The Priest and the Jester

 That our particular outlook or view of the world is greatly influenced by the era in which we live—what is often called “the spirit of the times”—is self-evident. Yet, throughout history, failure to notice this obvious truth has been the cause of much human misery. When some new worldview offering itself as the provider of all meaning and purpose in life comes to prominence, the false confidence it engenders invariably leads to tragedy. 

Perhaps in no other time has this been as obvious as it was in the twentieth century. In the first half of that century the twin evils of Fascism and Stalinism, on the promise of a new world order, tore Europe apart and killed or enslaved millions of people. Those who were born in Europe in the early part of the twentieth century and witnessed these horrors are, as a rule, much more sensitive to the dangers inherent in the zeitgeist. Leszek Kolakowski was such a one. As a schoolboy in Poland, he witnessed the Warsaw ghetto and his father was killed by the Gestapo. Not surprisingly, as a young adult he became an enthusiastic supporter of communism and saw it as providing a new and permanent order of peace and prosperity. Very quickly, though, as the inexorable logic of the ideology worked itself out, the iron grip of Stalinism was to produce human misery which, both in scale and barbarity, was eventually to match and perhaps even overtake that which had preceded it. 

Kolakowski, like so many other European intellectuals of that era, was to change his attitude to communism very rapidly. He began to criticise the system and, in 1966, was expelled from the Party. Soon after, he went into exile, occupying prominent university positions in England and America. 

When Kolakowski died in July 2009, most newspaper obituaries concentrated on his penetrating analyses of Marxist theory published in three volumes as The Main Currents of Marxism (1976–78). This is widely regarded as a masterly work which argues, amongst other things, that Stalinism was a logical outcome of Marxism and not an aberration. A tribute by Sev Sternhell in Quadrant of September 2009 also reproduced one of Kolakowski’s better-known short essays on political philosophy. 

This present essay is an attempt to demonstrate the extraordinary range of Kolakowski’s intellectual interests and the continuing relevance of his ideas. Indeed, it might be said that his early disaffection with Marxism was merely the spark which ignited his interest in a far wider range of subjects. And almost always, these issues were associated with problems which have occupied the minds of philosophers since the time of Plato, and perhaps even earlier. The trouble with philosophy is that, if you persist with it, you are eventually forced to consider the very validity of human reasoning itself. Even his works of fiction (Tales from the Kingdom of Lailonia, The Keys to Heaven) deal with the theme of human imperfection and the futile attempts of human reason to deal with infinitude, history and nature. And so, the first and most important point to make about Kolakowski’s output is that it was nearly always concerned with the permanent problems of human existence and rarely with purely current issues. If he did deal with the latter, it was always to dissect out of them their often unconscious reliance on some much more permanent issue in the history of ideas. 

As a philosopher, Kolakowski wrote important works on the history of positivism, commentaries on the philosophies of Husserl, Bergson, Spinoza and Pascal, and works on many more general aspects of philosophy, both modern and ancient. He was especially interested in metaphysics, and part of his reason for studying positivism was to investigate its fruitless attempt to purge philosophy of all metaphysical content. But from quite early in his career, Kolakowski was intensely interested in religion or more precisely, in those murky areas between philosophy, science and religion. He had a knack of writing about the big questions in religion and philosophy in a way that was both entertaining and lucid and, above all, accessible to the non-specialist reader. That he should have been so interested in religion is unusual, for he professed no particular faith and was widely regarded as an agnostic. Others, though, regarded him as a non-practising Christian and it is certainly true that he often defended Christianity and, in particular, Catholicism.

Despite this huge range of philosophical interests, it is possible to discern a common theme in nearly all his writing. His overriding interest was in the battle between tradition and progress or change, that is to say, between structure and development. This, he characterised as the antagonism between “the priest and the jester” in an early essay from the 1950s:

The antagonism between a philosophy that perpetuates the absolute and a philosophy that questions accepted absolutes seems incurable, as incurable as that which exists between conservatism and radicalism in all aspects of human life. This is the antagonism between the priest and the jester, and in almost every epoch the philosophy of the priest and the philosophy of the jester are the two most general forms of intellectual culture. The priest is the guardian of the absolute; he sustains the cult of the final and the obvious as acknowledged by and contained in tradition. The jester is he who moves in good society without belonging to it, and treats it with impertinence; he who doubts all that appears self-evident. He could not do this if he belonged to good society; he would then be at best a salon scandalmonger. The jester must stand outside good society and observe it from the sidelines in order to unveil the non-obvious behind the obvious, the non-final behind the final; yet he must frequent society so as to know what it holds sacred and to have the opportunity to address it impertinently. 

(reproduced in Marxism and Beyond)

Underlying this antagonism is the perceived antagonism between Enlightenment reason and faith. A large part of Kolakowski’s writing is devoted to this theme (see, for instance, his book Religion) and he maintains that the antagonism is an artefact—a product of the method of inquiry used. Neither reason nor faith can be chased down to some indisputable bedrock of epistemological certainty. Both, in the final analysis, involve philosophical presuppositions which are arbitrary and contestable. Of far greater importance for Kolakowski are the social and political outcomes that the two positions can create.

The battle between the priest and the jester can be treated under three general headings or themes, all of which have come under Kolakowski’s careful scrutiny—sometimes in his role as the jester (his disaffection with Marxist orthodoxy, for instance) and sometimes as priest (his insistence on the need for some form of transcendent wisdom in formulating moral criteria). The first is the question of human perfectibility and the quest for utopia. The second has to do with tradition and the need for what he calls “taboos” in establishing moral criteria. The third theme is the persistence of religious ideas in secular culture and the unsuccessful attempts to “explain” the religious mode of thought in secular terms.

It is hardly surprising given his early experiences with Marxism that Kolakowski should have written so much on the theme of utopia and on the quest for human perfectibility. Marxism is a utopian vision which completely ignores the frailties of the human condition and rejects the general idea of human imperfectability which, in the earlier Western Tradition, took the form of the Fall and the consequences of Original Sin. These, for Kolakowski, constitute a sort of Kantian “synthetic a priori” in human affairs and are much more that just religious ideas from another age. They are simply part and parcel of the human condition and all of our intellectual endeavours come under their unavoidable limitations. Political utopias which attempt to bring about perfect human fraternity are inevitably bound to produce a highly despotic society. 

There are other variants of the utopian quest which have felt the sharp blade of Kolakowski’s intellect. One is that extreme version of positivist philosophy which sees science as ultimately providing answers to all of the traditional problems of philosophy:

Positivism, when it is radical, renounces the transcendental meaning of truth and reduces logical values to features of biological behaviour. The rejection of the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori—the fundamental act constituting positivism as a doctrine—can be identified with the reduction of all knowledge to biological responses; induction is merely one form of the conditioned reflex, and to ask, “Under what conditions is induction legitimate?” is to ask, “Under what conditions is the acquisition of a given reflex biologically advantageous?” 

(Positivist Philosophy)

Even milder forms of positivism cannot escape his critique, for he sees the attempt to proscribe or limit the bounds of philosophy by people like Carnap and Ayer as an act of escape from those enduring problems of philosophy—a purely voluntary act to dissociate oneself from any concept or idea that cannot be correctly formulated by some rule of language or sentence construction. 

Behind much of Kolakowski’s thought on utopias and human perfectibility is the question of evil. Evil, for Kolakowski, is something real. It is not the result of faulty social institutions, or a lack of education, or a sort of sediment from our past history. All of these “explanations” presuppose the possibility of our capacity to overcome evil via our own efforts. Even worse, by repackaging it in these terms we judge ourselves to be innocent and simply revert to the Socratic idea that evil is merely ignorance. It has the effect too, of relieving the individual of all responsibility for his or her actions. So it is that today, we see such things as individuals suing tobacco companies because of their lung cancers. 

The second discernible theme in much of Kolakowski’s writing is concerned with the validation of cognitive and moral rules. He argues that it is only within the context of an intact Tradition (which means, in effect, a religious Tradition—the word is capitalised to emphasise that it is more than simply a set of customs or habits) that cognitive and moral rules can be validated at all. The attempts by moral philosophers over the years, beginning with Kant and continuing in our own era with people like John Rawls, to somehow fashion moral rules from a wholly secular base are doomed. They are doomed, Kolakowski maintains, because morality is not a set of normative utterances, but a lived allegiance to an order of “taboos”. The word taboo here seems to be borrowed from Mircea Eliade, whom Kolakowski has obviously read. It is difficult to portray the exact meaning of this word as used by Kolakowski but he clearly owes little to Freud, who also wrote on this subject. The taboo is not a law in our normal use of that word. It is one of the parameters of a Tradition and always belongs in the realm of the sacred. Its most important feature has to do pre-eminently with the sense of guilt that arises spontaneously when it is transgressed. For Kolakowski, we do not assent to our moral beliefs by admitting “this is true”, but by feeling guilty if we fail to comply with them. Our response is automatic, and not a product of reasoned analysis.

The third theme in Kolakowski’s writings, the attempts to accommodate or “explain” religious belief within some overarching cognitive scheme, is perhaps his most important contribution of all. There are many components to his argument here. His analysis of positivist philosophy, which I have mentioned above, led him to consider the attempts by people like Comte, Avenarius, Mach, Herbert Spencer and others to subsume religious belief and religious experience under some overall scientific schema. This idea was given tremendous impetus by Darwinism and, indeed, the whole movement is still very much alive today in the ideas of people such as E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins. But if we grant the evolutionary schema, Kolakowski points out that a real dilemma ensues. When we consider that the preoccupation with metaphysical ideas has been a feature of human thinking for as long as recorded history, we need to explain (under the evolutionary schema) why such a biologically useless, nay harmful, trait should have developed at all. Included under this umbrella of metaphysical ideas is religious thought and religious symbolism. If religious symbols and ideas are only means or channels by which various social, economic or libidinal needs are expressed, why are such needs not expressed directly? When science is used in this way, religion must be explained as some sort of adaptation providing survival benefits or, alternatively, as some sort of unavoidable by-product—like the coccyx or vestigial tail-bone in humans. No other type of explanation is allowable because it would tend to invalidate the very grounds upon which all explanation is deemed to depend.

But here, we need to go back a step and look at the history of the modern scientific method. It is often said that the drive to understand nature began with the ancient Greeks and is thus a consistent feature of Western thought. This overlooks the fact that all early attempts to understand nature, right through to the end of the medieval period, posited such understanding within a religious context. It was principally with Descartes and Francis Bacon that we first see the understanding of nature sundered from religion. This trend gained enormous force during the Enlightenment and eventually came to be regarded as the only valid way in which nature could be understood. Its popularity was enormously increased by the obvious success of the scientific method in providing beneficial results to humankind. But according to Kolakowski this particular approach was in itself neither rational nor irrational. It merely reflected human passions, not human knowledge, because “truth” and effectiveness are two quite different things. Also, we tend to forget that the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and even Newton were made possible because each of these men held certain Platonic or Neoplatonic notions regarding a pre-ordained harmony in the universe. Had they relied entirely on empirical observations, we may well ask whether they would have had the same degree of success. And so, at the end of the day the supposed conflict between science and religion is actually a cultural conflict which reflects a hierarchy of preferences. 

Thus, the attempts at “explaining away” the religious mode of existence are, for Kolakowski, wholly futile because the “language of the sacred” belongs to a totally different order of understanding. In sacred language, the act of understanding merges with the act of believing and the usual fact–value distinction employed in the conventional philosophy of language does not apply. When William Blake supposed that “truth cannot be told in such a way as to be understood and not believed” he was describing the operation of sacred language. From such a religious perspective, it is quite proper to use the terms true and false in moral judgments. Indeed, it is only in terms of the sacred language that judgments about what is right or wrong, good or evil, may be validated. Thus, that often ridiculed phase “if there is no God everything is permissible”, is absolutely correct in Kolakowski’s analysis. From this, one can easily see how it is that he arrives at the conclusion that moral rules can only have a real force and an unambiguous meaning from within a religious Tradition. In this he is followed by another former Marxist and philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, whose devastating analysis of the contemporary scene in moral discourse (After Virtue) is widely recognised and whose views I have mentioned in previous Quadrant articles. 

It is all too easy to dismiss Kolakowski as a mere theoretician whose ideas have little relevance to the practical issues of here and now. To demonstrate the falseness of this view, I would like to finish this essay by considering the relevance of Kolakowski’s analyses to just such a current issue. The issue I have chosen is the continuing attempt, from within, to “reform” the Catholic Church. Outsiders might well regard this as simply a demarcation dispute, not dissimilar to that seen in the union movement, but if you have any sympathy with Kolakowski’s view of the world, it is much more and it has the potential for far-reaching consequences. The issue has been quietly bubbling away for decades now but was recently given fresh impetus by the publication of an open letter to Catholic bishops by the dissident Catholic priest and theologian Hans Kung, in which he called for radical change.

That this is of importance to more than just Catholics ought to be obvious. Catholicism is now the largest single Christian sect in the world and many non-Catholics (including Kolakowski himself) have concerned themselves with Catholic issues because of the inextricable historical link between Christianity and what remains of that entity called the Western Tradition. Kolakowski has called Christian religiosity “the seminary of the European Spirit”. When, in his famous message to Congress, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that “we cannot escape history”, he had the future in mind. But the past is equally important for it is only through the past that we can identify who we are. It is, in this sense, a continuing frame of reference by which we approach the problems of our own era and bring the past to bear in making our judgments. Without such a frame of reference we disappear into that vast and featureless sea of negation called cultural relativism where all cultures, all Traditions are either equally valid or equally invalid depending on your taste (and nothing else).

In order for a religious Tradition to persist, two things are necessary. In the first place the Tradition must be able to adapt itself to the changing circumstances of history. Second, it must always retain the core of its belief system—that which actually constitutes the Tradition and serves to identify it. All other matters are really peripheral to these two basic concerns. The fact that church attendances, for instances, have fallen in living memory, is no reliable indicator of the “health” of a particular religious Tradition. It is precisely in determining the correct balance between adaptation (or change) and maintenance of a Tradition where we see the real problem facing Catholicism today. The proponents of radical change, for whom Kung is a hero, are ranged against the present Pontiff and the Vatican who are quite understandably concerned to ensure that the doctrinal identity of the church—its raison d’être—is not compromised. 

As I have indicated above, this was a particularly important area for Kolakowski. That which constitutes the Tradition is, in very large part, the realm of the sacred. That is to say, it properly belongs outside secular history and, indeed, is used to actually give some meaning to secular history. This was part of Christopher Dawson’s thesis as explained in a recent Quadrant article by Gregory Haines (May 2010). In the case of Catholicism, that which constitutes the realm of the sacred includes not just biblical revelation but also a specific structure of temporal authority devolving down through the Pope, the cardinals and thence to bishops and priests. This structure, although it may mimic a secular, political structure, has as its basis (for Catholics), a divine authority given to the Apostle Peter and, in the Catholic Tradition, handed on to his successors in that which is called the Apostolic Succession. Although this state of affairs obviously had its origins in human history, its mandate is seen as divine. As such, it is immutable. This is one of the core beliefs of the Tradition, but today that authority is being tested from within so as to push the always uneasy balance between structure and development, tradition and progress, dangerously in the direction of change. It is done, of course, with the best of intentions, and its proponents suppose that the tensions thus produced are creative tensions. But tensions of this sort can be destructive too. How does one judge?

The short answer is that no one can arrive at the best balance simply by the application of human reason. The desire for full ecumenism, for the ordination of women priests and married priests, for greater local autonomy in church matters—all these have their genesis in the attempt to apply secular, democratic ideas, born of human reason, to an institution in which the religious notion of human freedom is entirely different from that which obtains in the secular realm. The only possible way in which these matters can be resolved is for those charged with temporal authority in the church to reflect upon these matters in the light of Scripture and Tradition—that is to say, in the light of revelation—and make their decisions on this basis alone. Nothing else can aid in this process—no supposed precedent from history, no weight of popular opinion, and no application of democratic principles. We are dealing here with the realm of taboo, as understood by Kolakowski, and its only referent is the sacred. 

Back in 1989, Kolakowski was interviewed on this general theme by the Melbourne journalist and broadcaster Paul Gray. This, in part, is what he had to say:

It would be silly, foolish, to object to the Church on the grounds that it is “traditionalist”. The whole strength of the Church is that it is faithful to its tradition—otherwise, what is the Church for? If the Church is going to become a political party which merely adapts its beliefs to changing opinions, it can be safely dismissed altogether, because there are political parties doing such things. If the Church is there to sanctify and bless in advance every change in intellectual and moral fashion in our civilisation, then again—what is the Church for? The Church is strong because it has a traditional teaching, a spiritual kernel, which it considers its immutable essence. It cannot just yield to any pressure from people who think that whatever is in fashion at the present moment should immediately be adopted by the Church as its own teaching, whether in the field of political ideas or of daily life.

Kung and those who support him suppose that the church must undergo radical change in order to accommodate the perceived “needs” of the zeitgeist. The danger posed by his radical agenda cannot simply be dismissed as an example of creative tension, for its aim is essentially a destructive makeover which would see a single religious Tradition and its attendant authority fragmented into a myriad of “national” churches each evolving a particular structure and form of worship as “democratic principles” dictate. Under this scenario one can expect that each will eventually become yet another discrete Christian sect. At last count, there were some 38,000 identifiable Christian sects. The great majority of these had their origin with a Hans Kung and each Hans Kung is confident that God on his side. Each one had, as part of its motivation, a conviction that its predecessor was wrong. Among these 38,000, some speak in tongues, some heal by laying hands, and some can prophesy. Some believe in the Real Presence, some do not. Some believe in Hell, some do not. Some are ecological, some are scientific, some are transcendental, and some are mystical. One can, in surveying all this, have a degree of sympathy for Plato’s view that, as this world of ours progresses through time, it drowns itself in “the infinite sea of dissimilarity”.

Most religious Traditions have at their heart a set of beliefs and rituals which stand outside the secular purview and, as such, provide that unchanging reference point upon which the very survival of the Tradition depends. The requirement is certainly not restricted to Catholicism. To demonstrate this I reproduce an excerpt from A.P. Elkin’s book on the Australian Aborigines titled Aboriginal Men of High Degree. Elkin was an Anglican clergyman of humanist outlook and an anthropologist, who devoted most of his life to the protection of Aborigines and their culture. It is written with a sense of poignancy by one who knows precisely what Kolakowski’s use of the term taboo really means, what is involved in the maintenance of a religious Tradition, and just what happens when it is compromised: 

But such is their loyalty to their secrets, that they never drop a hint to the white “authority” of the great world of thought, ritual and sanction of which he is unaware. They feel either that he would not understand it or that he would despise it, and so the “past-masters”, the old custodians of secret knowledge sit in the camp, sphinx-like, watching with eagle eye the effect of white contact on the young men, and deciding how much, if any, of the knowledge of their fathers can be safely entrusted to them, and just when the imparting of the secrets can be effectively made. If the young men are too much attracted to the white man’s ways, if they are inclined to despise the old ways, and above all if they show a looseness of living which denotes lack of stability in character, the old men either teach them nothing, or else traditional false versions of some myths as a means of testing their sincerity and loyalty. But only too often, after contact with the white man, the time is never propitious for the imparting of “truth”, and so the secrets pass away with the old men; and though the latter die in sorrow knowing that the old rites and myths will pass into oblivion, that the sacred places will no longer be cared for, and that the tribe is doomed to extinction, yet they die triumphantly, having been loyal to their trust.

To be sure, the current challenge by Kung hardly puts Catholicism in the same category as Aboriginal religious Traditions because the danger for the former comes from within. Moreover, there has been a healthy and growing counter-trend within the church which re-asserts the importance of its Tradition. Nonetheless, Kung represents a real danger because in an age when secular democracy has demonstrated its obvious superiority over totalitarian rivals, there is always that temptation to suppose that the structures of authority within a religious system of belief ought to mirror those of the secular society around it. But the mission of Christianity, if I recall the words of its founder correctly, was to change the world, not to be changed by it.

B.J. Coman adds: I would like to acknowledge comment and encouragement from Associate Professor Tracey Rowland. Needless to say, any errors or shortcomings are mine, not hers.