A Rightly Ordered Civil Society

American Individualism & Orthodox Asceticism

Aug 02, 2024

How, as Orthodox Christians, might we understand the right ordering of society?

Developmentally, trust is a function of predictability; the more parents are consistent in their treatment of the infant, the more the infant comes to trust the parents. Moving from developmental psychology to sociology, men and women “in society can successfully pursue their ends” only if “they know what to expect from their fellows. Their relations, in other words, [must] show a certain order. How such an order of the multifarious activities of millions of [individuals] is produced or can be achieved is the central problem of social theory and social policy.”1

While “to the ordinary person,” social order “is the result of the ordering activity of an ordering mind” there is something more complex going on. Much of the order of society of which we speak is, ... , not of this kind; and the very recognition that there exists such an order requires a certain amount of reflection.”

The chief difficulty is that the order of social events can generally not be perceived by our senses but can only be traced by our intellect. It is, as we shall say, an abstract and not a concrete order. It is also a very complex order. And it is an order which, though it is the result of human action, has not been created by men deliberately arranging the elements in a preconceived pattern.2

For our concerns here, “society” means not only civil society but also the Church. Like the former, the latter is as a visible, historical society and which while, unlike the former, is willed by God, but institutionally and through the faithful, it interacts with different human communities. Finally, all that the Church does, it does through the actions of men and women responding in relative freedom to divine grace.

Building on this admittedly simple insight, key to the understanding of the relationship between the Church and society I will be defending is the idea that it is in and through the faithful (both the laity and the clergy), that there is not only an overlap with between the Church and other communities in terms of time and space but—in the heart of the faithful—there exists a real, if imperfect, communion.3 To help us see why this is so we will examine the role of tradition in human life and what the very American idea of “rugged individualism” might offer to an understanding of the Church relationship to American society.

Broadly, America individualism takes one of two forms: rugged or ontological. The latter brings in to focus the paradox that “at the very core of American culture” lies “individualism.” While a paradox can make for an enjoyable intellectual puzzle or serve as a spur to prayer, it is an uncertain foundation for a society and so a just political order to say nothing of the life of the Church. So, while “the dignity, indeed the sacredness, of the individual” is central to American identity, it is also the case that “some of our deepest problems both as individuals and as a society are also closely linked to our individualism.”4

Historically, individualism emerges within the “context of moral and religious obligations” of classical republicanism and Reformation Christianity that served both to justify and limit its autarkic tendencies. The question for Orthodox Christians in America is this: Can such “an individualism in which the self has become the main form of reality can be sustained”? The broad anthropological (and so social concern) “is not simply whether self-contained individuals might withdraw from the public sphere to pursue private ends.” It is to ask “whether such individuals are capable of sustaining either a public or a private life”?5

As we saw earlier, there are real benefits—personal and social—of modern individualism. And yet, it is hardly unreasonable to wonder if seem the Enlightenment concern for individual freedom and the more communal orientation of the Orthodox Church are at odds with each other. Certainly, if we understand human freedom in nakedly individualistic terms this opposition is real. The radical, ontological individualism that sees society—and the Church—as (at best) an “artificial construction”6 that may at any moment “overwhelm the individual and destroy any chance of autonomy unless he stands against it” serves only to foster fear and suspicion. In such a context, power replaces love, and my neighbor becomes my enemy.7

Whatever might be the excesses of the Enlightenment pursuit of individual freedom, it was at least in part a reasonable response to cultural forms—including those that emerge in so-called, Orthodox cultures—that valued institutions and hierarch over the person. Whatever might have been the strengths of pre-modern society, it is also true that “monarchical and aristocratic authority” both civil and religious could—and often was—“arbitrary and oppressive.”8

At the same time, we need to be careful that we don’t romanticize traditional societies. The canonical tradition of the Orthodox Church is based on the sober realization that “there are those in her fold whose degenerate will scorns” the life of mutual charity and respect in pursuit of their “own selfish” desires.9 And, yes, especially in recent years, contemporary forms of individualism “seem to be producing a way of life that is neither individually or socially viable.” But a “return to traditional forms” is unwise and requires we ignore history so utterly as to represent an even more radical form of individualism than that which it would seek to correct! “The question, then, is whether the older civic and biblical traditions have the capacity to reformulate themselves while simultaneously remaining faithful to their own deepest insights.”10

While we cannot even hope to address the whole of this question, let me offer a suggestion on how we can be faithful to Holy Tradition as we go about the business of not only evangelism but fulfilling our civic obligations to participate in the American Experiment of self-government.

The Church’s ascetical tradition is an anthropological sound starting point for any theoretical, and more importantly, practical, “reformulation” of American civic traditions. Especially as articulated within the tradition of the Orthodox Church, asceticism takes a holistic view of the human person rather than the more differential view common in the social sciences and legal positivism. The anthropology of the latter assumes a “moral logic [that] undercuts” the possibility of community and so being-in-communion11 since it does the person in terms of ever smaller “parts.”

But we can, I suggest, keep the insights of social sciences without sacrificing the Church’s catholic anthropology. Parents do this all the time when caring for a sick child. They acknowledge the insight of the physician and medical science not only without sacrificing their love for the child but as an expression of that love.

To say the same thing more systematically, our everyday experience testifies that we see that “differentiation takes place when” we concentrate our “attention on particular phenomena.” Ideally this, “differentiated knowledge leads us back to a deeper, more structured knowledge of the whole” While “there is no essential opposition between” a holistic, “comprehensive” view of the person and “the various differential theories” our “knowledge of the whole is primary.”12

The reason for this is clear enough. Even the most “detailed descriptions … are bound to fit more than one person” we only come to know each other in our uniqueness “only within the framework of direct personal relationships and communion. … Love is the supreme road to knowledge of the person, because it is an acceptance of the other person as a whole.” Unlike the more theoretical approaches we alluded to above (to say nothing of my own sinfulness), love does not “project on the other person” our own “preferences, demands or desires.” Love accepts the other as he or she “is, in the fullness of [their] uniqueness.” This is also why our highly, individualistic culture struggles with a broad range of problems related to sexuality. It is “in the self-transcendence and offering of self that is sexual love” where husband and wife learn to live in mutual acceptance of each other’s uniqueness.13

For the theological anthropology of the Orthodox Church, “’person’ and ‘individual’ are opposite in meaning. The individual is the denial or neglect of the distinctiveness of the person.”14 Christian asceticism has as its goal the liberation of the truly personal from the merely individualistic. In the full and proper sense, moreover, the liberty that ascetical struggle offers is not simply an absence of constraints (a “freedom from” if you will) but a “[p]erfection and sanctification” that makes possible the person’s “restoration to the fullness of [his or her] existential possibilities” and so to be what he or she “is called to be—the image and glory of God.”15

George F Will in a December 2012 speech delivered at Washington University in St. Louis reminds us that while the “ancients had asked what is the highest of which mankind is capable and how can we pursue this? Hobbes and subsequent modernists asked: What is the worst that can happen and how can we avoid it?”16 Christian asceticism, rooted as it is in a holistic understanding of the human person and the human condition, answers both these questions by remember us in very practical ways (e.g., fasting, sexual restraint, the importance of prayer, manual labor and care for the poor) that we cannot be our best unless we are first able to prevent being our worst. Here, in our ascetical tradition we find the point of convergence between the life of the Church and the demands of a life of civic involvement and political self-government.

In one sense the paradox at the core of American culture is inherent in being a member of any community secular or religious. There is always a tension between what is unique in each of us as persons and what we share as human beings. Seeking to resolve this tension in favor of the former at the expense of the latter, the ontological individualism that has taken hold of American culture reflects an anthropological heresy. As Yannaras points out, taken in the ontological sense the “individual is the denial or neglect of the distinctiveness of the person.” We see the consequences of this confusion most clearly in the ways in which our concerns for how individual rights become mere, identity politics in the pursuit of “some rationalistic arrangement for the ‘rights of individuals’ or an ‘objective’ implementation of social justice makes all individual beings alike and denies them personal distinctiveness.”17

American individualism, however, is not intrinsically immoral nor is it an anthropological heresy. For all America’s real faults and sins, it is founded on, and until recently preserved an ascetical intuition that had the ability to help Americans avoid the excessive of both the radical individualism of the Enlightenment and of pre-Modern aristocratic authority. The Puritan work ethic, the US Constitution’s separation of powers, our Bourgeois virtues, and our commitment to Civil Rights all reflect that aspect of that takes seriously the need to correct what is worse in us so that what is best in us can shine forth.

Americans are not by any stretch of the imagination monastics, but we are, in our way and when we are our best selves, an ascetical people, who understand that a healthy civic, political, and religious community life depends on self-restraint. In this, the often (and unfairly) maligned American character or ethos of rugged individualism18 finds a natural partner in the social ethos of the Orthodox Church.

The work of cosmic transfiguration requires great effort, a ceaseless striving against the fallen aspects of humanity and of the world; and the embrace of this labor re-quires an ascetic ethos, one that can reorient the human will in such a way as to restore its bond with all of creation. Such an ethos reminds Christians that creation, as a divine gift from the loving creator, exists not simply as ours to consume at whim or will, but rather as a realm of communion and delight, in whose goodness all persons and all creatures are meant to share, and whose beauty all persons are called to cherish and protect (FLOW, §74)

Building the convergence of Orthodox anthropology and rugged individualism, on this foundation, we will next turn to look at what the Church has to say in three, broad, overlapping themes: politics, economics,and bioethics.

Orthodox Social Thought: From Cruelty to Charity

Discussion about this post