer

His personal faith was simple, even emotive, and yet deeply intellectual, His book The Grammar of Assent explored the question of what is happening when we make an assent of faith, an assent to revealed truth, yet a personal assent to God.

The scriptural scholar who moved into Patristics, a study of the Church Fathers, had a firm belief in the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity, both truths contested by the Arian heresy, an area where he was an expert. John Henry’s Christological faith in the Incarnation saw God the Son taking our flesh in terms of his work for us in the Redemption, as in the angels’ hymn from the Dream of Gerontius, Praise to the Holiest in the Height:

O loving wisdom of our God!

When all was sin and shame,

A second Adam to the fight

And to the rescue came.

 

O wisest love! that flesh and blood

Which did in Adam fail,

Should strive afresh against the foe,

Should strive and should prevail.

Therefore, he took sin, grace, salvation, judgement and damnation very seriously. This shaped a strong personal spirituality of the Christian’s combat with evil. As friends noted at Oriel College: daily self-discipline, rising early for prayer, when others at Oxford were sleeping after much drinking, abstemious, when others caroused.

However, he regarded asceticism not as his human effort, only the work of God’s grace. Not only in his life story, but in his theology and spirituality, he seems closer to the champion of grace, Saint Augustine, rather than the scholastics. When he studied in Rome scholastic theology was tired, dull and dry, but that was before the return to Saint Thomas Aquinas that developed later in the Nineteenth Century.

Therefore, there is a severe side to his gentle personality, not only severity, but a hatred and horror of sin.  He was chaste, celibate and virginal. Yet, as a pastor and confessor, he tried to tolerate human weakness in others, even as it puzzled and pained him.

Beginning as an Anglican, he focused on Christ present and at work in the Sacraments. His deep love of the Eucharist also comes out in the hymn Praise to the Holiest:

 

And that a higher gift than grace

Should flesh and blood refine,

His presence and his very self,

And essence all divine.

 

For a Christian there can be no “higher gift than grace”, so I take these words as referring to the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Eucharist. As priest and cardinal, John Henry spent hours before the tabernacle conversing with his beloved Saviour. The Mass was the centre of his daily spiritual routine, and he described the Mass as “the most beautiful thing this side of heaven”. We need to bear in mind that the Mass he celebrated was the traditional Latin rite as reformed after the Council of Trent, now called the Extraordinary Form of the Mass.

His spirituality was also intensely Marian. Fr. Newman felt at home with the warm faith and popular Marian piety of his devoted parishioners, largely poor Irish folk, who prayed with him and who heard him preach tenderly on the Blessed Virgin at the Birmingham Oratory. He committed the new university in Dublin to the care of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom, Sedes Sapientiae.

A Man Open to Change

While he was a socially conservative Tory, in his own life and outlook John Henry was never afraid of change.  His oft-quoted words come to mind: “To live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine chapter 1, on ideas.

Some claim his theology of the development of Christian doctrine reflects Nineteenth Century faith in progress. But doctrinal development seems to be derived from St Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century. When Newman’s thesis is examined carefully, he never suggests that Divine Revelation in Scripture and Tradition idevelops. Yet religious liberals have distorted his theology of the development of doctrine into the error that Revelation itself changes and develops and is “ongoing”. But it is our understanding of Revelation that develops. Another area disputed in his day was evolution. Unlike his antagonist, Charles Kingsley, he had no problem with reconciling evolution with divine creation.

Today some want to present Newman as the proto-liberal Catholic. That is absurd. In 1832, at Palermo, he wrote a sharp poem against liberalism. In his Apologia and in his speech on becoming a Cardinal in 1878 he denounced its religious form. He also had little sympathy for liberalism as the prevailing ideological and political force in his century.  Yet he was “liberal minded” in the sense of being open, free from prejudices and seeing the best in people and he did not enjoy aggressive controversy.

His Love for People

Family and friends were always important in John Henry’s long life; he could walk alone yet he enjoyed human company. The conversion to Catholicism was a painful “parting of friends” yet, in the end, he found many new friends in the Church, and some became close friends, particularly his fellow Oratorian, Fr. Ambrose St John. At his request, he was buried in the same grave as Ambrose in the Oratorians’ cemetery at Rednal.

Gradually relationships were restored with various old Anglican friends, largely because they perceived his sincerity and charity and a commitment to conscience. Their photos adorn the wall of his cardinal’s oratory for they were always in the prayers of his Mass.

Much of his correspondence with relatives, friends and people seeking counsel has been published, so many letters covering a wide range of themes, some including spiritual direction or advice to great people and little people. Women and men were all treated with charity. He lived according to his motto Cor ad cor loquitur: Heart speaks to heart.

In spite of emerging differences over religion, he was devoted to his mother, who died in 1936. By becoming a Catholic in 1845, John Henry had renounced family ties. He tried to keep close to his surviving sisters. The youngest, Mary, had died at the age of nineteen, a trial to the whole family. But he was estranged from Harriet, who had no sympathy for Catholicism, and Jemima never understood conversion and conscience, so their relationship became distant. On the other hand, he agonised over his brothers, Charles who became a lonely sceptic and Frank, who finally repudiated Christianity. Yet he always kept contact with them, gently arguing, hoping to persuade. With fraternal patience he loved them still. He respected their choices in conscience, even as he regretted the paths they had taken.

His theology of the vital role of the laity in the Church had a strong influence on the Second Vatican Council. It was shaped by friendships and by pastoral experiences with parishioners in Oxford and Birmingham. The major source was his perceptive study of the early Christian centuries when, with a “sense of faith”, the lay faithful resisted the Arian heresy while bishops fussed and vacillated. He detested clericalism.

Whether with family and friends, or fellow Oratorians and their pupils, John  Henry, loved what is good, true and beautiful, especially music,  for he played the violin well, In company, he was witty and entertaining.

As an Anglican, Newman promoted the revival of gothic architecture but as a Catholic, he embraced Counter-Reformation culture and aesthetics. He recognised that classical and baroque architecture was better suited for Catholic liturgy; wider, spacious, well- lit churches, with everyone able to see the altar. He came to regard the zealous gothic architect, Augustus Welby Pugin as a “bigot” whose churches were more suited to medieval worship. The Oratorians’ “pagan” architecture was denounced by Pugin, an obsessive eccentric genius.

John Henry also loved animals; a dog, an old pony and a donkey were companions at the Oratorians’ country retreat at Rednal.  He abhorred cruelty to animals and, as a vicar he preached on the mystery of the lives of animals and their place in God’s creation, which we never fully understand.

Life Has Plan and Purpose

His sense of being a pilgrim on a journey of faith consoled him into old age and frailty. He firmly believed in Divine Providence, particularly as a “particular providence” for each one of us. His experience of a particular providence was expressed in his poem and hymn, Lead Kindly Light, amidst the encircling  gloom.

This Christian pilgrim may have speculated with apprehension about the future, but he never gave in to “the encircling gloom”. He understood time in terms of eternity, sub specie aeternitatis. John Henry saw his own life as a journey with a plan and purpose, marked by God’s love, that “kindly light” guiding us at particular moments in our journey. After all, as he put it at the end of his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, “Life is short, eternity is long”.

This is why his attitude to the Blessed Virgin was one of filial confidence. He trusted in her as our sister walking with us, as our Mother helping and healing, keeping us with her Son, as the Morning Star guiding us safely home to Him, into eternal truth. His epitaph reflects this hope: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem: From shadows and images into the truth.

READING NEWMAN

Reading About Him

It is important first to get a picture of him as a Christian man, in his own  works: Apologia pro Vita Sua, an autobiographical account and Loss and Gain, his earlier autobiographical novel, perceptive and entertaining. Then read the experts:

Louis Bouyer, Newman, His Life and Spirituality.

Austin Cooper, OMI, John Henry Newman: A Developing Spirituality.

Joyce Sugg, John Henry Newman: Snapdragon in the Wall, short and readable

Edward Short, Newman and His Contemporaries and Newman and His Family, provide a detailed and interesting historical context.

Philip Boyce, Mary: The Virgin Mary in the Life and Writings of John Henry Newman, revealing his Marian faith and spirituality

Reading His Own Works

Parochial and Plain Sermons, eight volumes, Anglican, flowing Victorian prose, according to one’s taste.

The Arians of the Fourth Century and St. Athanasius, historical studies in the age of the Fathers with insights regarding the faith of the laity.

Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, well-argued historical theology.

Discourses to Mixed Congregations and Sermons on Various Occasions, a simpler style after he became a Catholic.

Difficulties of Anglicans, dated, but much is still relevant, easy to read.

The Idea of a University, a wise and open approach, relevant in our intolerant times.

A Grammar of Assent, not so easy to read, tight philosophical theology of faith.

Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, issues arising from Vatican I and papal infallibility.

Meditations and Devotions, beautiful and inspiring, a small posthumous book.

Many of his Letters were edited and published by Stephen Dessain, but there at least 50,000 of them and recently more have been released in the year of his canonization.

Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem: From shadows and images into the truth.

 

Bishop Peter J. Elliott holds degrees in history from the University of Melbourne and a Master of Arts in theology from Oxford. He was ordained priest for Melbourne in 1973. After serving in parishes and as a bishop’s secretary, he gained a Doctorate in Sacred Theology at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, Rome. He worked for ten years as an official of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family. In 1997 he returned to Melbourne as Episcopal Vicar for Religious Education and became Director of the Institute in 2004. He was ordained Auxiliary Bishop in Melbourne in 2007. He retired as Auxiliary Bishop in October 2018 but remains Titular Bishop of Manaccenser. Bishop Elliott is a well-known speaker and author of books and articles on theology, marriage and the family, Church history, catechetics, liturgy, apologetics and demography. He was the Delegate of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference for the Personal Ordinariate for former Anglicans. His interests include classical music, writing, art, design, architecture and cats.

The full text of Prof Simon Haines’s talk to the Centre on 20 September 2019

Ramsay, the universities, and Western civilisation

Roughly speaking, here is what the Ramsay Centre has been offering universities: they put on a course in the arts or humanities faculty called “Western Civilisation”, though in fact it’s better described as a “great texts” course, similar to the often life-transforming courses offered in a variety of models for a hundred years or so at a number of top-flight American universities and liberal arts colleges. And in return we offer significant funding over eight years, possibly extendable, to hire academic staff to teach the courses, but also to slot into existing departments of classics, philosophy and so on and contribute there like anyone else. Vital new hires into struggling Arts faculties– and the universities run the hiring process. And then every year we offer up to 30 generous 5-year undergraduate scholarships, to be taught in small classes of 8-12 students, rather on the Princeton model. Also selected by the universities. And just as the staff can teach elsewhere, so the students can take other courses in parallel to this one—they could do a second major in anything they liked, indigenous studies, Asian studies: or indeed a combined degree such as Arts/Law.

As we have heard so many times over the last two years, how could anyone refuse? How could well-established academics deny these rare career opportunities to earlier career staff; or this wonderful degree and generous funding to so many students? What could be so offensive in a course offered for 100 years or more in some of the greatest universities and colleges on earth, most of them decidedly left-of-centre institutions, producing students of all political complexions: or none at all? What’s the problem with studying art and architecture from Praxiteles and Phidias to Le Corbusier and Zaha Hadid; or dramatists from Sophocles to Murray-Smith; or philosophers from Socrates to Simone Weil; or feminists from Wollstonecraft to Greer—at the discretion of the university to choose the list? And there’s room for cross-civilisation comparisons too: a look at the Koran alongside books of the Old Testament, or the Analects of Confucius alongside the Ethics of Aristotle. A course in which, I might add, and this has been attested to by thousands of students, there is no trace of a suggestion that that the civilisation which produced these texts is any “better” than all the others. Indeed its opinion of itself has often been pretty low. You have only to think about individuals as unlike each other as Jesus of Nazareth and Socrates of Athens, not to say a cast of thousands including for example Aristophanes, Juvenal, Rousseau or Solzhenitsyn, to realise that these so-called “great books” are great precisely because they were so very critical of their own cultures, which together make up that amorphous thing called a civilisation. This conversation is at times something close to a history of criticism of the West by the West, not a chorus of triumphalist self-promoters.

And indeed the response to all this from senior university managements and many academics has been positive. But at the same time there’s often a very different kind of reaction, especially from some of the more vocal, activist, and “progressive” academic staff and students in the Arts Faculties. To them, we are triumphalist, racist, supremacist, reactionary, imperialist, fascist, Zionist, masculinist, neo-Nazi: and so on and on. Now of course it’s extremely important to bear in mind that “a” university nowadays is often a huge complex aggregation of fiefdoms. Most of the lawyers, the commerce and business people, the scientists, the engineers, the architects, the musicians, and even many in Arts, to say nothing of the large class of administrators often as big as all the rest put together, probably wonder what all the fuss is about. But academics have their research and teaching to do, and the last thing they need is to get drawn into a nasty political fight with a minority of noisy outraged colleagues. And PR departments, university lawyers and media advisers are generally risk averse.

So what’s this really all about? Where exactly is this hostility coming from and why is it sometimes so extreme? There are some obvious answers; we aren’t that naïve.  We have some notable right-of-centre individuals on our Board: although we also have some notable left-of-centre ones (a fact often conveniently overlooked), as well as non-aligned educators and business people. And yes, of course academics are perfectly right to be suspicious of ideologically or commercially motivated outside funding (and it does happen, even more so in non-Arts areas). And this is the largest gift to the Humanities in our history: surely it must come with strings? But then—surely it doesn’t take much intelligence to understand what I was saying earlier about the non-political nature of our proposed courses?

We also fully recognise that we are implicitly criticising some teaching programs. Very far from all teachers or all courses, obviously. But our proposal is for a small class scholarship program in a context where most classes are very large—which raises accusations of privilege or elitism. Still: there’s nothing to stop non-scholars enrolling, within the limits of class sizes (many other courses are capped). Nor to stop the universities growing the courses themselves if they turn out to be popular. These courses work well for mass undergraduate populations at Chicago or Columbia. We are just showing the way to what might be possible. And there’s also the point that all scholarships are by definition exclusive of those who apply for but don’t get them.

And a third obvious point. The hostility is to some extent part of a reiteration of the so-called “culture wars”. You can read recent books by Frank Furedi, Jonathan Haidt and others, social psychologists, anthropologists, alarmed academics from across the political spectrum, many of them on the left, as most academics in the humanities are, charting the evolution of the civil rights and protest movements of the sixties and seventies into the stifling and alarming identitarianism of the last five to ten years, both on and off campus. We are feeling the backlash from that long-running, still-evolving, “protest” phenomenon.

But I want to take a different tack, on a much longer time scale, looking at some deeper tendencies in Western thought about the nature of knowledge itself, but also at the institution of the university itself and the role it has played in this thinking process. So let’s go briefly back to the beginning, about 2500 years back.

The Greeks recognised three kinds of knowledge: two of them “practical”, one “pure”. All three of them are in contrast to mere opinion or belief. Pure or higher knowledge, and I’m going to call it truth-knowledge, was known as episteme. The first kind of practical knowledge, skill or training or instruction or applied knowledge, was known to them as techne. And then the second type of practical knowledge, let’s call it good judgement, inward knowledge of the human, of the virtues and vices, of the values world: knowledge of how to live, how to grasp the moral contours of an issue or a behaviour: this was called phronesis, or later in Latin, prudentia (prudence is a miserable inadequate translation). Practical wisdom is the usual translation for phronesis, though I’m inclined to just call it wisdom, wisdom-knowledge as opposed to truth-knowledge or skill-knowledge. (I’m staying away from the confusing term sophia, usually but misleadingly translated as “wisdom”, as it is much closer in meaning to episteme in the sense of the perfection of theoretical knowledge, and indeed, on occasion, to techne in the sense of the perfection of a skill, than it ever is to phronesis.) Interestingly unlike techne and episteme this third Greek term for knowledge hasn’t entered our language, so I hope you will excuse me if I use phronetic from time to time.

Now the crucial point I want to make is that ever since Socrates, the master thinker of the West, this phronesis has tended to play second fiddle to its purer relative, episteme. No doubt all humanities academics and scientists too would endorse that subordinating of skill to truth, techne to episteme: but in the intellectual tradition of the West truth has also often trumped wisdom.

This happens quite often in Plato, perhaps most obviously in the dialogue called Protagoras. You will recall that Socrates is always the hero of Plato’s dialogues, demolishing his opponents by argument, especially by clear definitions of the concepts at stake, justice, courage, and so on. In this particular dialogue, though, he almost meets his match in a Sophist, a professional teacher specialising in literary criticism, whose job it is to teach his students how to be outstanding or virtuous in ethics and politics by showing them examples of such outstanding-ness in the passional lives displayed in drama and poetry. Since to show us what virtue is, is essentially Socrates’ own vocation, he’s a bit taken aback; but in the end he is able to show that the way to be virtuous is to understand what it is in the sense of the meaning of the concept. To have a virtue we must define its meaning properly: not watch it being embodied in some fictitious character as described at second hand by a mere sophist (this association is another problem with the word sophia). Truth is a matter of concepts, not lives; of intellect, not passion. Of logic, not rhetoric. Again in the Phaedrus, Socrates sets out to show that love itself, that archetypal subject matter of poetry, is thought about better by philosophers, along the above lines, than it is by poets.

I wouldn’t presume to trespass into territory so much more familiar to those here than it is to me: but I would venture the suggestion that you can see in Mark’s telling the story of Jesus in his Gospel, and Paul’s telling the story of his faith in the Epistles, some faint traces of that same conflict between an epistemic and a phronetic model of knowledge.

So with that little summary out of the way, let’s jump forward 1500 years or so, to 1088. That’s the date of the foundation of the University of Bologna, with Paris and Oxford both following around 75 years later. Bologna was created to offer mainly professional degrees in law and medicine; it was funded privately by the wealthy families of the students. The other two offered mainly theology and philosophy for future teachers, scholars and clerics, and were funded by the crown and the state in Oxford or by church tithes in Paris (much the same thing from the taxpayer’s point of view). So right from the beginning of the university there is that same contrast between professional training or applied knowledge, pursued for the sake of a career, and the pure or “higher” knowledge of the theologian or philosopher, pursued for its own sake. And also, by the way, another, ancillary contrast between privately and publicly funded education, wealthy private schools producing lawyers and doctors, and inadequately funded humanities institutions full of badly dressed philosophers nobly pursuing knowledge on a shoestring.

But all universities from then on, whether private schools for the professions, or public ones for theologians and philosophers, put their students through the same two- to three-year foundation course or first degree, called a Master of Arts. The twin bases of this degree were the trivium, the study of language; and the quadrivium, the study of number. The ‘trivial’ subjects were called that because they were the foundational ‘three ways’ considered to lie at the heart of all study. The three ways of language were grammar, rhetoric and logic. Logic is, in short, the truth of language, thought about and in concepts: its logos, its episteme. Grammar is its skills or instrumental aspect, the structure of language, its techne. Rhetoric, the study of great examples of wisdom from the past, occupies roughly speaking, the space of phronesis. This is the territory of our old friend Protagoras. The first of the three ways is so to speak the purest one; the second is the most useful for everyday language users; the third offers life models. All three were ideally meant to be in harmony: the primary colours of all thought in language. In fact the third one enjoyed about three centuries, the 12^th to 14^th, of great prestige: that is, during the medieval and early Renaissance periods. But its ascendancy faded as the high Renaissance arrived and evolved into the Enlightenment. On the one hand the new empirical science of Copernicus, Galileo and Bacon, and on the other the mathematical and logical systems of Descartes and Leibniz: both science and logic were developed for the most part outside the universities, and assumed between them the mantle of truth, of episteme. The medieval curriculum persisted well into the nineteenth century in many places. But these modern notions of what counted as truth did eventually confirm as well as transform the way the institutions came to regard empirical and mathematical science (and we all still tend so to regard it) as the pinnacle and paradigm of knowledge. The phronesis element of rhetoric, study of wise texts of the past, lost much of its prestige.

And now I’m making another big jump forward in time, to the nineteenth century. The modern university arrived in Germany in the early 1800s. It was to a remarkable extent the work of one man, the linguist and philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt, brother of the equally brilliant naturalist Friedrich. It happened partly as an outgrowth of the scientific Enlightenment but also partly in the anti-Enlightenment shadow of the Romantic philosopher-critics Johan Georg Hamann and Johann Herder. The key insight enlisted by Humboldt was that just as every culture and individual is distinct (this was the Romantic principle known as the principle of Bildung), so is every discipline of thought. The university’s job is to explore and document that near infinite set of differences in a scientific, methodical spirit (that’s the Enlightenment bit). What in German are called the Geisteswissenchaften, the knowledges of mind and spirit, the concerns of Wilhelm the humanities scholar, were seen as the complement to the Naturwissenschaften, the knowledges of physical nature, the concerns of his botanizing, naturalist brother Friedrich. Mind and spirit are to be studied like a science, a set of facts to be researched and investigated by a serious professional researcher, in an epistemic institution built on and devoted to a taxonomy of all knowledge. Research is rechercher, the thorough investigation or closer looking into of empirical discovery, resulting in the finding of new things. Whereas scholarship, from scholia and schole, originally meant leisure, then discussion. This was the preserve of the old-fashioned scholar, later perhaps the comfortable dilettante: not the dedicated modern professional.

The medieval and early Renaissance view, recognisably Protagorean, phronetic, wisdom-oriented, had been that the lineaments of human nature were eternal and unchanging and could be taught by reference to great and equally unchanging classical texts. This view was now replaced by a dynamic Romantic perspective, from which every culture, every individual, seems unique, protean, and can only be understood by mastering an infinite corpus of fact. Each researcher or scientist can only add his or her little stone to the ten thousand topless towers of scholarship and research. There’s not much room in this model for teaching character, virtue or wisdom as something transmissible across generations: except I suppose the great value or vocation of research itself, the human life given to serious truth-knowledge, as Socrates gave his (see for all this the excellent book by Anthony Kronman, The End of Education). And this is what on the modern German model the student must be prepared for. Humboldt’s key essay on education makes it clear that primary school is where we learn to learn; it “makes the teacher possible”, he says. Then secondary school is where teaching and learning happen and in the process the “teacher renders himself dispensable”. At university the teacher has disappeared; he has become a researcher, showing his students by example how to be researchers themselves. And broadly speaking, this is where we still are. “Research”, episteme, is now overwhelmingly prestigious, vital to rankings and status: teaching is mere instruction, mere techne, although of course it makes the institution a lot of money, especially in overseas student fees. Fourth year honours classes are increasingly regarded as MAs now, research training programs. As for wisdom: well, what’s that? Not something you learn at university, anyway.

In America the German model gradually took over during the course of the nineteenth century, displacing the Oxbridge-medieval model that had been in place since the foundations of Harvard and the other older colleges at the end of the seventeenth. What emerged was a hybrid. The old medieval model survived, though increasingly watered down and generalist, as it still does to some almost unrecognisable extent, in the so-called “liberal arts” foundation years. Meanwhile the research-intensive German model took over at graduate school.

But in early nineteenth-century America there was a new factor. Huge levels of immigration at the end of the century left educators feeling the need to provide common understandings to people from hugely diverse backgrounds. So at Columbia, Chicago, St John’s and other places there was a kind of Gothic revival, if I can use such a phrase (I’m thinking of Matthew Arnold speaking of Oxford “whispering from her towers the last enchantment of the middle ages”). I mean a revitalisation of the classical-medieval-Protagorean model, but with a new insight of its own: and this is something of the greatest importance to us at Ramsay. This insight is that truly great texts are not static monuments. The poet W. B. Yeats uses the phrase “monuments of unageing intellect” to refer to the great vestiges of past achievement in Byzantium. But the emphasis should be on “unageing” not “monuments”.  Great works of philosophy, art, literature, music, are themselves dynamic interactive inter-temporal generators of endlessly renewable intellectual energy, the signs and powerplants of a civilisation constantly and critically exploring and reinventing itself across the ages. This is classicaldynamism, not Romantic. Paradoxically, the university teacher’s main job in this model is to get out of the way, to lose his or her personality in the contemplation of or close careful attention to those texts, to enable the students to see those ancient thinkers as their contemporaries, to become part of a perpetual conversation, if not an eternal one. And that revived Protagorean or wisdom model, invented or revived or modified by the likes of Stringfellow Barr, Mortimer Adler, Robert Hutchins and Scott Buchanan, is still working very well, to judge by what we have seen at and discussed with St John’s College in Annapolis, Columbia University and other similar places.

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the Scottish university had consistently been more reformist, or should I say more Reformed: their ancient universities, St Andrews and Glasgow, were modelled on Paris and Bologna; but the Reformation had already seen a revitalised curriculum the equal of any in Europe. This was further transformed by the Scottish Enlightenment of Hume, Hutcheson, Smith and Blair. By the mid-nineteenth century the leading Scottish universities were urban, non-residential and with a strong scientific and secular disposition, with a four-year honours degree in a range of modern disciplines. The training they offered was principally professional and scientific: that is, in the terms I have been using, technical and epistemic. And this was in essence what we inherited in Australia, starting with William Charles Wentworth’s Sydney in 1850; although there was also strong influence from the comparable early nineteenth century Utilitarian foundation of University College London, where the embalmed corpse of Jeremy Bentham can still be viewed on site in a glass case.

Ours, then, is a London-Scottish model, liberal, secular, merit based not class based, metropolitan, utilitarian, comprehensive in its discipline range, non-residential for the most part, and publicly funded, owned and governed. And because much the same professional or technical instruction was needed in each of our widely scattered urban universities, they became nearly carbon copies of each other (see Glyn Davis’s Idea of an Australian University for a good short account). This techno-epistemic model persisted for about 100 years; and then after the second world war the German-American research model arrived (the foundation of the ANU in 1947 was a turning point) and was grafted on to it, particularly onto the epistemic function, where of course it now sits at the top of the heap.

The final step in the process that has given us our modern universities was taken with the Dawkins reforms of the 1980s. The effect of these was that an already uniform system essentially collapsed into a single giant monoversity with nearly 40 campuses. In 1995 an OECD analyst commented in amazement on their “uniformity of mission…all wanted to enter the research arena…all the avowed emphasis on teaching and diversity disappeared”. We witnessed massively expanding student numbers, costs and class sizes. In 1970 only 5-7% of 20-year-olds attended university: the figure is now 40-50% and rising, out of a much larger population. With them came an increasingly casualised teaching underclass; plummeting staff-student ratios; rapidly growing bureaucracies on the managerial-feudalist model analysed by Max Weber and bemoaned by Thorstein Veblen decades ago; and an increasingly corporate and commercial ethos in which those overseas students have recently become indispensable customers.

The political philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote over 50 years ago that “a university will have ceased to exist when its learning has degenerated into what is now called research, when its teaching has become mere instruction”. There has been in this country, perhaps more than elsewhere in the Anglosphere (and therefore anywhere else, since the Anglosphere is further down this track than universities in Europe or elsewhere), a perverse interaction, intended by no-one, between the homogenisation, the massification, the commercialisation, and the research-and-rankings obsession. This has all contributed enormously to the age-old tendency for the epistemic and the technical functions, truth and training, research and professional instruction, almost entirely to crowd out that part of a university education that had most to do with life-meaning, with character formation, or with wisdom. Those other functions are of course utterly essential in themselves, no doubt about that: but the balance has gone. Note that this happens not just systemically but at the level of the individual teacher and class: in how the delivery of knowledge happens, and its disposition is formed. That goes to the teaching function; but teaching itself has become disvalued at the systemic level in the modern Australian university.

So I think an important part of what we have run into is that our project at Ramsay is to introduce an American-based wisdom teaching model, itself developed relatively recently in reaction to a new research paradigm, but with its deepest roots in the medieval university, into an Anglo-Scottish techno-epistemic degree structure, with its own strong new allegiances to the research paradigm. The resistance in these terms isn’t surprising. University academics (and I include myself) are in general conservative (small ‘c’): by no means as innovative or radical as we often give ourselves credit for. By and large we don’t like having either our institutional environments or our world views questioned any more than anyone else does—indeed often much less so, since typically we have spent a working lifetime living in one and justifying the other. Indeed collectively justifying our views to each other, in those surroundings, is our life—much more deeply so than having our views questioned, which is supposed to be the function of university research. It’s also, nowadays, how we get research grants or positive readers’ reports: which is also what the administrative class needs from us so that it too can protect its funding, status and existence. This new academic career pattern absolutely requires that teaching become a second-order activity.

Now this all gives us some good clues, I think, to the near-hysteria Ramsay has sometimes encountered. It’s partly a defensive reaction from huge bureaucratic institutions. It’s partly a defensive fear in Arts faculties, disguised as the somewhat complacent assertion that “we already do all this”: the fear that a more interesting neighbouring gallery of material might steal students away from the increasingly threadbare tapestries of colonialism, empire, gender and race. It’s partly, as I said at the start, naked political partisanship, morphing into hostility to a perceived “elitist” small class model: seen in this mindset as an exclusive private stream within the public university—as if those stylish Bologna students were giving themselves airs in the threadbare quadrangles of Oxford.

But there are some deeper significances emerging from this story. One has to do with a fundamental misconception (or so I perceive it—others will say the misconception is mine): a misconception about what knowledge and education are, at least in the humanities (of course like a good post-German scholar I wouldn’t presume to speak for other disciplines). The misconception is that an uneducated reader can’t actually know a primary text at all. Education consists of telling the reader things about the text. Researchers of course already know these things from their research. In a way this is a distorted version of von Humboldt’s ideal. Their job is essentially to tell the student about their research, not disinterestedly to read with the student the primary material on which the research is ultimately founded and to which it is addressed. The discipline involved is not constituted in the careful reading of a complex text: that is to say, it isn’t a discipline derived from the text itself. Instead, it is constituted in the application to the text itself of a corpus of key concepts derived from elsewhere, that is, from the teacher’s own research. (An important exception would be where the text in question is a recent theoretical one: that can be carefully studied. Theory has the prestige of episteme here.) So any attempt to offer unmediated primary texts from the past, in all their richness and dynamism, to be patiently attended to by teachers and students together— this not only downgrades the value of the teacher’s own work, indeed his or her whole life as dedicated to research; it also questions the value, indeed the very validity, of that conception of research itself. The primary text has actually become a positive threat; it’s almost as if the student can’t be allowed to find something in it that the researcher hasn’t seen or can’t endorse. And of course the students receive those complex meta-messages loud and clear. Not so much the doctrines of the research itself, although they receive those too (see below)—but the suspicion of the text as something that’s trying, perhaps unconsciously, to hide something, something that needs exposing by research. And then here comes our Centre offering not just an implied criticism of this research-teaching model, but small primary-text-based classes where it’s much harder for the model to work. A recipe for hostility.

But now there is one more step. Rather than talking about the great texts of Western civilisation, let’s widen our scope to Western civilisation itself as a text, a huge tapestry. Suppose your research, the work you have given your life to and all your identity, has been utterly absorbed with the discovery and exposure of some subset of the cruel or inhumane or repressive aspects of human behaviour, and specifically of our civilisation. Of course it should go without saying that almost by definition every civilisation is implicated in cruelty and repression and exclusion, as well as innovation and creativity and inclusiveness: although almost none has been as self-critical of its own faults as ours has. But suppose that your life and research are so dedicated to a conception of unmasking evil that “Western civilisation”, to you, simply means, for example, Hitler not Goethe; genocidal imperialism not democracy; racism not multiculturalism; the burning of the Summer Palace not the building of the Winter Palace; slavery not abolition; misogyny not amour courtois; crusades not cathedrals; narcissistic consumerism not rational choice; capitalist greed not free markets; repressive tolerance not freedom of opinion; environmental destruction not green activism; vested interests not inclusiveness: and so ad infinitum.

Now what’s happened here is that both the German and the medieval insights have been warped into something quite new. The research ideal, the space of truth, has mutated into something more like activism: for how can anyone, faced with these appalling evil things, not want to do something about them, both outside and inside the classroom? This is turn perverts the teaching function. The vacated space of wisdom, of what you might call “invaluation”, has now been filled by what Oakeshott politely calls a “serviceable moral and intellectual outfit”. As the old cowboy ballad says, I see by your outfit that you are progressive. An off-the-shelf, ready-made set of views and opinions, of what the Greeks called doxa, mere belief, replaces real wisdom, and is purveyed to students as a kind of patina or gloss covering all the material they encounter. Both kinds of knowledge, pure and practical, episteme and phronesis, have disappeared, to be replaced by non-knowledge. You might say, well at least techne remains. Well, yes, and in the professional faculties that is certainly true. But otherwise, if sufficiently dressed up in the correct moral outfit, the place of instruction becomes an instrument of social change, or “social justice”.

The Chicago educator Edward Shils wrote about this as long ago as 1993: “some university teachers nowadays think that … they have a unique opportunity as well as a moral obligation to further the cause … . An aggressive and intimidating body of antinomian academic opinion [on such matters as] the equality of genders, the equality of races and cultures—these are the only real values.” [“Do we still Need Academic Freedom?”, The American Scholar, LXII, Spring 1993, 187-209.]

That was 25 years ago, but the underlying impulses are still just as intimidating. The arena of research has become for many academics one of political and social reform; that is the underlying emotional driver of the research agenda. And it is only human that the more passionate you are about your research/reformist agenda, the harder it is not to shout about it in the public forum: hard, even, appalling as it may seem, not to shout down others who have different views, which to you seem to lend support to the evil you are giving your life to combatting.

Wisdom has always tended to be overshadowed by truth on the one hand and training on the other; and now, in those areas of the old humanities faculties where it used once to be an equal partner with its two companions, it has become all mixed up with dogma, with doctrine. And if you march into the heart of this dogma, where research and instruction are converted into activism, march into it offering an opportunity for unmediated contact with the great primary texts of a hated (and self-hating) civilisation, then you will be strongly opposed, at least by those who see their vocations in that way. But for the sake of that very civilisation, it’s important that they not succeed.

© Simon Haines

The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation

November 2019

1 August 2019

Paper presented by the Director at Chavagnes Studium’s conference ‘Literature and the Light of Christ’, Chavagnes, France, July 2019

All is not quiet on the Western Front: can the Centre hold?

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the expansion of available knowledge in the modern world and argues that we have passed far beyond the stage at which a comprehensive mastery of any subject is even possible.  Premature specialisation, already at primary school level, has been an inevitable consequence, and the teaching of ‘core’ subjects such as history and literature has been weakened or even abandoned as schools and universities strive to train their students in merely occupational skills.  The impossibility of mastering the available literature has led many to deny the reality of objective truth, while humane cultural values are increasingly neglected.  One response to this is the ‘Great Books’ approach to liberal education, yet the difficulty of arriving at a universally agreed ‘canon’ appears insurmountable. Instead a profound re-engagement with core subjects is proposed as being central to a truly liberal education and the only possible basis for the restoration of a common human culture.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity…

…The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?[1]

 

Though we may have backed away from the ebullient Victorian belief in materialistic science-driven Progress, it is undeniable that the human race is far from static.  Our life is much more complex than that of even our most recent predecessors, and the physical comforts and advantages now available to us have entirely outstripped, in their brilliance and variety, everything that went before.  The most positive construction we can put on this, from a Christian perspective, is that we are advancing from the simplicity of a Garden to the City of God.

One of the indicators of the ineluctable movement in which we are all caught up is the mushrooming of the written record.  Just 500 years ago libraries counted their books in the hundreds; now the size of the world’s book stock is almost beyond reckoning.  Until the High Middle Ages and perhaps for a century or two afterwards it was possible, at least in theory, for one man in his lifetime to read everything that had been written and preserved in the libraries of the West.[2]  Yet with the rise of the universities, and even before the general availability of printing, this point had been passed.

The effect of this growth on education has been cataclysmic, for the emphasis has necessarily shifted from gleaning facts to, effectively, culling them, from training memory to side-stepping mere recollection as a poor cousin to abstraction.[3] My use of the word ‘culling’ may appear impolitic; certainly ‘edit’, ‘select’, or ‘research’ are kinder.  But I prefer ‘culling’ as being closer to the somewhat unpalatable truth.[4]  Within every single subject of study, even within a particular speciality of that subject, it is now impossible for one scholar to read all the available material. Anglophone specialists may occasionally suggest that they have achieved a mastery of their subjects, but by and large we are poor linguists and the assumption, too often beneath the surface, that everything worth reading is available in English, is both impertinent and dangerous.

The apparent impossibility of coping with the growth of knowledge has been a major factor in the rise in our schools and universities of a nebula of petty and unrelated subjects, many of which are driven by the ephemeral fancies of the day.

Everything that is now written, and very much of all that has ever been written, is now digitalized.  Search engines can now discover in a trice what a researcher of just a few decades ago could struggle to unearth in days or weeks.  Our corporate memory has increased a millionfold, but each individual’s RAM, his ‘onboard memory’, is no greater than it was a thousand years ago, nor is there the slightest chance that it will increase.  We may be sceptical about the possibility of artificial intelligences such as Hal, in Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey, evolving to the extent of having human feelings and ambitions, but the Hals of this world already run rings around the rest of us in their capacity for memory and calculation.  Our problem is knowing what to ask them to do, and that is a problem that is becoming more, not less, difficult with every passing moment.  No individual knows very much, in proportion to the world’s knowledge; even panels of experts, to state an unwelcome truth, inevitably against such odds fall short of mastery.

Not only is our memory restricted and finite, but our capacity to make moral judgments is no greater than it ever was. Many wise people would argue that it becomes significantly diminished as we forget how to think for ourselves and rely increasingly on ‘science’ to solve our ethical dilemmas.

Where do we look for resolution, when the world’s corporate knowledge is outstripping our individual personal intelligences almost literally at the speed of light?

Because we are individuals trying to make sense of such overwhelming forces, an element of the personal has a necessary place in each man’s response.  I had the great good fortune to receive a more or less classical education in Latin and Greek.  By the time I arrived on the scene the great days of the Classics had already passed away.  No longer might a British general announce his victory in a telegram, with a single Latin pun, in the certainty that it would be understood.[5] No more could a man like Prebendary Gaisford boast:

The advantages of a classical education are twofold: it enables us to look down with contempt on those who have not shared its advantages, and also fits us for places of emolument not only in this world, but in the next.[6]

But for all that I am deeply and unrelentingly grateful to have had the opportunities that I happily stumbled upon, and greatly deplore the powerful trend in my own days to dismiss the classics as ‘irrelevant’, and Latin as a tedious, soul-destroying waste of time.  That attitude was an over-reaction in favour of the ‘new’ scientific disciplines of Maths, Chemistry and Physics (which are valuable and necessary) as well as Sociology, Psychology, Geography (which, as undergraduate subjects, are perhaps less so).

Their strength as a discipline lay in their breadth of vision:  they embraced the mental discipline of learning other languages, together with the psycho-social discipline of trying to get inside the heads of other cultures that shared our humanity yet were so utterly alien in their thinking.  The classical world had long passed away, but its internal complexities were a world in microcosm, a closed laboratory, small enough to be studied at depth, whose subsequent effects upon our own culture were not only discernible but hugely inescapable.  They shaped our world in ways so various and at depths so diverse that modern men (especially those who have little awareness of history) struggle to retrace the steps they have taken.  We are indeed dwarves on the shoulders of giants.[7]

Of course a recovery of the great days of the Classics on anything like their former scale, even if that were desirable, is inconceivable.  There will always be people who study the Classics for personal or scholarly reasons, at least so long as Western Civilisation endures, but such studies will never again be the bedrock of conventional education.

There is evidence that some serious thinkers about education are reclaiming lost ground and positively reevaluating much of what in our folly we once rejected out of hand, but unfortunately there are stronger forces at work.

During the 70s of last century the term ‘Mickey Mouse subjects’ was coined to describe certain arts and semi-scientific subjects that universities were at that time starting to make available to undergraduates in response to the rapidly growing number of enrolments in the post World War II world.  This trend was driven by the universities’ fast emerging view of themselves as retailers of knowledge:  to stock their shelves with an attractive range of pre-cooked and easy-care products made very good business sense.  In this strategy they formed a not always easy but generally workable liaison with the political left that had as its own agenda a radical restructuring of society towards the advent of a Marxist and post-capitalist future.

Could anyone forty years ago have dreamed of the extent to which this trend would come to permeate the university sector as it does today?  Arts faculties have become laughing stocks in some modern universities.  There was a time when arts students were respected by their fellows in Law, Medicine or Science, as being engaged in worthwhile and demanding, if apparently impractical, intellectual exercises.  Nerds and Geeks we might have been, but we were not negligible.  When we enrolled in our courses we knew that we would be expected to cover a range of material that may not have interested or pleased us in every one of its aspects, but was necessary in order to achieve a broad understanding of our subject.

It was inconceivable then that a person could complete an undergraduate degree in English, let alone a PhD, without being well read across the genres and the centuries.  The same is true of History.  Specialization in a particular area of literature or history without a broad-based training in the whole scope of the discipline would have once been unthinkable but is now common. Women were very well represented among the novelists, but not so well among the poets, for the reason that relatively few women are reckoned among the great poets of our or any other literature.  This may be a sad truth, but it is a truth nevertheless. It was not allowed to skew our judgments.  The emphasis was on choosing the best, not righting perceived wrongs or applying with hindsight the moral principles currently in fashion.   This does not mean that social justice is now or was then unimportant, but there has been a huge shift in thinking about how and when it is to be striven for.  The Arts have suffered most in this reorientation, because they are by their very nature more open to interpretation, and none more so than the Disney-esque ones.

What all the modern ‘specialisms’ have in common, in contrast to more traditional academic programmes, is that they seek to narrow rather than broaden.  Gender and Women’s Studies may be acceptable at a postgraduate level, but they can have no integrity when erected on a base other than classical Sociology; polemical courses on racism and other such other causes are not the primary business of English or History departments, and will have no bottom unless well founded on broader studies.   The awful truth is that young people are treating universities as cafeterias, choosing very unbalanced diets, and what is worse, the universities are pandering to them, meeting their needs and, of course, encouraging them.  Business is business.  And the universities have utterly shirked all moral responsibility.  Does this sound familiar? –

‘In such a state of society, the master fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and tutors; young and old are all alike; and the young man is on the level with the old, and is ready to compete with him in word and deed; and old men condescend to the young and are full of pleasantry and gaiety; they are loathe to be thought morose and authoritative, and therefore they adopt the manners of the young.’[8]

Plato knew a thing or two!

Literacy is in decline, but the greatest loss of all is history.  Ignorance of history, even of comparatively recent events, or their submersion beneath various fatuous forms of identity politics, is a modern human tragedy.  Evidence for this is not hard to find.  But students will all be able to tell you that ‘equality’ is a basic human ‘right’ (whatever that might mean) and assert any number of meaningless platitudes.   G K Chesterton laments the modern habit of looking at the past‘only from the modern end’.  Those brought up without awareness of history, he says, ‘rebel against they know not what, because it arose they know not when; intent only on its ending, they are ignorant of its beginning; and therefore of its very being.’[9]  The neglect of history is perhaps the greatest disaster to have afflicted the contemporary educational world.

Postmodernism, with its aversion to the notion of objective truth, cringes before the enormity of the task of understanding the world. It masquerades as a kind of Socratic scepticism, which is what makes it attractive to so many.  The well-known definition of pessimism as ‘optimism with the facts’ is clever and amusing, but it exposes the sad truth that for many people in our privileged western world life is cruel and meaningless, that the beauty and wonder have gone out of learning, and that in the end everything is hopeless.  This has led, as inevitably as the needle turns to the pole, to a sense of frailty in the face of the universe.  Correct vision perhaps, but wrong solution if it leads, as it almost always does, to premature specialization.  Far too many children leave school never having learned to read, write and think straight, before going on to university to become criminologists, sports psychologists – or teachers. Education can now be chopped up into even smaller units and modules for ease of digestion and subsequent oblivion.

Is there any escape from this frenzied abandonment of the objective aspirations of broad-based education?

If a young person is taught well to communicate and to think, he can be trained, and re-trained, to do anything else.  And to do it better than one who has had no basic training in humane skills.  There is ample evidence to support this, and young people are themselves increasingly aware of the deficiencies in their own education.  Anyone who has worked in an educational institution will have met intelligent students who realize that they have been short-changed.

So is there a workable solution?  Certainly there is no returning to the past – the only way is forward.

The conservative response will be to seek to look for those qualities in humanity that are universal, drill down into them with disciplined energy and extract the core material which is (or should be) the fundamental stuff of all education for work and for life.  The notion of the trivium, the first stage of a liberal arts education that evolved in antiquity and continued through the Middle Ages to the very birth of modernity, is a reasonable focus deserving of reappraisal and even recovery. On the face of it, to the modern eye, the actual content of the trivium – grammar, logic and rhetoric – appears unexciting in the extreme.  Why on earth would one commit to subjects of that kind when one could be doing ‘relevant’ things like rock music or tourism studies?  Actually there should be no contest:  you will be a better rock musician, or businessman, or doctor, or lawyer, or anything else, if you first prepare yourself as a fulfilled and integrated human being.   The fundamental building blocks of these so-called liberal arts are clear thinking (twinned with efficient and accurate comprehension) and effective communication in speech and writing.  To the modern eye the trivium looks absurdly naïve, but paradoxically its very simplicity and its open-endedness are its strengths:  reading, writing, reasoning and persuasive eloquence constitute the foundation of rock on which everything else can be built.  Do the hard yards first, so that criminology, journalism and marketing (for example) can reasonably follow in their due place.

The gulf between Arts and Sciences, widening to breaking point within the past century and a half, has been another tragedy of modern education.  That divorce, now almost absolute, has in my view greatly contributed to the crazy proliferation of arts courses, on the one hand, and narrowing of the scientific imagination on the other.  Darwin would not have understood it, nor would Galileo or Newton, Mendel or Einstein.

In an ideal educational world one would hope for a rapprochement between what we now describe as the artsand the sciences.  It is fair to say that people in the artsstream very often, as I have already argued, have a far too narrow experience of their cultural matrix as well as an ignorance of the sciences;  but it is equally true to say that premature specialization in scientific and technical studies results in profound ignorance of the arts, especially history. If there were to be a rapprochement, what Arts courses ought a young student look for? They will need guidance. Adults, whether parents or counsellors, who have the privilege of having their advice accepted should prioritize breadth of vision: will their choice of subjects lead them to seek connections between different cultures and customs?  Will it assert the objective reality of truth and the distinction between good and evil?  Will it help them to value the things of today in the context of history and tradition?

Some educators, at least, recognize that early specialization produces high achievers in specific areas who are less than competent outside their fields, even profoundly ignorant of whole areas of human knowledge that were once considered essential to human civility.  How can a young man or woman be reasonably expected to make a life-long commitment to a career at 17 or 18, whose mind has never been properly exposed to the richness of human thought, in a world in which, as futurologists like to predict, many will need to re-train several times in the course of their lives?  Surely we are asking too much (or too little) of the young people who are both the inheritors and shapers of the future?  As a former president of a liberal arts college whose goal is to educate for life and not just for a job, I couldn’t agree more.

In my admittedly fond view, Campion College addresses this problem well.  All students take the same core subjects – History, Literature, Philosophy and Theology, all of which are integrated horizontally and vertically: in their first year students will study ancient authors such as Homer and Virgil, New Testament and patristic theology and ancient history, Plato and Aristotle. In their second and third years they move on chronologically, acquiring in three years a broad and expansive understanding of the flux of human thought and activity, a grasp of those basic and powerful ideas that have formed our actions, and a sense of the mutability and at the same time the universality of human life.

An alternative to the Campion approach is the notion of a literary ‘canon’ of Great Books that all should read[10].  Yet in a western culture that appears to be in terminal decline there can be no easy agreement on its content.  To say so is not to be overly pessimistic, but merely observant:  the time has long passed when we lived in a monoculture that agreed on the essential components of a sound education.  Such a notion stems from a Judaeo-Christian matrix, in which the Bible and some of the classics of Christian literature hold unquestioned place.  Some American institutions have adopted the Great Books as the basis of their undergraduate syllabus[11].  Even among like-minded colleges, though, there may be variance between the lists, and the notion of such a ‘canon’ holds much less appeal for that growing sector of modern intellectual life whose members think sceptics such as Lucretius and Dawkins more deserving of a place in the literary hall of fame than an Augustine or a Chesterton.  Quot homines, tot sententiae: in the post-Christian global village the notions of what constitutes the corpus of great books will be legion.  An almost inevitable weakness of modern attempts at framing a canon is that they are often heavily weighted towards modern authors and do not adequately reflect the diachronic and evolutionary character of human culture.  They are in a sense two-dimensional:  they expose the culture on top, but may tend to ignore the process by which it grew.

A solution may be to look at the manuscript tradition, to identify the books that shaped the western mind.  Even sceptics would concede a place for the Bible, if only as a literary work, in the canon of western culture.  There, and perhaps only there, is there some agreement.  In secular letters, Homer and Virgil are strong candidates.[12]  And if Virgil earns inclusion, so must Dante and Milton, both heavily dependent on him.  This is just one example, of course, but that same process can be used to trace other affinities and connections.  I suspect that with the passage of time many of the works now being considered fit for inclusion in the canon will drop out of sight, and that if we are ever to have something approaching an agreed canon it will be a little more elongated in time, a little less mushroom-like in appearance, than any current model.

The universities will not change unless the market does.  Only greater discernment among its ‘customers’ can drive change, but how can the community change its attitudes when its leaders and role models are leading it in another direction?  Perhaps Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson is right in asserting that the humanities should be taken out of the hands of the universities altogether.[13]  He makes a powerful argument, but it would be sad indeed if such were to happen.

I am aware, however, that much of what I have said above might be construed as the mere maunderings of a grumpy pessimist nostalgically longing for a past that probably never was and certainly never will return.  I plead in extenuation that the solution to a problem arises naturally from its recognition:  if we know that most Arts students are wasting their time on quasi-academic fripperies, and that many people are getting into the sciences and professions with poor communication and reasoning skills; if we hear journalists and public figures talking nonsense about our own nation’s history, whether through guile or ignorance; if signs such as these are there for all to see then we know we have a problem to which broader and truer education is the only real solution.  But if the blind lead the blind, what hope is there for betterment?

I began this chapter with some profoundly pessimistic verses of the poet Yeats, but in fact I am an optimist.  There is a discernible groundswell of opinion in favour of doing things better.  It will not easily prevail, and there is no denying that we are close to the brink of a catastrophic collapse of the Western culture, but I think there is a good chance that we will squeak through.  As a lecturer with the University of the Third Age I know well that many older people are conscious of important gaps in their education.  But more importantly my work with students over the years has brought me into contact with students who feel acutely that they have wasted or are wasting their time and their potential in studies that contribute little to their career prospects, or to their enjoyment.  There are also those, it is true, who have been so stifled that they have lost all interest in matters of the mind.  And, grimmest of all, there are those driven by other agendas entirely who approve the radicalization of education and would welcome the collapse of existing institutions and a refashioning of human society along entirely different lines.  The battle lines have been drawn up but we can find strong allies in all those who now realise that they have been short-changed by the educational establishment.  If we can fight our way back to a re-ordering of priorities, to a positive re-evaluation of the essential disciplines of reading, writing and reasoning, then the Great Books of human culture will self-select and we shall re-align ourselves to give due acknowledgement to ‘the best that has been thought and said’.

[1]Excerpt from W B Yeats, The Second Coming.

[2]Examples are Gilbert, Bishop of London 1128-34, called ‘Universalis’ because he was thought to have read everything, and his contemporary William of Malmesbury who had a reputation as the most learned man of his day.

[3]There is, I think, a discernible tendency in modern scholarship to despise memory.  Lawyers seem to hold little law in their heads, though they doubtless know where to find it; historians often despise populist writers who are prodigiously well informed as to detail, but lack (it is claimed) analytical capacity.  Ancient writers of porphyrian or acrostic verses, more difficult to compose than the most cryptic crossword puzzles, are dismissed as mere poetasters.  Perhaps Medicine is the only modern discipline that requires its practitioners to hold in their memories at any one time a substantial amount of their subject.  Many an emergency room patient must be thankful for that!

[4]I once knew a woman who was accepted as a PhD candidate in Middle Eastern studies by a distinguished Australian university.  Her supervisor told her that it was ‘not necessary’ to learn Arabic.

[5]General Napier was said to have announced his 1843 capture of Sindh  – ‘I have Sindh’ – with the single word peccavi(‘I have sinned’).  In fact the story is apocryphal, but the fact that it first appeared in Punch illustrates exactly the same point about the wide public familiarity with Latin.

[6]This is very possibly apocryphal too, or if genuine was certainly intended ironically, but generations of classics students have delighted in it.

[7]quasi nanos gigantium humeris insidentes: a remark ascribed by William of Malmesbury to Bernard of Chartres.

[8]Plato, Republic, 563a

[9]St Thomas Aquinas, from chap. 3, ‘The Aristotelian Revolution’, Kindle edition.

[10]For a succinct survey see Mortimer Adler (Editor-in-Chief), The Great Conversation: a Reader’s Guide to the Great Books of the Western World,University of Chicago/Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1992.

[11]For example Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula, California.

[12]B. Munk Olsen, Catalogue des Manuscrits Classiques Latin copiés du IXe. au XIIe. Siècle(CNRS Paris 1985) lists nine manuscripts from the eighth century or earlier, and two dozen from the ninth, exponentially more in each succeeding century, that contain all or substantial portions of Virgil’s works.

[13]See him interviewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-77NpxbE7k&feature=youtu.befor a forthright statement of his opinions.

David Daintree

 

2 July 2019

DAWSON COLLOQUIUM RESONATES WITH RETURN ATTENDEES

By Naomi Leach

Talks at the recent Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies Colloquium resonated with attendees who say the ‘wonderful’ speakers are the reason they continue to attend each year.

Held at Jane Franklin Hall on June 29, this year’s colloquium attracted speakers and attendees from Tasmania, interstate and overseas.

The theme – ‘Rebuilding the walls of Sion’ – was enthusiastically taken up by the speakers who spoke on topics from Gnosticism in the 21st century to the film Babette’s Feast.

Liberal Senator Jonathan Duniam gave the address at the Colloquium’s closing dinner.

Peter Cunich’s presentation on the role of intercessory prayer in the construction and maintenance of Christian communities resonated broadly with those who attended.  For Mavis Beattie, 88, of New Norfolk, who attended the colloquium for the fifth year in a row, the talk brought up the issue of honouring those who have passed away.

Attending for the third year in a row, Mrs Jenny Spinks, 65, of Sydney, says she always leaves with things to contemplate.  ‘I’d just encourage people to come down and enjoy the colloquium because they’re all such wonderful speakers. And it’s lovely to listen to other people, and we can all get something out of it.’

For Mrs Beattie, the colloquium is an opportunity to share challenges and gain strength.  ‘I think it’s nice to know that we can come together on an occasion like this and share our thoughts about the problems that we face as a faith community. And we gain strength I think from hearing other people’s points of view.’

Dr David Daintree, Director of the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies, says that Christian civilization is under threat and that its value is denied or ignored by most in the community.

‘All our colloquia have been aimed at the idea of trying to regain lost ground, trying to preserve what’s valuable and trying to tell other people about it, to enrich their lives,’ he said.

Christopher Dawson Centre

Summer School In Latin, Rome

7-20 July 2019

An intensive Latin Language course for beginners and a richly variegated reading party for the more advanced, but with free interchange between the two streams.  The goal is to examine two millennia of Roman and Italian culture – art as well as literature – through the medium of the Latin Language which is common to the whole tradition.  We shall reads pieces by the major writers of the Classical Canon and by their successors in Medieval and Renaissance times.  Genres will include Epic Poetry, Oratory, Philosophy and History.

WHY LATIN?

Latin is arguably the mother-tongue of Europe. Its literature is immensely rich: original work continued to be written in the Latin language up to modern times.  Some knowledge of Latin is essential to the full appreciation of English literature written up to at the least the beginning of the twentieth century, because Latin was part of the intellectual equipment of most authors until that time.  Students of history, philosophy and modern languages also recognize the value of increased familiarity with primary sources.  Latin is a doorway that can lead you to wonderful delights.

WHY ROME?

The City of Rome itself is our living textbook.  Its art, its inscriptions, its very stones tell the central story of Western Civilisation.  What better place to learn Latin than in its heartland?  Excursions to sites of particular interest in Rome and surrounding areas form a part of the programme.  We shall learn to interpret inscriptions that tell us so much yet escape the notice of ordinary visitors. Roman and Italian culture and language are a continuum: the course will illuminate the linkage between the two.

THE PROGRAMME

This two-week programme will guide participants through selected literature from the earliest times to the present, including the emergence of the Italian vernacular.  For at least the first week (according to demand) there will be parallel streams for beginners on the one hand, and experienced readers on the other. Movement between streams is possible at any stage.  The key to the experience is immersion – for two weeks, we will all be living and breathing Latin texts and the Latin language in the very heart of Roman civilisation, encountering (and engaging with) the material traces of that past in the fabric of the buildings and monuments that surround us.

There will be a strong emphasis on later Latin, because the vast amount of surviving material from the centuries between the close of Classical period and the modern age has been most neglected.  But no Latin course can ignore Cicero and Virgil.  Other areas for special attention will be: the Roman Novel (The Golden Assor Metamorphosesof Apuleius); Patristics (Augustine, Ambrose); philosophical and theological writing from Boethius to Aquinas; secular poetry and religious poetry including specimens of the great tradition of Latin hymnody (Ambrose, Venantius, sequences); narrative and history (Einhard, the Legenda Aurea); texts representing the continuation of the classical tradition.  Other material can be included on request.

There are no formal prerequisites for the reading party: participants from a diversity of backgrounds have contributed wonderfully to the success of these schools in the past; already proficient readers of Latin have derived benefit and pleasure from reading material from outside the standard curricula. Copies of primary texts will be provided as part of the enrolment package.  James Morwood’s Latin Grammar(Oxford University Press, 1999) offers a concise guide to the essentials of morphology and syntax and is recommended for purchase, though some students may prefer the fuller treatments given in Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer, ed. Sir James Mountford (Longmans, 1962).

THE LECTURERS

Dr Robert H. F. Carver, BA (Hons)(ANU), DPhil (Oxon)

Robert Carver is Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Durham, UK. Prior to this, he was a Junior Research Fellow in Classics and English at Trinity College, Oxford, and Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Oriel College. He has published widely on the reception of Classical literature (particularly, prose fiction) in the middle ages and early modern period. His publications include The Protean Ass: The ‘Metamorphoses’ of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance(Oxford University Press, 2007), translations from medieval Latin, Hildegard of Bingen: An Anthology(1990), and the chapter on ‘English Fiction and the Ancient Novel’ in the first volume of the Oxford History of the Novel in English, ed. Thomas Keymer (2017).

Dr David Daintree AM, BA (Hons)(UNE), MLitt (Cantab), PhD (UTas)

David Daintree (http://daviddaintree.blogspot.com.au) has taught intensive summer schools in Latin for a quarter of a century.  His courses have been offered in Hobart, Sydney, Perth New Zealand and Rome.  He was Senior Classics Master (St Peter’s College Adelaide), Principal of Jane Franklin Hall (Uni of Tasmania), Rector of St John’s College (Uni of Sydney) and President of Campion College Australia.  He is currently Director of the Christopher Dawson Centre, Hobart

THE COST

The total base cost of the two-week programme is 1480 Euros per person twin-share, comprising 780 Euros for bed and breakfast (13 nights, in 7 July out 20 July), and 700 Euros for tuition, written materials and local tours on foot or using public transport.  Single accommodation is also available at extra cost on request.  The fee excludes lunches and dinners, airfares and airport transfers – participants should make their own arrangements to arrive at the residence on 7 July.  Optional extras, including an overnight visit to Naples (with Pompeii), will also be available on request.  The cost has been kept down to break-even level.  If there is a surplus proceeds will go towards the work of the Dawson Centre.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION AND ENROLMENTS

Please contact Dr Daintree directly – dccdain@gmail.com

TESTIMONIALS FROM FORMER STUDENTS

‘Dr Daintree is widely read, and is able to relate the Latin text under discussion to the wider historical, philosophical and cultural currents of the time, and of our own day. His love of his subject shines through, and you can see through his eyes why what has been thought and written in the Latin language is so important for our own times.’  (John O’Halloran, Lawyer, Sydney)

‘Reading Latin with a small group of passionate fellows under the guidance of David Daintree was a delightful experience that provided me with lasting method and deepened my understanding of medieval texts.’  (Dr Pippa Salonius, Academic, New Zealand)

‘His teaching method was an intensive blend of classical and medieval Latin suitable for students at any level.’  (Dr Veronica O’Connell, General Practitioner, Sydney)

‘David Daintree’s Latin Summer Schools provide an ideal mix of Latin, history, culture, and conviviality.’ (Michael Gray, Lawyer, Sydney)

REGISTRATION FORM

Please complete and submit this form and pay the initial non-refundable deposit as soon as possible. Please read all information on the

form carefully as it outlines your contractual obligations. Your personal

information contained in this form will be treated with security and privacy.

PARTICIPANT DETAILS

Title (Dr, Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms):

Full Name as on Passport:

Date of Birth:

Address:

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I would like to enrol in the Latin Summer School in Rome, 7-20 July 2019

☐  I wish to do the Beginner’s Stream.

☐  I wish to do the Advanced Stream

Note that this decision is not binding; you may move freely between streams to suit your interests and your progress

IMPORTANT DATES

*    31 January 2019

Submit your Enrolment form and pay first instalment of the Tuition Fee.

*    7 July 2019

Recommended arrival date

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Cost of Tuition 700 Euros

+

Accommodation 13 nights (please select):

☐ Single – 1235 Euros (95 Euros per night)

☐ Shared (double) – 780 Euros (60 Euros per night)

(Optional) preferred room mate____________________________

Note that the Bernardi campus has a limited number of single rooms, and that if you choose the single option you might be allocated to a double room – for your sole occupancy.  A room with private facilities cannot be guaranteed.

Participants should check-in between 12 pm and 5 pm on 7 July 2019.  Participants must comply with the University of St Thomas rules for the Bernardi Campus. Note that alcohol and tobacco products are not permitted on campus.

Requests to arrive before 7 July and/or to remain after 20 July should be addressed to the Dawson Centre but must be confirmed by the Bernardi Campus manager and, if accepted, will be charged additionally pro rata.

MEDICAL CONDITIONS

The excursions entail some long walks in the middle of a hot Roman summer!  Nothing is compulsory, of course, but participants on the excursions must be fit to walk and endure heat.  Suitable clothing is essential.

Please advise any medical condition, disability or mobility difficulty that may affect the functioning of the group:

☐ No pre-existing conditions

☐ Yes (please list all conditions)

TRAVEL (PASSPORT, TRAVEL INSURANCE)

All participants must have valid passports (at least 12 months validity at the date of entry into Italy) to travel to Italy.

Passport Number:

Country of Issue:

Date of expiry:

All participants are advised to have proper travel insurance for the full duration of the programme.

☐ I understand that it is my responsibility to book my flights and have a proper travel insurance policy.

EMERGENCY CONTACT(S):

Name:

Address:

Telephone contact number(s):

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FEES AND PAYMENTS

The full cost of the Latin School is:

Tuition 700 Euros

+

Accommodation (room plus continental breakfast daily)

Single 1235 Euros

Shared 780 Euros

Please select method of payment you prefer to pay tuition fees

☐ I will pay the full fee in advance

☐ I will pay the deposit of A$500.00 now and the balance at least one month prior to the beginning of the course.

CONVERSION RATES

All fees must be paid in Australian dollars (A$).  The following conversion rates are locked in as at 15 December 2018 and will remain in force from this date:

Full course shared accommodation 1480 Euros – A$2350.00

Full course single accommodation 1935 Euros – A$3050.00

This price includes accommodation in Rome, local excursions on foot as listed in the School programme (incl. admission fees where appropriate), cost of teaching facilities, course material, breakfasts.

The price does notinclude airfares, travel insurance, local transport and daily meals (except breakfast).  All participants are required to make their travel arrangements to the campus and to organise their own catering.

1. The first instalment of A$500 is not refundablefor change of mind.

CANCELLATION AND REFUNDS

In the event you cancel your participation, you will be charged:

Cancellation prior to 7 May 2019, full refund less the $500 non-refundable deposit.

Cancellation on or after 7 May 2019, no refund.

☐ I have read and fully understand the Terms and Conditions.

☐ I attach/am paying the first instalment of A$500.

Payments can be made in the following ways:

WITHIN AUSTRALIA

1.   Electronic Funds Transfer –

BSB            067-000

A/C            10252831

REF.           YOUR NAME + CDC Rome School Deposit/Full Fee

or

2.   Post a cheque (made out to the Christopher Dawson Centre), to PO Box 68, Colebrook, Tas 7027

OUTSIDE AUSTRALIA

Bank name: Commonwealth Bank of Australia

BIC/SWIFT Code: CTBAAU2S

BSB number:  067-000

Account number:  10252831

Address

IBANs are not used in Australia. However, payers in certain countries may require you to provide one. In that case, your BSB and account number should be combined. Do not include any spaces or hyphens:

06700010252831

IF PAYING ELECTRONICALLY PLEASE ALSO CONFIRM YOUR PAYMENT BY EMAIL

Name of Participant:

Signature of Participant:

Date:

Please scan and return completed form (plus payment) to director@dawsoncentre.orgor post hard copy to PO Box 68, Colebrook, Tasmania, Australia.

All enquiries regarding the Rome Latin School to be directed to the same address.

PAST EVENTS 

Education on gender and sexuality, the role of government and parental rights

The Hon Kevin Andrews MP

An address to the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies, Town Hall Conference Centre, Hobart, June 5, 2018

 

In December 1948, the international community gathered at the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Confronted by the horrors of the Second World War and egregious breaches of human rights in many places, world leaders sought to enshrine standards of conduct that respected the inherent dignity and liberty of each human being.

 

Led by the redoubtable Eleanor Roosevelt, the Human Rights Committee of the new organisation had worked for nearly two years to draft the Declaration. Australia was a significant supporter of the creation of the United Nations, and also the Universal Declaration.

 

Central to the Declaration is the bold assertion that “human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want. . . (which) should be protected by the rule of law.”

 

Article 18 of the Declaration states that “Everybody has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in a community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

 

As the Harvard professor of law, Mary Ann Glendon, points out in her masterful account of the creation of the Declaration, A World Made New, Article 18 was a major achievement of the Human Rights Committee. Along with Eleanor Roosevelt, it was the work of other remarkable contributors, including Rene Cassin and Charles Malik.

 

Two decades later, the international community concluded a long process to transform the Declaration into an international legal instrument. Hence, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was drafted and adopted. Amongst the supporters again was Australia.

 

The Covenant expands Article 18 of the Declaration with three additional provisions.

 

First, “No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.”

 

Secondly, “Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.”

 

Thirdly the nations that are signatories to the Covenant “undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.”

 

Australia is a signatory to the Covenant, but it has not been incorporated into our domestic law.

Parental rights

My starting point is the Covenant, because it clearly establishes parental rights under International Human Rights law. As the High Commissioner for Human Rights has indicated, in relation to Article 24, responsibility for children is primarily that of the family, particularly parents, of which the State has a duty to assist in discharging their responsibilities.

The primacy of parents is further reinforced in the later 1989 Convention of the Rights of the Child. In particular, Article 14 provides:

1. States [Parties] shall respect the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

2. States [Parties] shall respect the rights and duties of the parents and, when applicable, legal guardians, to provide direction to the child in the exercise of his or her right in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child.

Moreover, Article 18 states, in part, that parents . . . have the primary responsibility for the upbringing and development of the child.

This is situated in the context of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which asserts:

1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Hence, there is international consensus that human rights should be upheld, and that critical amongst these rights are the primacy of the family and the priority of parental rights. Moreover, it is the duty of government to reinforce these rights.

Yet today, there is a concerted campaign to undermine these rights and responsibilities, especially by proponents of cultural Marxism in various academic institutions. While the so-called ‘Safe Schools Program’ is the most recent example of this assault on the family and parental rights, it is not the only one. It is however an illustration of the cultural forces aligned against families and parents.

It is no accident that the founder of the program, Roz Ward, is an avowed Marxist.

Marxism

The origins of the modern assault on the family can be found in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Following Marx’s death in 1993, Engels edited and translated his writings. His work, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State argued that monogamous marriage guaranteed male social dominion over women, analogous, in communist theory, to the owners of capital over the workers.

Engels argued that the monogamous family:

Is founded on male supremacy for the pronounced purpose of breeding children of indisputable paternal lineage. The latter is required, because these children shall later on inherit the fortune of their father. The monogamous family is distinguished from the pairing family by the far greater durability of wedlock, which can no longer be dissolved at the pleasure of either party. As a rule, it is only the man who can still dissolve it and cast off his wife.

Engels naively believed that if men needed only to be concerned with sex-love and no longer with property and inheritance, then monogamy would come naturally.

This theory was adopted as practice by the Leninists, as Geoffrey Hosking outlines in A History of the Soviet Union:

In the 1920s the regime tried to weaken the family as a ‘bourgeois institution’ [by passing new laws according to which] any stable cohabitation … could be considered a family … Abortion was available on demand [and] a partner to a marriage could obtain a divorce simply by requesting it.

The consequences were devastating. The country experienced a significant increase in divorce, bigamy, abortion and juvenile delinquency. Women and children were the victims of a legal regime that allowed the (mostly) males to dissolve their bonds with the mother and child. Faced with the growing social chaos, the Stalinist authorities restricted access to divorce in 1944. A divorce could only be granted by a court, and reconciliation was to be encouraged. The legal recognition of de facto relationships was abolished.

Soviet propaganda changed markedly:

The state cannot exist without the family. Marriage has a positive value … So-called ‘free love’ is a bourgeois invention … Moreover, marriage receives its full value for the state only if there is progeny, and the consorts experience the highest happiness of parenthood.

Despite the disastrous social consequences and the reversal of the policy by the Soviet authorities, the Marxist dream found new expression in the deconstruction of the postmodernists.

Deconstructing the family

One of the cultural influences most destructive of marriage and family has been the social philosophy of postmodernism and deconstructionism associated with the French critics Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Although this is not an essay on their works, some reference is necessary to demonstrate that the destruction of marriage and the family is not merely a consequence of their radical social philosophy; it is at its heart.

 

According to Professor Foucault, there is no objective truth upon which to base social structures, such as marriage and family. Rejecting reason, he argued that knowledge is a set of beliefs constructed to justify power relationships:

 

Sexuality (and social structures depending on sexuality like marriage and family) is something we ourselves create – it is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret (unchangeable) side of desire. We have to understand what with our desires, through our desires, go new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality: it is a (formless) possibility for creative life.

 

For Foucault, marriage and family are not fixed concepts. They have no meaning beyond the context in which they exist.

 

Foucault’s student, Jacques Derrida, regarded as the founder of deconstructionism, combined Marxist social analysis and Freudian psychological techniques to ‘deconstruct’ the pillars of western civilisation, including marriage and the family. In Glas, Professor Derrida deconstructs the concept of family by affirming the power of sexuality, while at the same time denying sexual difference is truly essential to human existence. Sexual difference does not belong to the existential structure of fundamental human existence (Dasein), according to the French philosopher:

 

If Dasein as such belongs to neither of the sexes, that does not mean that its being is deprived of sex. On the contrary: here one must think of a predifferential (non-sexually differentiated), or rather a predual (non-male/female), sexuality . . . a matter here of the positive and powerful source of every possible sexuality.

 

While Derrida relied, in part, on “Freud’s theory that civilisations are essentially neurotic and destroy themselves by restricting sex too much,” the British social scientist, Joseph Unwin, later discredited it. Surveying the major civilisations and societies over 5,000 years of history, Unwin reached the opposite conclusion:

 

In human records there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on pre-nuptial and post-nuptial continence.

 

Regardless of their historical legitimacy, the influence of the deconstructionists is evident in writings about modern ‘pure’ relationships. Beginning in the 1960s, some social scientists published negative views about marriage and family. An example well-known to scholars of the family is Edmund Leach’s 1967 Reith Lectures A Runaway World? in which he suggested that “far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.” Indeed, the nuclear family “is the most unusual kind of organisation and I would predict that it is only a transient phase of our society,” said Leach. Children “needed to grow up in larger, more relaxed domestic groups centred on the community rather than in mother’s kitchen, something like an Israeli kibbutz, or a Chinese commune.”

 

Despite the historical evidence that most people in Britain generally lived in nuclear families and births outside marriage were historically low by today’s rates, Leach was not alone in his distaste for marriage and family life. David Cooper and RD Laing saw the intense privacy of the family, with its network of introverted, intense and compulsory relationships as destructive of the individual’s self. Cooper described the nuclear family as “the ultimately perfected form of non-meeting;” and Laing claimed that the “initial act of brutality against the average child is the mother’s first kiss.”

 

Three decades later, the appeal of the Israeli kibbutz and the Chinese commune have somewhat diminished. Evidence has also continued to mount about the benefits for the health and well-being of stable family life. Despite this, Leach’s views continued to be recycled, for example by Anthony Giddens in his 1999 Reith Lectures. Not only are Giddens’ ideas reminiscent of Leach’s tilt against the family, even the title of his lecture series, Runaway World, is familiar.

 

In words similar to Leach, Professor Giddens asserts that “what most of its defenders in western countries call the traditional family was in fact a late transitional phase in family developments in the 1950s.” By defining the traditional family as “both parents living together with their children of the marriage, where the mother is full time housewife, and the father the breadwinner,” Giddens constructs a straw man against which to rail. For most families in the western world, two incomes is the norm.

 

“Romantic love is a modern invention,” writes the professor. “Marriage was never in the past based on intimacy.” This ignores thousands of years of history. From the Book of Songs to Shakespeare and since, authors and poets have written about romantic love and intimacy.

 

Professor Giddens would replace marriage with “coupling” and “uncoupling” – all done in a “democracy of the emotions.” As for children, parents in the past had them only for economic reasons: “One could say that children weren’t recognised as individuals.” In the end, Giddens is inconsistent. On one page, he refers to “coupling” and “uncoupling” and then to marriage “as a ritual commitment which can help stabilise otherwise fragile relationships.” But why bother if serial coupling is the path to individual happiness?

 

Having undermined the family, the deconstructionists and their latter day followers are now enjoined in the rejection of all gender differences. Ryan T Anderson writes: “At the core of the ideology is the radical claim that feelings determine reality. From this idea come extreme demands for society to play along with subjective reality claims.”

Hence the Safe Schools Program which is squarely based on the failed Marxist philosophy. Roz Ward has argued that capitalism has promoted the ‘myth’ that there is a biological basis for gender identification and imposes cultural and moral constraints on sexuality that inhibits sexual freedom. This, she says, facilitates the exploitation of the working class:

To smooth the operation of capitalism the ruling class has benefitted, and continues to benefit, from oppressing our bodies, our relationships, sexuality and gender identities alongside sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

Capitalism, says Ward makes “us keep living, or aspiring to live, or feel like we should live, in small social units and families.” The antidote to this, she claims, is Marxism which:

Offers the hope and the strategy needed to create a world where human sexuality, gender and how we relate to our bodies can blossom in extraordinarily new and amazing ways that we can only try to imagine today.

Hence, under the rubric of anti-bullying, the likes of Ward have sought to indoctrinate students, ignore parental rights, and undermine the family.

Not only are individuals able to determine their own gender from an ever growing list of descriptions, a new intolerance is being employed to silence anyone who differs. Hence laws in Canada and New York for example, seek to punish people who publicly disagree.

 

This Marxist fantasy has wrought social destruction in the past – and will again if we allow it to prosper.

 

FLYING UNDER THE SECTARIAN RADAR – JOE AND ENID LYONS

Anne Henderson

Address to the Christopher Dawson Centre, Hobart, 17 April 2018

A little over a century ago, in St Brigid’s Catholic church at Wynyard in northern Tasmania, on 28 April 1915, Tasmania’s Treasurer, Minister for Railways and Education Joe Lyons, aged 35, married his seventeen year-old sweetheart, the newly graduated teacher Enid Burnell. It was then – and would become – a very special union.

The celebrant at the wedding was Father Tom O’Donnell, a good friend of the groom and the priest who had presided over instruction to the Methodist raised Enid before she converted to become a Catholic a month before her marriage.

The conversion had its own uniqueness. O’Donnell, who did not impress Enid, was called away. Enid’s mother Eliza Burnell believed it was important for a couple to hold the same faith. At the presbytery, she urged her daughter to read the Catholic texts. In the end, it was Methodist Eliza who converted Enid to the Catholic faith.

Less than two months earlier, on the eve of Enid and Eliza’s departure for O’Donnell’s presbytery in Stanley, the Burnell family’s Methodist preacher had pleaded with Enid not to give up the “faith of your father”. Enid also recorded that her grandmother had “disowned” her mother for allowing her to marry a Catholic. And she had had no pre-wedding parties due to the similar disapproval of her Methodist girlfriends.

The union of Joe Lyons and Enid Burnell, its timing, its success and its many contexts, says as much about Australia as the characters of Joe and Enid.

Joe Lyons was Australia’s first prime minister to have a parent born in Australia. He became prime minister in January 1932.

Overwhelmingly, earlier prime ministers had parents who were born in the UK or were born there themselves. This small fact says a lot about the extent to which Australia remained, even after federation, so genetically linked to its mother country the United Kingdom.

But there is another distinction to be made. Joseph Lyons was the son of an Irish born mother and the grandson, on his Australian born father’s side, of immigrant Irish settlers to northern Tasmania. In Australia at the time, Catholic Irish immigrants made up a significant minority – about a quarter – in a Protestant dominated majority. In Tasmania, they made up significantly less at around a fifth.

In Michael Hogan’s comprehensive study of religious sectarianism in Australia – The Sectarian Strand: Religion in Australian History – he makes the following claim of Australian Catholics around 1870:

… within the Catholic community there was a suspicion about the links with England and a conviction that the Australian colonies should be something different – more like American society, perhaps where so many of their relatives and coreligionists were flourishing … Australian independence and nationhood became a rallying call for many Catholics and people with no religious allegiance at all.

Along with Prime Minister Jim Scullin – the son of Catholic Irish immigrants to Australia who assumed office as prime minister in October 1929 – Lyons was to be a trail blazer for Irish descended Catholics at a time of Anglo ascendency in Australia.

Yet, in the case of Lyons, the history books so often overlook this fact. Lyons’ leadership of the United Australia Party gave Australian Catholics their first taste of voting beyond their tribal Labor origins. He also offered a way to be loyal to Britain while supporting a proud Australian nationalism.

As Catholic Labor politicians, both Joe Lyons and Jim Scullin could, in part, thank their Labor Party membership for their achievement at rising to highest office – Lyons as Tasmanian Labor premier in 1923 and Scullin as Labor prime minister in 1929. Before the Labor split of 1916, the fledgling Labor Party was predominantly Protestant. For all that, a handful of Catholics, like T J Ryan in Queensland, Joe Lyons and Jim Scullin, had made their way into the parliamentary party.

The greatest achievement in this trail blazing, however, was Joe Lyons. In December 1931, as leader of the United Australia Party, he led a Protestant Anglo collective to a landslide victory against Labor. For that moment, the sectarianism that so dominated Australian politics, especially since 1916, was swept aside.

Pragmatic politics has defined Australia. While global dogmas have fermented revolution and far left and right regimes elsewhere, Australia has – despite its connections to the old world – maintained something of a survivor’s common sense.

While there have always been many groups who justifiably protest discrimination, the Australian mainstream has tended to vote for pragmatism over ideology more often than not. Maybe it is the rugged nature of Australia’s continental experience; maybe it is just a laid back, working person’s sense of getting reasonable outcomes.

The decades in which Joe and Enid Lyons matured and came to public life were decades where – through education – hard working settlers like the Burnell and Lyons families bridged the gap between penny pinching survival and modest middle class comfort.

Joe Lyons, whose father lost the family business in Ulverstone after betting his life savings on the 1887 Melbourne Cup, had been sent to work as a printer’s devil at age 10. He was saved only by his spinster aunts who eventually sent him back to school where he rose to become a monitor teacher and later a graduate of Hobart’s newly opened teachers college. For the Burnells, it was only Eliza Burnell’s scrupulous saving over years that enabled Enid Burnell and her sister Nellie to also attend teachers college in Hobart.

In the early 1900s, Catholic Joe Lyons and Methodist Eliza Burnell (Enid’s mother), for all their differences of faith and the sectarian divisions of the time, found themselves colleagues in the Tasmanian labour movement of northern Tasmania. For those committed to the cause of struggling working families, politics overrode faith or church alignments. It was this connection that in time introduced Joe Lyons to Enid Burnell.

Underpinning much of the antagonism between Catholics and Protestants was the backdrop of the British occupation of Ireland. And yet, while Joe’s Irish born mother and her sisters in Stanley were central to his upbringing after his father’s demise, in Lyons’ speeches and brief recollections of growing up, what shines forth is his concern for the people and the country that made him.

Lyons was stirred by the injustices of low wages for hard toil, the untrammelled power of Tasmania’s Legislative Council and the denial of education and medical benefits for those who could not afford to pay. In his early years as an MP, Lyons supported the Closer Settlement program where the government bought up older estates to divide into smaller allotments for new settlers.

And, in Enid, Joe Lyons had found the perfect partner. In time, with her growing brood of children, alongside her devotion to Joe and her mother’s Labor Party, and her instinctive understanding for mothers and children, Enid would somehow become more Catholic in character than her husband. All the while, able to charm an audience of mixed faith backgrounds from a podium.

On 25 March 1916, Labor lost the Tasmanian state election. Joe and Enid began building a house in Devonport while Enid expected the birth of their first child. A month later, at Easter in Dublin, a rebel Irish “Brotherhood” of some 1200-1600 strong began an uprising that held off British forces for over a week.

By the end of that week, British forces numbered some 19,000 in Dublin. In the years that followed, Britain would station some 50,000 troops in Ireland, depleting its forces in the war against Germany.

Irish militants had signed up with Britain’s number one enemy, Germany, while British troops were being slaughtered by the German army in France. Even worse, some 80,000 Irishmen would be part of the Great War’s UK forces and many of them were among the dead – 3500 Irish would die at the Somme in 1916, 1200 from the south.

That the leaders of the Rising faced execution within days of their surrender was not surprising – they were facing British firing squads just as British deserters did. But, while there had been little support in Ireland for the Rising in Dublin, the summary executions of the rebel leaders changed emotions. By 11 May, Irish Nationalist MPs in London were demanding answers from Prime Minister H H Asquith and challenging the government’s handling of the aftermath.

In far off Australia, the shock waves of the Easter Rising were muted by Australia’s distance and involvement in the war effort. As one, government, churches and public opinion condemned the Irish rebels as traitors and troublemakers.

Those who supported John Redmond’s Nationalists, within the Australian Catholic communities, lamented the work of the rebels for ruining what was a peaceful means to Home Rule being forged by the government at Westminster. But with the Rising – however much Australian Catholics of Irish descent would protest their loyalty to Empire – many non-Catholics would now mark out the Irish Australian Catholic minority as being on the side of traitors.

On Monday 1 May 1916, Australia’s Governor General, Ronald Munro-Ferguson spoke for all in a cable to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. The cable expressed deep regret from Australia “at the rebellious outbreak in Dublin”. He added that he was confident “the great bulk of Irish people disavow and deplore the proceedings”. He assured the Secretary of State that “Representative Irishmen here, as well as Roman Catholic bishops, all Irish born, denounce and repudiate the criminality of the Dublin fanatics”.

After the Dublin executions, Melbourne’s Catholic Advocate published a lengthy piece on the Sinn Fein actions, arguing that part of the problem was Britain’s inability to properly govern Ireland. Britain should never have allowed Edward Carson to raise an Ulster Volunteer army. The article, however, supported the crushing of the rebellion.

As Patrick O’Farrell has written and demonstrated in The Irish in Australia (p 253), “the big Irish questions in Australia were the ones that raised Australian questions”.

In 1916, Australia had been nation for barely a decade and a half. And, a struggle had begun, pushed by the Catholic Federation, around the lack of government aid to Catholic schools – aid which had been removed under the colonial education acts of the late nineteenth century. Archbishop Daniel Mannix in Melbourne would in time be in favour of the Federation forming its own Catholic party.

Nonetheless, Irish Catholic Australians proved loyal to the British Empire, and had enlisted as heroically as any when war broke out in 1914.

But the war would – as it had in Ireland – bring a bitter divide between Irish Catholic and Anglo Protestant. In Australia, the aftermath of the Easter Rising engendered sympathy for the executed rebels and soon translated into a Catholic–Protestant divide over the Hughes Labor government’s desire to raise greater numbers of troops to support the war effort by means of conscription.

As the conscription debates took hold of the nation, increasingly those opposing conscription were labelled as disloyal to Britain and the Empire. The Labor Party divided bitterly into pro and anti conscription forces.

Catholic Labor members opposing conscription were not helped by the prominence in the 1917 anti conscription campaign of Dr Daniel Mannix, Melbourne’s Irish and newly installed Catholic Archbishop. As a result, hysteria over Australian German residents soon became anti Catholic sectarianism – the accusation in both cases was disloyalty to Britain and the King.

Joe Lyons and Jim Scullin would be caught up in the ensuing struggle. Their experiences chart much of the fallout of the Easter Rising for Australians.

Unlike tribal leader Dr Daniel Mannix, fresh from Dublin and undeterred by Australian sectarian bitterness, Joseph Lyons and Jim Scullin were part of a political party that shunned accusations of partiality to sectional interests. Members of the Catholic Federation were debarred from joining the Labor Party.

In Hobart, The Mercury was known for its sectarian, anti-Catholic sentiments and, even before the conscription debates, had pushed the views of prohibitionists against “disloyal” Irish Catholics as the debate over closing hours for pubs heated up in 1915. The King after all had pledged to abstain from alcohol and, as many loyalists saw it, Catholics maintained true loyalty only to the Pope in Rome.

In 1916, Tasmania became a hot bed of sectarian politics ending with a splintered Labor Party. Families and party were torn apart over conscription during the plebiscite campaign in September and October 1916. The year ended with the removal of Tasmanian Labor leader John Earle, who had supported Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes, and the election of anti-conscriptionist Joe Lyons as new Tasmanian Labor leader.

Lyons had had pacifist leanings all his life but his opposition to conscription was not opposition to the war, its cause or to Britain. He held none of the anti-British sentiments to be found in the arguments of Daniel Mannix. Increasingly, Mannix would intensify his opposition to the war and British forces in Ireland.

Lyons’ argument, as put to the parliament in early September 1916, was that he accepted Australia needed to send more men to the front but that Australia “had reached the limit so far as recruiting was concerned”. He also refused “to get up and tell men they ought to enlist”.

Lyons spoke for a majority in the Labor Party at the time but faced many rowdy meetings and at one point was almost thrown off a bridge at Deloraine during the conscription campaigns.

Lyons would lead the Labor Party from late 1916 and through the post-war years, amid a nadir of sectarian politics for Labor. Lyons fought off ongoing sectarian slurs from The Mercury. In August 1918, The Mercury reported that the Chief Justice of Tasmania, in a speech, had rejected views of the war being put about by “the men fresh from the Irish College in Rome”. By September, Lyons felt strongly enough to move an adjournment in the House to discuss what he called “objectionable literature” being circulated by the Loyalty League.

At the 1919 Tasmanian state election, Lyons not only had to fight off sectarian attacks but also growing pressure on Labor to accept the demands of the Catholic Federation for state aid. The result of this battle on two fronts was the loss of a Labor seat in the 30 seat member Legislative Council.

But Lyons succeeded in leading Labor through the sectarian years largely from his pragmatic approach. By October 1923, when the Lee government lost a vote in the House and Labor fell in to government making Lyons Premier he had long recognised that his responsibility was not just to lead Labor but to offer a style of management that would lead a state.

Even as vice-president of the United Irish League in 1916, Lyons worked to keep his religion out of his politics. His arguments in support of Home Rule for Ireland were always that this was a political stand not a religious one.

This did not endear Lyons to tribal Catholic leaders like Daniel Mannix. For Lyons, the outspoken and divisive Mannix rallied the hopes of his Catholic adherents but also provoked an unhelpful sectarian backlash. Catholic working class men found themselves discriminated against for jobs and employment.

In Victoria, Jim Scullin faced a similar complex political dilemma. Both Lyons and Scullin argued the anti-conscription case in states that voted “Yes” in 1916. In 1917, Victoria swung to “No”. Both Lyons and Scullin supported Labor’s opposition to state aid for Catholic schools. They saw the actions of Catholic pressure groups as adversely affecting Labor’s appeal, especially after the Labor split following the 1916 plebiscite when Labor saw an exodus of non-Catholic members who went with Hughes.

With the Easter Rising, Scullin showed no indication that he supported the rebels. But he did change his perspectives as reports of the Black and Tan attacks on Irish towns and citizens began to shock in post war years. He joined protesters when the British government prevented Daniel Mannix from landing in Ireland in 1920. And he gave publicity to Sinn Fein writings as editor of the Ballarat Evening Echo.

Chief among both Lyons’ and Scullin’s arguments about Ireland was that the divide was a nationalist one of freedom from British rule – it was not a case of Catholic against Protestant. But the civil war that broke out over the Treaty, in 1922, would confound Australian supporters of Ireland. Like Irish Australians in general, Lyons and Scullin lost interest in the Irish question after 1922.

From October 1929 to March 1930, Joe Lyons represented the federal seat of Wilmot as a Labor MP. Switching to federal politics at the 1929 election, Lyons had become part of the Scullin Government – a Labor government after thirteen years in opposition.

The Scullin Government was immediately rocked by the Wall Street crash and the credit squeeze and depression that followed. Lyons found himself Acting Treasurer in August 1930 and facing uproar in caucus over monetary policy.

British creditors could no longer be relied on and in late 1930, Lyons found himself working with Victorian Nationalist Robert Menzies and Melbourne stockbroker Staniforth Ricketson in a campaign to raise more than £28 million from ordinary Australians to finance a loan conversion. The loan was in the end oversubscribed.

This unauthodox cross party strategy saved the loan and marked Lyons out as a politician who could reach across party lines in a time of crisis. The Labor Party caucus, however, was on a self-destructive track, besieged by followers of NSW Jack Lang’s populist belief in reckless spending and torn by ideological warfare at a time of financial disaster.

The upshot was that Joe Lyons and a handful of Labor colleagues decided to split with Labor over Ted Theodore’s fudiciary note legislation. On 13 March 1930, Joe Lyons made his last speech as a Labor man.

In the months that followed, Lyons and his small band of Labor splinter colleagues would link up with the Nationalists to form a new party known as the United Australia Party. Lyons was actually elected to lead that party in a Nationalists’ party room meeting at which he was not entitled to be present. It was a most unusual political arrangement.

Of the 17 men who made up Joe Lyons’ first ministry in January 1932, just one was a Catholic and he was the prime minister. Catholics might have made up around a quarter of the Australian population but the United Australia Party MPs were a conglomerate of White Anglo Saxon Protestants who were called Wasps.

For the most part, Catholic Labor had gone with the anti-Hughes Labor group at the Labor split in February 1917. The Nationalist Party thus was formed by uniting Hughes’ break away National Labor MPs and the Anglo-Protestant Liberal Party of the time. That Joe Lyons with his public spirited Catholic wife and their brood of eleven children, one in a basket joining his parents on the 1931 election campaign trail, should be the first minister of such a collective says much about the Lyons couple and the country they led.

But the men of the backrooms who had lured Joe Lyons to their side – Staniforth Ricketson, Keith Murdoch and Robert Menzies in particular – had picked the right man. Lyons took his break with Labor hard but he was as ambitious as any who have over decades won the top job in politics. At first he thought sufficient of his Labor colleagues would join him and he might manage a more Labor dominated re-alignment. But only five Labor MPs joined him.

So it was that old friends and some he knew around Melbourne business circles were able to convince Lyons that he could make a more successful attack on the inflationary monetary policy being pushed by Labor by leading the anti-Labor forces.

And so it was that at the December 1931 election, as Michael Hogan in The Sectarian Strand has written:

Catholics could choose to vote for the Catholic leader of what was left of the traditional ALP – James Scullin. Or they could support Lang-Labor whose Catholic leader was still in the New South Wales parliament. Or they could make the big leap and follow the devout Tasmanian Catholic, Joseph Lyons … Not surprisingly, the total ALP vote fell to an almost catastrophic 27 per cent, compared with the 49 per cent of the first preference vote which had elected Scullin in 1929. Middle class Catholic voters would return to support Labor in strength in the 1940s, but the safety net of Catholic middle-class votes could no longer be relied on. (page 214)

With this sort of movement in the electorate, it was not surprising that the UAP in December 1931 won a landslide victory greater than that of Malcolm Fraser in 1975 in terms of seats won as a percentage of total seats.

It is indicative that, over decades, historians have continued to ignore the impact of the Lyons government. Had Lyons come to office as the Catholic leader of the Labor Party and served three consecutive terms he would have gone into the tribal lexicon as the great Catholic figure who triumphed against the cultural odds. But he left his Labor tribe and was punished.

By bridging the cultural and religious divides, however, the Lyons couple led ordinary Australians through their most troubled economic years. Under Lyons, Australia returned to relative prosperity and faith in good government, back from the brink of financial collapse and the civil unrest that had developed under NSW Premier Jack Lang.

For Joe and Enid Lyons, their Catholic faith was never doubted. But it was a private faith, one that saw Joe dash to Mass at Albury in between changing trains on the way to Melbourne from Canberra or Enid playing the church organ or volunteering around her local Catholic parish. Their children all went to Catholic schools and colleges in spite of Joe Lyons’ resistence to supporting state aid for Catholic schools.

And, such was the respect for the way they handled their faith, after Joe died in April 1939, Richard Casey generously provided the money for the Lyons’ son Kevin to finish his schooling as a boarder at the Jesuits’ Xavier College in Melbourne. As a reflection of those divided times, Casey also admitted that, in doing so, he would have to “put aside residual anti-papist scruples”.

On Tuesday 11 April 1939, as the cortage carrying Joe Lyons’ coffin wound its way from St Mary’s Cathedral to the quay, the streets of Sydney drew crowds to rival the burial of a royal figure. Catholic and non-Catholic mourned Australia’s popular prime minister. One Sydneysider decades later recalled how, at the age of nine, he had watched the destroyer Vendetta, carrying Lyons’ remains to Devonport, as it moved down the coast off Maroubra beach.

If one is to try to capture the ethos that guided Joe and Enid Lyons, I can recommend a read of Enid Lyons’ maiden speech to the House of Representatves on 29 September 1943. As she pointed out in that speech, Enid was the first woman to ever address Australia’s House of Representatives. A widow and Catholic mother of 12.

The speech is a classic piece – weaving the domestic and the public together, gently chiding the male order of public life and setting out clearly the values that underpinned her public life with Joe. Yet she never once mentioned his name and her only reference to God came in her last sentence and that in the most generic of ways. As she put it:

I hope that I shall never forget that everything that takes place in this chamber goes out somewhere to strike a human heart, to influence the life of some fellow being, and I believe this, too, with all my heart: that the duty of every government, whether in this country or any other, is to see that no man, because of the condition of his life, shall ever need lose his vision of the city of God.

So it was that Joe and Enid Lyons flew under the sectarian radar.

Anne Henderson is the author of Enid Lyons – Leading Lady to A Nation (2008) and Joseph Lyons – The People’s Prime Minister (2001).

 

 

LUKE STREHER (CRADIO) REPORTS ON THE 2018 COLLOQUIUM

Colloquium explores world increasingly hostile to Christianity

The fourth annual Dawson Centre Colloquium attracted more than 60 people when it was held in South Hobart last month.

From Friday, June 29 to Saturday, June 30, thirteen national and international presenters explored the theme ‘A World without Christianity’.

Over the two days, presenters spoke on topics such as ‘How Christianity has made Sense of Human Suffering’, ‘History in a Post-Christian World’ and ‘Christianity and the Liberation of Women’.

Speakers included Hobart Presbyterian pastor Campbell Markham, Fr Pius Mary Noonan OSB of Rhyndaston’s Notre Dame Priory and Professor Margaret Somerville of the University of Notre Dame Australia.

On the Friday night, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott addressed the Colloquium dinner and reflected on the decline of Christian knowledge in Australian society.

Mr Abbott said that Christians, including himself, must admit fault in failing to speak up in Australian public life. In giving reasons for this silence, he cited shame at the Church’s scandals in recent decades, a lack of faith in Jesus Christ, worship of “false gods” such as “money, position and fame” and an overemphasis on prudence at the expense of courage.

“All too often on the grounds of prudence we fail to say what needs to be said because if we say it we might lose this position, or if we say it we might be discredited with this audience,” Mr Abbott said.

Attendee Peter Imlach of Lindisfarne said that there had been a participatory feeling at the Colloquium, and noted that the attendees engaged well throughout the two days.

“You could tell that they all wanted to listen, and they positively took part,” Mr Imlach said.

Director of The Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies Dr David Daintree believes the community nature of the Colloquium was a positive aspect of the event.

Referencing the Colloquium’s single-stream schedule, he said that one of the Colloquium’s strengths has been “bringing people who are not necessarily like-minded together and making them listen to each other”.

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THE COLLOQUIUM PROGRAMME

FRIDAY 29 JUNE

1430           Opening

1445           1. Mr Hal Colebatch

Fragile Flame: the uniqueness and vulnerability of Scientific and Technological civilization

1530           2. The Rev Campbell Markham

                  How Christianity has made Sense of Human Suffering

1615           Break

1630           3. Mr Karl Schmude

                  ‘Imagine there’s a heaven’ – The Plight of the Post-Secular

1715           4. Dr Nigel Zimmermann

                  Not Yet Erased: Christianity as an Overlooked Minority

1800           Pre-dinner Drinks – Asten Common Room

1830           Conference Dinner – Dining Hall

                  Welcome: Dr David Daintree

                  Guest Speaker: the Hon Tony Abbott MP

SATURDAY 30 JUNE

0830           5. Mr Erik Peacock

                  The Why and How of Defeating Cultural Marxism

0915           6. Prof Margaret Somerville

Why Are Conservative Values so difficult to present in Mainstream Media?

1000           Break

1015           7. Mr Ben Smith

                  Evangelisation in a world dominated by the Immanent Frame

1100           8. Dr Peter Cunich

                  History in a Post-Christian World

1200           Lunch – Dining Hall

1300           9. Dr Philippa Martyr

                  Clothed with the Sun: Christianity and the Liberation of Women

1345           10. Mr Eric Lockett

                  God in the Twilight

1345           Break

1400           11. Prof Augusto Zimmermann

Building on a Solid Foundation: Christian Foundations of the Rule of Law in the West

1445           12. Dom Pius Noonan

                  Any room for priests, monks and nuns in an atheistic world?

1530           Panel

 

 

ABSTRACTS AND SPEAKERS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Fragile Flame: the uniqueness and vulnerability of Scientific and Technological civilization

Hal Colebatch

Hal GP Colebatch has five degrees including Masters and Doctorate, in Politics, Jurisprudence and Law. He has won the WA Premier’s prize for poetry for The Light River and the Prime Minister’ Prize for History for his book Australia’s Secret War, which has now gone into seven editions and which was chosen as a book of the year by the Spectator Australia. His book Blair’s Britain was also chosen as a Book of the Year by the Spectator UK. . He was awarded the only Australian Centenary Medal for Writing, Law, Poetry and Political Commentary. He has written about 25 books on a wide range of subjects from poetry to biography, science-fiction, general fiction, speleology,  law and literary criticism and innumerable short pieces, including, frequently, in The Spectator Australia and Quadrant. He is married to Alexandra (32 years) and they have two children.

History in a Post-Christian World

Peter Cunich

The ancient Europeans were writing history long before the arrival of Christianity – Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Cicero, Caesar, Sallust and Tacitus being just a few of the major pagan historians working in the Greek and Roman worlds – but the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity after Constantine profoundly changed the way that Europeans thought about the connection between the past and the future. The merging of Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian historical traditions in the later Classical Age, under the influence of Christian writers such as Eusebius, Origen and St Augustine, established a universal providential framework to understand the unfolding history of humanity. This Christian historical tradition held sway throughout the medieval and early modern periods until the secularism of the early twentieth century began to challenge the old determinist notions of historical movement. Many new and secular, and some of them decidedly anti-Christian, ways of interpreting the past have been tried in the last hundred years, but the universalist worldview of the Christian historical tradition still remains attractive to many scholars who reject post-modernist and post-historical models of the modern world. What will happen to the way we interpret the history of humanity as the twenty-first century unfolds? Will attacks on Christianity bring an end to a Christian way of thinking about the past? What will the new history of the post-Christian future look like?

Peter Cunich is an historian of early modern Europe with a research focus on the dissolution of the monasteries and state finance in sixteenth-century England, but he also writes on the history of higher education, nineteenth and twentieth-century missionary activity in East Asia, and the history of the Catholic church in Australia. For the last twenty-five years he has taught the philosophy of history to undergraduate and postgraduate classes at the University of Hong Kong.

 

God in the Twilight

Eric Lockett

As religion fades from prominence, are we headed for John Lennon’s utopian fantasy in which he imagined away all the things that divide us? To the contrary, this paper argues that Australian society is becoming more fragmented. Atheism, environmentalism, populism or a misplaced trust in science, can provide only shallow and conflicting concepts of virtue and cannot fill that ‘God-shaped space’ in our hearts to guide us on how we should live. Without the Christian belief that every person has equal and infinite worth, life becomes a contest between competing interest-groups all seeking to assert newly manufactured ‘rights’. Have Christians been too complacent in assuming that the community will continue to share our values, if not our beliefs; beliefs about which all too many are now ignorant if not downright mistaken? Perhaps we need to be more willing to display, without self-righteousness, the difference which marked out the early Christians within their own communities.

Eric Lockett began his working life as an electrician, then became a forest scientist and spent more than three decades in native forest research. He was elected as a non-aligned delegate to the 1998 Constitutional Convention and subsequently contested upper house seats as an independent candidate at both state and national level. Coming from a Christian family, he has always had an interest in the role of morality and ethics in society. This led to six years’ service on a Human Research Ethics Committee reviewing social science research projects. He also served a term on the national Gene Technology Ethics and Community Consultative Committee. For nineteen years he was the Public Questions Officer for Tasmanian Baptists, which involved researching issues of social and moral concern, informing the churches, and advocating a Christian perspective to policy makers through over forty submissions. He has presented several papers to conferences on ethics and law.

 

How Christianity has made Sense of Human Suffering

Campbell Markham

In the mid 1850s, renowned French Preacher Adolphe Monod lay dying of liver cancer: an acutely painful death before the advent of modern pain relief.

For the final twenty-five weeks of his life, friends and family gathered around his bedside on Sundays to hear him preach. The sermons were mainly concerned with suffering, and were recorded and published in 1856 under the title Les Adieux d’Adolphe Monod à ses amis, a work which became a minor devotional classic.

I have produced a fresh translation of Monod’s work, entitled Christian Suffering. An analysis of the work shows that Monod affirms the classical Christian understanding of human suffering: that suffering is alien to God’s creation, and is the consequence of human sin; that Christian suffering proves solidarity with the suffering Christ; that the suffering of persecution witnesses to the truth of the gospel; and that God uses suffering to sanctify the Christian.

Monod, however, makes an important additional contribution to this classical understanding, by showing that the Christian’s suffering can bring substantive benefits to the sufferer’s companions.

In all, the Christian conception of human suffering, as reinforced and expanded by Monod, offers great hope to world that has failed to find any real purpose or comfort in the face of pain.

Campbell Markham has been a minister for twenty years, and serves today at Cornerstone Presbyterian Church in Hobart.  He is married to Amanda-Sue and they have four grownup children.  Campbell has commenced doctoral research this year.  He is translating and analysing the letters of Marie Durand, a French Christian woman imprisoned for her faith for 38 years under the reign of Louis XIV.

 

Clothed with the Sun: Christianity and the Liberation of Women

Philippa Martyr

Christianity liberated everyone, but it liberated women in measurable and practical ways. This paper celebrates the enormous contribution of Christianity to the status of women; the deeper magic of God’s salvific plan that has been at work in the world since the Redemption. It also addresses some of the historical and cultural distortions of Christianity that have sought to restrict women’s full claim to Christ, and some of the current challenges we face – which actually turn out to be the same old challenge that it’s always been: sexual expression.

Philippa Martyr graduated from the University of Western Australia in 1994 with a PhD in the history of medicine. She taught for six years in what was then the Tasmanian School of Nursing in Launceston, Tasmania, before moving to the UK in 2001 to become a Visiting Scholar at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine (then based at the University of East Anglia, Norwich). Dr Martyr then returned to Australia at the end of 2007, and spent the next nine years working for the WA Health Department as a researcher, project officer and clinical planner in mental health services. Dr Martyr writes, publishes and speaks on a range of subjects, including her academic research specialities, religious issues, politics, higher education, film, literature, Australian historiography, and popular culture and psychology. She also publishes poetry, and very occasionally short fiction. Her work has appeared in (among other places): Quadrant, AD2000, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Homiletic and Pastoral Review, First Things, Australasian Psychiatry, centre-right libertarian blog Catallxyfiles.com, and Metascience.

 

Any room for priests, monks and nuns in an atheistic world?

Dom Pius Noonan

History shows that a society devoid of religion inevitably becomes intolerant of those who practice religion. But it also shows that when religion is sidelined, or used to serve the ideology of the day, truly religious persons can never tolerate such a situation. If they have a living faith, they must react. This being so, what does the growing number of self-professed atheists mean for those who make it their profession to dedicate their entire lives to God in the monastic life?

It means that they must, first, deepen their own relationship with God and, second, share their message with the world in ways consonant with their monastic charism. There needs to be a veritable culture of religious vocations in a world that turns its back on God. The more people live as if there were no God, the more those who dedicate their lives to him should go forward in the offering of themselves, at whatever cost, for the furthering of his Kingdom on earth. 

Dom Pius Mary Noonan is a native of Louisville, KY, USA. He spent 32 years at the Abbey of Saint Joseph de Clairval in Flavigny-sur-Ozerain, France. Professed as a Benedictine monk in 1986, he completed the course of formation for the priesthood within the abbey of Flavigny between 1986 and 1994, at which he subsequently taught Latin, History of Philosophy and Moral Theology. Between 2010 and 2012, he earned his licentiate in Thomistic studies with the Institut Saint Thomas d’Aquin under the Dominican Fathers of the Province of Toulouse, with a thesis on The Role of Prudence in the Judgment of Conscience. Between 2012-2015, he prepared his doctorate with the same Institute and defended his thesis: The Final Option in Death: Reality or Myth. Critique of a contemporary theological hypothesis, written under the supervision of Fr Serge-Thomas Bonino, OP, present day Secretary-General for the International Theological Commission. The doctoral thesis was published in 2016 by Editions Téqui, France. In February 2017, he founded Notre Dame Priory, a Benedictine monastery in Tasmania, of which he is at present the Prior. He also conducts a number of retreats in Australia and in other English-speaking countries.

 

The Why and How of Defeating Cultural Marxism

Erik Peacock

This paper will argue that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the secular trend. Rather it is only the result of a well thought-out and strategic campaign to deconstruct civilisation in order to create a new organism. Choice exists for those who understand the nature of existential conflict. It analyses the underlying cause of social decay and numerous anti-social agendas in current Western Society. It explains the unholy alliance between the radical left and Islam. It sets out the Marxist strategies used to bring Western civilisation to a state of ‘demoralisation’ then identifies the flaws in cultural Marxism and how they can be exploited. The paper further argues that cultural Marxism is an existential threat, and outlines a practical set of intergenerational strategies to defeat it.

Erik Peacock has a Bachelor of Arts (geography/law) and a Graduate Certificate with Honours in Environmental Studies from the University of Tasmania. He has undertaken public policy studies at Masters level (Flinders) and is currently studying towards a Graduate Certificate in Ministry. Erik is a married father of three and has worked for 20 years in public service largely in policy roles. This included a year in the Department of Premier and Cabinet policy unit. He was an environmental activist with the Wilderness Society from approximately 1992 to 2000 and a trainer in non-violent direct action. In 1996/97 he represented Australian youth in Indonesia as part of the Australia Indonesia Youth Exchange Program which is run by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The program took place in the province of Ambon which was subsequently overrun by Jihadist forces. Since then Erik has studied social movements and geopolitics informally, and lobbied on defence issues with Australia’s only independent defence think tank Air Power Australia. Erik has maintained an active involvement in Christian community for over 30 years. He most recently campaigned for the ‘No’ side in the postal ballot. He is a writer, blogger, and author of an on-line training course in civics (www.3ptraining.com.au). He defected from the Greens over their stance on abortion and same sex marriage.

 

‘Imagine there’s a heaven’ – The Plight of the Post-Secular

Karl Schmude

The condition of present-day Western culture is commonly described as ‘post-Christian’, but it might more accurately be designated ‘post-secular’. The process of de-Christianisation has now intensified, and while ideologies of various kinds have proved powerful, they have failed to provide a sustainable replacement for Christianity. The cultural triumph of a secularist worldview and value system has opened up a spiritual and cultural void characterised increasingly by dysfunction and despair. The people of the West are now, in the words of the 19th century philosopher Ernest Renan, ‘living on the perfume of an empty vase’. What will happen as the ‘perfume’ continues to evaporate?   This paper will look at the results of secularist disillusion and the plight of the ‘post-secular’. It will explore the prospects of a culture whose capacity for belief in religious substitutes is rapidly fading, and whose future will turn on whether it can confront the void of religious unbelief – and false belief.   To vary the words of the John Lennon song, can it ‘imagine there’s a heaven’?   Can it come to believe that there are ultimate truths and ideals worth living for – and dying for?

Karl Schmude has combined a long career in universities with freelance writing and speaking, both in Australia and overseas.  He served for 16 years as University Librarian at the University of New England in Armidale NSW.  In the year 2000, he became a co-founder of Campion College, an independent institution of Catholic inspiration, which opened in Sydney in 2006 and offers a comprehensive undergraduate degree in the Liberal Arts. Karl has published extensively on subjects associated with religion and culture – particularly literature, history, and education. His feature articles and book reviews have appeared in various newspapers and journals, not only in Australia but in the United States, Canada, South America, and England.   Karl is President of the Australian Chesterton Society, editor of its quarterly newsletter, The Defendant, and organiser of the Chesterton conferences held annually at Campion College. He serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the international journal, The Chesterton Review, and is the author of a short biography of Chesterton, as well as other works on Catholic figures and subjects. Last year his contribution to Catholic intellectual life was acknowledged by a papal knighthood. He and his wife Virginia live in Armidale on the New England Tablelands of New South Wales. They have four sons and 14 grandchildren.

 

Evangelisation in a world dominated by the Immanent Frame

Ben Smith

Charles Taylor coined the term ‘Immanent Frame’ is his book A Secular Age (2007), to describe the current state of Western Society in which it is now possible to think about the material world without reference to any transcendent power. Postmodern Man has developed a form of spiritual and intellectual astigmatism that prevents him from being able to comprehend or even attempt to consider anything with a transcendent or vertical dimension. There are many implications for religion to thrive or even survive in a world in which the elites subscribe to the ‘Immanent Frame’ world view. Traditional approaches to promoting the Christian message are struggling to make an impact. Alternative approaches will be explored that involve changing the optics of the way in which the Christian message is presented and delivered.

Ben Smith has been the Director of the Office of Life, Marriage and Family at the Archdiocese of Hobart since July 2017. Since June 2016 he has also been the Marriage Education Project Coordinator for the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference. Prior to this he was the Director of the Life, Marriage and Family Office in the Diocese of Parramatta from June 2014 to June 2017. In these roles he has been actively engaged in ethical debates concerning hot-button issues such as euthanasia and same-sex marriage. Before he worked for the Church he worked in a variety of engineering, business development and management positions in the Corporate, Government and Higher Education sectors since 1997. He has tertiary qualifications in Applied Physics, Management and Theology.

 

Why are conservative values so difficult to present in mainstream media?

Margaret Somerville

Recently I Received An Invitation To Address “What You Are Seeing In Public Opinion: What Is The Typology Of The Simplification Processes In Public Square Debates About Values That Create Cliches And Reduce The Moral And Ethical Debate To Categories In Which It Is Very Difficult To Get A Dialogue And Where Should We Go From There In Order To Get A Real Dialogue And To Propose The Ideas Related To Positive Values? … What Is The Nature Of This Simplification Process That [Bioethics] Issues Suffer When They Are Discussed In The Public Arena?”

Here’s My Response:

First, Bioethics Issues Are Complex, Often Involve Factual Uncertainty, And Have Broad And Long-Term Potential Consequences For Individuals, Institutions And Society. Simplification Is A Strategy Used By So-Called “Progressive Values” Advocates To Promote Acceptance Of Their Values. It Results From Excluding Consideration Of Complexity, Uncertainty And Potentiality In The Values Disputes Focused On Bioethics Issues. We Need To Understand The 2018 Societal Values Zeitgeist – The “Youthquake” And “Progressive Values” Agenda Which Young People Espouse – And How It Differs From A Traditional Societal Values Zeitgeist, If We Are To Effectively Communicate With Young People So As To Cause Them To Reconsider Their Values. Words Are Weapons In The Values Battles. We Must Identify How They Are Being Used In The Presentation Of Ethical Issues In The Media And Ethical Decision Making And, When That Use Leads To Unethical Situations, Offer Alternatives. We Must Also Identify The Causes Of Biased Media Coverage Of Ethics Issues, Including The Phenomenon Of “Post-Truth”, And Work To Eliminate Them.  Most Importantly, We Must Not Lose Hope, But Generate It; We Must Give People The Words They Need To Express What They Believe; We Must Engender Courage, Through Our Being “Not Afraid”; And We Must Try To Open People’s Minds To “Amazement, Wonder And Awe”, As Those Experiences Are The Most Likely To Result In Ethical Societal Values Decisions.

Margaret Somerville, AM, FRSC, DCL is Professor of Bioethics at the University of Notre Dame Australia and Emerita Samuel Gale Professor of Law, Emerita Professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Emerita Founding Director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University in Montreal, where she taught from 1978 to 2016 and was the first woman in Canada appointed to a named chair in law. Prof Somerville was born in Adelaide, South Australia, and educated at Mercedes College, Springfield. She graduated in Pharmacy at the University of Adelaide in 1963, holds a Bachelor of Law degree with first class honours and the University Medal from the University of Sydney in 1973, and a DCL from McGill University in 1978. Her archive is held at the McGill University Archives. Professor Somerville is the recipient of many honours and awards including eight honorary doctorates and was the first recipient of the UNESCO Avicenna Prize for Ethics in Science awarded by an international jury. She has an extensive national and international publishing and speaking record and is a frequent commentator in all forms of media. In November 2006 she gave the five annual Massey Lectures on CBC Radio in Canada. An expanded version of the lectures was published in Canada, Australia, and the United States in book form as The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit. Her most recent book is Bird on an Ethics Wire: Battles about Values in the Culture Wars (MQUP 2015).

 

 

 

 

Building on a Solid Foundation: Christian Foundations of the Rule of Law in the West

Augusto Zimmermann

An underlying theme in legal theory is that the rule of law provides at least part of the solution to the problem of political tyranny. As an ideal of legality, the rule of law is a product of particular values, convictions, customs and traditions so that some societies may not be able to realise it. In western societies, the rule of law was developed over centuries under the dominating influence of Christianity.  And yet, as noted by the late Harold Berman of Harvard Law School, ‘the Western belief in the autonomy and supremacy of law – historically based, as it is, on the dialectic of the church and state – can hardly serve as the principal foundation of legality in a world that is only partly Christian.’  Indeed, according to the late English jurist O. Hood Phillips, ‘historically, the phrase [‘rule of law’] was used with reference to a [Christian] belief in the existence of law possessing higher authority — whether divine or natural — than that of the law promulgated by human rulers which imposed limits on their power’. In my presentation I will endeavour to explain why it is positively not safe to assume that the rule of law will survive in western societies under the current post-Christian environment, especially when these societies deliberately neglect the Christian faith in favour of secular philosophies which do not recognise an ultimate, transcendental source of fundamental rights and freedoms, nor objective standards of justice and morality that both ordinary citizens and the public authorities have to respect. The remarkable shift in paradigm from a Christian society to a post-Christian society also explains why the high esteem the greatest (Christian) jurists in our western legal history once held have almost completely disappeared, along with their jurisprudential contributions which often are not even properly taught in our law schools.

Augusto Zimmermann LLB, LLM cum laude, PhD (Monash) is Professor of Law at Sheridan College in Western Australia. He is also Professor of Law (Adjunct) at the University of Notre Dame Australia (Sydney campus), President of the Western Australian Legal Theory Association (WALTA), Editor-in-Chief of the Western Australian Jurist law journal, and an Elected Fellow at the International Academy for the Study of the Jurisprudence of the Family (IASJF). Dr Zimmermann is also a former Associate Dean for Research at Murdoch University and a former member of the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia (2012-2017).

 

Not Yet Erased: Christianity as an Overlooked Minority

Nigel Zimmermann

Many contemporary trends appear to be oriented towards a world without Christianity, or at least a public square in which the vestiges of Christian faith have been cast aside. An anti-Christian prejudice can be felt in mainstream news reports, popular editorials, as well as in the messages and conversations on social media, not to mention at the school gate or in the shopping centre coffee shop. Not all of it is really hatred, but much of it is ignorant, and Christian communities have largely resisted meeting the challenge that is now present among all their members. In 2017 much of that changed, largely because of the dramatic changes in public policy on the topics of marriage, end of life care, Catholic school funding, and the sudden realization that religious freedom is no longer a conceptual battle but a political one. In this strange moment of time, Christianity is not yet erased, but has begun the hard task of re-imagining itself as a minority, at least insofar as its political strength is manifest in Australia. This paper explores the significance of Christianity now being a minority and what this means for our engagement in matters of social and ethical controversy. Inverting the meaning of John Lennon’s call to ‘imagine’ a different future, we might now be called to re-imagine our role in a present moment of fast change and dramatic cultural upheaval.

Nigel Zimmermann supports the Church in Australia through his role as Associate Director, Church Policy, at Australian Catholic University (ACU). Nigel grew up in Brisbane in an evangelical Christian community, and was received into the Catholic Church in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he completed his PhD in theology. He holds a degree in Journalism and Masters Degrees in theology (Brisbane College of Theology) and bioethics and medical law (St Mary’s University Twickenham). He taught theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia and worked in the Archdiocese of Sydney and the Diocese of Broken Bay, before joining ACU as a Senior Policy Advisor. He has written on contemporary topics facing theology and the Church, and serves on the Executive Committee for the Plenary Council 2020. Nigel is author of Levinas and Theology (2013), Facing the Other: John Paul II, Levinas, and the Body (2015), and The Great Grace: Receiving Vatican II Today (editor, 2015).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Papers presented to the Dawson Centre to mark the 500^th Anniversary of the Reformation, 31 October 2017

1.   The Revd Campbell Markham:

Who was Martin Luther?

1) Luther was a Miner’s Son

Martin Luther was born in 1483 in Eisleben, Germany, into a Roman Catholic Family. His father, Hans, a prosperous mine owner, wanted him to be a lawyer. In this way Martin would have been able to care for his parents in their later years.

Aged 22 Luther completed his undergraduate studies, and was on his way to commence his legal studies when he was caught in a thunderstorm. In fear he cried out, “St Anne, save me, I will become a monk!”

Saint Anne was the patron saint of miners.

2) Luther was an Augustinian Monk and Priest

In 1505 Luther entered the monastery of the Augustinian Hermits in Erfurt. This was a so-called “Observant” order of Augustinians, an order that wanted to get back to the rigors of the original program. At the same time the hermits could serve the community as parish priests, and in hospitals, schools, and universities.

Luther hoped to find peace for his soul in Monastic life.

In his 24^th year, Luther was ordained a priest and celebrated his first Mass. His Father attended this great occasion with a procession of twenty horsemen, and gave a very generous gift to the monastery. Afterwards he expressed his deep disappointment in Luther’s decision to forsake law for the cloth. Luther argued that he was only obeying God. Hans pointed out that God commanded children to honour their parents. This weighed heavily on Luther’s conscience into his old age.

His first Mass plunged Luther into turmoil. To be standing as priest in the presence of God, and handling, as he thought at the time, the real presence of Christ, terrified Luther. He used the German word anfechtung to describe his feelings, a word that refers to an inner maelstrom, despair, and distress.

In an effort to find salvation and peace, Luther threw himself into the monastic program. Apparently he fasted, prayed, and abstained from sleep, far more than required. Later he said: “If any monk could be saved by monkishness, it was me!”

He confessed his sins until he wore his confessors out. Johann von Staupitz, the Vicar General of Luther’s order, said in exasperation: “If you expect Christ to forgive you, come in with something to forgive—parricide, blasphemy, adultery—instead of all these peccadilloes!” and at another time her urged Luther, “Just love God!” “Love God?” Luther replied, “Sometimes I hate him!”

He couldn’t find peace. He knew that he hadn’t earned salvation.

In 1510, aged 27, Luther visited Rome as part of a delegation to the pope. The renaissance was in full bloom, and Michelangelo was at the time on his back painting his frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Although failed to gain a papal audience, he did climb on his knees the twenty-eight steps of the Scala Sancta, as an act of penitence for his dead grandfathers.

Overall, he was shocked by the visible immorality, crass commercialism, and religious cynicism of the “Holy City.” All too often he heard priests making mocking fun of the saints and rituals of the church.

Luther was especially shocked by the sale of Indulgences, which we will return to in a moment.

 

3) Luther was an Academic

Luther’s extraordinary intellectual abilities were being noticed. In 1508, in his 25^th year, Luther was sent to Wittenberg, in the eastern part of Germany, to teach ethics at the university, newly founded in 1502. In 1511 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Theology, and was made Professor of Biblical Exegesis, a position that he retained until his death 35 years later.

In 1515 he was made a vicar in his order, and put in charge of eleven Augustinian monasteries. (And so he came to have a much wider influence.) From 1512-19 he undertook an intensive study of the Psalms, Romans, and Galatians.

Theologically, Luther had trained to be a Nominalist, a position that allowed a person a limited but definite role in their justification. Luther’s exegetical work led him to a new position: where he saw that the righteousness of God was not something infused into the Christian, but imputed to the Christian. A Christian is justified by faith not by religious ritual or good works, but only on the basis of the imputed merits of Christ. Human works or religious observance brings nothing to salvation, for “a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ… because by works of the law no one will be justified.” (Galatians 2:16)

Important parallels have been noted between Luther’s doctrines and Augustine’s writings against Pelagius. In any case, Luther found the peace he was looking for in this doctrine. Years later, in a letter to his associate Melanchthon, he wrote, “God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners.  Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world.”

In other words, don’t think that your works or piety can contribute in the least to salvation.

4) Luther was a Protestor

Rediscovery of Justification by Faith made Luther angry about Indulgences. The doctrine of the Indulgences is often caricatured, but its basis is quite sophisticated, and presupposes these three dogmas:

1) That divine justice demands that sin be penalised even after the sinner is reconciled to God by penitence and absolution.

2) That there is available a treasury of merits that can be accessed by any Christian, that has been accumulated not only Bible Christ, but also by the Saints and Mary.

3) That the Church has the right to administer these merits: in consideration of prayers or other good works.

Sophisticated or not, this had however been turned into a crass commercial transaction: “You pay the church money, the church will shorten your time in purgatory.” The notorious Johann Tetzel, one of the more prominent priest-pedlars of indulgences, even came up with this jingle (the translation apparently captures the original doggerel): “As soon as a coin in coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”

The Indulgences enraged Luther for two reasons. Firstly he found it to be thoroughly anti-scriptural and opposed to the doctrine of justification by faith. Secondly, as a patriotic German, he hated the way the German poor were being fleeced of their savings to pay for building projects in Italy.

On the 31^st October 1517, aged 33, Luther posted his immortal 95 Theses, or questions, primarily about the Indulgences. Here are six of them:

27 They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory.

28 It is certain that when money clinks in the money chest, greed and avarice can be increased.

32 Those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned, together with their teachers.

35 They who teach that contrition is not necessary on the part of those who intend to buy souls out of purgatory or to buy confessional privileges preach unchristian doctrine.

36 Any truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt, even without indulgence letters.

37 Any true Christian, whether living or dead, participates in all the blessings of Christ and the church; and this is granted him by God, even without indulgence letters.

These theses were quickly copied and spread, and exploded in Europe like a theological bomb. Luther followed this up, in 1520, with three treatises:

1) To the Christian nobility of the German Nation concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate.

This was a critique of the secular-sacred distinction, and argued for the priesthood of all believers. Any Christians may challenge the pope on the interpretation of Scripture, and any Christian has the right to call for the church to reform.

2) The Babylonian Captivity of the Church

This criticised the withholding of wine to the laity, opposed the doctrine of transubstantiation, and argued for two sacraments only: baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

3) The Freedom of the Christian

This, one of Luther’s most attractive writings, argued that the Christian is freed by their justification from the bondage of religious ritual and works for salvation. The book centred around these paradoxical aphorisms:

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.
A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

In 1520 the Pope Leo X issued his bull Exsurge Domine, “Rise up O Lord!” Rise up to smite Luther! Luther was given sixty days to recant. He responded by burning the bull in a public square in Wittenberg.

 

5) Luther was a Fugitive

Luther was therefore called to be tried at the Diet of Worms in 1521, a great gathering of the religious and secular governing authorities of the Holy Roman Empire, presided over by Emperor Charles V himself.

Travelling to Worms was very dangerous for Luther, but Charles promised safe passage.

And so Luther appeared, a solitary monk in his simple cassock, before the imposing governmental and ecclesiastical might of western Europe.

The prosecutor confronted Luther with his books, 25 of them were laid out on a table. Luther was commanded to recant. He begged leave for 24 hours to give his answer. He Prayed. He consulted with close friends. A large crowd gathered, and his reply was classic:

Your Imperial Majesty and Your Lordships: I ask you to observe that my books are not all of the same kind.

There are some in which I have dealt with piety in faith and morals with such simplicity and so agreeably with the Gospels that my adversaries themselves are compelled to admit them useful, harmless, and clearly worth reading by a Christian. Even the Bull, harsh and cruel though it is, makes some of my books harmless, although it condemns them also, by a judgment downright monstrous. If I should begin to recant here, what, I beseech you, would I be doing but condemning that truth which is admitted by friends and foes alike?

The second kind consists in those writings levelled against the papacy and the doctrine of the papists, as against those who by their wicked doctrines and precedents have laid waste Christendom by doing harm to the souls and the bodies of men. No one can either deny or conceal this, for universal experience and world-wide grievances are witnesses to the fact that through the Pope’s laws and through man-made teachings the consciences of the faithful have been most pitifully ensnared, troubled, and racked in torment, and also that their goods and possessions have been devoured by unbelievable tyranny. If then I recant these, the only effect will be to add strength to such tyranny, to open not the windows but the main doors to such blasphemy.

The third kind consists of those books which I have written against private individuals; against those who have exerted themselves in defence of the Roman tyranny and to the overthrow of that piety which I have taught. I confess that I have been more harsh against them than befits my religious vows and my profession. For I do not make myself out to be any kind of saint. But it is not in my power to recant them, because that recantation would give that tyranny and blasphemy an occasion to lord it over those whom I defend and to rage against God’s people more violently than ever.

And so, through the mercy of God, I ask Your Imperial Majesty, and Your Illustrious Lordships, or anyone of any degree, to defeat my books by the writings of the Prophets or by the Gospels; for I shall be most ready, if I be better instructed, to recant any error, and I shall be the first in casting my writings into the fire.

The prosecutor retorted:   “Tell us plainly: are you prepared to recant, or not?” Luther responded:

Since your Lordships demand a simple answer, Here it is, plain and unvarnished. Unless I am convinced of error by the testimony of Scripture or by manifest reasoning, since I put no trust in the unsupported authority of Pope or councils, since it is plain that they have often erred and often contradicted themselves, I stand convinced by the Scriptures to which I have appealed, and my conscience is taken captive by God’s word, I cannot and will not recant anything, for to act against conscience is neither wise nor safe.

Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.

What was the response of the council?

We forbid anyone from this time forward to dare, either by words or by deeds, to receive, defend, sustain, or favour Martin Luther. On the contrary, we want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic, as he deserves, to be brought personally before us, or to be securely guarded until those who have captured him inform us, whereupon we will order the appropriate manner of proceeding against the said Luther. Those who will help in his capture will be rewarded generously for their good work.

 

6) Luther was a Bible Translator

Charles kept his promise and allowed Luther to leave Worms, but on the way to Wittenberg he was kidnapped by armed men. In fact they were friends, and they took Luther to the Wartburg castle. There he grew a beard and lived disguised as a knight, “Junker Jorg,” Sir George.

There in the Wartburg Luther translated the New Testament into German. (He translated the Old Testament some years later.)  His conviction that every Christian must believe and live according to Holy Scripture drove him to do this. By doing so, not only did he place the whole Bible in the hands of every German, he also gave a book that came to unify the diverse dialects of the Germanic peoples into one national language.

Of his translating work Luther wrote: “The Holy Scriptures are a vast and mighty forest, but there is not a single tree in it that I have not shaken with my own hand.”

And of the Scriptures he said:

Oh how great and glorious a thing it is to have the Word of God in front of you! With it we can always feel joyful and secure; we need never be in want of consolation, for we see before us, in all its brightness, the pure and right way. He who loses sight of the Word of God, falls into despair; the voice of heaven no longer sustains him; he follows only the disorderly tendency of his heart, and of world vanity, which lead him on to his destruction.

 

7) Luther was a Family Man

In 1523, in his forty-first year, Luther helped twelve nuns escape from a Cistercian Convent, smuggled out in herring barrels. Luther arranged marriages for eleven, leaving only Katharina von Bora.

Writing to a friend in 1524, Luther had said, “I shall never take a wife, as I feel at present. Not that I am insensible to my flesh or sex (for I am neither wood nor stone); but my mind is averse to wedlock because I daily expect the death of a heretic.”

Luther however married Katie. It was a happy marriage, and they had six children together.

“My Katie is in all things so obliging and pleasing to me that I would not exchange my poverty for all the riches of Croesus.”

Luther died in 1546 in Eisleben, the city of his birth, at the age of 62.

A final thought

I finish by observing the notable fact that a Protestant Pastor is delivering a lecture on Martin Luther on the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation under the auspices of a Roman Catholic society: the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies, dedicated to advancing Catholic tradition.

Truly, one of the greatest delights of my nine years in Hobart is the friendship that I have come to enjoy with so many Roman Catholics, not least with Dr Daintree, Director of the Dawson Centre, Alex Sidhu, and Archbishop Julian Porteous.

(I am especially pleased that the Archbishop and I are friends, not least because of the remote possibility we may one day have to share a jail cell.)

Indeed, the friendship that my wife Amanda-Sue and I enjoy with the Catholic Church was formed while standing together against the drive of unjust and immoral laws, such as the legalisation of abortion, prostitution, and medical killing; and the redefinition of marriage.

From this perspective, it isn’t strange that I speak under at a Catholic Church event this evening, for we are brothers in arms.

We live an age, however, where principled disagreement and reasoned argument has become a lost art. We live at a time when friends are not supposed to disagree with each other; where disagreement is now almost always equated with disrespect, and even enmity.

It is tempting, while breathing this atmosphere, to sustain our friendship by pretending that our differences are not real or important – or even to make light of them.

I respect the convictions of my Catholic friends too much for this. I respect your convictions too much to pretend that we do not sharply disagree on some very important doctrines.

Nor would you respect me if I pretended that what we believe is all basically the same, and that our differences don’t really matter.

Let us deny the great lie of our age, that disagreement means disrespect and even hatred.

Instead, in the name of truth, and out of deep regard for the hard-won convictions that we hold, let us openly acknowledge that many of the doctrines that were contended 500 years ago are doctrines that we continue to contend today.

For example, our authority is different. The Roman Catholic looks to the Authority of Scripture, the Popes, and the Traditions of the Church; whereas the Protestant looks to Scripture Alone.

And our conviction about our justification before God also differs. The Protestant believes that we are justified by faith alone, but the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2020, teaches that Justification is “granted through baptism.”

And we differ in our understanding of the nature of justification. The Catholic Catechism teaches that justification is indistinct from the inward ethical transformation of the Christian; whereas the Protestant believes that justification is the Christian’s objective legal status of “not-guilty,” a status that must inevitably lead to renovation, but yet is distinct from it.

Let us respect each other enough to acknowledge that we cannot both be right about these core doctrines, and that these differences are far from trivial.

If the Australian Church is going to survive the onslaught of radical subjectivism, then we must never, by buying into the relativism of our age, paper over our differences.

This would sever us from our own roots, from our own deepest theological convictions.

Instead, we must go back to our roots, with a genuine willingness to be transformed by the truth, and to ask: “How do we differ?” “Why do we hold a different view?” “What reasons have led to this difference?”

If we are going to be Roman Catholic, then let us be convinced Roman Catholics. If we are going to be Protestant, then let us be convinced Protestants. Let us never lazily drift on a calm pool of subjectivism.

When it comes to Martin Luther, I believe that this is something we can all agree on: that it is good to fearlessly question, to examine, to dig deep, and to come to sincerely and deeply held convictions.

May we all come to that place, where, like Luther and many others in the Church through the centuries, we can say:

Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.

 

2.   Peirce Baehr:

The Bible and Culture

 

Introduction

“Christians suppressed all science, music, books and art for centuries. They have never created anything.”

That was almost the first thing a fiery young Italian and his partner told my over dinner a few years ago.

As you may know, we run a ministry called Pilgrim Hill. We’re grateful to God, we’ve gotten to feed and share the Gospel with folks from over 45 countries, at weekly dinners, with up to 80 guests a night.

Most of our guests are young and ignorant or apathetic: they know little or nothing about the Bible and its story, and they don’t care. Sometimes they’re a bit feistier: they care a lot, but they still know nothing.  Our first year, we had this fiery young Italian couple. They earned the nickname “the angry Italian atheist.” They came to their first Pilgrim Dinner in January and stuck around for four months, completely changing perspective by the time they left.

Yet almost the first thing they said to us: “Christians suppressed all science, music, books and art for centuries.  They have never created anything.”

Let your jaws drop.  You’d think, living in Italy, they’d give credit for Vivaldi, or da Vinci, or Dante; frescos and mosaics; church architecture, etc. But no: their narrative “Christians suppress, Christians don’t create.”

I’m sure you’ve heard it before. “Christians produce nothing, suppress learning, start crusades, burn witches, and worse.” For many people, that’s all they know about Christians. Which means the only thing most people know is a complete lie.

Tonight, we get to shine a light at the Truth. Rather than destroying culture, we’ll see that Christianity does the very reverse. Indeed, as I aim to show you tonight, the truths of the Bible are the source and life blood of any good we see in culture at all.

To demonstrate this, we’ll be looking at the Bible and Culture. It’s one of my favourite topics, there are so many things worth saying, we could be here for days. But to fit the time, and keep things short:

• first I’m going to define our primary terms,

• then I’ll apply the topic in three ways,

so that you may see and be encouraged by how profoundly the Bible has and must shape culture. I’m praying that my words would be edifying to you whether you’ve heard this sort of message a thousand times or never heard it before at all.

Defining Terms

Let’s start with our terms.

What is the Bible?  Physically it’s a collection of 66 books written over a 1500and year period, consisting of two primary divisions (Old and New Testaments) and containing a huge variety of genres, including:  poetry, narrative, prophecy, letters, and more. This physical artefact is the Bible.

But the Bible is far more than a physical artefact. As Christians, we know the Bible to be: the inspired words of God himself; a book created by God for the edification of his people.  And we are edified by the Bible’s content. It’s the content of this Bible that makes the Bible so unique. Despite multiple human writers, the Bible tells a comprehensive, unified story. A story we call the Gospel. So what is the story…

What is the Gospel?

Sounds like the easy one, but too often, Christians don’t define it. How you define the Gospel makes a huge difference. We need to define the Gospel to know we’re heading in the right direction.

On the surface, you probably all know that the Greek word for Gospel is εὐαγγέλιον (euangelion), which means good news. But did you know that the English word Gospel come from old English Good Spell. Yes, like magic spell. But, at that time, spell meant story. [Think of the German word spiel].  The Gospel is the Good Story.  But what is this Good Story about?  If you been around the traps, you know that ‘Gospel’ is often shorthand for Jesus death on the cross to pay for our sins, so that we who trust in him can have eternal life. This is true. And it is an unfathomably Good Story. Indeed, it’s the centre point of history, and each of our stories.

But it’s not the whole Gospel. If we stopped there, our Gospel would be too small. When the Bible uses the word Gospel, it includes much more. For example, in Mark 1:1 we read “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.” Mark says he’s giving us the beginning of the Gospel in his book. What is Mark’s Gospel? It’s the story of Jesus — the whole story, including: his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection; his ascent, rule, return and judgment; and his eternal reign. Mark’s Gospel is the beginning of the whole story about Jesus.

And that’s also what the other Gospels are: Matthew, Luke, and John. [That’s why we call them Gospels]. They are stories about Jesus. The story of Jesus is the Gospel.  But, that’s still not all the Bible uses the word Gospel for.

Do you know what Jesus himself most often says the Gospel is about? When Jesus says “the Gospel of…” in the Gospels, he almost always ends with “…the Kingdom”. That is, the Kingdom of God. The content of our Good Story is also the Kingdom of God.  Which makes more sense if you know the most frequent title for Jesus in the New Testament is Lord. [Not Saviour or Messiah, but Lord]. The title comes up over 600 times. We’ve got a Kingdom and a Lord.

With this lens, looking over Bible, it’s easy to see the Gospel is the story of God’s Kingdom coming under its Lord, Jesus. The Gospel is the whole epic narrative of God’s work on earth to bring His Kingdom through Jesus: an epic epically dwarfing all others, Tolkien included, which involves everything that was, is and will be; covering the entire story of history from Creation through Consummation; spanning the entire Bible, but centred on our Lord, Jesus, the hero and his redemptive, God-glorifying work of mercy, through his incarnation, death, resurrection, rule and return.

What is the Bible?

It’s the God-inspired account of this Greatest-of-all stories. The Bible is the God-given book whose content is the Gospel.

So what is Culture?

I’ve got three answers, intimately related.

First

The theologian Henry Van Til (nephew to Cornelius) was partly right when he said: “Culture is religion externalised.” Culture is what our beliefs or worldviews look like when live them out: what they look like in the things we do, the stuff we make, the clothes we wear, our art, science, music, etc.  Put this way, I like to say, culture is fruit. It’s the fruit of what a group of people believe. It’s the fruit of their worldview.  We’ll come back to that idea in minute, so hold that thought: culture = fruit.

Second

I said Van Til’s famous quote was partly right. Here’s why it was only partly right.  In talking about culture as fruit – we’re seeing it as a unified thing: a mass noun, like sand, or water; something we treat like one thing, though made up of many.  But, we can also talk about cultures, a diversified thing, like: Japanese culture, Australian culture, American culture.

Sometimes we can get squeamish about cultural diversity as a PC code word, but we shouldn’t.  Our God loves a diverse, full creation, even more than the tolerance crowd.

Consider that our God made more than 1.7 million different species, including: the peacock, the baboon, the giraffe (all seven species of them), the cockroach, the cherry tree, the moustached guenon; the Mantis shrimp, a critter 10cm long with the most complex eyes of any animal on earth — where we have 3 types of colour cones in our eyes, they have AT LEAST 16 different types of cones — who knows what that critter sees; the lowly caterpillar, which becomes complete mush before turning into a butterfly; or the jelly fish, that basically turns into a plant for half its lifecycle, reproducing both sexually and asexually. God is comfortable with diversity – he designed it.

This is true not only of animals, plants, but of cultural diversity too. Revelation 5:9 says, in a hymn of praise to Jesus: “by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and tongue and people and nation.” Revelation 21:23-26 adds, at end of time, about the great city — the new Jerusalem: “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, because God’s glory illuminates it, and its lamp is the Lamb. 24 The nations will walk in its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. 25 Each day its gates will never close because it will never be night there. 26 They will bring the glory and honour of the nations into it.”

Here’s where things get interesting.

Two cultures, like two people can produce right fruit and look different. Take a look at your neighbour: one of you is taller; one thinner; one of you is a better dancer. Does that stop either of you worshipping God in the right way? Of course not!  Remember the different parts of Christ’s body in 1 Cor 12? God ordained some to be eyes, some hands; some preachers, some in admin. See, your difference doesn’t stop you worshipping God the right way. Rather, our differences exist exactly so we can most fully worship God together, each in the way God designed for his glory. It’s part of His Good Story.

So too with cultures. God designed the diversity of cultures. He clearly doesn’t expect all cultures to be eye or hand. He designed each culture to fully worship God in specific ways:

Japanese culture to worship Him in a Japanese way; Australian culture in an Australian way; and the same with American culture.

Remember Revelation. God wants all the glory and honour of all nations in the new city. So the eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you,” or worse “you must be me.” God has so designed cultures to differ for his ultimate glory telling a story through it.

In this sense, culture is more than religion externalised, more than fruit. It’s more like the use of word ‘culture’ in biology. Think of a bacteria colony, petri dish and all: an organic society, designed and grown by God, and there are a huge diversity of them. Within the bounds of true Biblical unity, this diversity is a very good thing. So culture can mean not only fruit, but also the diversity of human societies, designed by God for his glory.

Third

Which brings us to our third and deepest meaning: culture as worship.  Did you know, the word culture comes from the Latin colere, meaning to tend, dwell, worship.  That Latin word gave us all our English words starting C – U – L – T, like: cultivate, cultured, and cult. In English, “cult” is a bad word, but in many languages it isn’t. It just means ‘worship’.  This combined meaning — tend, dwell, worship — fits beautifully the Christian story.

Remember, the first command of God to us in Genesis 1:28:  “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.”

Often called cultural mandate, our first command involves tending and dwelling. In obeying this command, like any command, we are worshiping God.  The cultural mandate was man’s first call to worship and we’re still called to worship God through culture: the command is ongoing, God never revoked it, it still applies to us.

Culture is a form of our worship.

Everything we do to take dominion: being fruitful, multiplying, filling the earth, and subduing/ruling it, including our art, our science, our literature, our music, our fashions. All of these aspects of culture are forms of worship. Culture is worship.

I have no time to go further, but Luke Jankovic wrote an excellent piece a few years back, which I highly recommend you read. Run a Duckduckgo search for “Worship culture Jankovic” (you could also use those other, evil-doing search engines, but I’ll leave that to your conscience).

What is culture?

You can parse the word three ways:

• The fruit of our beliefs

• The diversity of our societies

• The expression of our worship.

All three definitions help us understand our topic: the Bible and culture.

Application

Now that we’ve defined the Bible, its subject the Gospel, and Culture, how does the Bible relate to culture?

Our commitment and love of God’s Good Story should shape all three meanings of culture:

• Affecting the fruit of our beliefs: objects, ideas, outward manifestations of our culture.

• Protecting the diversity of our societies: making it possible for us distinguish sin from legitimate difference.

• Driving our worship: shaping the ways we dedicate our lives to God.

We’ll look at each of these in turn.

Having the Bible shape culture affects the quality of our fruit. Jesus said, “A tree is known by its fruit.” (Lk 6:43) Like you can know person by fruit, you can know a worldview by cultural fruit. So let’s take gander at the fruit of a few worldviews.

Did you know that the 20th century was the bloodiest century in human history? And Atheism was a huge cause. Not counting the carnage of both World Wars, over 281,000,000 people were killed by atheist rulers — people committed to Communism, National Socialism, and other atheist political philosophies, like: Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, and Tito — names synonymous with evil who show the fruit of the atheist worldview, where man can be as God, because in a godless universe, might makes right.

As a point of comparison, consider the greatest wrong Christians are often blamed for: the Crusades. By the most generous estimate, counting deaths on both sides, perhaps a million people died in the Crusades. Many scholars put the number much lower. Remember, the Crusades were a series of wars, lasting over 200 years. And contra popular media, plenty of academics admit there were just reasons for the Crusades.

Regardless, it’s a helpful comparison. A 200 year Catholic-Muslim conflict killed less than 1 million people. But 20th atheist leaders alone killed nearly 300,000,000 people. Again, not counting the World Wars themselves, or the many, many other horrendous dehumanising evils perpetrated by these atheist on their own and other peoples.  Atheism when it rules a culture has produced some of the rottenest fruit in history.  But secularism and her twin, therapeutic deism, are little better.  Since abortion became ‘legal’, in US alone, over 58,000,000 people — unborn humans — have been killed. Often gruesomely killed, torn limb from limb, in D & E abortions, feeling what must be excruciating trauma as they died. These deaths are fruit of philosophies that say unborn humans do not matter, they can be sacrificed to things like: time, convenience, preference; my wants, my wishes, my choices. Bear in mind, when we say the 20th century was the bloodiest in human history, we’re not even counting these deaths.

The 20th century has produced a lot of extremely rotten fruit. Almost all directly a result of atheist and secular worldviews that say: “humans are just machines” or “humans are just monkeys”; “there is no ultimate right and wrong, so I can make up what I think is right and wrong”; “I can do whatever I like: I can murder millions to get what I want or I can murder one, unborn inside me, for the same reason.”

These worldviews are responsible for making the 20th century so bloody. But the 20th century is not alone in producing bad fruit. The cultures of the ancient world also grew rotten fruit.  One example: did you know, in Ancient Rome, the father had almost absolute power over his house? For almost any reason, he could have his wife put to death, or his servant, or any baby born in his house, including the babies of his servants. A Roman father could order their death based on his own preferences — whatever he liked. This was fruit of a pagan worldview that said power mattered most. It produced this and much other rotten fruit.  But again, it was not alone. Other religions have also produced bad fruit Hinduism created a caste system that kept millions in abject poverty. If the poor are there by the faults of a past life, why care for them? They deserve it. [We have actually had guests at our Pilgrim Dinners say as much.]  In Islam, at least 20% of Muslims believe Jihad means physical warfare, based on a legitimate possible reading of their sacred texts. One Muslim scholar boasts that Islam has killed over 120,000,000 people in 1400 years of Islamic Jihad. He boasts about it because he thinks it a good thing — he thinks it is a boast-worthy fruit of Islam.

What we believe effects the fruit we produce. When we believe false things – real evil results. It matters what we believe.

So what happens when you start with the Bible? Start with truth?

We know the Bible says none of us as individuals is righteous (Romans 3:10). We all produce bad fruit. We naturally do evil because of the evil in our hearts. In the same way, we can see no human culture is righteous: not in the ancient world, not under Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or any other religion, and very obviously not under atheism. Our lives and history are clear that humans produce bad fruit.

But through the Bible God has given us a way out – a way that brings good fruit. See, despite being God’s enemies and producing bad fruit, Jesus, by becoming man to save and set us right in His Kingdom, makes it possible for us to produce good fruit. And he shows us what good fruit looks like.  For one most obvious thing, he showed us how very much humans and human cultures matter to him.  That’s why — not because of anything we’ve done, but because God first loved us — Christians living God’s way started the world’s first hospitals, hostels, orphanages, and charities to care for people rejected by non-Christian cultures — to save the lives of those babies that Roman fathers threw out.

It’s also why Christians are responsible for our modern system of human rights. I’m not a big fan of the modern language of rights, but the concept behind them, of caring for the weak whileacknowledging weakness, is thoroughly Christian. The rights of women, babies, the elderly; the poor, blind, and disabled; prisoners, slaves, and factory workers come from long centuries of Christian reform. Look it up, you will find it so. Through history, the key names and movements in these fields we Christians.

Human rights didn’t develop out of Ancient empires, Hinduism or Islam, Atheism or Communism. They did not because they could not. Those beliefs can’t produce that fruit.  In real history, human rights came out of Christian cultures. In fact, in 1948, when the UN put forward the Declaration of Human Rights, Islamic countries stood against it. They refused to sign it because knew it was Christian.  Human Rights and Hospitals are the fruit of the Bible. The fruit of God’s love for us.

If we serve a God whose love is so deep he would die to save us when we were his enemies — when all we produced was evil fruit — that’s going to change the kind of fruit we produce — how we treat others.

There are many other examples I could share, of fruit from the Bible, like: universities, the scientific method, even Harmonic music, which are only possible as fruits of the Bible: things that did not and could not exist as the fruit of other beliefs. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to go into more detail, but if you are interested to know more, read “The Book that Made Your World” by a scholar from India named Vishal Mangalwadi. He shows all these things and more are only possible as a fruit of the Bible.

If we want this kind of good fruit in our cultures, the Bible must be shaping culture.

Secondly, if we to want protect godly diversity – the Bible must shape our cultures.  Godly diversity is really about two things: diversity and unity at same time. Though we are made diverse as individuals and cultures, we must be united in the truth, one in purpose in serving God.  Cultural diversity is not some false ecumenicism, or skin deep multiculturalism. It does not sacrifice God’s good news for false peace. It calls out sin as sin, and demands repentance. It has hard edges that cannot be violated. Yet it also isn’t communism, turning men into cogs and gears, and leaving a cultural grey.

Let me illustrate.

Two opposite human sins work against godly diversity:

• The sin of unity at all costs.

• The sin of diversity at all costs.

We see both errors everywhere the Bible isn’t shaping cultures.

For example, some beliefs say unity at all costs — unity must dominate. There are so many examples of this in history, like Communism, Islam, even secular pop culture. These beliefs say one culture should dominate everything, there should be only one culture.  These beliefs actively stomp out diversity. They create an ugly sameness, a dull cultural grey.  Think of the ugly architecture communism left everywhere it went.  Or Islam. As one former Muslim, now a Christian, Lamin Sanneh puts it: everywhere Islam goes it tries to recreate 7th century Arabia. The more seriously islamic an area becomes, the more like 7th century Arabia.  At a basic level, you get a dull cultural sameness.

But it gets worse.

When one culture must dominate, we see race hatreds, class warfare, religious hatred, etc, leading to horrors like: enforced poverty, slavery, and genocide. We’ve seen it under Communism and in the daily horrors of ISIS.  But such things don’t just happen out there. We also see them right here in the first world, in our popular culture, which values young independent adults above all else — which says they should be dominant. This leads to ugly cultural grey, people of all ages trying to look and act like young independent adults: five year old beauty queens, 75 year old beauty queens; 70 year olds with nose jobs, new cars, new wives.

But it also leads to much worse horrors like assisted suicide of the aged and disabled, because they don’t fit the dominant cultural ideal, they just get in the way. Or abortion of the unborn because they don’t fit the dominant cultural ideal, they just get in the way.

Beliefs like Communism, Islam and even secular popular culture say one culture should dominate, so hey destroy God given diversity, making an ugly, grey cultural sameness, and perpetrating horrors, leading to death.  It’s Grim. But the opposite problem is just as grim.

Some beliefs say diversity at all costs — diversity must dominate. These beliefs come under names like equality, tolerance, relativism, and multiculturalism. They say “no culture, no group is better than any other”, “all cultures must be equal”.  These beliefs actively stamp out unity and truth. The big problem is that they force us to pretend a lie, that everything is OK. Fully believed, they rob us of the ability to show love. If every culture must be equal, we can not judge — we cannot say: “the caste system in India is harmful” or “Abortion is wrong.” We must pretend everything is ok.

This is profoundly unloving. When horrible beliefs harming millions of people can’t be judged and get a free pass, we are showing the opposite of love. We are condemning people to death.  Or when a friend chooses sin — a life in darkness, acting against God’s good law — and we treat that sin as an acceptable life choice, we are not showing love. Rather the opposite: we are condemning our friend to death.

True love, wants what is best for the other. Which means, it doesn’t tolerate sin and wrong. It cares enough to speak out against brokenness to seek to see it resolved.

The godly solution is neither unity without diversity nor diversity without unity. Both ways lead to death. Yet without Bible, every human culture falls for one of these.

To get out of the trap, we need the Bible to shape our cultures. Through the truths of the Bible, God has given us a way out. He’s shown us how both unity and diversity matter to him, and fit together. Indeed, only through the Bible can they.  God showed us diversity matters in the incarnation, He became a human being in a specific culture. The God of universe, creator of everything, took on a specific human culture, came to us at our level, and reached out to us, for love of us.  Ever since, when Christians have spread the Gospel, they’ve cared about local cultures. From St Paul to Hudson Taylor, from St Patrick to Steve Saint, Christians have intentionally copied the incarnation by enculturating the Gospel to bring good news to the full diversity of cultures.  Did you know the Bible is the first book in almost every written language? Almost every national literature started with the Bible or part of it — with the hard work of Christians putting God’s word in local languages.  This is true for thousands of languages and has been going on for thousands of years, from long before Cyril and Methodius, to countless numbers of missionaries with groups like Wycliffe Bible Translators today. Men and women who have given their lives, like Christ, to bring the Gospel to people through translation.

You know, it doesn’t have to be that way — the Christian belief in the incarnation and Biblical translation has its opposite in a religion like Islam. The Quran is never meant to be translated.  Do you want to be a good Muslim? You need to learn to recite the Quran in 7th century Arabic.  Worship of Allah is never incarnational, never localised. There is only one form of worship intended for everyone, everywhere. All good Muslims are meant to worship in exactly the same way.  You can see the difference in Africa. Northern Africa: the more Islamic, the more same.

Southern Africa: Christian diversity.

As an example – you may not know it, but care for diverse cultures through Bible translation made a profound different in African and Middle Eastern history. See, when Islam spread across the world in the six + seven hundreds, it destroyed Christian cultures everywhere it settled — wiped them out. But every culture that had a Bible translation when Islam came — every culture except one — still has a Christian church today. Because Christian translators took seriously Gods love for local cultures, those cultures were able to resist Islam; those cultures could be Bible shaped themselves.  The Biblical incarnational love, of godly diversity, matters. Christians living biblically have valued and built up local cultures all over the world. Just as God incarnated himself for love of same.  But diversity cannot stand alone.

The Bible also emphatically shows unity matters. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to God except through him (Jn 14:6). There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to people, by which we must be saved (Ac 4:12). There is one body and one Spirit —just as you were called to one hope at your calling— one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all (Eph 4:4-5).  The Bible is clear, unity in the truth is essential for all cultures.

So how do these two things fit together – unity and diversity? In the deepest truth of Biblical reality: that God is Trinity. He is both truth and love, perfection and personality, unity and diversity, forever and always within himself.  This fundamental truth makes three things possible that are impossible as the fruit of human worldviews and religions.

First, our God is able to create and love a diversity of cultures. Worldviews like Atheism and Islam cannot account for our diversity).

Second, He can do this despite our profound sin and brokenness. Tolerance and relativism cannot account for our sin.

Third, He is able to redeem us out of our sin and brokenness — to change what is broken in our cultures and make us whole. The non-Christian world cannot do this. Such a task would make the anthropologist short-circuit: “How could you change a culture?!” Or an atheist superman laugh: “Just crush the under-evolved thing!” Or the tolerance crowd cry foul. For them, it is literally meaningless to love the sinner and hate the sin: they have no category for sin separate from sinner.

You need godly diversity, grounded in unity, shaped by the Trinity to have these things. The Bible alone can make way for true diversity and unity.

So far, we’ve seen having a Bible shaped culture affects the quality of our fruit and protects true unity and diversity.

Changing gears, finally, I want to show that if culture is worship, we also need the Bible to shape culture by driving our worship Campbell has been speaking to us tonight about Martin Luther. One way that Luther continues to challenge us as both protestants and Catholics is to value non-religious vocations. There’s a temptation that we, the church, protestant and Catholic, have frequently succumbed to and which has its roots in ancient pagan gnosticism, which says that the body is bad and the spirit is good. Fully fledged, it can turn into mono-physitism, which denies the full humanity of Christ.  Now this is a massive subject and I can’t do justice to it tonight. But I want to give this warning:

If the Bible doesn’t shape our worship, other beliefs will. The ancient cults are ready to step in when the Bible is removed from its proper place of driving/shaping our worship.  Over and over again — feeling the pull of gnostic dualism — we’ve created a two-tiered holiness system where those who work in religious vocations are more holy, more valuable than those who do the everyday work of tending and dwelling (remember the latin source of our word culture). To say, “that over there — that prayer, preaching, fasting, studying, contemplation — that is worship, but this over here — this caring, teaching, building, cooking, birthing, working — is just normal life.” And if you think I’m talking about Catholics right now, think again. I’ve said the same things many times to Protestants.

We need to be aware of this dualistic pull, especially when the world gets dark around us. If the spirit is better than the body, and everything around us is going wrong, we’re prone to push everyone into religious vocations. We adopt a “ship’s on fire” mindset and we throw the cultural cargo overboard. In our effort to be more pragmatic than God, we ditch the things we think are extraneous. And then our Italian atheist couple might as well be right.  But if Christ will reign until every enemy is under his feet (1 Co 15:25), the ship may be here a long time. If history teaches us anything, it’s that God is an incrementalist.

A wise man named Christopher Dawson once said, “The Christian church lives in the light of eternity and can afford to be patient.” Putting the worship of God first lets us play the long game. It lets us live in the light of eternity. It lets the Bible shape our culture by driving our worship, our whole-of-life worship to our creator God.  Rather than being pragmatic about how to shape our worship, we need to trust God in His perfect timing, be patient, and build for the future. Build a culture as an act of worship, a Bible-shaped culture with institutions that glorify God, and prepare the next generation to continue to serve in the Gospel story.

For this is what we are called to do in the Cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28. It’s an essential part of our worship. The promising medical student, the artist, the mother, the children — they aren’t distractions. They, their work, and our work with them are essential in the worship of God. They are part of the body, along with preachers, teachers, and evangelists. They are essential for a Bible-shaped culture

By leaving out the cultural mandate from the Gospel story, this provides the perfect conditions for the local church to burn out and the next generation to be wiped away by whatever cults are popular among the unchurched — something that has happened many times in history. See for example the books of Judges or Kings.

As an aside, when we’re tempted to think the ‘ship’s on fire’ in our evangelism, a temptation with many dangerous consequences, we need to remember that God alone is in charge of the hearts of people. He is in control. We awesomely get to be a part of God’s rescue story, but it’s not about us: it’s His story, and He’s winning (1 Co 15:25). So we are not on fire. We don’t ever need to be anxious in our worship. We just need to be obedient. Which again proves, we need the whole Bible shaping culture to drive our worship.

Conclusion

To close up, I’ll recap.

The Bible tells the story of the Gospel, which is the greatest of all good stories, the epic God is telling through all history. It’s the story of God’s Kingdom coming under the Lord, Jesus to bring the world into right worship of Him again for all eternity. Culture is the fruit of what a group believes, or the diversity of societies God has lovingly created, or a form of worship, based on God’s first commandment to us.

How does the Bible relate to culture?  Our love and commitment to this Good Story God is telling:

• affects the fruit we produce — what we do and make as a culture;

• protects the godly diversity God created = making it possible for us to enjoy difference

• drives our worship = directing the ways we live our lives for God

It almost would have been better to ask the question the other way round: how doesn’t the Bible shape culture?  To produce fruit at all, to worship at all, to live in any kind of diversity, every culture already starts from the Bible — the Good Story — whether it likes it or not. No culture, even a sinful, broken one, is possible without starting there.

Even ignorant and anti-Christian cultures can’t escape the Good Story: anything they do, like it or not, is part of that story — possible only because of that story. As Scripture puts it

“For from God and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory

forever. Amen.” (Romans 11:36)

So to those Italian atheists, who said:

“Christians suppressed all science, music, books and art for centuries. They have never created anything”

They are certainly wrong, historically speaking. But they are also wrong, fundamentally about the Bible. Because without the truths of the Bible — without the true facts of the Good Story we’re in — nothing would’ve been created: none of the science, music, books and art that has ever been. The only reason we have culture at all, is because of the Good Story of the Bible.

 

 

 

Speech to the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies Hobart

– Gerard Henderson –

Monday 22 May 2017

“The Media, the Royal Commission & Freedom of Religion”.

It’s great to be in Hobart where I lived for a year in 1972, teaching at the University of Tasmania. I value my associates from that time – particularly James McAuley (1917-76), Brian Harradine (1935-2014), Wayne Williams (who is here tonight), Archbishop Guilford Young (1916-88) and my colleague Dr Peter Boyce. Jim McAuley, Guilford Young (1916-1988) and Brian Harradine all feature prominently in my biography of the late Bob Santamaria – Santamaria: A Most Unusual Man which was published in 2015.

I also remember my friend Professor Harry Gelber who died recently. He addressed The Sydney Institute on a number of occasions and, I understand, attended functions at the Christopher Dawson Centre. It’s also good to catch up with Sister Majella Kelly who I knew during the four years that Anne and I spent in Launceston in the late 1970s.

My research in the early 1970s on Catholics and politics in Australia led me to what remained of the Central Catholic Library in Melbourne, which had been established by the Irish-born Jesuit Fr William Hackett. The Central Catholic Library was frequented in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s by the men – and they were all men – who established the Campion Society in Melbourne. It was there that Bob Santamaria met his future wife Helen Power who worked at the library.

B.A. Santamaria was a pragmatic person. Contrary to what some have claimed, I never believed that he was much influenced by the views of the English distributists such as G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc – but others in the Campion Society, like Frank Maher and Denys Jackson, were. Nor do I believe that Santamaria spent much time reading the historical and cultural studies written by such English Catholic intellectuals as Christopher Hollis, Fr. C.C. Martindale S.J. and Christopher Dawson. But, again, others did.

It was at the Central Catholic Library four decades ago that I read Christopher Dawson’s 1935 book Religion and the Modern State. Unlike Belloc, Dawson was a convert. He presented what Joseph Pearce referred to in Literary Converts (HarperCollins, 1999) as the belief that “only the Roman Catholic Church held the true faith in an unbroken tradition from the Apostles” in a more nuanced – and, indeed, more plausible – manner than Belloc.

I was very pleased to accept the invitation to address the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies. As a lover of history, I’m impressed that Dr Julian Porteous saw fit to support the creation of the Christopher Dawson Centre in the Tasmanian capital and I support the work being done by Dr David Daintree. I’m also here because I am an admirer of the Archbishop of Hobart as a person who thinks deeply and is prepared to promulgate and defend his views – the same can be said of Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP in Sydney.

Archbishop Porteous had the courage to distribute and defend the pastoral letter of the Australian Hierarchy titled Don’t Mess with Marriage – despite the attempt, which ultimately failed, to silence him. I believe that Dr Porteous has the same right in a democratic society to stand up for what was, until very recently, the traditional view of marriage as a union between a man and a woman – as Qantas CEO Alan Joyce has to advocate same-sex marriage.

Moreover, I condemn the physical attack on Mr Joyce in Perth a couple of weeks ago with precisely the same force as I condemn the recent attempt by radicals to prevent the Australian Christian Lobby holding a meeting in Melbourne by means of intimidation and real force.

I note that Qantas, a publicly listed company, has declared that the man who attacked its chief executive officer will never be allowed to fly on Qantas again. It remains to be seen whether Qantas will adopt a similar position concerning anyone who attacks or threatens a member of the ACL who happens to be a Qantas customer.

So a sense of history and a regard for intellectual courage brought me to Hobart tonight. Before addressing the topic “The Media, the Royal Commission and Freedom of Religion”, I should clarify my position and put aside some myths.

I was baptised a Catholic and educated at Catholic schools. I have admiration for the Christian religion in general and Catholicism in particular. However, I am not a practising Catholic – having converted to agnosticism some decades ago. Moreover, I am not close to Cardinal George Pell – a man I happen to admire. The fact is that I have had only one person-to-person meeting with George Pell in my life. However, like many others, he has been a welcome speaker at The Sydney Institute and attended some of our functions when he was in Sydney.

I also make the point that this speech reflects my personal views only – The Sydney Institute is a forum for debate and discussion and does not take stances on matters of church or state.

And now for something completely serious. The Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in its valuable work has confirmed what was already known – albeit in more shocking detail than many would have expected – the extent of historical pedophilia in the Catholic Church.

When Prime Minister Julia Gillard set up the Royal Commission in November 2012, George Pell, (the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney) said that he supported the decision on the understanding that the Catholic Church was not, as he termed it, the only cab-on-the-rank.

I happened to be on the ABC TV Insiders couch soon after the Royal Commission was announced. I was asked for my reaction and replied that I supported the Prime Minister’s decision but drew attention to the fact that sexual assaults would have been occurring the previous night within Indigenous communities and no one was likely to have done anything about it. Warren Mundine, among other Aboriginal leaders, has condemned the lack of action to stop real-time pedophilia within his people’s communities.

The libertarian Bettina Arndt (who was brought up in an atheist family) made a not dissimilar point when interviewed on The Bolt Report late last month. Asked about the fact that (now) French president Emmanuel Macron is married to a woman 25 years his senior whom he met when he was 15 years and she was his teacher, Ms Arndt had this to say:

It’s total hypocrisy. We jump up and down in the Royal Commission about abuse of people in institutions. We don’t give a stuff about the major risk for children which is, you know, children in single parent families being abused by boyfriends passing in and out of those families… There are a whole lot of areas [of sexual child abuse] we don’t discuss because they are not politically correct. Obviously, we’re trying to get the Catholic Church [and] attack churches. This area’s rife with hypocrisy.

George Pell was correct. The Royal Commission’s findings have revealed that in the period from 1950 until 2010 child sexual abuse was rife within Australian – and other – societies. There was child sexual abuse within religious, secular and government institutions alike. The Catholic Church was not the only cab-on-the- rank.

It should be remembered that, not so long ago, pedophilia in general and pederasty in particular was somewhat fashionable in intellectual circles.

Remember Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita which celebrated the relationship between a middle-aged male and a 12 year old nymphet? There was scant criticism when the novel and the first film version of Nabokov’s work was released.

Remember the ridicule that was piled upon morals campaigner Mary Whitehouse in the 1960s and 1970s? In November 2012, the British historian Dominic Sandbrook reviewed Ben Thompson’s edited collection Ban This Filth!: Mary Whitehouse and the Battle to Keep Britain Innocent (Faber and Faber, 2012) in The Sunday Times. Sandbrook wondered if Mrs Whitehouse was “quite as cranky as she looked at the time”. He quoted from a letter Mary Whitehouse wrote to the BBC objecting to the 1973 song Do You Want To Touch Me (oh Yeah) on the BBC show Crackerjack – which contained the lyrics:

Every growing boy needs a little joy,Beggin’ on my knees, baby, if you pleaseEvery growing boy needs a little toy,I’m a natural man doin’ all I can,Every Friday night, I got to get my share,I’m waiting so long, oh

Mary Whitehouse was ridiculed at the time. But the singer/songwriter was none other than Gary Glitter – who, in time, became a convicted pedophile.

In Australia, the ABC still will not redress – or even report – the fact that in July 1975 its chairman Professor Richard Downing declared that Australians should “understand” the urges of pederasts and said that “in general, men will sleep with young boys”. Professor Downing, speaking in his official capacity as ABC chairman, was defending an ABC Radio program which was presented by self-confessed pedophile Richard Neville. Neville interviewed three pederasts in the ABC’s Sydney studio who spoke about their assaults on young boys. The ABC did not report the matter to NSW Police at the time and has never adopted a duty of care with respect to the pederasts’ victims – who, if alive, would be around 50 years of age today.

An ABC journalist would not accept a Catholic or Anglican bishop refusing to accept responsibility for events in his diocese four decades ago. But the current ABC chairman Justin Milne has advised me that “there is nothing to be gained by revisiting the matter”. An unpleasant double standard, to be sure – especially in view of the ABC’s support for Louise Milligan’s enquiries concerning events of 40 years ago.

In its wisdom, the Royal Commission decided not to conduct hearings into institutional responses by the Australian media to instances of child sexual abuse. This despite the evident offending against children at the BBC, of which the case of the late Jimmy Savile is the most notorious example. The Royal Commission also did not hold hearings with respect to Islamic institutions or government schools.

While the Royal Commission chose not to conduct hearings into the ABC on Islamic institutions or government schools, it focused overwhelmingly on the Catholic Church in general and Cardinal George Pell in particular.

This was lapped up by sections of the Australian media – particularly the ABC, Fairfax Media (mainly The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald), The Saturday Paper, The Guardian Australia, Channel 9’s 60 Minutes, Channel 10’s The Project and Sky News’ Paul Murray Live and Hinch Live (the latter program is no longer extant).

While all these media outlets employ objective journalists, it is true that some contain a high proportion of alienated ex-Catholics along with Catholics who disagree with the social conservatism of George Pell. Then there are the secular atheists, many of a sneering disposition, who resent believers – particularly those of Christian disposition.

In short, sections of the media have used the Royal Commission’s obsession with Catholicism to run campaigns against the Catholic Church.

In what the Royal Commission called its “wrap” of its public hearings, three weeks were devoted to the Catholic Church. This was roughly the same amount of time devoted to all other institutions – religious, secular and government combined.

Writing in her Catholic Talk blog in February 2017, Monica Doumit quoted Royal Commission chairman Justice Peter McClellan AM as stating that around 40 per cent of all complaints received by the Royal Commission related to Catholic institutions. During the second half of the 20^th Century, Catholics amounted to between 20 per cent and 25 per cent of the Australian population. What’s more, the Catholic Church ran many more schools, orphanages, hospitals and the like than other religious or secular institutions – judged on a per capita basis.

The figures presented by Counsel Assisting Gail Furness SC on 6 February 2017, the first day of the Catholic “wrap”, were truly shocking. The raw statistics were provided by the Catholic Church and interpreted by the Royal Commission. Ms Furness commenced her comments as follows:

Now, in terms of the results, between January 1950 and February 2015, 4,444 people alleged incidents of child sexual abuse made to 93 Catholic Church authorities. These claims related to over 1,000 separate institutions.

78 per cent of the claims were lodged by males and 90 per cent of the alleged perpetrators were male. Clearly, these were overwhelmingly crimes of men against boys – a fact that the Royal Commission has tended to avoid. This matter is well dealt with by Dr Philippa Martyr in her article in the April 2017 issue of Quadrant – the magazine founded by Jim McAuley.

Ms Furness went on to state that, within the time period 1950 to 2010, “7 per cent of priests were alleged perpetrators”. Not surprisingly, this statement led to widespread reporting that 7 per cent of the Catholic priests are pedophiles – and did huge reputational damage to current Catholic priests. Responding after Gail Furness’ address, the Truth, Justice and Healing Commission’s chief executive Francis Sullivan accepted what became the media’s interpretation. Mr Sullivan told the Royal Commission that “the data tells us that over six decades from 1950 to 2010, some 1265 Catholic priests were the subject of a child abuse claim”.

This was a true statement. But was it an accurate assessment of the contemporary church? No. Surprising it was the non-Catholic Gail Furness who provided a reassessment before the Royal Commission on Wednesday 16 February 2017. This is what she said:

Between January 1950 and February 2015, 4,445 people alleged incidents of child sexual abuse in 4,765 claims. The vast majority of claims alleged abuse that started in the period 1950 to 1989 inclusive. The largest proportion of first alleged incidents of child sexual abuse, 29 per cent, occurred in the 1970s. (Emphasis added).

In other words, what Ms Furness eventually addressed – and what Mr Sullivan consistently overlooked – is that pedophilia in the Catholic Church is essentially an historical crime. Repugnant? – yes. Important? – yes. But contemporary? – overwhelmingly, no.

This reflects the fact that the Catholic Church was the first institution in Australia to set up a procedure to handle child sex abuse cases. The reference is to the Melbourne Response set up by (then) Archbishop Pell in Melbourne in 1996 and Towards Healing set up by the other archdioceses and all the dioceses in 1997.

This fact is not known within large sections of the media. For example, on the ABC TV New Year’s Eve coverage, film reviewer David Stratton had this to say about the film Spotlight:

This is a true story of investigative journalism in the great tradition of All the President’s Men. From their base at the prestigious Boston Globe newspaper, a handful of dedicated journalists pursue the horrific story of the abuses of pedophile priests, facing opposition every step of the way but leading the world in the exposure of these crimes. [Emphasis added]

This is hopelessly wrong. The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” reporting – which inspired the film – took place in 2002, some six years after the Melbourne Response was set up in co-operation with Victoria Police.

But you would never know this if you only listened to Francis Sullivan.   In a major speech at the Villa Maria Parish in Sydney’s Hunter’s Hill on 10 March 2017, Mr Sullivan never once mentioned the action which the Catholic Church took in Australia to tackle child sexual abuse close to two decades before the establishment of the Royal Commission. It is reasonable to criticise the processes of both the Melbourne Response and Towards Healing – but it is incomplete to ignore their existence.

Francis Sullivan’s speech contained nothing but criticism of the Catholic Church. As Geraldine Doogue – hardly a conservative Catholic in the tradition of Cardinal Pell – told The Weekend Australian Magazine’s Greg Bearup, who wrote a profile on Sullivan which was published on 6-7 May 2017:

The church in Australia is the greatest supplier of social welfare outside the government…I think Francis has decided that he can’t say anything good. It’s a tactic in my opinion. I applaud it [what he’s trying to achieve with respect to the Royal Commission] but I don’t think it’s the whole story of the Catholic Church.

The media focus of the Royal Commission’s coverage of Catholics has led to a distortion of the sad universality of a terrible crime.

While spending 15 days on the Catholic “wrap”, the Royal Commission spent a mere half a day on its Uniting Church “wrap” – hearing only three witnesses in the process. Here’s a quote from Counsel Assisting Angus Stewart SC’s introduction concerning the Uniting Church “wrap”.

In the 40 years since the Church’s inauguration, there have been 2,504 incidents or allegations of child sexual abuse that have been reported as having occurred at an institution or place of worship of the Uniting Church.

That’s 2,504 incidents or allegations in the period between 1977, when the Uniting Church was formed, and 2017. This compares with 4,445 claims with respect to the Catholic Church between 1950 and 2015. And the Catholic Church is five times larger than the Uniting Church. Moreover, the Royal Commission did not include allegations in the period 1950 to 1977 with respect to the Presbyterian, Congregational and Methodist communities which folded into the Uniting Church in 1977. This would take the number of allegations beyond 2,504, especially since it seems that child sexual abuse was at its worst in the 1960s and 1970s.

Evidence presented to the Royal Commission suggests that no real action was taken with respect to a nest of pedophile teachers at the Uniting Church’s Knox Grammar School in Sydney until a group of old boys went to NSW Police in 2009 – over a decade after the establishment of the Melbourne Response.

On the Royal Commission’s own figures, a child was safer in a Catholic institution than a Uniting Church institution any time after 1950. Yet you would not get an idea of this reality by following the reportage of the Royal Commission on the ABC, in Fairfax Media, The Saturday Paper, The Guardian Australia, 60 Minutes, The Project or Paul Murray Live. Allegations against the Jehovah Witness religion, on a per capita basis, are dramatically higher than for either the Catholic or the Uniting churches.

This is not a matter of nit-picking. The Royal Commission has used instances of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church to enquire into genuine matters of freedom of religion that pertain to Catholicism – apparently with the support of Francis Sullivan. No other institution has been the subject of such scrutiny.

Justice McClellan and his colleagues believe that the Royal Commission is entitled to look into such teachings and practices with respect to the Catholic Church as canon law, clericalism, celibacy, the confessional, psycho-sexual development, seminary training, the Vatican, church history and lay leadership.

The justification for all this is that sexual child abuse is exceptional in the Catholic Church. However, this theory falls to pieces once it is realised that child sexual abuse, person to person, was probably greater in the Uniting Church – an institution which has married clergy, no compulsory celibacy, no sacrament of confession, female ministers and in recent times has supported same-sex marriage.

The Royal Commission has not merely focused attention on the Catholic Church’s teachings. It has also interfered with the media. Following one of my columns in The Weekend Australian, the Royal Commission’s chief executive officer Philip Reed wrote to me asserting that I was wrong to claim that Cardinal Pell had been subjected to a greater enquiry than anyone else. This was true – but Mr Reed went into denial when his error was pointed out. I understand Mr Reed made a similar complaint to Andrew Bolt. Philip Reed refuses to answer the question as to whether he approached any other media figures in an attempt to influence their comments on the Royal Commission or correct their alleged or real errors.The Royal Commission’s focus on Cardinal Pell has made it possible for the media to do likewise. I pointed out to the ABC’s managing director and editor-in-chief Michelle Guthrie that the public broadcaster had highlighted serious allegations made against the cardinal before the Royal Commission but had all but ignored the fact that Gail Furness (who is regarded by many as hostile to Pell) subsequently submitted to Justice McClellan that many of these allegations were without substance. Despite my documentation of all these instances – Ms Guthrie flicked the matter to her offsider Alan Sunderland who threw the switch to denial.

I have just read ABC journalist Louise Milligan’s latest hatchet job on Cardinal Pell titled Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell (MUP, 2017). The only new allegations consist of people’s recollections of conversations which allegedly took place three decades or more ago. One involves a person who, though located in a room next door to the one George Pell was in, can relate an overheard conversation of Cardinal Pell three decades ago with such accuracy that Ms Milligan believes it warrants being reported in direct speech. This is unprofessional journalism. I covered some of these matters in my column in The Weekend Australian on 20 May 2017.

It seems that the ABC fails to train journalists that you cannot believe what anyone says simply because you want to. Some people have bad memories, some exaggerate, while others have clear “recollections” of events which never happened. Memory is very fallible thing as Justice McClellan himself wrote in an article published in the Australian Law Journal in 2006.

Among other comments, Justice McClellan warned about the ability of a person to implant a false memory in the mind of another, said that false memories of trauma are possible and reflected that, in reality, our memories are unstable and malleable and that – even without external influences – memory will fade over time. He also acknowledged that memories may be altered by post-event factors.

Reporters like Louise Milligan would be well advised to read Justice McClellan’s 2006 article along with Daniel L. Schacter’s The Seven Sins of Memory before believing what they want to believe.

The sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, other churches plus secular and government institutions was shocking. Truly shocking. But recent statistics from the Archdiocese of Sydney indicate that there were about zero such crimes over the past two decades. I understand there were very few offenders in the Archdiocese of Hobart throughout the period examined by the Royal Commission.

The problem is that the Royal Commission may use a crime within the Catholic Church, which reached its height in the 1970s, to recommend clamping down on religious practices today. This would be an unhealthy development in a democracy – for both religious and social reasons – since it would establish a dangerous precedent.

The Christian tradition today faces two fundamental challenges. From militant Islamists who want to kill Christians and place the so-called Islamic State’s black flag on the Vatican. And from intolerant atheists who hold believers in contempt, particularly those of the Christian tradition, and wish to restrict their freedom of expression and action.

In his introduction to Christopher Dawson’s The Gods of Revolution, Arnold Toynbee wrote that for Dawson “the destiny of Western Civilisation is bound up with Christianity” and that “if Western civilisation were to become irretrievably ‘post Christian’, its prospects… would be dark”.

It’s good to see that the Christopher Dawson Centre today speaks out as an opponent of the dark in what was once called Hobart Town.

 

 

 The Benedictine Contribution to Western Christianity

Fr Pius Mary Noonan, OSB

Hobart, 5 April 2017

 

First of all, I am no historian. So, when Dr Daintree was so kind as to ask me to deliver this lecture, after giving it some thought, I suggested having a look at the Benedictine contribution specifically from the inside. Many historians have documented with meticulous detail what has happened in the west under the influence of sons and daughters of the Patriarch of western monasticism. I could not possibly add to that. What I think I can do however, is point out some of the reasons for which it happened: the spiritual genius of the man who left such an indelible mark, not only on his own order and on the western Church, but even on the whole world.

 

I propose to have a look at several texts of the Rule which, in my opinion, have contributed not a little to shaping our culture. I would divide them into three categories which present our holy Father St Benedict as:

• a man of prayer

• a man of work

• a legislator.

 

St Benedict the man of prayer

Quite a few people, when mention is made of monks, think almost spontaneously of what they produce: wine, beer, liqueur, olive oil, cheese, etc. But, as you probably are aware, the Benedictine motto is “Ora et labora — pray and work” in that order. A monk is first and foremost a man of prayer. What then are the key aspects of Benedict’s life of prayer that have helped shape civilisation in the west?

Let’s mention first of all a few phrases of the Rule that are foundational for any serious life in the divini schola servitii, the school of divine service, as St Benedict calls the monastery. Benedict, whose only desire, according to St Gregory the Great, was to please God (soli Deo placere cupiens), tells his monks that they must prefer nothing to the love of Christ (nihil amori Christi praeponere). Such desire for God and love for Christ gives direction to the monk’s life, orients it continually towards our final goal. It also gives shape to the practical way prayer is offered in Benedictine communities. Even though St Benedict did not invent the 8-fold prayer of the divine office (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline), his legislation in the Rule did set the standard for all subsequent legislation in religious orders up until the 20th century. Alongside other spiritual masters, his insistence that the entire psalter be recited each week left an indelible mark on ecclesiastical legislation, even for the secular clergy.

It is not possible to overly stress this point when one considers the role of the liturgy in the Church. If it is true, as Vatican II said so powerfully that “the Holy Eucharist is the source and summit of the Church’s entire life”, and if the various hours of the Divine Office are like the rays of that Eucharistic sun which shines over the life of the Church, it can only be the case that Benedictine monasteries have contributed not a little throughout the centuries to giving form to the Church in its most sublime aspect: a city built on a mountain gathered around its Lord in prayer, receiving from Him the light which it then radiates over the rest of the world. The centrality of the Divine Office throughout the day, with the apparent loss of time it involves, is the most important manifestation of the otium sanctum, the “holy idleness” so dear to our fathers and fundamental not only to monastic life, but to any life in the spirit. Whereas our modern technological era makes it more and more difficult for the mind to rest in thoughtful appreciation of reality, our ancestors knew how to “stop and smell the flowers”, to make leisure time in which one could pray and meditate, all indications of a healthy society in which the supreme value is not material production but spiritual progress, not doing but being.

The focus on the Sacred Liturgy in the Benedictine Tradition goes hand in hand with lectio divina. This “reading of divine or spiritual things” includes first and foremost the Holy Scriptures themselves but also all that it has inspired such as the commentaries by the Fathers of the Church as well as everything that prepares the mind to understand it and profit from its lessons. St Benedict reserved several hours a day for this activity, more in winter than in summer. He clearly wanted his monks to be well-read, well-instructed, well-armed to practice their profession of singing the praises of God. In prescribing this attentiveness to the content of Divine Revelation, he was also equipping his monks to become experts in the ways of God, to teach others, to preach the Gospel. It is no surprise if the Benedictine Tradition very quickly gave rise to exceptionally gifted monk preachers, apostles and missionaries.

 

St Benedict the man of work

The other half of the Benedictine motto is “labora”. St Benedict specifies that “Idleness is an enemy of the soul; and hence at stated hours the brethren ought to occupy themselves in the labour of their hands” (Rule, ch. 48). He goes on to prescribe just how much time is to be devoted to this labour according to the diverse seasons of the year.

Thanks to manual work, the monk conforms himself to the example of the Fathers, the Apostles, Saint Joseph the Worker, nay Christ himself, obeying the common law and preaching the dignity of humble work by which man is associated with the work of the Creator. He finds therein the sure and excellent way of self-denial and humbly takes part in helping the monastery provide for its needs and those of the poor. Manual work also teaches the monk solidarity with all the working sectors of people and makes him personally experience what it means to slog to earn a living.

It is easy to see how such an ethos of work has contributed to building up Western civilisation and to this day inspires solidarity among various classes of people. Perhaps this is one of the aspects of the monk’s life which favoured in a special way the implantation of monastic communities in missionary countries: the monks, being men of work, not only gave the good example of making a living for themselves, but also taught the people of other countries the skills they had developed in Europe.

The value of manual labour, not only for providing for one’s own needs, but also for giving peace to the soul, is admirably exemplified by a touching incident in the life of St Benedict recounted by St Gregory. “At certain Goth,” he writes “poor of spirit, that left the world, was received by the man of God; whom on a day he commanded to take a scythe, and to cleanse a certain plot of ground from briers, for the making of a garden, which ground was by the side of a lake. The Goth as he was there labouring, by chance the head of the scythe slipped off, and fell into the water, which was so deep, that there was no hope ever to get it again. The poor Goth, in great fear, ran unto Maurus and told him what he had lost, confessing his own fault and negligence: Maurus forthwith went to the servant of God, giving him to understand thereof, who came straightways to the lake: and took the handle out of the Goth’s hand, and put it into the water, and the iron head by and by ascended from the bottom, and entered again into the handle of the scythe, which he delivered to the Goth, saying: “Behold here is thy scythe again, work on, and be sad no more.” Labora, et noli contristari.

“Work on, and be sad no more”. A profound thought lies behind this expression. Work, and be sad no more. There is here an entire ethic of work as a remedy to sadness and all it can lead to. Is it not significant that, along with an increase in “leisure” in our modern world, we see also an increase in sadness, depression, and suicide? “Work on, and be sad no more”, says St Benedict. If you want to avoid sadness, find yourself some healthy form of work adapted to your capacities, and work on. Seek to reach your potential by ardent work. Such a philosophy of work, inspired by the Gospel and implemented by monks throughout the centuries, is one our world is in dire need of. Instead of finding fulfilment by the development of talents in and through work, our present day world seems hell-bent on avoiding work as much as possible. To make the most money with the least effort and have the longest weekends and holidays seems to many the ideal, and yet, how terribly depressed our contemporaries are as they go feverishly about their daily affairs, eyes glued on their mobile phones, or ears squeezed between a set of headphones, ever in search of some new distraction to dissipate the boredom, and totally unconscious of the neighbour at their side. St Benedict is there to repeat again and again: “Work, and be sad no more”. Man was created in a garden, one he was commissioned to cultivate, and so it is that man must busy himself in tranquility with healthy work if he wishes to be happy.

I might share here an incident that struck me profoundly, and which will illustrate the correlation between the “ora” and the “labora” of the Benedictine Tradition. At the abbey of Flavigny in France many years ago I welcomed an American couple who had never visited a monastery. After a bit of conversation, I offered to show them the audio-visual presentation of the community which consisted at the time of photo slides and a commentary by one of the monks, interspersed with Gregorian chant. When it was over, the lady looked at me and said: “When I came here, I was thinking: ‘These monks must really spend all their time in idleness; no wonder they get nothing done. But now, I’m wondering how you actually do everything you do!”. What she meant was that it is rather astounding how much work monks actually get done, even though they sacrifice long hours each day to activities which seem an idle waste of time, namely silent prayer, chanting psalms, reading the Bible. Well, that’s precisely why they are so effective. Spending time with God in liturgical prayer, sacrificing time to listen in silence to His Word, knowing how to “lose time” reading really good and wholesome books that nourish the mind and heart, such activities actually sharpen the acuity of the soul, and give it redoubled capacity for work. It also places things in their proper perspective, and allows the heart to be fully conscious of priorities. In the world, so much time is wasted on futilities. But the monk has no time for futilities. Every minute of his day is put to good use. Labora, et noli contristari.

A presentation of monastic work would not be complete however without making mention of intellectual and pastoral work. As mentioned above, the Rule provides for a few hours a day of lectio divina. That study of divine things inevitably led the monks to becoming scholars and missionaries. Think only of St Augustine of Canterbury, the apostle of England who was sent there by another great Benedictine, none other than St Gregory the Great himself. Think of St Boniface the apostle of Germany, of Venerable Bede, St Anselm of Canterbury, Hildebrand (St Gregory VII), initiator of what came to be known as the Gregorian reform, the first five Abbots of Cluny (Odo, Odilo, Maiolus, Hughes, Peter the Venerable) Rabanus Maurus, John of Glastonbury, Jean Mabillon, Blessed Columba Marmion, Blessed Alphonsus Schuster. Here in Australia, one cannot fail to mention men like Bede Polding, William Bernard Ullathorne, Rosendo Salvado, all Benedictine monks who became missionary bishops and found no contradiction between their life of praise learned in the cloister, and the mission to souls which was destined to give rise to other “schools of the divine service”. It is no secret that Archbishop Polding’s dream was to make of Australia one big Benedictine diocese.

We cannot fail to mention as well the legions of monks who have assisted the Church throughout the centuries by their expertise in all the sacred disciplines. Suffice to mention that, at the beginning of the 20th century, when St Pius X wanted to have a new revised edition of St Jerome’s vulgate, he entrusted this work to the Benedictines of the abbey of St Jerome in Rome. The reputation of quality work achieved in the silence of the cloister was well earned by generations of monks and nuns. For we must not omit to mention some of the illustrious women, Benedictine nuns, have illustrated the Church by their learning: to the names of Gertrude, Mechtildis, Hildegard, we should add those of modern nuns who left an indelible mark on monastic spirituality in recent times, such as Mother Cécile Bruyère, first abbess of Solesmes, or Mother Marie Cronier, foundress of Dourgnes in France. The spiritual, moral, intellectual, pastoral impetus given by St Benedict has carried through to our own day.

 

St Benedict the Legislator

St Benedict is not ordinarily conceived of as a political figure. And yet, I think it worthwhile to say a few words about the mode of government which is given form in the Rule and which has prevailed in Benedictine monasteries throughout the centuries. Benedict makes the abbot responsible for everything, everything that goes right and everything that goes wrong. Consider such phrases as this: “Let the Abbot be ever mindful that at the dreadful judgment of God an account will have to be given both of his own teaching and of the obedience of his disciples. And let him know that to the fault of the shepherd shall be imputed any lack of profit which the father of the household may find in his sheep” (ch. 2); “the Abbot ought always to remember what he is, and what he is called, and to know that to whom more is committed, from him more is required; and he must consider how difficult and arduous a task he hath undertaken, of ruling souls and adapting himself to many dispositions” (ch. 2); “the Abbot is bound to use the greatest care, and to strive with all possible prudence and zeal, not to lose any one of the sheep committed to him. He must know that he hath undertaken the charge of weakly souls, and not a tyranny over the strong” (ch. 27). It is not without trepidation that a man would take upon himself such imposing duties that will have everlasting consequences.

Let’s pause for a moment. By placing the abbot before his eternal destiny, St Benedict places things in their proper perspective, just as the Lord Himself did in the parable of the talents. Upon his return, the master of the household shows no mercy to the evildoers, to the shepherds who had no care for the flock entrusted to them. Such a teaching has a profound and lasting effect on anyone in authority who truly takes to heart what is said here. The reminder that in the end one must give an account to an eternal, non-corruptible Judge who has power to open the gates of heaven or condemn to hell was a timely one that shaped not only monasteries but also the solid European governments of the middle ages. Admirable figures such as King St Louis IX who prayed his Hours each day in the midst of his administration of the kingdom or Emperor St Henry II, a Benedictine Oblate, were the logical, sublime products of this evangelical truth. It was only when eternal realities were ignored that princes became tyrants. I might add that the very same considerations are perhaps what is lacking most in our modern governments. Our lawmaking bodies no longer have the conviction that they are but servants of an eternal law expressed in nature and therefore given by God. They no longer believe that they are accountable to the Supreme Being who will judge, reward or condemn. Modern political leaders would do well to take to heart St Benedict’s stern remonstrances to the abbot.

But if St Benedict makes the abbot responsible for everything, this does not mean he considers him to have direct and infallible inspiration at every step. Such a concept of authority has never been a Catholic one, in which even the divine right of popes and kings was never considered to be absolute, but always subordinate to the higher authority of Christ. Indeed, St Benedict stresses also that the abbot must take counsel. Immediately after the chapter on the abbot’s role (ch. 2), chapter 3 evokes the way in which the abbot must call the brethren to council every time there is an important question that needs to be treated and decided. Interestingly, whereas for the ordinary, everyday decisions, the abbot is encouraged to take counsel only of the seniors, that is, the elder monks who are experienced, when there is some more important issue at hand, the abbot is to convoke the entire community, even the youngest members. Here we see the common sense of the legislator perfected by the insight of the saint: “all should be called to council, because it is often to the younger that the Lord revealeth what is best.” In chapter 63, on the order to be kept in community, the patriarch gives us a deeper insight into why he insists on taking advice even from the juniors: “in no place whatsoever let age decide the order, or be prejudicial to it; for Samuel and Daniel, when but children, judged the elders”. This magnanimous appeal to all the members of the community concludes with a double admonition: “let the brethren give their advice with all subjection and humility, and not presume stubbornly to defend their own opinion; but rather let the matter rest with the Abbot’s discretion, that all may submit to whatever he shall judge to be best. Yet, even as it becometh disciples to obey their master, so doth it behove him to order all things prudently and with justice.” In other words, all are invited to express their opinion, but always with humility. But in the end, it is the abbot who must make the decision, and he will answer to God for it.

This form of government is one that has proved itself as solid and has survived the centuries. Even our democratic age has a lot to learn here in terms of the way in which one expresses one’s opinions, the way in which one listens to the opinions of others, and the way in which the ultimate decision lies with one man who will answer to God.

 

Conclusion

On 1 April 2005, just one day before the death of John Paul II, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, upon receiving the St. Benedict Award for the promotion of life and the family in Europe, pronounced what has come to be known as the “Subiaco Address”. In this discourse, Ratzinger, after seeking to draw the lessons from the crisis Europe now finds itself in, concluded that today, what we need are “men who, through an enlightened and lived faith, render God credible in this world”. After evoking a fact that we are all acutely and painfully aware of, namely, the negative testimony of Christians who speak about God and live against him, thus darkening God’s image and opening the door to disbelief, he added: “To understand true humanity, we need men who have their gaze directed to God. We need men whose intellects are enlightened by the light of God, and whose hearts God opens, so that their intellects can speak to the intellects of others, and so that their hearts are able to open up to the hearts of others. Only through men who have been touched by God, can God come near to men. We need men like Benedict of Norcia, who at a time of dissipation and decadence, plunged into the most profound solitude, succeeding, after all the purifications he had to suffer, to ascend again to the light, to return and to found Montecasino, the city on the mountain that, with so many ruins, gathered together the forces from which a new world was formed. In this way Benedict, like Abraham, became the father of many nations. The recommendations to his monks presented at the end of his Rule are guidelines that show us also the way that leads on high, beyond the crisis and the ruins”. And to conclude by quoting the Rule, ch. 72, this chapter which is as it were the final testament of St Benedict:

“As there is an evil zeal of bitterness, which separates from God, and leads to hell, so there is a good zeal, which keeps us from vice, and leads to God and to life everlasting. Let monks, therefore, exert this zeal with most fervent love; that is, “let them give precedence to one another”. Let them most patiently endure one another’s infirmities, whether of body or of mind. Let them vie with one another in obedience. Let no one follow what he thinks good for himself, but rather what seems good for another. Let them cherish fraternal charity with chaste love, fear God, love their Abbot with sincere and humble affection, and prefer nothing whatever to Christ. And may He bring us all alike to life everlasting.”

Dr Cunich (University of Hong Kong History Department) gave a public lecture at Parliament House, Hobart, on Thursday 17 November.This is the full text of his paper:

‘When Civilisations Meet: What East Asia wants from the West’

It is both an honour and a pleasure to be here in Hobart to share some of my thoughts on the relationship between Asia and the West in the early twenty-first century. It is not often that an early modern historian such as myself, whose academic interests are firmly anchored in the history of Europe in the sixteenth century, is given an opportunity to muse about the part of the world that he has called home for the last twenty-five years. But my intellectual engagement with East Asia goes back even further than that, for when I was at school in the 1970s, the curriculum was being transformed as Australia become aware of the need to engage more wholeheartedly with the countries to our north, and their ‘teeming millions’. In my last two years of secondary school, the history and geography curriculums in particular gave me an opportunity to learn about Asia for the first time. While our geography classes tended to focus on Southeast Asia and the former British colonies of Malaysia, the history course, although still dominated by the West and the two world wars (as I believe it still is to this day), had several units of study on East Asia. I learned about the Meiji Restoration in the mid-nineteenth century and the modernisation of Japan, all with a view to explaining the horrors of the Japanese aggression in the Pacific War. I also learned about the much slower opening of China to Western influence, the revolutionary activities of Dr Sun Yat-sen, the reluctance of the Qing dynasty in general and the Empress Dowager Cixi in particular to embrace change, and the eventual civil war which proved such a disaster for the most populous country in the world. Little did I realize when I was sitting at my desk all those years ago in intellectually isolated country NSW, that I would one day be teaching at Sun Yat Sen’s own university, the institution that he acknowledged as the ‘birthplace’ of his revolutionary ideas, or that I would be writing about him and his place in the evolution of modern China in my recent history of the University. So in some ways I feel that this talk is a particularly welcome opportunity to bring my own personal engagement with East Asia into some perspective as I begin to prepare for a retirement back in the familiar embrace of the West.I am also glad to be giving this talk under the aegis of the Christopher Dawson Centre. While Dawson is, of course, best known for his work on the cultural history of Western civilisation and the role of Christianity in the long development of the West, he also had a keen interest in the impact of Western civilisation on the rest of the world – and especially Asia. He made some preliminary observations in 1952 when he devoted a whole chapter to ‘Asia and Europe’ in his book titled Understanding Europe.[1] In 1955 he published The Mongol Mission, a selection of the written accounts of Catholic missionaries who were sent by the medieval popes to the Mongol emperors of China in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.[2] Dawson brought these musings up-to-date in 1956 when he published two influential articles in the Tablet on the impact of the West in contemporary Asia, released as a pamphlet in 1957 under the title of The Revolt in Asia.[3] Dawson was fascinated by the paradoxical role of Western nationalism in this Asian revolt, a movement that was rallying Asian peoples against the political, economic and cultural influence of the West, but at the same time was removing the age-old barriers that had prevented communication between East and West, ‘doing all in its power to diffuse Western education, Western science and Western political ideologies’. In the third and final phase of the ‘world revolution’ in Asia, Dawson asserted that ‘the internal transformation of oriental society by the spread of Western education and the rise of nationalist movements … represented at the same time a revolt against the West and the acceptance by the East of Western culture and political ideology’.[4] It seems to me that Dawson’s interpretation of the Asian Revolt is as relevant to us today as it was in the 1950s. Here we are sixty years after Dawson wrote The Revolt in Asia, and Asia appears to be revolting yet again.David, you asked me to speak ‘on any aspect of the history and influence of Western Civilisation, with particular emphasis perhaps on your own experiences in Asia’. I have taken you at your word and plan to give a very personal interpretation of where East Asia finds itself at present with respect to its relationship with the culture of the West. I am not a specialist in this field; in fact, when one of my colleagues heard about this talk he said, ‘But you have no expertise in that area!’ While that is true – I am not an expert on Asian history, politics, economics, society or culture – I have nevertheless lived in East Asia for nearly twenty-five years and have experienced some remarkable times of rapid change. I have also travelled widely throughout the region; this has given me an opportunity to watch the transformations that have been taking place in Asia over the last quarter of a century, especially in China. My own university attracts speakers from all over the world who regularly lecture us on Asia; moreover, I have learned a lot while simply listening to my students from different parts of East Asia as they discuss their aspirations, fears and hopes for the future. I am also an inveterate newspaper clipper, so I have trawled through my collection of news clippings from the last few years in bringing my thoughts on the present situation in Asia into focus for this talk. So what I lack in expertise, I hope I will make up for in basic experience.But first, let me define the geopolitical area that I have described as ‘East Asia’ in the title of this talk. It is that region which used to be known as ‘The Orient’ until such terms became taboo in the academic world because of political correctness. But even in the old days, ‘The Orient’ was a difficult term to pin down: it referred more to a set of cultural norms that were placed in opposition to the dominant Western belief systems than an actual place on the map. My definition of modern East Asia is based on a geographical and political understanding of a globalised world which has chopped the globe up into ‘regions’. It has always struck me as curious that, in an age of so-called ‘globalisation’, we still need ‘regions’ to understand how the world works, but this is, of course, linked to the way in which we try to understand the economic and political functioning of a global system that is far to difficult intellectually to swallow in one gulp. To me, then, East Asia consists of five major states bordering on the South China Sea, the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan, and perhaps one other developing nation which was for centuries associated with Chinese overlordship. These modern-day nation-states are:China, with a population of 1.357 billion in 2013, and the Chinese satellites of Taiwan (23 millions), Hong Kong (7 millions) and Macau (600,000)Japan, with a population of 127 millionsThe Philippines, with a population of 98 millionsSouth Korea, with a population of 50 millions, andNorth Korea, with a population of 25 millions (we think!)The final state that I would want to include in this list is Vietnam (population 90 millions) because I think that in many ways it is more integrated with the East Asia nations than it is with the Southeast Asian countries further south, both economically and culturally. Together, these six countries have a population of 1.778 billion people (25% of the world’s population) and are home to some of the most dynamic and fastest growing economies in the world – even Japan, which is now economically stagnant, was for a time in the second half of the twentieth century a similar economic dynamo, but it is worth remembering that Japan still the third-largest economy in the world in terms of GDP. It is self-evident that this area is one that is of enormous importance for the future of the world, especially in an economic sense. China and Japan are the second and third largest economies in the world by GDP ($11.4 trillion and $4.7 trillion), and South Korea is fast catching up to the other countries in the top 10 ($1.4 trillion, currently in eleventh place).[5] Everyone predicts that China will be the largest world economy by 2021, even though it is notoriously difficult to know exactly what China’s current GDP is.[6] With economic power comes political and cultural clout, so the whole world is watching East Asia as it moves forward to becoming the centre of the world economy in the next few years. Within the next decade, we are told, China will once again be the Middle Kingdom of old, albeit a Communist kingdom!            There is, of course, a problem with using nation-states as the basis for an interpretation of East Asia’s place in the world today. In doing so we leave out a very significant part of the East Asian land mass – the Russian Far East, a huge area stretching from Lake Baikal to the Sea of Okhotsk. The problem is that this area has never really been included in the Western notion of the ‘Far East’ because its connections are largely with Russia and always have been. While it may be geographically East Asian, it certainly does not fit in economically or culturally. I have also left out Mongolia because, even though it is closely linked to China especially in sharing its very long southern border, it has no access to the Sea of Japan and is not generally thought of as part of East Asia – it is more normally spoken of as a Central Asian state. The other problem with taking the modern nation-state as the basis for an evaluation of East-West relationships is that we might be tempted to consider only the formal national policies as being valid measures of a people’s engagement with the outside world. I have rejected this approach, as you will see, because in many East Asian states today there is a marked and growing dichotomy between what the state says and what the people actually think.I would like to start this analysis by telling you what I found in East Asia when I first visited in the late-1980s. While it was already possible to visit China at that time, my only incursion into the sleeping giant of Asia was a brief hour-long walk over the border from the Portuguese enclave of Macau into the ‘special economic zone’ of Zhuhai to the north of the Gongbei gate. What I found there was extraordinary: a long narrow street brightly lit with fluorescent lights and lined with shops selling every type of modern consumer goods and appliances – I had not expected this in Communist China – but only a few yards on either side of the street the traditional China was still evident in all its faded and grimy dullness. The point at which we turned back was the local market, where we saw all manner of animals for sale in cages. As we watched the haggling going on we saw a pangolin being removed from its cage and being killed by clubbing its head against the pavement. This ghastly introduction to so-called ‘modern’ China will always be engraved in my memory.Back in Macau, I was amazed not by the Chinese-ness of the place, but by the feeling that I had seen it all before. Macau was, in many respects, a Baroque European city, with tree-lined civic squares, neo-classical public buildings and dozens of beautiful churches, all reflecting the cultural aspirations of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe. Most of the signs were in Portuguese, and the whole place closed down for the Mediterranean fiesta in the middle of the day. I found this both quaint and rather confronting. I had not expected Macau to be caught in such a time warp because Hong Kong had by that time lost most of its colonial charm and its public places had given way to the sorts of concrete and steel skyscrapers that you see in any other modern city. I have been going back to Macau every year since I arrived in Hong Kong to teach in 1993 because for me it is the perfect teaching resource for any course in early-modern European history. Not only does it have the architecture and the ambiance of a Mediterranean city, it was also the place where Europe’s modern engagement with East Asia began. It was Macau that St Francis Xavier used as a forward base for his missionary activities in Japan in the mid-sixteenth century; Macau then became the headquarters for the Jesuit missionary encounter with China, led by Matteo Ricci and a succession of priest-scholars who were among the few Westerners ever allowed to gain access to the imperial capital of Peking and even the Emperor himself.It was through this acquaintance with Macau and its history that I came to understand that contact and cultural interchange between China and the civilisation of the West stretched back over many centuries, from the diplomatic and trade contacts between the Roman Empire and China in the first century BC, to the great Nestorian migration of the Tang dynasty in the seventh or eighth centuries AD, and the European emissaries sent by the medieval popes to the Mongol emperors in the thirteenth century. The relics of the early Christian settlers in China can still be seen in Xian, even though the Chinese authorities like to play down the significance of the fact that Christianity was a well-established religion in the cosmopolitan court of the Tang emperors more than seven hundred years before the Portuguese reached south China in the sixteenth century. But there is even earlier evidence of contact between China and the West in the red-haired and big-nosed Westerners who settled in the Tarim basin of present-day Xinjiang nearly 4,000 years ago. Our historical gaze regarding the contact between China and the West tends to be directed by historians of the modern world towards the attempts by European imperialists in the nineteenth century to ‘open’ China to Western trade, but how many people realise that the Chinese economy, the largest in the world at the time, had been sucking the majority of European silver hewn from the mines in Mexico and Brazil out of the international system for three hundred years between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. The ‘unequal treaties’ of the nineteenth century therefore represented an attempt by the Europeans to take control of a long-standing globalised economy that had for centuries been largely controlled by the Chinese, despite Western notions that they were in control. At the same time, the Philippines had been colonised by the Spanish from the middle of the sixteenth century and integrated into their global empire and, like the Portuguese in Macau, was used as a bridge to China.            I have started with this long historical aside because it is important for us to understand that the so-called ‘dominance’ of the West in Asia is a relatively recent phenomenon. The ‘modernisation’, or perhaps we should say the ‘Westernisation’ of Japan and China beginning with the Meiji restoration in the 1860s is therefore considered by many Asian scholars to be an aberration in the longer span of the world’s history. Consequently, they also have a rather different take on the current resurgence of Asian economies than we do in the West. What we can be certain of, however, is that the two dominant East Asian civlisations of the nineteenth century had a lot of catching up to do when they came face-to-face with the technologically superior Christian civilisation of the West. Japan was, of course, an early adopter of all things Western, even if she did retain the essential elements of traditional Japanese culture. For the Chinese it was a rather different path to modernisation, with Sun Yat-sen’s early attempts at bringing modern Western nationalism and democracy to China eventually descending into the chaos of a decade-long civil war and the ultimate victory of communism in 1949, at a time when the West was itself divided between democratic and communist blocs. By 1949, however, China had experienced one hundred years of intensive cultural interchange with the West, especially through missionaries who had come primarily to convert pagans, but in the process also brought with them Western education, Western medical advances, and a whole new system of ethics that was willingly adopted by many in the burgeoning urban middle classes. Western missionary activity also made significant inroads in Vietnam, Japan, and especially Korea after 1945; today, around 30% of the population of South Korea are Christian.In the years that followed communist victory in China, the Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese all revolted against both the imperialism of the West and Western values in general. As Christopher Dawson realised with such insight in the 1950s, the century-long presence of the West in Asia was leading to a revolt against Western political dominance, but paradoxically that revolt used the very same cultural and ideological tools of the dominant Western civilisation. In each part of East Asia this revolt was slightly different – anti-colonial in Vietnam, anti-imperial in China, and a programme aimed at beating the Westerners at their own economic game in Japan – and for that reason it led to different results in different parts of East Asia. In Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, there were stunning economic gains through full participation with the global economy from the 1950s. China, Vietnam and North Korea closed their doors to outside influence and aimed at self-sufficiency through a series of disastrous economic policies that blighted people’s lives and left their economies out-of-step with worldwide trends. Even their own cultural history was annihilated in an iconoclastic cataclysm that left millions dead and national treasures destroyed. The Philippines just muddled on, relying on Western aid and military support for its corrupt government and lackluster economy. When China opened itself to renewed economic engagement with the West from the late 1970s under Deng Xiaoping’s policy of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’, a new age of economic development was ushered in which led to startling GDP growth of up to 10% per annum. China’s ‘economic miracle’ rapidly caught up with the rest of East Asia and has ultimately dragged Vietnam into the modern globalised economy through Mainland and Taiwanese investment schemes.            This story of engagement between East Asia and the West obviously did not have an even impact across the region. The Vietnamese did not reach out to the West until after the 1991 Paris Agreements, and the Kim dynasty in Pyongyang has always seen the West (but more particularly the United States) as its enemy. More recently, Rodrigo Duterte has upset his country’s international relations by moving closer to China and rejecting Western concerns about extrajudicial killings as part of his war on drugs. His belligerent rhetoric towards Western nations and the Catholic Church (calling the bishops of the Philippines collectively ‘sons of whores’) has proven popular in a country that has always proudly boasted of being Asia’s only Christian nation, with 86% of the population being Catholic. In Japan, it has been pointed out that the current economic policy, popularly known as Abenomics, represents a rejection of Western fiscal and monetary norms. While Shinzo Abe’s ‘three arrows’ have fallen far short of their target in reviving Japan’s flagging economy, the policy has nevertheless allowed Japan to position herself more favourably in regional geopolitics and begin to dilute some of the pacifist provisions imposed by the West after the Second World War. Abenomoics is seen by many as a means of reasserting Japan’s place in the world, unrestrained by Western influence and more closely allied with her old enemy China.[7] Some commentators have recently argued that all East Asia really wants from the West is respect. Perhaps these anti-Western measures are simply part of a continuing campaign by East Asian powers to demonstrate that they deserve a respected place among the old Western nations in the twenty-first century?Unfortunately, all of these developments seem to indicate the gradual closing of doors that were previously open to Western influences of various kinds, but it is in China that opposition to the key elements of Western civilisation has recently been most startling. The confrontational actions of the Chinese government under the presidency of Xi Jinping since 2013 have sent a chilling warning to those of his comrades who would wish to continue accommodating prevalent Western cultural norms within China. While Xi’s determination to exercise control over the minds of the Chinese and rid the country of harmful Western ideas have been likened to a ‘Maostalgia’ for the good old days of the Cultural Revolution when Mao Zedong was prepared to do anything to crush opposition to the regime, the current programme of de-Westernisation in China has not been as brutal as that of the 1960s.[8] Nevertheless, worrying signs of an all-out war against Western ideas and beliefs have been growing over the last four years. In July 2012, the General Office of the Communist Party of China issued a confidential internal document warning against the infiltration of seven dangerous Western values that are representative of the ‘liberal ways of thinking’ by which the West attempts to subvert other cultures and polities. This warning was widely circulated within the Communist Party in 2013, becoming known as the notorious ‘Document Number 9’,[9] whose implementation led to a sudden crackdown against human rights lawyers, media outlets, academics and various other independent thinkers and artists. The document announced that ‘disseminating thought on the cultural front [is] the most important political task’ of the Party, especially the need to proclaim that ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics and the Chinese dream are the main theme of our age’. Party members were encouraged to ‘expand and strengthen positive propaganda’, and ‘strengthen the management of ideological fronts’ because ‘we must clearly see the ideological situation as a complicated, intense struggle’. The seven areas of concern to the central party machine were listed as:Promoting Western Constitutional Democracy as an attempt to undermine the current leadership and the socialism with Chinese characteristics system of governance;Promoting ‘Universal Western Values’ in an attempt to weaken the theoretical foundations of the party’s leadership;Promoting Civil Society in an attempt to dismantle the ruling party’s social foundation;Promotion of Neoliberalism (unrestrained economic liberalisation) in the guise of Globalisation by Western powers in an attempt to change China’s Basic Economic System;Promoting the West’s Idea of Journalism (‘freedom of the press’), thereby challenging China’s principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to Party discipline;Promoting Historical Nihilism in the guise of ‘reassessing history’ in an attempt to distort Party history and the history of New China; andQuestioning the Reform and Opening of China Policy in a way that deviates from the dogma of Socialism with Chinese characteristics.Party members were enjoined to guard against failures in the so-called ‘ideological sphere’ being promoted by ‘Western anti-China forces’ in their ‘attempt at carrying out Westernisation’. Protection and strengthening of the ‘ideological sphere’ was to be achieved through:Strengthening leadership in the ideological sphere: key leaders must react swiftly and effectively and preemptively resolve all problems in the ideological sphere;Guiding party members to distinguish between true and false theories: resist ‘false tides of thoughts … uphold strict and clear discipline’; ‘We must not permit the dissemination of opinions that oppose the Party’s theory or political line’;Unwavering adherence to the principle of the Party’s control of the media: in political matters the media must be ‘of one heart and mind with the Party’; andConscientiously strengthening management of the ideological battlefield: the management of propaganda ‘on the cultural front’ must be reinforced and absolutely no opportunity or outlet must be allowed ‘for incorrect thinking or viewpoints to spread’.The ‘conscientious strengthening of the ideological battlefield’ that has been attempted through the implementation of Document Number 9 since 2013 has taken various forms, but chief amongst them are (1) a crackdown on media outlets selling Western books, (2) tightening of control over publications entering China (including the kidnapping and detention of five publishers and booksellers from Hong Kong),[10] (3) monitoring of textbooks used in schools and universities to ensure that Western ideologies are not taught in the Chinese education system,[11] (4) close surveillance of academics in universities to ensure that ‘further advances in Marxism’ are made in the social sciences and philosophy,[12] (5) tightened control over news media, (6) greater supervision of the internet in China and the blocking of ideologically unsound content, (7) a clampdown on political activists promoting democracy or Western liberal principles (including in Hong Kong where students involved in the Umbrella Movement of late 2014 have been arrested and convicted for their political activities), (8) the targeting of artists who use political satire in their work, (9) making it more difficult for Western expatriates to enter and stay in China for work,[13] and (10) implementing tighter controls over Christian churches whose religious practices the Party has long perceived as an ‘existential threat to its rule’.[14] In all these areas, the Chinese government has attempted to enforce its control over the minds of its citizens in order to rid China of politically destabilising Western ideas. How successful have they been?            In answering this question I would like to start by making an obvious point of which the Chinese government is itself fully aware. People do not always believe what they are told to believe or do what their governments tell them to do, even within a totalitarian state such as the People’s Republic of China. While it is clear that the Chinese government wishes to restrict the continuing impact of Western ideas through repressive measures, it seems to me unlikely that they will achieve these aims given the existing penetration of Western ways of thinking throughout China, but particularly in the cities. In assessing why I think China and the other countries of East Asia will continue to be influenced by the West, whether they want it or not, I am going to be focusing on the agency of individual people as a conduit for these ideas to spread. In my experience, people within a state such as China actually continue to do whatever they think is right or most expedient for themselves, despite what the government tells them. In exploring the continuing relevance of Western civilisation to East Asian peoples I am going to use the analytical categories that David employed in his book, Soul of the West.[15] These seem to me to be a good starting point for understanding why it is impossible in the modern world for Western civilization NOT to continue to have an impact on East Asia, with the one possible exception of North Korea.            David’s first category in analyzing the ‘primary structural components of our complex [Western] culture’ is language. While he focused on Latin as the ‘principal vehicle of Western civilisation’ in the past,[16] I think in the modern world most people would agree with me that English is now the universal language of Western ideas. This is something which is readily recognised by people in East Asia. People living in Hong Kong or the Philippines have a valuable cultural advantage in the modern globalised economy because they possess higher levels of competence in the use of the English language. Other East Asian nations understand this and have been pursuing national programmes of English language instruction for many years. In China, English is the most popular foreign language (having long overtaken the previous favourite, Russian), but there are a number of other languages that are also thought to have practical value in today’s world, especially French, German and Spanish (all European languages), which are considered to be the most important means of communication (apart from English) that people use for international business transactions. Places on foreign language programmes in Chinese universities are highly sought after, and the same is true in Japan and South Korea. You will no doubt be surprised to learn that Latin is also flourishing at China’s top university, Beida in Beijing, where an American Benedictine monk has been teaching Latin to large classes for several years after running a similarly successful programme at a Catholic university in Taiwan for more than a decade. Almost everyone in East Asia seems to want to learn a Western language. The importance of this development for cultural interchange is obvious: in order to acquire a foreign language these days, students do not just learn grammar and vocabulary, they also read Western texts, many of which are drawn from the great canon of our Western civilisation. It is therefore difficult, if not impossible, to learn a Western language in Asia without being exposed to Western ideas.This brings us to David’s second category: literature. David made the point that ‘echoes [of the Bible] are everywhere’ in Western literature, from the early church fathers through to Dante, Shakespeare and most of the modern authors before the twentieth-first century.[17] What we do not realise in the West is that so much of our literary canon has been translated into the vernacular languages of East Asia. I am not sure how Shakespeare’s plays would sound in Chinese, or whether Petrarch’s sonnets still have a noticeable rhyming scheme when translated into Japanese, but the extraordinary truth is that so much of the West’s great literature is being published and circulates relatively freely within East Asian nations. While most of this literature is perhaps known only by the intellectual elite, we should remember the old Jesuit maxim about what you teach a boy when he is young – some of the future leaders of China are already deeply imbued with Western literature, and this literature has been consumed within the seemingly closed intellectual borders of China, not in courses taken in Western universities. But it is not just the Chinese intelligentsia who are frequently exposed to Western texts. One of my favourite statistics is the fact that the world’s largest publisher of Bibles is located in Nanjing: the Amity publishing company printed 13.22 million Bibles in more than 100 languages in 2014. Established in 1987, Amity had printed more than 130 million Bibles by the beginning of 2015, 60 % of which were distributed within China.[18] When a communist country such as China allows the Western civilisation’s Sacred Scripture to be printed and distributed so widely within its borders, it is surely impossible for Western ideas not to have some impact on an increasingly large percentage of the population who can now read. The same is true in Taiwan and Korea where active evangelisation of the non-Christian population has been in progress for many years.            In the field of law, philosophy and government, East Asia is similarly exposed to a whole range of Western ideas. Half of my East Asian nations are democracies (Japan, Taiwan and South Korea), while the other half are ‘communist republics’ (China, North Korea and Vietnam). Only Japan retains its ancient imperial monarchy, although these days that is stripped of its old powers. The point that I want to make here is that both representative democracy and communist totalitarianism are Western inventions, and even though China may insist that her political system is ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, the basic political philosophy is a nineteenth-century Western notion. Even within present-day China there are two small islands of executive-led representative government which are closer to Western democracy than Chinese communism – Hong Kong and Macau. Although tiny by comparison with the enormity of the Chinese state, both places represent a serious threat to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party through repeated demands for a more representative and responsible system of government. Beijing realises the threat that is implicit in such calls, and is reacting by trying to suppress the democracy movement in Hong Kong. Despite attempts to restrict news media and the internet, many Mainlanders (Chinese Mainlanders) are fully aware of the battle that is taking place in Hong Kong. I am told by my students that one of the reasons that some Chinese people want to visit Hong Kong is so that they can see the local democratic movement in action, especially at the key annual events such as the June 4 Vigil in Victoria Park to commemorate the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. While resistance to Western democracy will no doubt continue for a long time as communist regimes in China, Vietnam and North Korea attempt to retain political control of their countries, an awareness of democratic principles cannot be easily purged from the collective memory, especially in China which had nearly fifty years of democratic government in the first half of the twentieth century. North Korea may, of course, be a slightly harder nut to crack!            We must also remember that the reach of Western law in both its common (British) and civil (European) manifestations has been so extended beyond their home jurisdictions in the last half century that Western legal norms are now considered to be the guiding principles of international trade, business and finance. With the possible exception of North Korea, all the East Asian nations are now major players in the world economy and all have surrendered to the need for contracts to be negotiated and adjudicated according to Western norms. Major international law firms (mostly American, British and Australian) are present throughout East Asia, as are the world’s largest accountancy firms, which also operate under Western principles. Tens of thousands of East Asians are being trained in Western legal and accounting standards so that they can take part in the global boom in trade and finance. Once released, these principles will be difficult to restrain. And as David says, these principles are based on the fundamental Christian notion that ‘each human being has absolute value’.[19] To uphold Western ideas of ‘the intrinsic value of every individual’ goes completely against the traditional Asian belief in ‘the total subordination of the individual to the sacred traditions that have been handed down from antiquity’,[20] yet East Asian nations, particularly China as the emerging economic superpower of the twenty-first century, know that they must play by the legal and accounting rules that govern international trade and finance. In this way, notions of basic human rights have been creeping into China for decades, a trend that has not gone unnoticed by the Communist Party. Whether China will be able to maintain its international presence economically and not eventually embrace the wider ramifications of using Western legal codes is yet to be seen.            Another major factor in bringing Western influence to East Asia has always been education. Initially it was the foreign missionaries who brought Western learning to the orient, but now such learning is fully embraced by the state, even when it is carefully controlled, as is the case in China and Vietnam. It is simply not possible for modern professionals to function in the global economy without a comprehensive Westernised education. This is fully recognised by all East Asian nations, even North Korea. You will be well aware that millions of Chinese have been educated outside China over the last thirty years in every field of academic endeavour, some of them at my own university in Hong Kong and very large numbers here in Australia. Not all of these graduates return to China, but those who do return take with them not just a theoretical knowledge of how the Western system works, but an intimate acquaintance with daily life and how it reflects the intellectual foundations upon which the Western academy is founded. There are many senior people in China who choose to tow the party line, but who nevertheless hope for a better future when Western principles become more acceptable to the masses and the Party.            There are already some important cultural areas in which it is clear that Western ideas dominate. Whenever I visit a Chinese city I am absolutely amazed at the extent to which the built urban environment that has suddenly arisen over the last twenty years is an almost exact copy of what we have in the urbanised West. You might expect to discover in China, or Japan or South Korea architecture in an established vernacular style, but you would be wrong. Most of the large public, commercial and residential buildings that are being constructed with such alarming speed in these countries today are recognisable to the Westerner as neo-classical in style. It is as if someone had taken all the architectural conventions of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in Europe and applied them religiously to the new urban landscapes of East Asia in the early twenty-first century. You will also hear Western music played everywhere in East Asia; not just the pop tunes that are churned out by the modern Western music industry, but also the great music from the classics of the Western repertoire. Colin Thubron was surprised in the mid-1980s when he heard ‘The Blue Danube’ being broadcast over the tannoy in a public park near Beijing.[21] Many Western visitors to China have had similar experiences of cultural dissonance in China; just a few weeks ago I took an Australian friend across the border to Zhuhai and we heard ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ being played in a shopping centre! Moreover, the Chinese have long had some of the best Western orchestras in Asia, and many Chinese children learn a Western musical instrument. Many of you will also be aware of the Suzuki method of violin education, pioneered by the Japanese musician Shinichi Suzuki. I could say more about Western music in East Asia and also Western art in general, but my time is running short. Suffice it say that western art, music and architecture have penetrated deep into the East Asian psyche and will be difficult to evict.            There are many other areas that I could have quoted to show you that Western civilisation is alive and well in East Asia. Mass tourism to the West from Japan, China and South Korea over the last forty years has brought tens of millions of East Asians into direct contact with the wonders of Western art, architecture and culture in cities across Europe. Modern consumer culture has placed a high premium on Western goods that reflect and refract Western culture to an eager East Asian market. Western sport has slowly become another prism through which East Asians learn something of Western values of co-operation and teamwork. Just consider the baseball-mad Japanese and the soccer-crazy Chinese, or the way in which Rugby has been spreading its tentacles throughout Asia.[22] This is surprising because East Asians were always considered to be disinterested in sport and not very good at it. We might also want to consider the national priority that is placed on being selected to host the Olympic Games: China desperately wanted to host the 2008 Olympics to showcase its role in the modern world, and Japan did everything it could to secure the 2020 Games in Tokyo. People cannot play and watch Western sport without being influenced by it. I would also perhaps want to talk more about the new ‘Belt and Road’ policy of China, a scheme which seeks to connect China indirectly via Central Asia to Europe through a new twenty-first-century Silk Road. This will be a permanent and powerful artery for the transfer not just of trade goods and resources, but also of people and ideas. I agree with David that, ‘Ideas are the most powerful things in the world’,[23] and for this reason I believe that the great tradition of Western civilisation will become more visible to East Asia as the years go by.            When Dawson wrote The Revolt in Asia in the mid-1950s, he suggested that ‘the oriental world is being transformed before our eyes’ and that the influence of Western civilisation was ‘seeping in by a hundred channels and nothing can prevent its ultimate triumph’.[24] While I think it would do us well to be cautious about the Western triumphalism of Dawson’s rhetoric, I find the metaphor of Western civilisation ‘seeping’ into the cultures of East Asia to be very convincing. As I have tried to argue this evening, Western culture IS seeping into East Asia, and has been for centuries. I do not think that this process is reversible – when even the brutal totalitarian machinery of communist China has failed to arrest the spread of Western ideas and beliefs in the People’s Republic, it seems unlikely that any other political or intellectual system will be able to prevent this seepage in the modern globalised world of the internet and the relatively free flow of information. There will always be gaps and fissures in any system of mind control, and into these crevices will seep ideas and beliefs, especially ideas and beliefs that are already partially known or even familiar. So I believe that the ‘great tradition’ of the civilisation of the West will continue to meet and mingle with the even older traditions of the East. And while some of East Asia will continue to embrace the gifts of Western civilisation, even those nations that are currently resisting its influence will ultimately be engaged and changed by it. Like Dawson, then, I believe that this process is unstoppable. Once the genie is out of its bottle, it cannot be squeezed back in.

[1] Christopher Dawson, Understanding Europe (London & New York: Sheed and Ward, 1952).[2] Christopher Dawson, Mission to Asia, originally published as The Mongol Mission in 1955 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).[3] Christopher Dawson, The Revolt in Asia (London & New York: Sheed and Ward, 1957).[4] Ibid., p. 35.[5] While different institutions have their own means of calculating GDP, China and Japan come second and third in ranking tables of the IMF estimates for 2016, World Bank calculations of 2015, and the United Nations list for 2014.[6] Prableen Bajpai, ‘The World’s Top 10 Economies’, Investopedia (18 July 2016), http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/022415/worlds-top-10-economies.asp, retrieved 9 November 2016.[7] Tom Holland, ‘The hidden agenda behind Japan’s Abenomics’, This Week in Asia (12 September 2016).[8] Niall Ferguson, ‘In the grip of a new cultural revolution’, South China Morning Post (26 May 2016).[9] Its full title is ‘A Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere’, see https://www.chinafile.com/document-9-chinafile-translation, retrieved 27 May 2016. See also Chris Buckley, ‘China Takes Aim at Western Ideas’, The New York Times (19 August 2013), and The Washington Post editorial, ‘China’s pathetic crackdown on civil society’ (22 April 2015).[10] Raquel Carvalho, ‘Official booksellers to be missing from Guangzhou event’, Sunday Morning Post (23 October 2016).[11] Mandy Zuo, ‘Warning to private schools in Shanghai’, South China Morning Post (27 October 2016).[12] Cary Huang, ‘Academics must remake Marxism for 21st century: Xi’, South China Morning Post (18 May 2016).[13] Julia Hollingsworth, ‘Good old days may be over for expats in China’, Sunday Morning Post (23 October 2016).[14] Mimi Lau, ‘The New Commandments’, South China Moring Post (24 October 2016).[15] David Daintree, Soul of the West: Christianity and the Great Tradition (Ballarat: Connor Court, 2015)[16] Ibid., p. 29.[17] Ibid., p. 33.[18] Cang Wei, ‘Spreading the Word: China’s Bible Industry’, The Daily Telegraph (21 April 2015).[19] Daintee, Soul of the West, p. 45.[20] Dawson, Revolt of Asia, p. 32.[21] Colin Thubron, Behind the Wall, originally published in 1987 (London: Folio Society, 2016), p. 13.[22] Jun Mai, ‘China lays down plan to dominate World Cup’, South China Morning Post (12 April 2016); Nazvi Careem & Chan Kin-wa, ‘Ambitious plan to grow rugby in China’, South China Morning Post (11 April 2016).[23] Daintree, Soul of the West, p. 70.[24] Dawson, Revolt in Asia, p. 39.

Full Text of Prof Jeff Malpas’s address to the Centre on 25 August.

“Good Government Starts Today”: On the Death of the Public, the Triumph of Private Interest, and the Loss of the Good

The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufacture, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public…The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it – Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.[1]“Good government starts today”, declared the then Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbot, after surviving a potential leadership challenge in February of 2015.[2] The question is, what sort of government does the Prime Minister think is good? It seems unlikely that the conception of good government he was referring to was the same as the famous portrayal of good government in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the 14^th century.[3] There good government is seen as based on the promotion of the common good for which “it is indispensable that our rulers should be lovers of justice”.[4] Lorenzetti contrasts good government with bad, and of the city characterised by bad government, we are told that “because each seeks only his own good, in this city Justice is subjected to tyranny”. [Insert image 1: Ambrogio Lorenzetti, ‘Allegory of Good Government’ (1338-40), Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy]. I will come back to Lorenzetti in a moment, since in spite of the distance between Siena and Canberra, in both time and space, Lorenzetti has something to say about good government that remains true today. To return to Tony Abbot, however, it would seem, on the face of it, that the short answer to the question as to his own conception of good government was essentially that it was a government in which he remained Prime Minister. Viewed more broadly, and looking to the actual practice of government under Abbot, as well as under other administrations both Liberal and Labor, good government in contemporary Australia would seem, in contrast to 14^th century Siena, to be taken as defined by a relatively narrow of set of considerations, almost all of them, with the exception of electoral success, economic – and almost all of them also short-term (this seems not have changed under Abbott’s successor, Turnbull). Moreover, in taking the economic as their over-riding principle, they do indeed seem, in the terms of Lorenzetti’s portrayal, to subject Justice to Tyranny, since what typically underpins the economic in its contemporary form is the assumption that “each seeks his own good”, rather than the good of all.Such a narrow orientation seems to have become typical of governments across the English-speaking world from Australia to Canada, and, in addition, often infects governmental and policy discussion at international levels. It is a focus that takes the economic to be the primary concern of public discourse and the primary consideration in the determination of the public good. It might be objected, however, that even though contemporary public debate is indeed often focussed around matters economic, this is not to say that the public and the economic have therefore been conflated or the one reduced to the other. The realm of public discourse includes other topics than the economic as its focus, while the public remains distinct from the economic as a realm of debate and discourse that is apart from the realm of commercial transaction, monetary exchange, and financial management. Although such an objection may appear to be correct, what it overlooks is the way in which the realm of the public is now indeed structured in a way that takes economic considerations as primary, and in which the economic and the commercial themselves enter into and often determine the very character and context of public discourse and decision-making. The so-called ‘business-model’ now determines almost everything from art to health. Not only does the economic provide the terms in which public activity is almost invariably framed and by which it is assessed, but increasingly our public engagement with others takes place in economic and commercial spaces, by means of electronic communication and information systems that are commercially owned and operated, and often itself has the character of a form of an economic or commercial transaction. The realm of the public – or indeed the ‘civic’ – does indeed seem to have become almost identical with the realm of the economic.It is worth reflecting for a moment on the starkness of the contrast here betweenthis conception of good government and that which we find in Lorenzetti. ‘The Allegory of Good and Bad Government’ does not neglect the economic – economic activity, in this case,buying and selling, is clearly portrayed in the fresco among the ‘Effects of Good Government’ – but it is secondary to Justice, as well as the other virtues, and secondary also to Wisdom, to which Justice herself attends [insert image 2: Ambrogio Lorenzetti, ‘Allegory of Good Government – Effects of Good Government in the City’, (1338-40), Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy.]. Economic success is indeed one of the effects and not a cause (whether effective or constitutive) of good government, and neither can economic success be said to be a principle of good government or that which rules over it. One might argue that the ideal of good government that arose in Siena was one dependent on Siena’s own rise to prosperity, but the ideas of good government portrayed in Lorenzetti’s fresco are nevertheless not peculiar to Siena alone, reflecting ideas prevalent in much pre-humanist and humanist thinking, and in the Latin traditions on which Lorenzetti seems to draw as well as the Greek.What characterises the conception of good government, and so also rules the domain of public life in Lorenzetti’s portrayal, is virtue. The economic is itself subject to virtue, and is indeed made possible by it. Lorenzetti’s account is not peculiar to the pre-modern, but can also be seen as present in modern conceptions of good government. Most significantly, it is clearly present in the work of Adam Smith whose Theory of Moral Sentiments should properly be regarded as the essential preliminary to The Wealth of Nations. Indeed, not only does Smith contest the idea, popularised by de Mandeville, that the pursuit of private interest is sufficient for the advancement of the public good, but he also argues for the need for the activities of the marketplace to be constrained by considerations of morality if the public good is to be preserved (moreover Smith, as the lines at the head of this essay suggest, warns strongly against allowing business interests to lead governmental policy). The contemporary dominance of the economic is not something endorsed by Smith any more than by Lorenzetti (and Smith’s thinking is itself heavily influenced by the Stoic conceptions that are also present in Lorenzetti). In this respect, both Smith and Lorenzetti offer important counters to the contemporary mode of ‘economistic’ thought and governmental practice.[5]Yet although the contemporary situation is one in which the public, and so too the political, seems to have been engulfed by the economic, the economic nevertheless appears as an anomalous category to be associated with the public. The economic, that which pertains to the oikos (to use the original Greek term from which ‘economy’ comes), is a category that originally belonged with the domestic and the familial. That the term might indeed encompass the public is indicative of a shift in the understanding of the economic and the public, but also of the increasingly problematic character of the traditional distinctions between the domestic and the civic, between private and public, between the ‘social’ and the ‘political’. The idea that the public good – that which is the concern of ‘good’ government – might be first and foremost an economic good, further reinforces the breakdown that appears here.The understanding of the public good as an economic good, and of that good as determinative of public and governmental decision-making, typically leads to the transformation of the public good into a set of private interests, and government comes to be oriented to the fostering of those interests, while public discourse becomes a domain in which differing private interests compete for the right to be viewed as the means by which the public good is to be furthered. Contemporary liberal political theory has reinforced this tendency towards an economistic form of government though its refusal to recognise any ‘metaphysical’ or properly moral underpinning to the political – its refusal, for instance, to recognise the pre-eminence that is given in Lorenzetti’s portrayal, to Justice, to Wisdom, and the virtues that flow from them – instead treating the political as essentially a realm for the negotiation of private interest and preference. The liberal model is thus itself already predisposed towards ‘economism’ and so also stands, so I would argue, in a problematic relation to the very idea of the public as distinct from the economic. It does so precisely because it can no longer provide any articulation of the public good, or indeed, of the good as such, that stands apart from private interest. What the public might itself be thus also become uncertain – the public becomes merely an agglomeration of the private.One could view the process that I have begun to sketch here as one in which the idea of the public (along with the notion of the economic, and perhaps even of the political and the moral) has simply changed, but I would suggest that it is better viewed in terms of the death of the public. There is no longer any clear sense to be attached to the idea of a public domain – or a public good – that goes beyond private interest. In the brief discussion that follows I want to explore some of what is at issue here, and especially the way in which the rise of a privileged economic discourse contributes to this death of the public, not only through the triumph of private interest that is associated with it, but also through the transformation it brings in the very idea of the ‘good’ – whether in association with the notion of the public, in association with ideas of government, or, in more general terms, as it might refer to the ‘good’ that is the focus for ethical discourse and around which a properly human life might be said to be oriented. Moreover, inasmuch as I would talk of the ‘death’ of the public, so the seeming ‘transformation’ of the good that occurs with the rise of economism actually amounts to a loss of the good – though part of the way this occurs is precisely through a shift in language that obscures the very fact that it is a loss.Talk of the ‘death’ of the public is immediately suggestive of Richard Sennett’s famous work from the 1970s, The Fall of Public Man. Sennett’s book does not focus on the economic in quite the way I have sketched here (although the economic is certainly not absent from his discussion), but Sennett does argue for a problematic tension between private and public as that emerges in modern, and especially contemporary culture. For Sennett, what occurs with the rise of modernity is a turn away from the public towards the private, not construed in terms of a shift from private good to public interest, but rather in terms of a shift from the outward engagement with others to an inward engagement with the self – although it turns out to be an engagement that cannot be satisfied.There is much in Sennett’s argument with which I would agree, except that, when read against the background of contemporary ‘economism’, it seems that the turn to the private that Sennett identifies should actually be understood as a turn towards a self that is now almost entirely constituted and shaped by the primarily economic context in which contemporary modernity situates it. I would argue that part of what is problematic about the contemporary world, and part of what underpins Sennett’s own analysis, is an emptying out that has occurred, not only in relation to public space and its forms – an emptying out that is tied to the turn ‘inwards’ – but also in relation to the private. Moreover, this has occurred precisely through the reshaping of human life through economic forms and their associated structures – forms and structures that are focussed around interest and preference, but also around interest and preference as these are taken up within the frame of the economic and the commercial, as they appear within systems of consumption and production, as they are amenable to surveillance and manipulation, as they operate to drive systems of authority and power.The rise of social media is an important example of this. Media platforms like Facebook and Twitter ostensibly offer new forms of social engagement – apparently allowing the opening up of new forms of intimacy and new possibilities for the articulation of the self. They also have a prominent role in contemporary forms of public and political engagement – even politicians tweet and every politician has a Facebook page. Yet Facebook and Twitter are first and foremost commercial systems that sit within a framework of production and consumption, but in which consumption, in this case consumption of the service Facebook and Twitter offer, is itself immediately productive and in multiple ways. Facebook users themselves generate the content that Facebook users also consume; while Facebook users also generate the content – the informational content and the access to a consumer marketplace – that Facebook sells to its commercial customers, and the same is analogously true for Twitter. Not only have the consumers of Facebook and Twitter become the unpaid producers of what it is that Facebook and Twitter sell (the collapse of consumption into production that is evident here being a characteristic feature of late capitalism), but the consumption and production that occurs here, as well as the seeming transformation of social engagement into itself a form of commercial exchange based around the accumulation of ‘followers’, and binary expressions of preference in terms of ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’, also depends upon and exemplifies the peculiar collapsing of the private into a form of public discourse, and of public discourse into the realm of the private.This collapse occurs in several ways. One of the factors that drives it as well as being in turn driven by it is the tendency towards individualisation. On the one hand this leads to increased focus on individuals as they stand apart from more complex forms of social relationality, instead reducing them simply to subjects, and so as the focus for systems of production, consumption, surveillance and control. This sort of individualisation, because it involves a reduction down to a form of empty individuality, is itself compatible with forms of mass socialisation, and is a key element in contemporary systems of individual disempowerment and impoverishment. On the one hand, the tendency towards individualisation also leads to the concentration of power, authority, and attention in specific individuals – hence the contemporary cult of celebrity, the over-valuation of ‘leadership’ and excessive individual reward for those in ‘leadership’ roles, the increasing tendency towards top-down systems of management and decision-making, and the rise of arbitrary, narcissistic, and sociopathic behaviours on the part of those in positions of power and authority.In contemporary discourse, individualisation and economism seem to go together, and they certainly reinforce one another – especially given the economist presumption of an essentially market-oriented model of social interaction as occurring among individual ‘consumers’. In a world of individual subjects, the very idea of any form of public good becomes opaque – if it remains, it seems it can only be as something constituted out of individual preferences and concerns, in which case public good seems to become nothing more than a multiplicity of private goods. This does indeed look to be what has occurred across much of the contemporary English-speaking world (it is less common outside it): what was previously understood as a genuine public good, such as education, is now increasingly construed as a private good, and access to it determined accordingly as something that could be privately funded – or if publicly funded then on an individual basis. Almost all of those goods that were previously provided by the State have been transformed or are in the process of being transformed in this way. The transformation of public good into private interests also leads to the privatisation of the means by which public goods were previously made available. Not only do public goods become private, then, but the realm of what was public activity is transformed into a domain of private entrepreneurship. Indeed, even worse than that, the public realm itself becomes a domain for commercial exploitation by private interests. Thus public administration is increasingly infiltrated and driven by private commercial interests, most notably, especially in contemporary Australia, by the interests of the big accounting and audit forms who even get to define the ethical standards under which they will themselves operate. Indeed, the peculiar situation now exists in which those firms essentially set the constraints – often given regulatory as well as ethical force – on how public administration should itself operate at the same time as those firms also stand to benefit directly from the constraints they impose. One particularly striking example of this, affecting both the private and public sectors, is the imposition of the International Accounting Standards – formulated by the same firms who directly benefit from the implementation of those very standards.The conversion of public good into private interest also leads to the effective identification of the public good, inasmuch as that notion still retains any content, with certain particular private interests, namely those corporate interests who command the greatest influence within government through the sheer weight of lobbyists employed, through personal influence, or through the personal and professional connections that link politicians and political parties to the business and commercial sphere, often linking them directly to corporations and their CEOs. The ‘governing class’ thus becomes almost indistinguishable from the ‘business class’. It should be no surprise that the dominance of economic discourse is accompanied by the increasing dominance of the most powerful economic interests. Indeed, when economism prevails, there is an inevitable tendency – reflecting the tendency for concentration and centralisation identified by Marx as a feature of capitalism itself – towards the dominance of particular sectional economic interests and groups over others that reflects the economic dominance of those same interests and groups. Economic dominance thus brings discursive dominance, and that in turn institutionalises, in the very discourse, underlying forms of economic power and inequality. This is one reason why contemporary economism is so starkly opposed to any genuine concept of the democratic, and perhaps also partly explains why anti-democratic measures are so readily embraced by economistically-inclined governments.The predominance of economic and business interests in contemporary public discourse is underpinned by the economistic prejudice towards what might be termed economistic universalism or foundationalism: the idea that economic interests are the bedrock on which any and every other interest is founded. The satisfaction of economic considerations is thus taken to be the absolute precondition for the satisfaction of any and every other consideration. On the face of it this may seem such a common-sensical idea as to be beyond challenge. But it only appears so because of the prior dominance of an unquestioned economistic prejudice – a prejudice that, never acknowledging itself as a prejudice, presents itself as somehow neutral between interests, or as promoting an interest that belongs to all, at the same time as it implicitly promotes an identification of certain particular economic interests as privileged over others.In many cases, the prioritization of the economic is presented in a fashion that make sit looks as it were merely the discourse to which other discourses must attend if they are to have any chance of satisfying their goals, but which is neutral with respect to those interests. The economic thus pretends not to differentiate between goods, but to be that which allows other goods to be realised. In this way the focus on the economic converges with a ‘liberal’ political sensibility that refrains from any adjudication of the nature of the good, but instead supposedly aims merely at an impartial negotiation between competing claims and conceptions. Yet at the same time, any and every economic decision or judgment, and the political decisions with which they are implicated, involves the differentiation between interests and the realisation of some interests over others. Thus although the Greek oikos does not name that which is valuable, but rather concerns the management of the domain in which that which is valuable resides, the manner in which such management operates is itself expressive of a commitment to the value of that which it aims to preserve and protect. The idea of economic discourse or indeed of liberal political discourse – as somehow evaluatively neutral is thus doubly problematic in that it obscures the inevitable evaluative partiality that it supposedly abjures – allowing the promotion of sectional interest under the banner of sectional impartiality. The realm of the economic can only function on the basis of decisions about what is valued, and yet those questions are kept outside of the realm of public discussion by the very prioritization of the economic as such.Of course, sometimes, the prioritization of the economic is presented in terms of the prioritization, not merely of what facilitates value, but of that which is indeed valuable in itself, and equally valuable to us all, namely, economic prosperity and success. Here the supposed ‘neutrality’ of the economic resides in the supposed universality of the value enshrined within it. Once again, however, this obscures the way in which the idea of economic prosperity or success is often itself geared to very particular measures of such prosperity or success, and, in addition, also involves a fundamental misconstrual of the nature of value and of the economic. To refer again to the Greek notion of oikos, even though this domain is predicated on valuation, oikos does not name anything that is in itself a value (unless it be a secondary value). To take an analogy from business, profitability, here the analogue to economic success, is not itself a good or value in its own right such that business can take the maximisation of profitability alone as its guiding principle. Profitability becomes a partial measure of the effectiveness of business management (and so might be construed as a secondary value) given an already determined set of decisions about the nature and orientation of the business in question. This is reflected in the fact that those business that are oriented only to the maximisation of profit are businesses that typically lack coherence, lack effective organisational and managerial integrity, and typically also lack longevity (there ought to be an important lesson here for those contemporary public institutions, for instance, universities, that have taken economic considerations as pre-eminent in driving the operation of those institutions – on the basis of what can learn from the business sector, the future of such institutions is likely to be a grim one).A characteristic feature of the contemporary dominance of the economic is that it is a dominance not mitigated or constrained by any countervailing interest or group – and this is largely because no other interest is recognised as an interest that is not already an economic interest. A useful illustration of the dominance of the economic, although a very specific one, can be seen in the climate change debate in which scientific views have routinely been discounted on the grounds, in part, that scientists have what is essentially an economic interest in promoting climate change as a result of the research grants to which they gain access as a result of the acceptance of climate change as a scientific orthodoxy. Outside of the scientific community, scientific opinion tends only to be given significant weight in contemporary discussions where it is itself translatable into an economic interest that connects with the dominant economic interest. On this basis, there is indeed no interest that is not an economic interest or convertible into such; no interest that, if set against economic interests, is not challengeable through being reducible to an economic interest (or that can be treated as such). Those interests that cannot be reduced to the economic in this way, for instance, the interests of some green or environmental groups, are thus characterised as irrational or fanatical – even as standing against normal society –– a characterization that can be seen to follow almost inevitably from the dominance of the economic, the assumption of economic interest as the only rational interest, and so the automatic exclusion from rational discourse of any discourse that is not predicated on the primacy of economic interest.The situation here is made more complex by the fact that even though what has occurred, and is still occurring, is indeed the transformation of public goods into private interests, and the effective death of genuinely public discourse (the latter being perhaps best defined as discourse that takes the public good as its primary focus), still the language of public life retains much of the language of the public good, though it now effectively functions to disguise the very transformation and loss of the public that is also underway. Since the way the notion of the public figures here is generally in tension with the fact that it is actually private interest that is dominant, we can say that part of what also occurs is a transformation in the language of public discourse – a transformation that can be characterised as a ‘subversion’ of the good. That is, the language of the good, and not only of the public good, but of the good as such, and so of a host of normative concepts including ideas of justice, excellence, virtue and so forth, has itself become a language that now functions to support and sustain modes of discourse, types of behaviour, and forms of social, political, and institutional structure, that would ordinarily be taken to run counter to those ideas. The good thus becomes attached to that which is actually an emptied-out conception of the good.This is not merely an emptying out of ethical language that reduces it to some form of neutrality, but more than that, a subversion of that language – a transformation of it into that to which it would ordinarily stand opposed. Something like this was already described by George Orwell in 1984. His description of elements of ‘Newspeak’, and more specifically his account of the various ministries that make up the governmental apparatus of the state of Oceania under the leadership of ‘Big Brother’[6]: the ministry of love, which uses torture as a means of subjugation, the ministry of truth, which propagates lies, the ministry of plenty, which manages rationing, and the ministry of peace, whose responsibility is war. Significantly, the ministries’ names are not ironic – within the social and political order of Big Brother, each minister is seen as aiming at bringing about that which is given in its name, it is just that the meaning of those names, love, truth, plenty, peace, become strangely different from what we might ordinarily imagine – language is indeed subverted, put in the service of that which ought to be considered contrary to it. The good is thus put in the service of evil – in the service of that which stands again any conception of humanity. In Orwell’s account it is not private interest that has taken over, not any notion of the public good either, even though the latter notion is indeed used to justify the existing political order. Nevertheless, the state of affairs Orwell describes is not so far removed from that of the present, not only in its emptied out and subverted normativity, but in its removal from any sense of human value by which it could be limited or constrained. The world of Orwell’s 1984 is thus different from the present world, and yet in many respects not so far away from it either – in neither case is there any value outside of the value already prescribed, any value other than that of the ‘good’ as determined by the existing political order or of the existing economic system.Like the political totalitarianism described by Orwell, contemporary economism recognises nothing that constrains or limits it – economic discourse is that which encompasses all rational discourse (so in many circles the ‘market’ is taken, somewhat counter-intuitively, to be the epitome of rationality) and may even be said to be taken as identical with rational discourse. The refusal of limit is perhaps the most problematic aspect of contemporary economism and the public discourse that it constitutes. Not only does it mean that contemporary economism has to be itself counted as a form of discourse that is ‘totalitarian’ in character, but it also means that it lacks any capacity to engage in genuine self-critique, may even be said to refuse such critique, and so is blinded to its own shortcomings and failures. Moreover, in its refusal to recognise its own partiality, it also limits the capacity for public discourse to function in a genuinely democratic fashion (which can itself be seen as part of its ‘totalitarian’ or ‘authoritarian’ tendency), limits the capacity for dissension and debate, and vitiates the possibility of genuine public engagement on critical issues. The dominance of the economic does not just entail the death of the public and the triumph of private interest, but it also brings with it the effective disabling and shutting down of public discourse, and so even of the possibility that the question of the public good might emerge as a subject for discursive public engagement.The question of good government ceases to be a question if good government is already assumed to be completely determined within an economic frame. Indeed, that assumption essentially sets the question of the good to one side – in many cases, explicitly taking it to be a matter that is itself secondary to the economic. In this way the economic comes to take priority even over the political (which is effectively subsumed into the economic) and over the ethical – the economic itself takes priority even over the good. Part of what is lost in the dominance of the economic is even the sense of what the good consists in and its binding character. The good cannot be set aside because of pragmatic considerations that seem to lead in a contrary direction, and in the absence of any ethical deliberation – any deliberation in regard to the good – there can be no adequate estimation of how even pragmatic considerations should be weighed, assessed, or even determined. Indeed, it is at this point that the extent to which the loss of the good has occurred, and the absolute dominance of the economic, becomes even more clearly evident. All too often, the attempt to reintroduce notions concerning the good or the ethical into existing public discourse, such as it is, take the form of attempts to show that ethical considerations, and considerations relating to the good, ought to be taken account of because of their economic relevance – because, for instance, ethical investment portfolios actually turn out, so it is sometimes said, to have historically performed better financially, or because unethical business practices do indeed undermine long-term business viability, or because a society that is actively engaged with questions of the good is also likely to be a society given to more creative and vibrant economic activity. In all such cases, the attempt to re-found a mode of public discourse through re-founding the idea and relevance of the good in its supposed economic virtue is not only deeply confused, but is itself destructive of the very attempt that it enacts – effectively serving only to reaffirm the very economic framework that it seeks to contest.We cannot reclaim a sense of the public unless we also reclaim the idea of the good, even if as a contested notion, on which the public is itself founded and from which it draws it real vibrancy and viability. Reclaiming the public thus means reclaiming a genuine public discourse that already recognises the good as standing before any idea of the economic. It will not help us in that task of reclamation if we constantly give in to the discourse of the economic by trying to reinterpret the good in terms of the economic. The reclamation of the public will only begin in a reclamation and reassertion of the idea of the good. It is precisely with such a reclamation that good government has the possibility of beginning anew. Without it, the only government that remains is bad government. The latter begins when Justice, which we can also understand here as identical with the idea of the good, is removed from her pre-eminent position, and is instead bound by tyranny. The Tyrant himself sits in company with Cruelty, Deceit, Fraud, Fury, Division, and War, and is ruled by Avarice, Pride, and Vainglory. [insert image 3: Ambrogio Lorenzetti, ‘Allegory of Bad Government’, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena] Not only does contemporary public discourse, including the discourse of contemporary politics, seems to lack many of the virtues identified by Lorenzetti, but it also seems all too easy to find in it exemplifications of the vices that Lorenzetti associates with bad government. Perhaps one has to take Tony Abbot’s confident assertion about the new beginning of good government as itself an example of the subversion of the good, and the inversion that inevitably accompanies it.Notes and References[1] The Wealth of Nations edited by A. Skinner (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), p.359). The “dealers” referred to here are those who “live by profit”, namely, “the merchants and master manufacturers”[2] He finally succumbed – being ousted by Malcolm Turnbull – some seven months later in September 2015.[3] The images included in the text are each from the series of frescos together known as ‘The Allegory of Good and Bad Government’ painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti  between 1338 and 1339. The frescoes are located in the Sala dei Nove (Salon of Nine, which is actually the Council Room) in the Palazzo Pubblico (Town Hall) in Siena, Italy. The first shows Justice (Justicia) with Wisdom (Sapientia) placed above and Harmony (Concordia) below, from ‘The Allegory of Good Government’, the second shows ‘The Effects of Good Government in the City’, and the third shows ‘The Effects of Bad Government in the City’. Images of the frescos are readily available online.[4] Quentin Skinner, ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Artist as Political Philosopher’, Proceedings of theBritish Academy, 72 (1986), p. 15 [1-56].[5] Antagonism towards the demands of the ‘economic’ can be seen to be present throughout almost all of the philosophical tradition prior to the twentieth century. This is not merely indicative of the philosopher’s suspicion of the merchant (although this certainly runs deep – it is part of what underpins Plato’s scorn for the Sophists who turn the teaching of wisdom into a commercial transaction), but of a deeper concern for the priority of the ethical over the merely prudential or pragmatic. One might even say that what is at stake here is the very possibility of the ethical and also the philosophical as distinct from the prudential and pragmatic. The contemporary attack on the critical disciplines, including philosophy, that make up the Humanities, is thus directly related to the assertion of the dominance of the economic.[6] The use of ‘Big Brother’ as the name of a reality TV show has changed some of the connotations that might now attach to the name. Indeed, the use of the name for that show seems to have only a tenuous connection with Orwell’s original use – primarily in terms of the idea of continuous surveillance – although the way the show can itself be seen to fit into a larger system of corporatized entertainment that itself seems to reinforce problematic forms of social interaction may be thought to represent one respect in which the show does indeed connect quite directly with aspects of Orwell’s vision in ways presumably not intended by the producers of the show itself.

CDC HOSTS TOP CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHER JOHN HALDANEEminent Scottish philosopher and Vatican advisor, Professor John Haldane was in Hobart recently as a guest of the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies.Centre Director, Dr David Daintree said it was an honour to host one of the world’s leading Catholic philosophers.“It was a huge privilege to have him visit us in Hobart,” he said.St Mary’s Cathedral Centre was close to capacity on Friday 15 April for Prof Haldane’s address on the topic Is Civilisation under Threat?Throughout his presentation Prof Haldane pointed to social changes that have increasingly lead to the sexualisation of children as one of the central anti-civilising factors.“When people look at histories of civilisations they, and not only religious writers, have been interested in a feature in some of the later stages of civilisation, which is the movement of sexuality outside of the context of fairly strong social structures,” Prof Haldane said.“I do think that we are in a very interesting state of affairs of cultural development in which there is something quasi-pathological going on,” he continued, “in the disconnection of sexual interest from anything that one could see as serving the interests of family or community as well as the interest of the individuals themselves.”He described the current culture as suffering from what he called “sexual schizophrenia.”“What is interesting is that in the very culture that is denunciatory of paedophilia there is also an explosion of the barely legal pornography,” Dr Haldane said. “It’s a genre of pornography that is growing very, very rapidly.”Dr Haldane went on to speak about the threat of terrorism as an anti-civilising force in the world, especially for Western Countries in Europe, such as Britain, France, Holland and Belgium where terror attacks have occurred.He also gave insight into the Islamic State’s (IS) barbaric two-fold terror strategy.“Transgressive behaviour breaks down the norms of practice,” he said. “Then the idea is that you degrade the culture to such a degree that you then step in as the saviour of that culture.”He also mentioned that within this strategy IS co-opts children in their barbarous beheadings and ritualised executions.“I do think that the sexualisation of children on the one hand and this kind of barbarism on the other both represent profoundly counter-civilising influences,” Prof Haldane said in his concluding remarks. “I think there is a serious threat to civilisation and I think Western Societies are not well placed to meet those threats, partly because they are themselves engaged in the degradation of the human, but also partly because as Yeats says they have lost all conviction.”During his time in Australia Prof Haldane has also appeared on the ABC’s Q&A and Compass programs.“His recent television appearances reveal him as a man of sensitivity and tact in difficult situations, but with a towering intellect,” Dr Daintree said.

See alsohttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/26/conservatives-love-to-hate-political-correctness-but-the-left-should-rail-against-it-tooand http://www.abc.net.au/religion/
Professor Benno Zuiddam’s address on 7 April is now available at http://www.bennozuiddam.com/The%20Shadows%20of%201516,%20Zuiddam.mp3.

DR KEVIN DONNELLY 5 NOVEMBERDr Kevin Donnelly is one of Australia’s leading education commentators and authors.  He is currently Executive Director of the Education Standards Institute and Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University.  He was co–author of the Review of the Australian Curriculum.Topic:  The Place of Religion in a Secular Curriculum.Thursday 5 November at 5.00 pm in Law Lecture Theatre 2, Faculty of Law, University of Tasmania Sandy BayDr Donnelly taught English and Humanities for 18 years in Victorian government and non-government secondary schools. He has also been a member of state and national curriculum bodies, including: the Victorian Education Department’s Post Primary English Committee and Post Primary Taskforce, the Year 12 English Panel of Examiners, the Victorian Board of Studies and the federally funded Discovering Democracy Programme and inquiry into the Australian Certificate of Education.  Dr Donnelly has written extensively on contemporary developments in education for Australia’s print media and is the author of Why our schools are failing, Dumbing Down, Australia’s Education Revolution and Educating your child: it’s not Rocket Science.

Gala Musical ConcertSt Mary’s Cathedral Centre(corner of Patrick and Harrington Streets, Hobart)2.00 pm Sunday 31 MayBid the season farewell with autumnal tones selected from Bach and Beethoven, Debussy and Ravel, as well as some contemporary compositionsThe Programme

 6-7.30 pm on Tuesday 12 MayFORUM:  Religious tolerance in an age of extremesProfessor Fred Woods and Professor Neville Rochow SCA public forum on religious freedom and respect for minorities and how they enhance social cohesion and economic performanceTuesday 12 May, 6 -7.30 PMLaw Lecture Theatre 2, Law Building, University of Tasmania

We live today in what some claim to be one of the most religiously intolerant periods in history. Not only are some religious minorities believed to be fomenters of disharmony in other countries but, in our society, they are seen to mix only with their peers, wear distinctly un-Australian clothing and live together in ethnic ghettoes into which no-one else is allowed to enter.

As part of the South Pacific Speakers of Excellence series, prominent American professor, Dr Fred Woods, is coming to Australia in 2015. Over a period of two weeks (2-20 May), he will meet with many Australian political, legal and academic leaders to speak about this complex issue: “Religious tolerance in an age of extremes”.“I will examine the current situation facing religious minorities in the context of a unique experience 150 years ago that affected people in many countries,” says Dr Woods. “Then, a religious minority, the Mormons, suffered severe persecution. Unable to practise their beliefs in the Eastern U.S., converts from all parts of the world, including Australia, were forced to move to the western territory, often suffering severe depredations and death on the way.“Today,” he continues, “the Mormons are an American success story, filling the senior ranks of politics and business, even including a presidential candidate, after decades of being religious and social pariahs. We will talk about why religious tolerance is a breeding ground for multicultural success while discrimination and ostracism leads to societal failure.”Accompanying Professor Woods on his tour is Professor Neville Rochow, an Australian barrister and legal theorist. He will address the subject of freedom of religion and the implications of marginalisation of religious thought and practice resulting from growing secularism.“Some secularists have contended that religions are a financial albatross around the neck of state. They often cite tax concessions as a problem,” says Professor Rochow. “The evidence, considered as a whole, points the other way. Where there is religious freedom and tolerance, a country’s economic performance is at its greatest. Religious organisations provide monetary benefit to communities where congregations are located. They make their capital assets and other resources available in ways that would be economically hard to replicate except at great additional cost to the government and possibly reduced efficiency.“On our tour, I will give evidence that religious freedom should be enhanced rather than restricted.”Fred Woods, a religion professor at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah, has lectured in many countries on the subject of interfaith relations and the importance of religious tolerance in an age of religious extremism. He held the Richard L Evans Chair of Religious Understanding for five years at BYU.Neville Rochow is an adjunct professor at Sydney’s University of Notre Dame and adjunct associate professor at the University of Adelaide. He has over two decades of experience as barrister, being appointed silk in 2008. He has spoken and published nationally and internationally.

 5.30 pm on Tuesday 28 AprilProfessor John Armstrong, Professorial Fellow at the University of Tasmania:The Two Sources of Western CivilisationProf Armstrong (http://www.johnarmstrong.com.au) was born in Glasgow, educated in Oxford and London and moved to Australia in 2001. He is the author of nine books, including In Search of Civilisation, Love Life Goethe, The Secret Power of Beauty, How to Worry Less About Money, Life Lessons from Nietzsche. For five years he was Senior Advisor in The Office of the Vice Chancellor, University of Melbourne. In 2014 he became a Professorial Fellow at the University of Tasmania. John works closely with The School of Life news website The Philosophers’ Mail (http://thephilosophersmail.com).  His latest book Art as Therapy was written jointly with Alain de Botton.OUR FIRST LAUNCESTON FUNCTION 26 MARCH 2015Thursday 26th March saw the inaugural presentation from the Christopher Dawson Centre in the north of the state.Almost forty people gathered in the Launceston Pastoral Centre to listen to the Centre’s Director Dr David Daintree speak on the topic ‘What has gone wrong with education?’He spoke of the failure of moral purpose with the resulting rejection of objective (absolute) truth together with the virtual disappearance of the teaching of History from the syllabus. The fragmentation of the syllabus together with the increasing trend towards premature specialisation enforced upon our students has been detrimental to both their moral and academic growth. The neglect of great books by humane writers of universal importance and the primary place given to pleasure in learning (together with the tendency to avoid or dumb-down more difficult subjects that call for a degree of discipline) has resulted in our inability to teach students but merely to entertain them.After an all too brief presentation (we could have listened for very much longer) a lively and lengthy question time followed. It was agreed that the presentation was very successful and so it was decided that Launceston will have a bimonthly presentation. The next event will be on Thursday 28th May, when the speaker will be Mr Joshua Martin on J R R Tolkien.Janet Hoare

Friday 28 November 5.00 pm: Prof Greg Craven, Vice-Chancellor of the Australian Catholic UniversityReligious FreedomFrances Parsons Building, Jane Franklin Hall

Tuesday 2 December 6.00 pmMr John Dawson, from Youth With A Mission (YWAM),The Fundamental Importance of Christianity for our CivilisationJOHN DAWSON and his wife Julie operate out of several locations around the world. They have four children and seven grandchildren. Author of the bestselling book Healing America’s Wounds and founder of International Reconciliation Coalition (IRC), John has spoken at hundreds of citywide gatherings in the US and around the world.BOOK LAUNCH – OCTOBER 2014A short biography of the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson was recently launched by Archbishop Julian, at the Cathedral Centre in Hobart.Christopher Dawson-A Biographical Introduction was written by Karl Schmude, a former Head Librarian of the University of New England in Armidale and founder of Australia’s first tertiary ‘liberal arts’ college, Campion College in Sydney.Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was an English Catholic historian who devoted a lifetime of learning to exploring the relationship between Christianity and Western culture.As a Catholic scholar, Dawson looked closely at the historical sources of the Christian way of life and the secularisation of contemporary culture.He believed strongly in the necessity of spirituality to every living culture and the importance of religious foundation to society.Christopher Dawson-A Biographical Introduction was published by the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies, which was officially launched in Hobart earlier this year to promote greater awareness of the richness of the Christian intellectual traditionCopies of Schmude’s book are available for $11 plus postage. Click here for your order form

FR BILL MISCAMBLE CSC – 31 JULY 2014 Fr Bill Miscamble CSC, professor of History at the University of Notre Dame in the US, will visit Hobart as a guest of the Centre next month, and will speak on the topic “Catholics and Public Life in the United States and Australia: New Challenges and Enduring Responsibilities.” at 5.00 pm on Thursday 31 July. The venue, through the kind offices of the Hon Madeleine Ogilvie MHA, will be The Reception Room, Parliament House, Hobart. All welcome.  To help us plan seating please advise us on director@dawsoncentre.org if you intend to be present. Rev. Wilson D. (Bill) Miscamble, C.S.C. joined the permanent faculty at Notre Dame in 1988. The Australian native was born on July 23, 1953, and educated at the University of Queensland, from which he graduated in 1973 and obtained a master’s degree three years later.  In 1976 he came to Notre Dame to pursue graduate studies in history.  He received his doctoral degree in 1980.  He then served for two years as North American analyst in the Office of National Assessments, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, Australia. In August of 1982 he returned to Notre Dame and entered the priestly formation program of the Congregation of Holy Cross.  He was ordained a priest on April 9, 1988.  In the History Department he teaches at all levels from first year courses to doctoral seminars.  He chaired the History Department from 1993 to 1998.  In addition to his responsibilities on the history faculty, he has served (2000-04) as Rector and Superior of Moreau Seminary, the principal formation site for the Congregation of Holy Cross in North America.  Fr. Miscamble’s primary research interests are American foreign policy since World War II and the role of Catholics in 20th century U.S. foreign relations.  His book entitled George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950 was published in 1992 by Princeton University Press and received the Harry S. Truman Book Award.  He also has authored Keeping the Faith, Making a Difference (2000), and edited American Political History: Essays on the State of the Discipline [with John Marszalek] (1997), and Go Forth and Do Good: Memorable Notre Dame Commencement Addresses (2003).  His 2007 book From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima and the Cold War was published by Cambridge University Press and received the Harry S. Truman Book Award in 2008. More recently Father Miscamble has published  The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs and the Defeat of Japan (2011) and For Notre Dame: Battling for the Heart and Soul of a Catholic University (2013).  He also has published a number of other articles, essays and reviews. Father Miscamble has notable interests in the areas of Catholic higher education and Catholics and public life and he lectures and writes on these topics.  During the 2013-14 academic year he held a visiting appointment as the Paluch Chair in Theology at Mundelein Seminary of the Archdiocese of Chicago.

DR CONOR SWEENEY:CHRISTIANITY – HIGH IDEAL OR PERSONAL FAITH?THE CENTRE’S FIRST  PUBLIC LECTURE, 20 MAY, 2014After a successful launch last month, the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies hosted our first public seminar on Tuesday May 20 at Jane Franklin Hall, a college of the University of Tasmania, South HobartAn appreciative group was privileged to hear Dr Conor Sweeney, lecturer in Sacramental Theology and Postmodern Philosophy at Melbourne’s John Paul II Institute. The seminar was held in the Frances Parsons Building at Jane Franklin Hall in South Hobart. Dr Sweeney remarked that the panoramic view of the city reminded him of his hometown in Vancouver Canada.His talked focused on the link between the Catholic culture and Baptism.  He referenced the thought of Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI), Christopher Dawson, Heidegger, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Blaise Pascal and even Friedrich Nietzsche.Dr Sweeney agree with Ratzinger’s claim that there is no such thing as pure reason. “Before faith can be an idea or an encounter” he said, “it must be a practice.” Baptism is a washing away of the old person, someone who is alienated and cannot see reality as it truly is. That self dies in the waters of Baptism and a new self is born. It is this new self that discovers the Father and enters the Trinitarian world where God and humanity can touch in a filial adoption.Dr Sweeney acknowledged the eschatological nature of our baptism – the tension of there, but not there – which means we continually pick ourselves up again and again as we fall back into the dark waters of sin. We are given both grace and a challenge to live our lives as a Christ to others.Dr Sweeney spoke of his personal journey, having been born to a Catholic father and a Protestant mother. He said his upbringing was not within a liturgical environment, but he travelled through a metaphysical search for the universal back to the particulars of faithNow, as he said: “My sense of reality is utterly influenced by my faith.”Dr David Daintree, Director of the Centre and the host for the evening, thanked Dr Sweeney for his ‘lucid and charming talk”.The future of the Centre looks very promising after such a thought provoking evening.By Mary-Anne Johnson

THE CENTRE’S OFFICIAL LAUNCH, 10 APRIL 2014

L:R DAVID DAINTREE, REV WARWICK CUTHBERTSON, PETER MANSOUR
   The Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies was officially launched at Parliament House in Hobart this week. The Centre, which formally came into existence in November 2013, was launched enthusiastically by the Hon. Tim Fischer AC in the presence of the patron Archbishop Julian Porteous along with other church, academic and civic dignitaries and invited guests.Host for the evening, Dr David Daintree welcomed guests who had travelled from around Tasmania and interstate for the celebration. They were entertained by anecdotes from Mr Fischer who told guests, among other things, that Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, visited Rome in 1902 where he met Pope Pius X and conversed with him in Latin.Archbishop Porteous recognised that Christopher Dawson had quite unique insights into the nature of human civilisation, the basic message being that cultural development depends on a religious foundation.Christopher Dawson (1889 – 1970) was a British historian who was brought up an Anglican, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1914, and is principally known for his powerful defence of the vital role of the Christian religion as a major strand of Western culture.The Centre is planning a number of talks throughout each year and will invite distinguished guest speakers from Australia and abroad. In 2015, a colloquium is planned with the title: ‘Ideas dangerous to a secular world’. Other activities will include the provision of short courses in philosophy and theology.