The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
— Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, XI
The French Revolution left a deep mark on European thought, by demonstrating that the world can change. The events of 1789 really did change our world, profoundly altering the set of background assumptions that shape how that world appears to us [1]. The German Romantic movement strove to respond to this new data by developing an art and philosophy appropriate to a changeable world [2]. Since a changeable world can be morally evaluated as good or bad, this insight naturally inspires a desire to deliberately change it for the better. In the next generation, Karl Marx developed a concrete proposal for implementing such change by paying attention to how the way we go about providing for our basic material needs sets the fundamental structure of our world [3]. If every re-organization of the means of production changes the world, then lasting and radical change can be intentionally catalyzed by philosophers capable of identifying and harnessing the social tensions arising out of the current situation.
In 1939, Don Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer published a small book outlining an alternative “way” of changing the world, entitled Camino. His approach is based on an earlier shift in the ground of the human world, arguably the first to take place consciously: the one initiated by Jesus of Nazareth [4]. While many of Jesus’ contemporaries expected him to simply constitute a new and more just political authority, his closest followers eventually understood that his vision of the “Kingdom of God” went much deeper, signifying a real transformation of the world, adequate to the dramatically cosmic descriptions of the “Day of the Lord” in the writings of the prophets [5]. Their efforts to advance this Kingdom were rooted in the conviction that it is of God, that only the Creator has the power to change the world for the better. Jesus was able to initiate the change because he is the Son of God, and the change continues to propagate thanks to the action of the divine Spirit that he infuses into the hearts of his disciples.
Escrivá’s proposal thus differs sharply from that of Marx (and is perhaps more similar to the original view of Hegel) in attributing primary causality for positive change to a transcendent principle. But alongside this central divergence, the two paradigms display some substantial points of commonality. They share a deep appreciation for the process of material production in constituting the human world, with Escrivá identifying work as the “hinge” of both individual and social change. They also agree on the importance of social context in forming the deepest convictions and habitual behavior of the individual [6]. This is why Escrivá founded an institution to spread his message, rather than simply trying to convince people through writing and speaking, and devoted vastly more time and effort to sculpting the social fabric of this new entity than to articulating a theory of its nature and aims [7].
This last point helps explain why Escrivá’s thought has received relatively little attention from academic philosophers and theologians [8]. Camino is one of the few works he published while he was alive, and is certainly the most important of those. But as the title indicates, it is a “way,” not a treatise. Its contents come directly from Escrivá’s ten years of practical experience assembling the initial nucleus of his new family, with many points taken literally from letters and conversations with his first followers [9]. That activity, in turn, derives from an experience that Escrivá always attributed to an extraordinary divine light, which took place during a spiritual retreat in Madrid on October 2, 1928. This is fully consistent with the original Christian “way” of changing the world, which relies on God as the main protagonist, but it also makes his work difficult to evaluate from the standpoint of the scholar. Confident in the overriding authority of his supernatural illumination, Escrivá never seeks to justify his ideas through citation of contemporary authors, but instead writes in an assertive style permeated with Biblical language, reminiscent of other prophets and mystics such as Catherine of Siena and Hildegard von Bingen.
These difficulties are not insuperable, however, and we have some effective instruments at our disposal for approaching this kind of text. On the one hand, according to some of the most influential philologists of the last century, the works of the ancient philosophers and early Christian writers were much more similar in genre to Camino than they are to modern academic writing. A philosopher was someone who had made contact with the transcendent source of order and strove to introduce this order through a corresponding way of life. The written texts were not meant to be self-contained products, but instruments to help shape and sustain the way of life. Since the relevant ways of life have long been extinguished, reading these ancient texts correctly requires great patience and attention to all the available circumstantial evidence. Escrivá provides an interesting test case for applying and refining this approach because his “way of life” still exists and can be directly observed.
On the other hand, though Escrivá does not cite contemporary sources, he does occasionally contrast his proposal with the activities of Marxists and other revolutionaries, starting from the very first point of Camino. This provides a complementary method of analysis, exploring the shared assumptions and points of divergence between the two visions. From this perspective, Camino surprisingly appears as a viable way forward towards the deepest aims of the theologies of liberation, which seek to revive the dynamism of the Kingdom of God by appealing to Marx’s insights into the possibility of world change.
In this series of essays, I plan to study Camino with this twofold approach, examining the structure of the book both in terms of the concept of Christianity in the early Christian writers and in light of the categories of Marx’s social analysis. I am much less expert in the latter than the former, and I will appreciate comments from those more expert in social and political philosophy to address the inevitable lacunae. My main goal is to organize a few scattered ideas I’ve been collecting on how this sort of analysis might work, with the hope that others can help pursue it more seriously in the future.
Camino (part 2)
Camino begins with a brief prologue, a poem of 14 lines, which sketches the nature and goal of the book:
[1] In other words, this large-scale social reorganization changed the “ground” of human consciousness, in the sense of McLuhan, Laws of Media, Introduction: “All situations comprise an area of attention (figure) and a very much larger area of inattention (ground). The two continually coerce and play with each other across a common outline or boundary or interval that serves to define both simultaneously. The shape of one conforms exactly to the shape of the other. Figures rise out of, and recede back into, ground, which is con-figurational and comprises all other available figures at once. [...] Ground provides the structure or style of awareness, the 'way of seeing' as Flaubert called it, or the 'terms on which' a figure is perceived.”
[2] See Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf for a vivid introduction to the spirit and origins of this movement.
[3] See previous post on Guardini and the impact of the second industrial revolution on the human world.
[4] Several recent books have explored various aspects of this transformation from a historian’s perspective, including Dominion by the popular historian of the ancient world Tom Holland, The Victory of Reason and sequels by sociologist Rodney Stark, and The Final Pagan Generation by Edward J. Watts.
[5] For example Joel chapter 2. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, Chapter 2 (commenting on the scene of Peter’s denial in the Gospel of Mark): “What we see here is a world which on the one hand is entirely real, average, identifiable as to place, time, and circumstances, but which on the other hand is shaken in its very foundations, is transforming and renewing itself before our eyes. For the New Testament authors who are their contemporaries, these occurrences on the plane of everyday life assume the importance of world-revolutionary events, as later on they will for everyone.”
[6] Alasdair MacIntyre captures the core insight behind Marx’s provocatively phrased (and certainly exaggerated) Thesis VI on Feuerbach – that man’s essence is the ensemble of social relations – in a recently republished description of his own “conversion” to Aristotelianism: “This discovery of a directedness in ourselves toward a final end is initially a discovery of what is presupposed by our practice, as it issues in a transformation of ourselves through the development of habits of feeling, thought, choice, and action that are the virtues [...] Only secondarily, as we articulate at the level of theory the concepts and arguments presupposed by and informing our practice, are we able to recognize that we have had to become some sort of Aristotelian.”
[7] In this sense, Escrivá’s strategy is contiguous with other efforts to revive the original Christian dynamism in earlier moments of history, as summed up by MacIntyre on the last page of After Virtue (with reference to the final century of the Roman imperium): “What they set themselves to achieve instead – often not recognizing fully what they were doing – was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained.”
[8] The first systematic theological study is currently being translated into English, with two out of three volumes published: Burkhart and Lopez, Ordinary Life and Holiness in the Teaching of St. Josemaría.
[9] Escrivá left behind abundant documentary evidence on the process of composition, which has made possible the precise identification of the original source in personal letters or private notes for most of the points of the text, as compiled in the 2002 historical-critical edition.