I had a wonderful day last Wednesday teaching a day-long course on ‘Church, Society and Sociology’ to students at OASIS (a new outfit for me). I inherited some content from whoever gave the course in previous years, but bulked it up a bit with a strong narrative and did the whole thing with pictures via PowerPoint. We started with the sociologists Weber and Durkheim, saw that these gentlemen expressed many of the things that we think are unique to our own contemporary crisis, thereby revealing that the things we think are true only for our own society being said a century and more ago. I said that it is not just a matter of these thinkers’ ideas but also of how knowledge and science are divided and arranged, and how they were understood as solutions to what was taken to be the inevitable problem of conflict in society. I said Weber and Durkheim may be better understood through Kant and with Tom Paine, Robespierre, the American Founding Fathers as part of the impulse to found society afresh on new ground – and so, devious as ever, Knight got the conversation around to Plato and the Republic, so we could have straight compare-and-contrast exercise – Plato (noblest of the pagans) on one hand, Christian gospel on the other.
We looked at Augustine’ claim to have found the wisdom Plato was searching for, and that, in the Christian case it comes with means of forming that wisdom in persons by means of a long training that Augustine termed discipleship. Augustine said that there were two ways of life, under two jurisdictions (cities) each with its own account of human being, so we have two competing accounts of who we are and two competing histories. We decided to tell keep these histories distinct but in parallel. One, the Christian version, took us from Augustine to Benedict to Aquinas to Luther and on. The other took us a non-Christian route, from Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Rousseau, Hume, Adam Smith, Kant, Hegel, Marx to the sociologists and positivists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all the way to Benjamin and Adorno.
It was very simple a tour of the great history of ideas, showing two opposing stories, the Christian and the non-Christian. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much for ages, and the students didn’t seem to suffer too much. I found pictures from Google Images and Wikipedia. It was easy to follow, students made all the right interjections and enjoyed the magic lantern show, so I will do it again. Everybody likes a picture show, but I’m stating the blooming obvious again.
I ended with MacIntyre, pointing out that we need a new Benedict, Milbank and his return to Augustine against the pagans of ‘social theory’, and Benedict XVI who obviously also believes that we need to recover the disciplines of discipleship of Saint Benedict, and thus the Christians out-narrate the sociologists. Obvious, really.
