Is the pope Catholic? That question used to provide a moment of tautological fellowship for all of us, but with one terse declaration from the current pope that good-humored moment has completely evaporated. In a recent network television interview Pope Francis declared to his American Audience, “Conservatism is a suicidal attitude.”¹ His condemnation of conservatism is an official confirmation of the pope’s commitment to the attitude of progressivism. In the United States we have had our fill of progressivism from our current Catholic president and the mainstreamed fringe members of his Democrat party.

We have also had our fill of progressivism in education, including our religious schools and universities. Progressivism, not conservatism, is the “suicidal attitude” that is leading our sons and daughters, our grandchildren, to despair and to an anxious, life-threatening restlessness, to what I have identified as dysphoria in our Lutheran universities with their dalliances, adoption, and harboring of Woke Marxism. For example, in several of the universities in my Lutheran church body’s Concordia University System.

This essay on progressivism is an epexegesis of a term I used to describe Woke Marxism at my Lutheran university in an essay entitled Woke Dysphoria at Concordia. In that essay I wrote, “My Concordia university is experiencing dysphoria because it is coming under the influence of Woke-ism (that is, a potent cocktail of Progressivism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Marxism).”

Whereas John Paul II was a leading philosophical thinker, and Benedict XVI a top tier German theologian, Francis is a cultural influencer. By “cultural” I do not mean cultural in the vague merely descriptive way that the social sciences portray culture, but rather in the normative and philosophical way that I learned from years of teaching Roger Scruton’s Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged to graduates and undergraduates at Lutheran schools.

For the opening weeks of my courses on Christ and Culture, the Athanasian Creed provided our working understanding of who Christ is while Scruton helped us attend to the First Act of the Mind regarding culture. Scruton’s normative definition of culture is “the handing down of shared moral judgments from one generation to another.” Western culture then is defined as “the handing down of moral judgments from one generation to another via Greek forms of thinking and with biblical (Old and New Testament) content.”

It follows from this normative definition that a conservative person in Western culture conserves Greek forms of thinking along with biblical content. In other words, the attitude of conservatism is the commitment to hand down to another generation the moral judgments formed by Greek thinking interacting with the biblical text which have been handed down to us. In its Latin form, the philosophy of conservatism is a commitment to the received tradition (literally, the handing down).

You could say that the attitude of conservatism may in a minimal sense be a hand me down attitude, a transmission of thinking and texts that the older generation regards as useless, but which they will at least hand down to the next generation so that their children and grandchildren can try them on for size or depend on them in time of need. But progressivism not only disdains conservation; it also hardheartedly wants to deprive following generations of their cultural inheritance by devaluing and disposing of it altogether.

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To continue defining our terms according to the First Act, consider that progressivism is an attitude and a philosophy of “going further” while devaluing and jettisoning every good and perfect gift (James 1:17) that came before.

In the Preface to his Fear and Trembling this is how Søren Kierkegaard, writing sarcastically and in character as John the Silent, puts his finger on the phenomenon of progressivism in the middle of the 19th century.

Not only in the commercial world, but in the realm of ideas as well, our age is holding a veritable clearance sale. Everything is had so dirt cheap that it is doubtful whether in the end anyone will bid. Every speculative score-keeper who conscientiously keeps score of modern philosophy, every lecturer, tutor, student, every outsider and insider in philosophy does not stop at doubting everything but goes further… In our age nobody stops at faith but goes further. To ask where they are going would perhaps be foolhardy; however, it is surely a sign of courtesy and good breeding for me to assume that everyone has faith, since otherwise it would be peculiar to talk of going further. In those olden days it was different; then faith was a lifelong task because it was assumed that proficiency in believing is not achieved in either days or weeks…

– Søren Kierkegaard

Concretely, existentially, in human existence as it is – what exactly does it mean to be going further? Progressivism means going further from something. Let’s for one moment step away from a philosophical and theological assessment to see how progressivism expresses itself politically.

Quite simply, the Progressives detested the bedrock principles of American government. 
They detested the Declaration of Independence, which enshrines the protection of individual natural rights (like property) as the unchangeable purpose of government; and they detested the Constitution, which places permanent limits on the scope of government and is structured in a way that makes the extension of national power beyond its original purpose very difficult.  “Progressivism” was, for them, all about progressing, or moving beyond, the principles of our founders… This is why the Progressives were the first generation of Americans to denounce openly our founding documents.  Woodrow Wilson, for example, once warned that “if you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface” – i.e. that part of the Declaration which talks about securing individual natural rights as the only legitimate purpose of government.  And Theodore Roosevelt, when using the federal government to take over private businesses during the 1902 coal strike, is reported to have remarked, “To hell with the Constitution when people want coal!”  This remark may be apocryphal, but it is a fair representation of how TR viewed these matters.

– R.J. Pestritto

So, we as citizens are all concerned with the pope’s condemnation of conservatism in the U.S. – after all, it is an American Catholic president who, like Woodrow Wilson, cannot bring himself to speak the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. But (as I will explain shortly) in harmony with Kierkegaard, I am mostly concerned with the incursion of progressivism into religious and Lutheran higher education. (For my analysis and documentation, see Anatomy of an Implosion.)

In that essay on Woke dysphoria at my former Concordia university I also observed, quoting an earlier Lutheran professor about a very similar religious crisis in my Lutheran church body fifty years ago, that Wokeism “had no room for privileged authority and sacrosanct texts.”

Progressivism by any other name is the same phenomenon, the same hardhearted and wasteful philosophy whether expressed politically or religiously. It is a going further than our sacrosanct texts, while at the same time “committing then to the flames” the Bible, the Christian creeds, and the Declaration of Independence with its Founding Proposition (see Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address) in a radical twenty-first century enactment of Hume’s Fork.

Progressivism is the cheapening of Western values and the destruction of our sacrosanct texts for the purpose of going beyond faith and the faithful sacrosanct texts to a not-so-great beyond. Progressivism has successfully occupied our universities in the States, but in our counteroffensive against progressivism we conservative Christians (Christians are by definition conservative of the Bible and traditional, creedal dogma) have suffered not only from a lack of courage, but from a fundamental misreading of our opponents’ philosophy – and, for that matter, a superficial and less-than-biblical understanding of attitude, as in the assertion that conservatism is a suicidal attitude. I propose that we address the anxious hearts and suicidal minds of our students in a religiously existential and phenomenological manner. Let me sketch this out briefly and conclude with a phenomenological and existential reading of Saint Paul’s admonition in Philippians 2, “Make your own attitude that of Christ Jesus…”

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We need to address attitude in connection with that progressive devaluation of conservatism and tradition because the Bible, which is God’s means for working faith (Romans 10:17), is a divinely inspired canonical hand me down (2 Timothy 3:16). As I will explain momentarily, one of the central Bible chapters about Christ includes an apostolic mandate for all Christians to “have the same attitude as Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5).

The Epilogue of Fear and Trembling is a repetition of the diagnosis of progressivism from Kierkegaard’s Preface as a fire sale philosophy that goes further even than faith (more sarcasm here) and then provides a way to oppose cultural influencers and educators who promulgate this weak-minded and hardhearted philosophy.

You will notice that Kierkegaard’s remark about “making students anxious” pertains to my lament at the Woke/Progressive/Pragmatic/Marxist dysphoria in our universities, while his call for “honest earnestness” and fulfilling “our tasks” dovetails with Scruton’s normative definition of Western culture as passing shared moral judgments from generation to generation, the very culture that the wasteful, prodigal progressives are in the process of burning to the ground. This is Kierkegaard.

Are we so sure of having attained the highest that there is nothing left to do except piously to delude ourselves… The present generation needs rather an honest earnestness that fearlessly and incorruptibly calls attention to the tasks, an honest earnestness that lovingly preserves the tasks, that does not make people anxiously want to rush precipitously to the highest but keeps the tasks young, beautiful, delightful to look upon, and inviting to all, yet also difficult and inspiring for the noble-minded (for the noble nature is inspired only by the difficult).

– Søren Kierkegaard

There is nothing “beautiful, delightful to look upon, and inviting to all” from either the political or religious acolytes of progressivism, nothing difficult and inspiring to ennoble our children and our grandchildren. The progressivists, and their number is legion, have absented themselves and their followers from the task, the task of understanding what it means to be human. Kierkegaard continues,

Whatever one generation learns from another, no generation learns the genuinely human from a previous one. In this respect, every generation begins primitively, has no other task than each previous generation, and advances no further, provided the previous
generation has not betrayed the task and deceived itself. This genuinely human quality is passion, in which the one generation perfectly understands the other and understands itself as well… no later generation has a shorter task than the previous one, and if someone here is unwilling to abide with love like those previous generations but wants to go further, then that is only foolish and idle talk.

– Søren Kierkegaard

Passion is the key. In the section of Fear and Trembling headed Problem III, Kierkegaard as John the Silent comes to realize, “The conclusions of passion are the only trustworthy ones, i.e., the only convincing ones.” In the Epilogue he concludes, “Faith is the highest passion in a human being. There are perhaps many in every generation who do not even come to it, but nobody goes further.”

Defining faith as passion is hard for us moderns to understand. On the one hand, we have long cultivated a misunderstanding of passion (pathos in Greek). On the other hand, we may be operating on the assumption that faith is fundamentally an intellectual matter, something to be handled rationally in a comprehensive system of some sort.

To overcome our misunderstanding of pathos, we can cleanse our palate by approaching theology and biblical anthropology phenomenologically. Phenomenology, as I learned it first from my professor, Andrew Tallon, recognizes that human consciousness is a triune consciousness, a union of emotion, intellect, and will as an operational synthesis. “Operational synthesis” reminds us that there are, so to speak, not three consciousnesses taking turns, but one consciousness. Our consciousness is a tri-unity. In its operation the three aspects of consciousness interact. It is just as we teach in Catechism: you can have a wrongly educated conscience or a properly educated conscience. For example, our moods and emotions are immediate experiences, but our short-term emotions and long-term moods can be trained, educated, or re-formed by God via His Word (Psalm 51:10-19).

Then there is the first principle of phenomenology: Every emotion we have, every thinking we do, and everything we will, is always about something. We call this inherent “aboutness” intentionality.

The core doctrine in phenomenology is the teaching that every act of consciousness that we perform, every experience that we have is intentional: it is essentially consciousness of, or an experience of something or other.

– Robert Sokolowski (my bolding)

Professor Tallon taught me to give particular attention to emotion (“affect” or “affection” in the literature) as a distinct “person” in triadic consciousness to respond to the overbearing philosophical attention given to intellect (“cognition” in the literature). His Head and Heart: Affection, Cognition, Volition as Triune Consciousness sparked my interest because of his argument that establishing emotional intentionality (verifying the aboutness of our emotional feelings and moods) was necessary for understanding the vertical or spiritual aspect of human beings.

We should define ourselves by the highest and deepest horizon, not by our lowest or shallowest… to recognize the role of affection in triune consciousness is absolutely essential for moving toward that horizon.

– Andrew Tallon

(For more, see my book on the long-term mood of what Kierkegaard calls “anxiety,” Wednesday’s Child: From Heidegger to Affective Neuroscience, a Field Theory of Angst.)

This is where Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith comes in. It is an existential understanding, an understanding gained from firsthand experience of our human consciousness; not an idea or speculative theory about our mind. That is, not an ideology. “Faith is the highest passion in a human being.” Phenomenology can then help to bracket off distractions, theories, and preoccupations that keep us from paying attention to the phenomenon of human consciousness as it really is – that is, both as we experience it in our human being and as Scripture depicts head and heart – paying attention to the built-in intentionality of each of the irreducible three parts of our trinitarian consciousness. Passion (pathos in Greek) is in the emotional aspect (or affection) of human consciousness.

This is an insight, as I explain to classes and reading groups such as our weekly Lutheran Philosopher Readers Fellowship, that Kierkegaard learned from Martin Luther. Fear and Trembling is an existential contemplation (that is, very attentive to human consciousness as we actually experience it, complete with powerful emotions) because it reflects Luther’s lectures on Genesis. For example, in the fourth volume of the American edition of Luther’s Works you will find this from Luther:

8. Abraham said: God will provide Himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son. So they went both of them together.

At this point there is surely profound emotion, and there is powerful pathos. Moses did not want to pass this over… All this could not be overcome without great sorrow and grief. For the saints are not blocks of wood and devoid of feeling; but they are human beings, and the emotions and affections implanted in human nature are present in them to a higher degree than they are in others.

– Martin Luther

Here is a phenomenology of pathos and the passion of faith from the second part of Abraham Heschel’s twentieth-century masterpiece, The Prophets, that enables us to bracket off numerous distractions in order to pay attention to the consciousness, specifically, the emotional intentionality, of the Old Testament prophets.

The prophets had no theory or “idea” of God. What they had was an understanding. Their God-understanding was not the result of a theoretical inquiry, of a groping in the midst of alternatives about the being and attributes of God. To the prophets, God was overwhelmingly real and shatteringly present. They never spoke of Him as from a distance. They lived as witnesses, struck by the words of God, rather than as explorers engaged in an effort to ascertain the nature of God; their utterances were the unloading of a burden rather than glimpses obtained in the fog of groping…They did not offer an exposition of the nature of God, but rather an exposition of God’s insight into man and His concern for man. They disclosed attitudes of God rather than ideas about God…
Together with receptivity to the word of God they were endowed with a receptivity to the
presence of God… A person will notice what he is conditioned to see. The prophet’s perception was conditioned by his experience of inspiration.

– Abraham Heschel

Intentional “attitudes of God.” The prophet’s perception was “conditioned by his experience of inspiration.” Rabbi Heschel concludes that prophecy “consists in the inspired communication of divine attitudes.” “The divine pathos is the ground-tone of all attitudes,” he asserts. “A central category of the prophetic understanding of God, it is echoed in almost every prophetic statement.”

In a subsection headed Pathos and Passion, Heschel further elaborates pathos, “the ground-tone of all attitudes” this way.

God does not stand outside the range of human suffering and sorrow. He is personally involved in, even stirred by, the conduct and fate of man. Pathos denotes, not an idea of goodness, but a living care; not an immutable example, but an ongoing challenge, a dynamic relation between God and man; not mere feeling or passive affection, but an act or attitude composed of various spiritual elements; no mere contemplative survey of the world, but a passionate summons.

– Abraham Heschel

Again, pathos as “an act or attitude” and a “passionate summons.” This elaboration of pathos is a phenomenological elaboration of Kierkegaard’s existential understanding that “Faith is the highest passion in a human being.”

Reading Professor Heschel’s phenomenal understanding of pathos or passion learned from the Hebrew Scriptures, we Christians understand the contiguity of the Greek Scriptures of the New Testament: “Long ago God spoke to the fathers by the prophets at different times and in different ways. In these last days, He has spoken to us by His Son…” (Hebrews 1:1-4). To paraphrase the letter to the Hebrews, understanding that Jesus is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, true God and true Man, the Son of God, we could say: “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory, and the exact expression of His pathos, His passion.” Indeed, we insist not only that God “is personally involved in, even stirred by, the conduct and fate of man,” but that He has taken on human flesh, blood, and soul in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth.

In stark contrast, progressivism is a dispassionate unwillingness to love God for the gifts He has given us in the past and continues to bestow in the present. It is a mania for going beyond faith to regions of despair from which there is nothing but the “escape” of suicide.

By contrast, Kierkegaard’s passionate call for faith – “Faith is the highest passion in a human being” – is the answer to the educational and cultural problem at the center of C.S. Lewis’s essay at the heart of The Abolition of Man, namely, Men Without Chests, and its novelization, That Hideous Strength.

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism… We were told it long ago by Plato. As the king rules by his executive, so reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the “spirited element.” The head rules the belly through the chest – the seat, as Alanus tells us of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment – these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

– C.S. Lewis

Lewis puts his concern over the neglect of the “spirited element” of our emotions (the affections in Tallon’s phenomenology of triune consciousness) in terms of Plato’s tripartite view of the human soul.

Here is a summary of this philosophical psychology. In the twentieth century Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked, “The best picture of the human soul is the human body.” This was Plato’s intuition in Republic, where justice is defined as the condition where each of the three parts of the soul harmoniously fulfills its proper function. The three parts from top to bottom are: the head (the function of cognition), the chest or region from neck to diaphragm (the emotions, affection), and the lower parts (the seat of desires).

This puts us in position to consider attitude as in “conservatism is a suicidal attitude.” Let’s conclude with Saint Paul’s admonition in Philippians 2:5, “Make your own attitude the same as that of Christ Jesus…” The apostle’s imperative is from the Greek word phren, which refers to the diaphragm. This is laid out in etymological detail in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. The ten-volume TDNT is a recognized standard for New Testament word study. Here I have rendered the TDNT’s Greek with English letters and have written its scholarly abbreviations in full.

Phren, usually plural phrenes, meaning “diaphragm,” was early regarded as the seat of intellectual and spiritual activity. The diaphragm determines the nature and strength of the breath and hence also the human spirit and its emotions…There is no single Hebrew original for phren and cognates. LEV (translated “heart” in English)… seems to correspond only to the original psychosomatic range of phren.

– Theological Dictionary of the New Testament.

In other words, the attitude that is “the same as the attitude of Christ Jesus” is an affect, not an intellectual performance and it is intentional or about something. It is not a self-contained or self- centered state of mind. Of course, this is exactly what Paul writes in the four verses leading to the imperative, “Make your own attitude that of Christ Jesus.”

Summary

In summary, progressivism is, as Kierkegaard writes in Fear and Trembling, a devaluing philosophy of “going further” than every good gift that God has provided in Western culture, following the normative sense of culture. In this way, progressivism’s “going further” amounts to the abolition of culture.

But progressivism is not only a “going further” than Western culture (the culture formed by Greek thinking put to work on the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures), it also seeks to “go further” than faith. However, “faith is the highest passion of the human being.” Because faith is the highest passion of the human being, progressivism’s “going further than faith” amounts to the abolition of mankind.

Where does the “going further” of progressivism get us as human beings? “Are we so sure of having attained the highest that there is nothing left to do except piously to delude ourselves?” This is what Kierkegaard asks of those who, because of the progressive attitude fail in the task, the task of teaching the next generation how to learn what it means to be human.

Kierkegaard provides an affective response to the dispassionate, faithless attitude of progressivism: “The [crucial], genuinely human quality is passion, in which the one generation perfectly understands the other and understands itself as well.”

“Make your own attitude the same as that of Christ Jesus…” Having unpacked Søren Kierkegaard’s existential understanding that faith is the highest human passion via Abraham Heschel’s phenomenological understanding of pathos, and Andrew Tallon’s phenomenological understanding of the centrality of affection as the seat of our spiritual capacity, we now know that the suicidal attitude in our day is progressivism. We also know, not merely in our heads, but in our hearts and diaphragms that “Faith is the highest passion in a human being.”

1. This is the published transcript: “Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): You used an adjective, ‘conservative.’ That is, conservative is one who clings to something and does not want to see beyond that. It is a suicidal attitude. Because one thing is to take tradition into account, to consider situations from the past, but quite another is to be closed up inside a dogmatic box.” Not the prejudicial, dismissive mention of tradition, situations from the past, and traditional teaching as being closed up in a dogmatic box. The surrounding context demonstrates the same progressivist attitude toward persons practicing homosexuality within his church.. ↩︎