On the Beauty of Human Relationships, Cultures, and States

Humans are, by their nature, social creatures. We are created to be in relation with other people; from our birth, we are dependent upon our family in order to actualize our potential; as we grow and develop relationships with other people, we truly find out who we are in ourselves. A person is a relational entity who can only fully express themselves, can only be themselves, when they are in communion with an other; they get to know themselves in that act of communion, when they find themselves in a participated unity with an other. They find themselves to be neither entirely different from that other, because they do not exist in total isolation from that other, and yet not identical to the other; the two are differentiated from each other not only according to how they relate to each other, but also in how they relate to the world at large (an experience they then share with one another).

We find Holy Scripture indicating this truth in many ways; for example, in its rich creation myths. “It is not good that man should be alone,” (Genesis 2:18). After making Adam, God saw that he needed a companion, someone Adam could relate to on the same ontological level. “So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man,” (Genesis 2:21-22). Eve, the first woman, comes out of Adam; she is one with Adam, and yet different, a help-mate sharing in Adam’s stewardship over the earth.

Why does our true personal nature reveal itself only in a proper communal relationship with others? Scripture again indicates the answer. “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness,” (Genesis 1:26). Humanity is created in the image and likeness of God, but what exactly do we see God to be like? God is Trinity, a oneness in expressed in three persons, three relational entities which are united in perfect communion and yet express themselves in three distinct manners. Because we are in the image and likeness of God, there is a fittingness for the incarnation, because humanity unites with its prototype. But there is more to this. “The ‘image and likeness’ of God in man implies, not only an openness of man toward God, but also a function and task of man in the whole of creation,” John Meyendorff. Byzantine Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 1983), 140. We are called to be like God, to be in relational unity with the rest of humanity, to create the social bonds necessary for this unity to exist. Communion, and not isolation, is necessary in order to express the fullness of our human potential, even as in the Trinity it is through the communion and unity of the divine persons their reality is realized.

Family ties express the foundation of this human community. We come from two parents, sharing qualities from each, making them our own. We show ourselves as being distinct offshoots from our parents, and yet, look behind the obvious differences, we can find that we are not entirely different, entirely separated from them. Genetically speaking, save for mutation, we share one half of our own material makeup with our mother, and the other half with our father. Try as we might, we will never be completely different from them, even though our relative distinction is clear.

We find the Holy Family to have central importance in the life and work of messiah, starting with the call Joseph and Mary received to raise him, and ending with Jesus’ giving over of Mary, his mother, to John and through John, to all of us. “In revealing the Father’s love and humanity’s sublime calling, he made use of the most ordinary things of social life and illustrated his words with expressions and imagery from everyday life. He sanctified those human ties, above all family ties, which are the basis of social structures,” Gaudium et Spes in Vatican Council II: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations. Ed. Austin Flannery, O.P. (Northport, New York: Costello Publishing Company, 1996), paragraph 32.

It is in this light we can understand how and why ancient Christians took the family to be in the likeness of the Trinity. They understood that the Father, in loving unity with the work of the Holy Spirit, brought Christ to the world, just as a father and mother come together in love and through their love, beget children. Love is not static; it is creative, within and without the Trinity. From this, we can understand why the family is the foundation of all society: human society is the realization of the family by the fact that it is in reality one large, extended family. The same qualities that are inherent in the family should be inherent with society: it should make itself into a loving unity working for the common good, each person having a unique role, each person having qualities which makes the family possible. If society can only be understood in relation to the family, then this means that a breakdown in the family will result in a breakdown with society. One of the grave defects of socialism lay in its breakdown of the family; there was nothing left it could create to justify why some lone individual, theoretically at war with everyone else, would want to give up this war and work for some common good. Raised in such a condition, raised without a proper appreciation of their immediate family, one will not form a proper appreciation of the human family. If the communion between a child with its family is no longer possible, a child raised in such a condition will have a difficult if not impossible time appreciating communion with others. But this truth goes both ways, one who does not realize the common good and the extended human family that one has in society will slowly lose sight of the meaning of family, even at its most basic unit. Why express any concern with one’s most immediate relations if we see the relations between two people to be primarily a relation of discordant opposition and not unity?

However, society is not one megalithic entity, even if humanity is, in its core, experienced through the interdependent but free encounter of relational persons. The communal unity of humanity must be understood as the basis for society, but freedom of expression must be seen as the basis for the variety of rich, distinct cultures. “The essence of society is not the external interaction of isolated individuals, not the collision of social atoms, but a primordially collective multi-unity. Outwardly, in the empirical layer of society, this multi-unity collectivity has two correlative expressions: the free interaction of the elements of multiplicity and the organizational unity of the whole,” S.L. Frank. The Spiritual Foundation of Society. Trans. Boris Jakim (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1987), 169. Only through this freedom can human potential be actualized. It is in the free movements of the human spirit that beauty can be realized here on earth, while beauty is itself what makes life full and rich, a life worth living. We are called to generate beauty in all we do; we are all called to be artists, making the world a more beautiful place because of our very existence. In the matrix of world cultures, we find common methods of generating such beauty, a common language which allows the deep recesses of our heart to be expressed in such a way as to be understood and appreciated by all. “In its essence, culture is the search for the one thing necessary which leads us beyond the immanent boundaries in which we find ourselves,” Paul Evdokimov. “Culture and Faith,” in In The World, Of the Church. Ed. and Trans. Michael Plekon and Alexis Vinogradov (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 214.

Freedom, however, must not be confused with irrational anarchy. While we have the potential to act in many different ways, some actions enliven the spirit, others enslave it; a society understanding this tries to create those laws in which it believes the human spirit can be most free. “A freedom without law is anarchy and therefore the destruction of freedom,” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). Values In A Time Of Upheaval. Trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 33.

In an ideal world, laws would not be needed; but it is only in an ideal world that we would know what actions would cause us harm, limiting our freedom, and what actions would keep it intact. Because, in actuality, we do not know the consequences of our actions, it is quite clear we live in fallen ignorance; but if this is the case, then what guarantees do we have that the laws, once enacted, will fulfill their duty, and produce that freedom which we seek? Sadly, we do not have any; we must use our reason to the best of our ability to predetermine those consequences, but reason is an imperfect tool, and the laws we create will thus show evidence of our imperfection, and even our fallen nature. The rule of law, which is good, could be turned into a tyrannical rule, where a law does not serves its purpose and must be removed. We must keep the rule of law for the sake of humanity, but we must know humanity is not made for the sake of law! “The social order requires constant improvement: it must be founded in truth, built in justice, and enlivened by love: it should grow in freedom towards a more humane equilibrium,” Gaudium et Spes, paragraph 26.

A culture which creates and generates its own rule of law with its own rule of government to protect that rule of law can be seen as the foundation of the state. As such a culture is a good, the state must be seen as a good. But they must only be seen as relative goods, because the final good will always be God. Hence any culture and the state or states it produces must be seen only to exist for a purpose, making the state relative in its value. But in that act, it is to become the outward expression of the social bonds inherent in human nature, allowing for human freedom to express itself in a just and beautiful society. The relative goodness of a state can only be declared in according to how well the state generates and perpetuates this profound human expression. Its failures to do so are failures in its goodness; in extreme circumstances, where it squashes the human spirit, the state no longer performs its function and must be understood as a relative evil, and must be resisted.

Thus we can begin to understand the relationship between a Christian with the state. A Christian exists in the world, and must act in the world, and must not seek to destroy the world, but to transform it to its proper end in Christ. Thus the Christian must not seek to destroy an evil state, but to transform it, to purify it. “The Christian service to the state consists in preserving its greatness while considering it inferior to God,” Hugo Rahner, Church and State In Early Christianity Trans. Leo Donald Davis, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 20.We realize our final end is in God, and that all states are relative, temporal goods; they are not our final end; we must not turn it into an idol. But this does not mean we cannot and should not love the state we live in; the state, in what good it does, in what freedom it provides, in what cultural matrix it allows human freedom to express itself, is a good and all good deserves to be respected and loved. But that love must be proper to the kind of good it is. We must not love the state so much that its purpose is lost, and love the state more than its purpose.

Our love for our state can cause us to consider our state as being better than some other state, for those qualities in it which we appreciate. This is not necessarily wrong; indeed, if it is done in a good natured way, rivalry between states can be a good. However, this rivalry must exist only with one express aim: for the improvement of all. Nicholas of Cusa, for example, tells us that this is true not only on a secular level. How we worship God and experience God cannot be limited in one way; such attempts will stifle the creative interaction with God, and the ever-increasing cooperation with grace which we seek in the Christian life. Therefore rivalry between states can help develop better relations with God. ”Perhaps as a result of a certain diversity devotion will even be increased, since each nation will endeavor with zeal and diligence to make its own rite more splendid, in order that in this respect it may excel some other nation and thereby obtain greater merit with God and greater praise in the world,” Nicholas of Cusa. De Pace Fidei, XIX. Trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1994), 70.

Yet, to appreciate this role, to appreciate the greatness of the state, to realize why a Christian cannot abandon it, we must realize that because the state’s foundation is from the humanity which generated it. Because humans are open in their very nature to the free graces of God, the state is also opened to them, allowing it to be a participant in God’s will and therefore directed, in part, by God. “The state (like all other social unions and relations) is the human incarnation (and therefore always only a partial and inevitably distorted incarnation) of the divine principle of truth which is grounded in Truth itself as it is revealed in the essentially moral spiritual life of mankind, the life of grace,” S.L. Frank, The Spiritual Foundations of Society, 102. When Sts. Peter and Paul declare state authority to be instituted by God, it can only be understood in this context. “Neither Paul nor Peter expresses an uncritical glorification of the Roman state. While they do insist strongly on the divine origin of the legal ordering of the state, they are far from divinizing the state itself. It is precisely because they see the limits on the state, which is not God and may not behave as if it were God, that they acknowledge its ordering function and its ethical character,” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger . Values In A Time Of Upheaval, 19.

A Christian is therefore called to take part in the development of the state, realizing that there are as many different ways as there are people for how this should be done. Politics, which deal with the government of the state, is important, but we must understand, like the state, it too has a limit, and unless we are called to political service, we must not let our lives be ruled by the temporal conditions of the politics of our state. We must work for their improvement, but we must understand that politics is itself only a means to an end, and not an end in itself. “Politics is the realm of reason – not of a merely technological, calculating reason, but of moral reason, since the goal of the state, and hence the ultimate goal of all politics, has a moral nature, namely, peace and justice,” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, ibid., 24. Moreover, we cannot be under the illusion that through politics we can transform the world into a utopia; while we seek for the betterment of the world, its pristine reconditioning is only to be had in the eschaton. But we must recognize a key danger that many fall into when dealing with politics: people often become party loyalists over and above the principles in which government should be run. We might believe in one ideal and put it forward above all others, but in doing so it is no longer holistically working for the betterment of humanity. What Sergius Bulgakov points out about how socialism works is true about any principle when it is taken to an extreme: it becomes so important that no other issues seem to matter. “The warmth of human relations is edged out by socially utilitarian rationalism, immediacy of feeling replace by the infamous adherence to ‘principle,’ so that the success of socialism and the growth of social solidarity are by no means accompanied by an increase in love or even sympathy and a decrease in enmity among people.,” Sergei Bulgakov. Philosophy of Economy Trans. Catherine Evtuhov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 240. The problem becomes more apparent when the Christian puts a secular principle over and above the dictates of their religious faith. Christians can and should engage in politics, but they should not become its slave:

The Christian as such may be utterly deprivatized, commissioned to act publicly as an assessor on the world state (1 Co 4:9; Heb 10:30) – and in this sense he may be political: all the same, his existence cannot be classified in secular terms, and he himself cannot grasp in its totality, and so the Christian cannot be simply put into the “political” pigeonhole. Politics concerns him: as a ‘member’ under Christ, the Head, he is in profound solidarity with each of the Lord’s least brothers and must realize that he has an inescapable responsibility for the conditions under which they live.
-- Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Theo-Drama. Volume I: Prolegomena. Trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco:Ignatius Press, 1988), 39.

Moreover, as an actor in the world scene, the Christian must realize the temporal nature of the state, even of the culture they live in; there can come a time when a given state or culture has outlasted its purpose and must be respectfully put aside for something better, something greater. “Sooner or later, thought, art, and social life reach their own limits and then a choice is imposed: to be located in the infinity of their own immanence, to be intoxicated by their own emptiness, or to surpass their strangulating limitations and, in the transparency of clear waters to reflect the transcendent,” Paul Evdokimov. “Culture and Faith,” 201.The Christian must not be attached to the state; they must not find themselves attaching to the things of the world; they are to enjoy and appreciate them, yes, but in the end, they must go through an ascetical renunciation of all attachments in order to experience everything in their proper place, to see how all things point to God and participate in existence through God. Their beauty, which we must acknowledge, is but a reflection of the greater beauty that exists in God, a beauty that draws us to experience the intense love shared by the three persons of the Holy Trinity. In this way it can be said, “Intense love, purified by authentic asceticism, is our true destiny,” Paul Evdokimov, ibid., 205.