Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Hierarche - Anarchie - Tyrannei (der monolithische Staat); Ordnung nur möglich: 1 Unterschiede (identische Dinge sind nur austauschbar) 2 Ordnung immanent in den Unterschieden; säkular: kein religiös neutraler Begriff

Kurzinhalt: ... the supreme irony of our situation is that we can safeguard human equality only by safeguarding the significance of our sexual differentiation as male and female... Tyranny is order without sanctity or holiness, order based not on the authority and hi

Textausschnitt: HIERARCHY, ANARCHY, OR TYRANNY?

106a Richard John Neuhaus has said he believes this is the "Catholic moment" in American history. Certainly there are many indications today that Americans are beginning to recognize that anarchy is the real result of egalitarianism (the article in The Atlantic Monthly is one such sign). But if there is to be a Catholic moment in this society, we must catechize the new generation who are now inheriting the anarchy produced by their elders and who therefore will be motivated to embrace some alternative to it. More than anything else, we need to teach them at the outset the doctrine of the Trinity and then make clear the Trinitarian character of the rest of reality, especially with regard to how man, male and female, images the Trinitarian communion of love. Only by preparing Catholics to live out this imaging can the Trinitarian hierarchy or sacred order of communal love become the basis for the restoration of hierarchy or the sacramental order of marital love in American society. (Fs)

106b This, paradoxically enough, is also the only foundation upon which a democracy, committed to the equality of all of its citizens before the law, can truly flourish. In fact, the supreme irony of our situation is that we can safeguard human equality only by safeguarding the significance of our sexual differentiation as male and female. This is true for two reasons. First, there can be an order among things only if those things are differentiated, not identical. Things which are identical cannot be ordered; they can only be interchanged. Hence, differentiation is required if there is to be any kind of order at all. (Fs) (notabene)

107a Second, there can be no order based upon relationality unless those things which are different are ordered to one another by their differences. For if they are merely different but not ordered to one another, they can only be ranked according to their differences, as for example, from the largest to the smallest, from the heaviest to the lightest, from the strongest to the weakest, from the most intelligent to the least, etc., and such ranking necessarily renders them unequal. Only if there is something in the differences themselves which orders them to one another can they be related to one another as equals. (Fs) (notabene)

107b The only such differentiation with which God has invested man is that of male and female. Upon this differentiation, therefore, the whole of human existence and the whole order of human relations rely. This is what the Pope has in mind when he says, "Human life, by its nature, is 'coeducative' and its dignity, its balance, depend, at every moment of history and at every point of geographical longitude and latitude, on 'who' she will be for him, and he for her."1

107c The need to reincarnate within this society that hierarchy which is based on marital love is urgent, for we face two dangers, one immediate and the other in the not-too-distant future. The immediate danger is that anarchy already mentioned, which is both the direct opposite of hierarchy and the direct consequence of egalitarianism, and which we already see being played out in the disorder in our schools, the chaos in our streets and the breakdown of our marriages and families. This anarchy, however, will not be allowed to prevail over the long haul, because people simply will not tolerate the dangers and dislocations caused by it. Sooner or later people will demand the imposition of order, any order. And there is, unhappily, a second antithesis to hierarchy available to them—tyranny. Tyranny is order without sanctity or holiness, order based not on the authority and hierarchy of God but on the power of the monolithic State. It is, in short, the imposition of a desacralized, unholy order of oppression by the most powerful against the least, such as we have seen played out in our own times in virtually every corner of the earth and on every scale imaginable.2 (Fs) (notabene)

108a Our secular society is not immune to tyranny. Indeed, it is somber to reflect that "secular" is an antonym of "sacred". We have been lulled into thinking that "secular" is a religiously neutral term, but it is not. The secular is the "worldly" and the "profane" which, in itself, knows neither the Trinitarian God nor the sacred order with which he has invested his creation. Divorced from its religious mooring in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and, consequently, from all religious notions of authority and order, our society has no way of discovering for itself that hierarchy by which the dignity of the human person and the equality of all human beings can be secured. The only kind of order a "secular" society knows is the "desacralized" order of tyranny. (Fs) (notabene)

108b The most urgent task facing Catholics in particular and Christians in general in a secular society such as ours is to establish and live out, at the level of marriage and family, that imaging of the sacred order of the Trinity which is the only effective means by which to reestablish within such a society the kind of relationships among human beings which, because they are ordered, provide the only basis for human dignity and equality. Such a "holy order" is our one sure bulwark against either the secular anarchy of an undifferentiated multitude, such as looms today in the violence in our schools and on our streets, or the secular (unholy) tyranny of a monolithic state such as looms in the political manipulations of the Constitution and the cultural marginalization of the "politically incorrect", all of which are the consequences of our current egalitarian vision of man. (Fs)