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He tries to break free of narrow specialization and cross the boundaries between scientific disciplines. Expeditions beyond economics’ borders and its connection to history, philosophy, psychology, and ancient myths are not only refreshing, but necessary for understanding the world of the twenty-first century.

Reality is spun from stories, not from material. Zdeněk Neubauer

Before it was emancipated as a field, economics lived happily within subsets of philosophy—ethics, for example—miles away from today’s concept of economics as a mathematical-allocative science that views “soft sciences” with a scorn born from positivistic arrogance. But our thousand-year “education” is built on a deeper, broader, and oftentimes more solid base. It is worth knowing about.

The study of the history of a certain field is not, as is commonly held, a useless display of its blind alleys or a collection of the field’s trials and errors (until we got it right), but history is the fullest possible scope of study of a menu that the given field can offer.

History of thought helps us to get rid of the intellectual brainwashing of the age, to see through the intellectual fashion of the day, and to take a couple of steps back.

“The separation between the history of a science, its philosophy, and the science itself dissolves into thin air, and so does the separation between science and non-science; differences between the scientific and unscientific are vanishing.”

we seek to chart the development of the economic ethos. We ask questions that come before any economic thinking can begin—both philosophically and, to a degree, historically. The area here lies at the very borders of economics—and often beyond. We may refer to this as protoeconomics (to borrow a term from protosociology) or, perhaps more fittingly, metaeconomics (to borrow a term from metaphysics).

stories; Adam Smith believed. As he puts it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “the desire of being believed, or the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires.”

“The human mind is built to think in terms of narratives … in turn, much of human motivation comes from living through a story of our lives, a story that we tell to ourselves and that creates a framework of our motivation. Life could be just ‘one damn thing after another’ if it weren’t for such stories. The same is true for confidence in a nation, a company, or an institution. Great leaders are foremost creators of stories.”

contrary to what our textbooks say, economics is predominantly a normative field. Economics not only describes the world but is frequently about how the world should be (it should be effective, we have an ideal of perfect competition, an ideal of high-GDP growth in low inflation, the effort to achieve high competitiveness …). To this end, we create models, modern parables,

I will try to show that mathematics, models, equations, and statistics are just the tip of the iceberg of economics; that the biggest part of the iceberg of economic knowledge consists of everything else; and that disputes in economics are rather a battle of stories and various metanarratives than anything else.

That is the reason for this book: to look for economic thought in ancient myths and, vice versa, to look for myths in today’s economics.

is a paradox that a field that primarily studies values wants to be value-free. One more paradox is this: A field that believes in the invisible hand of the market wants to be without mysteries.

The History of Animal Spirits: Dreams Never Sleep

The more important elements of a culture or field of inquiry such as economics are found in fundamental assumptions that adherents of all the various systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming, because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them, as the philosopher Alfred Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas.

I argue that economic questions were with mankind long before Adam Smith. I argue that the search for values in economics did not start with Adam Smith but culminated with him.

We should go beyond economics and study what beliefs are “behind the scenes,” ideas that have often become the dominant yet unspoken assumptions in our theories. Economics is surprisingly full of tautologies that economists are predominantly unaware of. I

argue that economics should seek, discover, and talk about its own values, although we have been taught that economics is a value-free science. I argue that none of this is true and that there is more religion, myth, and archetype in economics than there is mathematics.

In a way, this is a study of the evolution of both homo economicus and, more importantly, the history of the animal spirits within him. This book tries to study the evolution of the rational as well as the emotional and irrational side of human beings.

I argue that his most influential contribution to economics was ethical. His other thoughts had been clearly expressed long before him, whether on specialization, or on the principle of the invisible hand of the market. I try to show that the principle of the invisible hand of the market is much more ancient and developed long before Adam Smith. Traces of it appear even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hebrew thought, and in Christianity, and it is expressly stated by Aristophanes and Thomas Aquinas.

This is not a book on the thorough history of economic thought. The author aims instead to supplement certain chapters on the history of economic thought with a broader perspective and analysis of the influences that often escape the notice of economists and the wider public.

Progress (Naturalness and Civilization)

The Economy of Good and Evil

from his beginnings, man has been marked as a naturally unnatural creature, who for unique reasons surrounds himself with external possessions. Insatiability, both material and spiritual, are basic human metacharacteristics, which appear as early as the oldest myths and stories.

the Hebrews, with linear time, and later the Christians gave us the ideal (or amplified the Hebrew ideal) we now embrace. Then the classical economists secularized progress. How did we come to today’s progression of progress, and growth for growth’s sake?

The Need for Greed: The History of Consumption and Labor

Metamathematics From where did economics get the concept of numbers as the very foundation of the world?

mathematics at the core of economics, or is it just the icing of the cake, the tip of the iceberg of our field’s inquiry?

idea that we can manage to utilize our natural egoism, and that this evil is good for something, is an ancient philosophical and mythical concept. We will also look into the development of the ethos of homo economicus, the birth of “economic man.”

All of economics is, in the end, economics of good and evil. It is the telling of stories by people of people to people. Even the most sophisticated mathematical model is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us.

Masters of the Truth

Originally, truth was a domain of poems and stories, but today we perceive truth as something much more scientific, mathematical. Where does one go (to shop) for the truth? And who “has the truth” in our epoch?

Our animal spirits (something of a counterpart to rationality) are influenced by the archetype of the hero and our concept of what is good.

The entire history of ethics has been ruled by an effort to create a formula for the ethical rules of behavior. In the final chapter we will show the tautology of Max Utility, and we will discuss the concept of Max Good.

The History of the Invisible Hand of the Market and Homo Economicus

We understand “economics” to mean a broader field than just the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. We consider economics to be the study of human relations that are sometimes expressible in numbers, a study that deals with tradables, but one that also deals with nontradables (friendship, freedom, efficiency, growth).

When we mention economics in this book, we mean the mainstream perception of it, perhaps as best represented by Paul Samuelson.

By the term homo economicus, we mean the primary concept of economic anthropology. It comes from the concept of a rational individual, who, led by narrowly egotistical motives, sets out to maximize his benefit.

the Epic of Gilgamesh bears witness to the opposite—despite the fact that the first written clay fragments (such as notes and bookkeeping) of our ancestors may have been about business and war, the first written story is mainly about great friendship and adventure.

is a story of nature and civilization, of heroism, defiance, and the battle against the gods, and evil; an epic about wisdom, immortality, and also futility.

Even today we live in Gilgamesh’s vision that human relations—and therefore humanity itself—are a disturbance to work and efficiency; that people would perform better if they did not “waste” their time and energy on nonproductive things.

But it is in friendship where—often by-the-way, as a side product, an externality—ideas and deeds are frequently performed or created that together can altogether change the face of society.19 Friendship can go against an ingrained system in places where an individual does not have the courage to do so himself or herself.

started with Babylonians—rural nature becomes just a supplier of raw materials, resources (and humans the source of human resources). Nature is not the garden in which humans were created and placed, which they should care for and which they should reside in, but becomes a mere reservoir for natural (re)sources.

To be human seems to be somewhere in between, or both of these two. We

The entire history of culture is dominated by an effort to become as independent as possible from the whims of nature.39 The more developed a civilization is, the more an individual is protected from nature and natural influences and knows how to create around him a constant or controllable environment to his liking.

The epic captures one of the greatest leaps in the development of the division of labor. Uruk itself is one of the oldest cities of all, and in the epic it reflects a historic step forward in specialization—in the direction of a new social city arrangement. Because of the city wall, people in the city can devote themselves to things other than worrying about their own safety, and they can continue to specialize more deeply.

“The chief thing which the common-sense individual wants is not satisfactions for the wants he had, but more, and better wants.”47

If a consumer buys something, theoretically it should rid him of one of his needs—and the aggregate of things they need should be decreased by one item. In reality, though, the aggregate of “I want to have” expands together with the growing aggregate of “I have.”

the Old Testament, this relationship is perceived completely differently. Man (humanity) is created in nature, in a garden. Man was supposed to care for the Garden of Eden and live in harmony with nature and the animals. Soon after creation, man walks naked and is not ashamed, de facto the same as the animals. What is characteristic is that man dresses (the natural state of creation itself is not enough for him), and he (literally and figuratively) covers52 himself—in shame after the fall.53

Nature is where one goes to hunt, collect crops, or gather the harvest. It is perceived as the saturator of our needs and nothing more. One goes back to the city to sleep and be “human.” On the contrary, evil resides in nature. Humbaba lives in the cedar forest, which also happens to be the reason to completely eradicate it.

Symbolically, then, we can view the entire issue from the standpoint of the epic in the following way: Our nature is insufficient, bad, evil, and good (humane) occurs only after emancipation from nature (from naturalness), through culturing and education. Humanity is considered as being in civilization.

The city was frequently (at least in older Jewish writings) a symbol of sin, degeneration, and decadence—nonhumanity. The Hebrews were originally a nomadic nation, one that avoided cities. It is no accident that the first important city57 mentioned in the Bible is proud Babylon,58 which God later turns to dust.

is enough, for example, to read the Book of Revelation to see how the vision of paradise developed from the deep Old Testament period, when paradise was a garden. John describes his vision of heaven as a city—paradise is in New Jerusalem, a city where the dimensions of the walls(!) are described in detail, as are the golden streets and gates of pearl.

Hebrews later also chose a king (despite the unanimous opposition of God’s prophets) and settled in cities, where they eventually founded the Lord’s Tabernacle and built a temple for Him. The city of Jerusalem later gained an illustrious position in all of religion.

this time Christianity (as well as the influence of the Greeks) does not consider human naturalness to be an unambiguous good, and it does not have such an idyllic relationship to nature as the Old Testament prophets.

If a tendency toward good is not naturally endowed in people, it must be imputed from above through violence or at least the threat of violence.

If we were to look at human naturalness as a good, then collective social actions need a much weaker ruling hand. If people themselves have a natural tendency (propensity) toward good, this role does not have to be supplied by the state, ruler, or, if you wish, Leviathan.

How does this affect economics?

us return for the last time to the humanization of the wild Enkidu, which is a process we can perceive with a bit of imagination as the first seed of the principle of the market’s invisible hand, and therefore the parallels with one of the central schematics of economic thinking.

Sometimes it is better to “harness the devil to the plow” than to fight with him. Instead of summoning up enormous energy in the fight against evil, it is better to use its own energy to reach a goal we desire; setting up a mill on the turbulent river instead of futile efforts to remove the current. This is also how Saint Prokop approached it in one of the oldest Czech legends.

Enkidu caused damage and it was impossible to fight against him. But with the help of a trap, trick, this evil was transformed into something that greatly benefited civilization.

By culturing and “domesticating” Enkidu, humanity tamed the uncontrollable wild and chaotic evil

Enkidu devastated the doings (the external, outside-the-walls) of the city. But he was later harnessed and fights at the side of civilization against nature, naturalness, the natural state of things.

A similar story (reforming something animally wild and uncultivated in civilizational achievement) is used by Thomas Aquinas in his teachings. Several centuries later, this idea is fully emancipated in the hands of Bernard Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. The economic and political aspects of this idea are—often incorrectly—ascribed to Adam Smith.

Here the individual does not try anymore to maximize his goods or profits, but what is important is writing his name in human memory in the form of heroic acts or deeds.

immortality, one connected with letters and the cult of the word: A name and especially a written name survives the body.”77

After this disappointment, he comes to the edge of the sea, where the innkeeper Siduri lives. As tonic for his sorrow, she offers him the garden of bliss, a sort of hedonistic fortress of carpe diem, where a person comes to terms with his mortality and at least in the course of the end of his life maximizes earthly pleasures, or earthly utility.

In the second stage, after finding his friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh abandons the wall and sets out beyond the city to maximalize heroism. “In his (…) search of immortal life, Gilgamesh

The hero refuses hedonism in the sense of maximizing terrestrial pleasure and throws himself into things that will exceed his life. In the blink of an eye, the epic turns on its head the entire utility maximization role that mainstream economics has tirelessly tried to sew on people as a part of their nature.81

today remember Gilgamesh for his story of heroic friendship with Enkidu, not for his wall, which no longer reaches monumental heights.

the eleventh and final tablet, Gilgamesh again loses what he sought. Like Sisyphus, he misses his goal just before the climax

The very existence of questions similar to today’s economic ones can be considered as the first observation. The first written considerations of the people of that time were not so different from those today. In other words: The epic is understandable for us, and we can identify with it.

We have also been witnesses to the very beginnings of man’s culturing—a great drama based on a liberation and then a distancing from the natural state.

Let us take this as a memento in the direction of our restlessness, our inherited dissatisfaction and the volatility connected to it. Considering that they have lasted five thousand years and to this day we find ourselves in harmony with a certain feeling of futility, perhaps these characteristics are inherent in man.

with the phenomenon of the creation of the city, we have seen how specialization and the accumulation of wealth was born, how holy nature was transformed into a secular supplier of resources, and also how humans’ individualistic ego was emancipated.

For small acts (hunting together, work in a factory), small love is enough: Camaraderie. For great acts, however, great love is necessary, real love: Friendship. Friendship that eludes the economic understanding of quid pro quo. Friendship gives. One friend gives (fully) for the other. That is friendship for life and death,

less a civilized, city person is dependent on nature, the more he or she is dependent on the rest of society. Like Enkidu, we have exchanged nature for society; harmony with (incalculable) nature for harmony with (incalculable) man.

human nature good or evil? To this day these questions are key for economic policy: If we believe that man is evil in his nature, therefore that a person himself is dog eat dog (animal), then the hard hand of a ruler is called for. If we believe that people in and of themselves, in their nature, gravitate toward good, then it is possible to loosen up the reins and live in a society that is more laissez-faire.

For a concept of historical progress, for the undeification of heroes, rulers, and nature, mankind had to wait for the Hebrews.

Because nature is not undeified, it is beyond consideration to explore it, let alone intervene in it (unless a person was a two-thirds god like Gilgamesh). It

As early as the “dark” ages, the Jews commonly used economic tools that were in many ways ahead of their time and that later became key elements of the modern economy:

Gilgamesh’s story ends where it began. There is a consistency in this with Greek myths and fables: At the end of the story, no progress occurs, no essential historic change; the story is set in indefinite time, something of a temporal limbo.

For a nation originally based on nomadism, where did this Jewish business ethos come from? And can the Hebrews truly be considered as the architects of the values that set the direction of our civilization’s economic thought?

PROGRESS: A SECULARIZED RELIGION One of the things the writers of the Old Testament gave to mankind is the idea and notion of progress. The Old Testament stories have their development; they change the history of the Jewish nation and tie in to each other. The Jewish understanding of time is linear—it has a beginning and an end.

The observance of God’s Commandments in Judaism leads not to some ethereal other world, but to an abundance of material goods (Genesis 49:25–26, Leviticus 26:3–13, Deuteronomy 28:1–13) (…) There are no accusing fingers pointed at

There are no echoes of asceticism nor for the cleansing and spiritual effect of poverty. It is fitting therefore, that the founders of Judaism, the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were all wealthy men.12

about due to a linear understanding of history. If history has a beginning as well as an end, and they are not the same point, then exploration suddenly makes sense in areas where the fruits are borne only in the next generation.

however, the idea of progress itself underwent major changes, and today we perceive it very differently. As opposed to the original spiritual conceptions, today we perceive progress almost exclusively in an economic or scientific-technological sense.

Because care for the soul has today been replaced by care for external things,

This is why we must constantly grow, because we (deep down and often implicitly) believe that we are headed toward an (economic) paradise on Earth.

Only since the period of scientific-technological revolution (and at a time when economics was born as an independent field) is material progress automatically assumed.

Jewish thought is the most grounded, most realistic school of thought of all those that have influenced our culture.17 An abstract world of ideas was unknown to the Jews. To this day it is still forbidden to even depict God, people, and animals in symbols, paintings, statues, and drawings.

economists have become key figures of great importance in our time (Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin [Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History]). They are expected to perform interpretations of reality, give prophetic services (macroeconomic forecasts), reshape reality (mitigate the impacts of the crisis, speed up growth), and, in the long run, provide leadership on the way to the Promised Land—paradise on Earth.

REALISM AND ANTIASCETICISM Aside from ideas of progress, the Hebrews brought another very fundamental contribution to our culture: The desacralization of heroes, nature, and rulers.

Voltaire writes: “It certain fact is, that in his public laws he [Moses] never so much as once made mention of a life to come, limiting all punishments and all rewards to the present life.”21

As opposed to Christianity, the concept of an extraterrestrial paradise or heaven was not developed much in Hebrew thought.19 The paradise of the Israelites—Eden—was originally placed on Earth at a given place in Mesopotamia20 and at a given time,

The Hebrews consider the world to be real—not just a shadow reflection of a better world somewhere in the cloud of ideas, something the usual interpretation of history ascribes to Plato. The soul does not struggle against the body and is not its prisoner, as Augustine would write later.

The land, the world, the body, and material reality are for Jews the paramount setting for divine history, the pinnacle of creation. This idea is the conditio sine qua non of the development of economics, something of an utterly earthly making,

The mythology of the hero-king was strongly developed in that period, which Claire Lalouette summarizes into these basic characteristics: Beauty (a perfect face, on which it is “pleasant to look upon,” but also “beauty,” expressed in the Egyptian word nefer, not only means aesthetics, but contains moral qualities as well),

THE HERO AND HIS UNDEIFICATION: THE DREAM NEVER SLEEPS The concept of the hero is more important than it might appear. It may be the remote origin of Keynes’s animal spirits, or the desire to follow a kind of internal archetype that a given individual accepts as his own and that society values.

This internal animator of ours, our internal mover, this dream, never sleeps and it influences our behavior—including economic behavior—more than we want to realize.

Anthropology knows several archetypes of heroes. The Polish-born American anthropologist Paul Radin examined the myths of North American Indians and, for example, in his most influential book, The Trickster, he describes their four basic archetypes of heroes.

The Torah’s heroes (if that term can be used at all) frequently make mistakes and their mistakes are carefully recorded in the Bible—maybe precisely so that none of them could be deified.32

the Hebrew heroes correspond most to the Tricksters, the Culture Bearers, and the Twins. The divine muscleman, that dominant symbol we think of when we say hero, is absent here.

Undeification, however, does not mean a call to pillage or desecration; man was put here to take care of nature (see the story of the Garden of Eden or the symbolism of the naming of the animals). This protection and care of nature is also related to the idea of progress

For the heroes who moved our civilization to where it is today, the heroic archetypes of the cunning trickster, culture bearer, and sufferer are rather more appropriate.

the Old Testament strongly emphasizes the undeification of nature.37 Nature is God’s creation, which speaks of divinity but is not the domain of moody gods

in an Old Testament context, the pharaoh was a mere man (whom one could disagree with, and who could be resisted!).

RULERS ARE MERE MEN In a similar historical context, the Old Testament teachings carried out a similar desacralization of rulers, the so-called bearers of economic policy.

Ultimately the entire idea of a political ruler stood against the Lord’s will, which is explicitly presented in the Torah. The Lord unequivocally preferred the judge as the highest form of rule—an

The needs of future generations will have to be considered; after all humankind are the guardians of God’s world. Waste of natural resources, whether privately owned or nationally owned is forbidden.”39

Politics lost its character of divine infallibility, and political issues were subject to questioning. Economic policy could become a subject of examination.

44 God first creates with the word and then on individual days He divides light from darkness, water from dry land, day from night, and so forth—and He gives order to things.45 The world is created orderly— it is wisely, reasonably put together. The way of the world is put together at least partially46 decipherably by any other wise and reasonable being who honors rational rules.

THE PRAISE OF ORDER AND WISDOM: MAN AS A PERFECTER OF CREATION The created world has an order of sorts, an order recognizable by us as people,

From the very beginning, when God distances Himself from the entire idea, there is an anticipation that there is nothing holy, let alone divine, in politics. Rulers make mistakes, and it is possible to subject them to tough criticism—which frequently occurs indiscriminately through the prophets in the Old Testament.

Hebrew culture laid the foundations for the scientific examination of the world.

Examining the world is therefore an absolutely legitimate activity, and one that is even requested by God—it is a kind of participation in the Creator’s work.51 Man is called on to understand himself and his surroundings and to use his knowledge for good.

The Book of Proverbs emphasizes specifically several times that it was wisdom that was present at the creation of the world. Wisdom personified calls out:

The last act, final stroke of the brush of creation, naming of the animals—this act is given to a human, it is not done by God, as one would expect. Man was given the task of completing the act of creation that the Lord began:

MAN AS A FINISHER OF CREATION The creation of the world, as it is explained in Jewish teachings, is described in the Book of Genesis. Here God (i) creates, (ii) separates, and (iii) names [my emphasis]:

Naming is a symbolic expression. In Jewish culture (and also in our culture to this day), the right to name meant sovereign rights and belonged, for example, to explorers (new places), inventors (new principles), or parents (children)—that is, to those who were there at the genesis, at the origin. This right was handed over by God to mankind.

The Naming itself (the capital N is appropriate) traditionally belongs to the crowning act of the Creator and represents a kind of grand finale of creation, the last move of the brush to complete the picture—a signature of the master.

Without naming, reality does not exist; it is created together with language. Wittgenstein tightly names this in his tractatus—the limits of our language are the limits of our world.53

Reality is not a given; it is not passive. Perceiving reality and “facts” requires man’s active participation. It is man who must take the last step, an act (and we

A real-ization act on our part represents the creation of a construct, the imputation of sense and order (which is beautifully expressed by the biblical act of naming, or categorization, sorting, ordering).

God connects man with the task of guarding and protecting the Garden of Eden, and thus man actually cocreates the cultural landscape. The Czech philosopher Zdeněk Neubauer also describes this: “Such is reality, and it is so deep that it willingly crystallizes into worlds. Therefore I profess that reality is a creation and not a place of occurrence for objectively given phenomena.”61

The Jews believed the exact opposite. The world is created by a good God, and evil appears in it as a result of immoral human acts. Evil, therefore, is induced by man.66 History unwinds according to the morality of human acts.

GOOD AND EVIL IN US: A MORAL EXPLANATION OF WELL-BEING We have seen that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, good and evil are not yet addressed systematically on a moral level.

the epic, good and evil are not envisaged morally—they are not the result of an (a)moral act. Evil was not associated with free moral action or individual will.

Hebrew thought, on the other hand, deals intensively with moral good and evil. A moral dimension touches the core of its stories.65

discrepancy between savings and investment, and others are convinced of the monetary essence

The entire history of the Jewish nation is interpreted and perceived in terms of morality. Morality has become, so to speak, a mover and shaker of Hebrew history.

sunspots. The Hebrews came up with the idea that morals were behind good and bad years, behind the economic cycle. But we would be getting ahead of ourselves. Pharaoh’s Dream: Joseph and the First Business Cycle To

It is the Pharaoh’s well-known dream of seven fat and seven lean cows, which he told to Joseph, the son of Jacob. Joseph interpreted the dream as a macroeconomic prediction of sorts: Seven years of abundance were to be followed by seven years of poverty, famine, and misery.

Self-Contradicting Prophecy Here, let’s make several observations on this: Through taxation74 on the level of one-fifth of a crop75 in good years to save the crop and then open granaries in bad years, the prophecy was de facto prevented (prosperous years were limited and hunger averted—through a predecessor of fiscal stabilization).

The Old Testament prophesies therefore were not any deterministic look into the future, but warnings and strategic variations of the possible, which demanded some kind of reaction. If the reaction was adequate, what was prophesied would frequently not occur at all.

If the threat is anticipated, it is possible to totally or at least partially avoid it. Neither Joseph nor the pharaoh had the power to avoid bounty or crop failure (in this the dream interpretation was true and the appearance of the future mystical), but they avoided the impacts and implications of the prophecy (in this the interpretation of the dream was “false”)—famine did not ultimately occur in Egypt, and this was due to the application of reasonable and very intuitive economic policy.

Let us further note that the first “macroeconomic forecast” appears in a dream.

back to Torah: Later in this story we will notice that there is no reason offered as to why the cycle occurs (that will come later). Fat years will simply come, and then lean years after them.

Moral Explanation of a Business Cycle That is fundamentally different from later Hebrew interpretations, when the Jewish nation tries to offer reasons why the nation fared well or poorly. And those reasons are moral.

Only in recent times have some currents of economics again become aware of the importance of morals and trust in the form of measuring the quality of institutions, the level of justice, business ethics, corruption, and so forth, and examining their influence on the economy,

it is not within the scope of this book to answer that question; justice has been done to the question if it manages to sketch out the main contours of possible searches for answers.

THE ECONOMICS OF GOOD AND EVIL: DOES GOOD PAY OFF? This is probably the most difficult moral problem we could ask.

Inquiring about the economics of good and evil, however, is not that easy. Where would Kant’s “moral dimension of ethics” go if ethics paid? If we do good for profit, the question of ethics becomes a mere question of rationality.

He remains righteous, even if his only reward is death. What economic advantage could he have from that?

morals cannot be considered in the economic dimension of productivity and calculus. The role of the Hebrews was to do good, whether it paid off or not. If good (outgoing) is rewarded by incoming goodness, it is a bonus,99 not a reason to do outgoing good. Good and reward do not correlate to each other.

This reasoning takes on a dimension of its own in the Old Testament. Good (incoming) has already happened to us. We must do good (outgoing) out of gratitude for the good (incoming) shown to us in the past.

So why do good? After all, suffering is the fate of many biblical figures. The answer can only be: For good itself. Good has the power to be its own reward. In this sense, goodness gets its reward, which may or may not take on a material dimension.

the Hebrews offered an interesting compromise between the teachings of the Stoics and Epicureans. We will go into it in detail later, so only briefly

constraint. It calls for bounded optimalization (with limits). A kind of symbiosis existed between the legitimate search for one’s own utility (or enjoyment of life) and maintaining rules, which are not negotiable and which are not subject to optimalization.

In other words, clear (exogenously given) rules exist that must be observed and cannot be contravened. But within these borders it is absolutely possible, and even recommended, to increase utility.

To Love the Law The Jews not only had to observe the law (perhaps the word covenant would be more appropriate), but they were to love it because it was good.

the principle of doing good (outgoing) on the basis of a priori demonstrated good (incoming) was also taken over by the New Testament. Atonement itself is based on an a priori principle; all our acts are preceded by good.

THE SHACKLES OF THE CITY Owing to the Hebrew’s liberation from Egyptian slavery, freedom and responsibility become the key values of Jewish thought.

Laws given by God are binding for Jews, and God is the absolute source of all values,

The Hebrew ideal is represented by the paradise of the Garden of Eden, not a city.116 The despised city civilization or the tendency to see in it a sinful and shackling way of life appears in glimpses and allusions in many places in the Old Testament.

The nomadic Jewish ethos is frequently derived from Abraham, who left the Chaldean city of Ur on the basis of a command:

This way of life had understandably immense economic impacts. First, such a society lived in much more connected relationships, where there was no doubt that everyone mutually depended on each other. Second, their frequent wanderings meant the inability to own more than they could carry; the gathering up of material assets did not have great weight—precisely because the physical weight (mass) of things was tied to one place.

One of Moses’s greatest deeds was that he managed to explain to his nation once and for all that it is better to remain hungry and liberated than to be a slave with food “at no cost.”

SOCIAL WELFARE: NOT TO ACT IN THE MANNER OF SODOM

regulations is developed in the Old Testament, one we hardly find in any other nation of the time. In Hebrew teachings, aside from individual utility, indications of the concept of maximalizing utility societywide appear for the first time as embodied in the Talmudic principle of Kofin al midat S´dom, which can be translated as “one is compelled not to act in the manner of Sodom” and to take care of the weaker members of society.

In a jubilee year, debts were to be forgiven,125 and Israelites who fell into slavery due to their indebtedness were to be set free.126

Land at the time could be “sold,” and it was not sale, but rent. The price (rent) of real estate depended on how long there was until a forgiveness year. It was about the awareness that we may work the land, but in the last instance we are merely “aliens and strangers,” who have the land only rented to us for a fixed time. All land and riches came from the Lord.

These provisions express a conviction that freedom and inheritance should not be permanently taken away from any Israelite. Last but not least, this system reminds us that no ownership lasts forever and that the fields we plow are not ours but the Lord’s.

Glean Another social provision was the right to glean, which in Old Testament times ensured at least basic sustenance for the poorest. Anyone who owned a field had the responsibility not to harvest it to the last grain but to leave the remains in the field for the poor.

Tithes and Early Social Net Every Israelite also had the responsibility of levying a tithe from their entire crop. They had to be aware from whom all ownership comes and, by doing so, express their thanks.

“Since the community has an obligation to provide food, shelter, and basic economic goods for the needy, it has a moral right and duty to tax its members for this purpose. In line with this duty, it may have to regulate markets, prices and competition, to protect the interests of its weakest members.”135

In Judaism, charity is not perceived as a sign of goodness; it is more of a responsibility. Such a society then has the right to regulate its economy in such a way that the responsibility of charity is carried out to its satisfaction.

With a number of responsibilities, however, comes the difficulty of getting them into practice. Their fulfillment, then, in cases when it can be done, takes place gradually “in layers.” Charitable activities are classified in the Talmud according to several target groups with various priorities, classified according to, it could be said, rules of subsidiarity.

Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.140 As one can see, aside from widows and orphans, the Old Testament also includes immigrants in its area of social protection.141 The Israelites had to have the same rules apply for them as for themselves—they could not discriminate on the basis of their origin.

ABSTRACT MONEY, FORBIDDEN INTEREST, AND OUR DEBT AGE If it appears to us that today’s era is based on money and debt, and our time will be written into history as the “Debt age,” then it will certainly be interesting to follow how this development occurred.

Money is a social abstractum. It is a social agreement, an unwritten contract.

The first money came in the form of clay tablets from Mesopotamia, on which debts were written. These debts were transferable, so the debts became currency. In the end, “It is no coincidence that in English the root of ‘credit’ is ‘credo,’ the Latin for ‘I believe.’”

To a certain extent it could be said that credit, or trust, was the first currency. It can materialize, it can be embodied in coins, but what is certain is that “money is not metal,” even the rarest metal, “it is trust inscribed,”

Inseparably, with the original credit (money) goes interest. For the Hebrews, the problem of interest was a social issue: “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest.”

there were also clearly set rules setting how far one could go in setting guarantees and the nonpayment of debts. No one should become indebted to the extent that they could lose the source of their livelihood:

In the end, the term “bank” comes from the Italian banci, or the benches that Jewish lenders sat on.157

Money is playing not only its classical roles (as a means of exchange, a holder of value, etc.) but also a much greater, stronger role: It can stimulate, drive (or slow down) the whole economy. Money plays a national economic role.

In the course of history, however, the role of loans changed, and the rich borrowed especially for investment purposes,

In such a case a ban on interest did not have great ethical significance. Thomas Aquinas, a medieval scholar (1225-1274), also considers similarly; in his time, the strict ban on lending with usurious interest was loosened, possibly due to him.

As a form of energy, money can travel in three dimensions, vertically (those who have capital lend to those who do not) and horizontally (speed and freedom in horizontal or geographic motion has become the by-product—or driving force?—of globalization). But money (as opposed to people) can also travel through time.

money is something like energy that can travel through time. And it is a very useful energy, but at the same time very dangerous as well. Wherever

Aristotle condemned interest162 not only from a moral standpoint, but also for metaphysical reasons. Thomas Aquinas shared the same fear of interest and he too argued that time does not belong to us, and that is why we must not require interest.

MONEY AS ENERGY: TIME TRAVEL AND GROSS DEBT PRODUCT (GDP)

Due to this characteristic, we can energy-strip the future to the benefit of the present. Debt can transfer energy from the future to the present.163 On the other hand, saving can accumulate energy from the past and send it to the present.

labor was not considered degrading in the Old Testament. On the contrary, the subjugation of nature is even a mission from God that originally belonged to man’s very first blessings.

LABOR AND REST: THE SABBATH ECONOMY

The Jews as well as Aristotle behaved very guardedly toward loans. The issue of interest/usury became one of the first economic debates. Without having an inkling of the future role of economic policy (fiscal and monetary), the ancient Hebrews may have unwittingly felt that they were discovering in interest a very powerful weapon, one that can be a good servant, but (literally) an enslaving master as well.

It’s something like a dam. When we build one, we are preventing periods of drought and flooding in the valley; we are limiting nature’s whims and, to a large extent, avoiding its incalculable cycles. Using dams, we can regulate the flow of water to nearly a constant. With it we tame the river (and we can also gain

But if we do not regulate the water wisely, it may happen that we would overfill the dam and it would break. For the cities lying in the valley, their end would be worse than if a dam were never there.

If man lived in harmony with nature before, now, after the fall, he must fight; nature stands against him and he against it and the animals. From the Garden we have moved unto a (battle)field.

Only after man’s fall does labor turn into a curse.168 It could even be said that this is actually the only curse, the curse of the unpleasantness of labor, that the Lord places on Adam.

Both Plato and Aristotle consider labor to be necessary for survival, but that only the lower classes should devote themselves to it so that the elites would not have to be bothered with it and so that they could devote themselves to “purely spiritual matters—art, philosophy, and politics.”

Work is also not only a source of pleasure but a social standing; It is considered an honor. “Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will serve before kings.”170 None of the surrounding cultures appreciate work as much. The idea of the dignity of labor is unique in the Hebrew tradition.

Hebrew thinking is characterized by a strict separation of the sacred from the profane. In life, there are simply areas that are holy, and in which it is not allowed to economize, rationalize, or maximize efficiency.

the message of the commandment on Saturday communicated that people were not primarily created for labor.

This dimension has disappeared from today’s economics. Economic effort has no goal at which it would be possible to rest. Today we only know growth for growth’s sake, and if our company or country prospers, that does not…

the purpose of creation was not just creating but that it had an end, a goal. The process was just a process, not a purpose. The whole of Being was created so…

ancient Greek economic ethos, we will examine two extreme approaches to laws and rules. While the Stoics considered laws to be absolutely valid, and utility had infinitesimal meaning in their philosophy, the Epicureans, at least in the usual historical explanation, placed utility and pleasure in first place—rules were to be made based on the principle of utility.

CONCLUSION: BETWEEN UTILITY AND PRINCIPLE The influence of Jewish thought on the development of market democracy cannot be overestimated. The key heritage for us was the lack of ascetic perception of the world, respect to law and private…

poets actually went even further, and with their speech they shaped and established reality and truth. Honor, adventure, great deeds, and the acclaim connected with them played an important role in the establishment of the true, the real.

those who are famous will be remembered by people. They become more real, part of the story, and they start to be “realized,” “made real” in the lives of other people. That which is stored in memory is real; that which is forgotten is as if it never existed.

“epic and tragic poets were widely assumed to be the central ethical thinkers and teachers of Greece; nobody thought of their work as less serious, less aimed at truth, than the speculative prose treatises of historians and philosophers.”5 Truth and reality were hidden in speech, stories, and narration.

general? In the end, poetry could be more sensitive to the truth than the philosophical method or, later, the scientific method. “Tragic poems, in virtue of their subject matter and their social function, are likely to confront and explore problems about human beings and luck that a philosophical text might be able to omit or avoid.”8

In the end, you realize your only real option – against almost every fiber in your irate being – is to take each knot in turn, patiently and gently undo it, loosen a little, see what happens, and move on to the next. You will never know exactly when all the knots will resolve themselves – it can happen quite quickly after a while or seemingly never. But you do know that patience, and concern with the here and now, is the only way to “solve” the “problem.” You don’t look forward with a plan; you look down with a practice.

we can say what God is not, we can speak of his attributes, but we cannot say what He is. That apophatic dimension, which reveals how I speak about God, is critical to our theology

I would also classify as arrogant those theologies that not only attempted to define with certainty and exactness God’s attributes, but also had the pretense of saying who He was.

It is only in living that we achieve hints and guesses – and only hints and guesses – of what the Divine truly is. And because the Divine is found and lost by humans in time and history, there is no reachable truth for humans outside that time and history.

We are part of an unfolding drama in which the Christian, far from clinging to some distant, pristine Truth he cannot fully understand, will seek to understand and discern the “signs of the times” as one clue as to how to live now, in the footsteps of Jesus. Or in the words of T.S. Eliot, There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Ratzinger’s Augustinian notion of divine revelation: it is always a radical gift; it must always be accepted without question; it comes from above to those utterly unworthy below; and we are too flawed, too sinful, too human to question it in even the slightest respect. And if we ever compromise an iota on that absolute, authentic, top-down truth, then we can know nothing as true. We are, in fact, lost for ever.

A Christian life is about patience, about the present and about trust that God is there for us. It does not seek certainty or finality to life’s endless ordeals and puzzles. It seeks through prayer and action in the world to listen to God’s plan and follow its always-unfolding intimations. It requires waiting. It requires diligence

We may never know why exactly Benedict resigned as he did. But I suspect mere exhaustion of the body and mind was not the whole of it. He had to see, because his remains such a first-rate mind, that his project had failed, that the levers he continued to pull – more and more insistent doctrinal orthodoxy, more political conflict with almost every aspect of the modern world, more fastidious control of liturgy – simply had no impact any more.

The Pope must accompany those challenging existing ways of doing things! Others may know better than he does. Or, to feminize away the patriarchy: I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people, and accompany them like the good Samaritan, who washes, cleans, and raises up his neighbor. This is pure Gospel.

the key to Francis’ expression of faith is an openness to the future, a firm place in the present, and a willingness to entertain doubt, to discern new truths and directions, and to grow. Think of Benedict’s insistence on submission of intellect and will to the only authentic truth (the Pope’s), and then read this: Within the Church countless issues are being studied and reflected upon with great freedom. Differing currents of thought in philosophy, theology, and pastoral practice, if open to being reconciled by the Spirit in respect and love, can enable the Church to grow, since all of them help to express more clearly the immense riches of God’s word. For those who long for a monolithic body of doctrine guarded by all and leaving no room for nuance, this might appear as undesirable and leading to confusion. But in fact such variety serves to bring out and develop different facets of the inexhaustible riches of the Gospel.

Francis, like Jesus, has had such an impact in such a short period of time simply because of the way he seems to be. His being does not rely on any claims to inherited, ecclesiastical authority; his very way of life is the only moral authority he wants to claim.

faith is, for Francis, a way of life, not a set of propositions. It is a way of life in community with others, lived in the present yet always, deeply, insistently aware of eternity.

Father Howard Gray S.J. has put it simply enough: Ultimately, Ignatian spirituality trusts the world as a place where God dwells and labors and gathers all to himself in an act of forgiveness where that is needed, and in an act of blessing where that is prayed for.

Underlying all this is a profound shift away from an idea of religion as doctrine and toward an idea of religion as a way of life. Faith is a constantly growing garden, not a permanently finished masterpiece

Some have suggested that much of what Francis did is compatible with PTSD. He disowned his father and family business, and he chose to live homeless, and close to naked, in the neighboring countryside, among the sick and the animals. From being the dashing man of society he had once been, he became a homeless person with what many of us today would call, at first blush, obvious mental illness.

these actions – of humility, of kindness, of compassion, and of service – are integral to Francis’ resuscitation of Christian moral authority. He is telling us that Christianity, before it is anything else, is a way of life, an orientation toward the whole, a living commitment to God through others. And he is telling us that nothing – nothing – is more powerful than this.

I would not speak about, not even for those who believe, an “absolute” truth, in the sense that absolute is something detached, something lacking any relationship. Now, the truth is a relationship! This is so true that each of us sees the truth and expresses it, starting from oneself: from one’s history and culture, from the situation in which one lives, etc. This does not mean that the truth is variable and subjective. It means that it is given to us only as a way and a life. Was it not Jesus himself who said: “I am the way, the truth, the life”? In other words, the truth is one with love, it requires humbleness and the willingness to be sought, listened to and expressed.

“proselytism is solemn nonsense.” That phrase – deployed by the Pope in dialogue with the Italian atheist Eugenio Scalfari (as reported by Scalfari) – may seem shocking at first. But it is not about denying the revelation of Jesus. It is about how that revelation is expressed and lived. Evangelism, for Francis, is emphatically not about informing others about the superiority of your own worldview and converting them to it. That kind of proselytism rests on a form of disrespect for another human being. Something else is needed:

nstead of seeming to impose new obligations, Christians should appear as people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet. It is not by proselytizing that the Church grows, but “by attraction.”

what you see in the life of Saint Francis is a turn from extreme violence to extreme poverty, as if only the latter could fully compensate for the reality of the former. This was not merely an injunction to serve the poor. It is the belief that it is only by being poor or becoming poor that we can come close to God

Pope Francis insists – and has insisted throughout his long career in the church – that poverty is a key to salvation. And in choosing the name Francis, he explained last March in Assisi, this was the central reason why:

Saint Francis. His conversion came after he had gone off to war in defense of his hometown, and, after witnessing horrifying carnage, became a prisoner of war. After his release from captivity, his strange, mystical journey began.

the priority of practice over theory, of life over dogma. Evangelization is about sitting down with anyone anywhere and listening and sharing and being together. A Christian need not be afraid of this encounter. Neither should an atheist. We are in this together, in the same journey of life, with the same ultimate mystery beyond us. When we start from that place – of radical humility and radical epistemological doubt – proselytism does indeed seem like nonsense, a form of arrogance and detachment, reaching for power, not freedom. And evangelization is not about getting others to submit their intellect and will to some new set of truths; it is about an infectious joy for a new way of living in the world. All it requires – apart from joy and faith – is patience.

“Preach the Gospel always. If necessary, with words.”

But there is little sense that a political or economic system can somehow end the problem of poverty in Francis’ worldview. And there is the discomfiting idea that poverty itself is not an unmitigated evil. There is, indeed, a deep and mysterious view, enunciated by Jesus, and held most tenaciously by Saint Francis, that all wealth, all comfort, and all material goods are suspect and that poverty itself is a kind of holy state to which we should all aspire.

Not only was Saint Francis to become homeless and give up his patrimony, he was to travel on foot, wearing nothing but a rough tunic held together with rope. Whatever else it is, this is not progressivism. It sees no structural, human-devised system as a permanent improver of our material lot. It does not envision a world without poverty, but instead a church of the poor and for the poor. The only material thing it asks of the world, or of God, is daily bread – and only for today, never for tomorrow.

From this perspective, the idea that a society should be judged by the amount of things it can distribute to as many people as possible is anathema. The idea that there is a serious social and political crisis if we cannot keep our wealth growing every year above a certain rate is an absurdity.

this is a 21st-century heresy. Which means, I think, that this Pope is already emerging and will likely only further emerge as the most potent critic of the newly empowered global capitalist project.

Now, the only dominant ideology in the world is the ideology of material gain – either through the relatively free markets of the West or the state-controlled markets of the East. And so the church’s message is now harder to obscure. It stands squarely against the entire dominant ethos of our age. It is the final resistance.

For Francis, history has not come to an end, and capitalism, in as much as it is a global ideology that reduces all of human activity to the cold currency of wealth, is simply another “ism” to be toppled in humankind’s unfolding journey toward salvation on earth.

Francis will grow as the church reacts to him; it will be a dynamic, not a dogma; and it will be marked less by the revelation of new things than by the new recognition of old things, in a new language. It will be, if its propitious beginnings are any sign, a patient untying of our collective, life-denying knots.

“People in the Nuba Mountains will never forget his name,” said Lt. Col. Aburass Albino Kuku of the rebel military force. “People are praying that he never dies.”

A Muslim paramount chief named Hussein Nalukuri Cuppi offered an even more unusual tribute.“He’s Jesus Christ,” he said. Continue reading the main story Write A Comment Er, pardon?The chief explained that Jesus healed the sick, made the blind see and helped the lame walk — and that is what Dr. Tom does every day.You needn’t be a conservative Catholic or evangelical Christian to celebrate that kind of selflessness. Just human.

there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces.

Could anyone have offered a more potent critique of current Republican ideology than John Paul II? Could anything better illustrate John Paul II’s critique of radical capitalist ideology than the GOP’s refusal to be concerned in any way about a fundamental question like access to basic healthcare for millions of citizens in the richest country on earth?

the Church in no way disputes the fact that market capitalism is by far the least worst means of raising standards of living and ending poverty and generating wealth that can be used to cure disease, feed the hungry, and protect the vulnerable. What the Church is disputing is that, beyond our daily bread, material well-being is a proper criterion for judging human morality or happiness. On a personal level, the Church teaches, as Jesus unambiguously did, that material goods beyond a certain point are actually pernicious and destructive of human flourishing.

the Pope is not making an empirical observation. In so far as he is, he agrees with you. What he’s saying is that this passion for material things is not what makes us good or happy. That’s all

if the mania for more and more materialist thrills distracts us from, say, the plight of a working American facing bankruptcy because of cancer, or the child of an illegal immigrant with no secure home, then it is a deeply immoral distraction.

material goods are not self-evidently the purpose of life and are usually (and in Jesus’ stern teachings always) paths away from God and our own good and our own happiness.

Christianity is one of the most powerful critiques of radical market triumphalism.

And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two. Meaning that if a master commands you to carry something a mile down the road, you carry it the mile, as commanded, but then you go the extra mile in protest

Non-violent protest of unfair civic institutions - a way to raise yourself up, without raising a hand. This is my Christ. This is why I still follow him.

beating of a homeless Hispanic man in Boston, allegedly inspired by Donald J. Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric, and by the shooting deaths of police officers in California, Texas and Illinois, which some have attributed to anti-police sentiment expressed at Black Lives Matter protests.

history does show that a heightening of rhetoric against a certain group can incite violence against that group, even when no violence is called for. When a group is labeled hostile and brutal, its members are more likely to be treated with hostility and brutality. Visual images are particularly powerful, spurring actions that may well be unintended by the images’ creators.

Official Christian theology and policy toward Jews remained largely unchanged in the Middle Ages. Over roughly 1,000 years, Christianity condemned the major tenets of Judaism and held “the Jews” responsible for the death of Jesus. But the terms in which these ideas were expressed changed radically.

Before about 1100, Christian devotions focused on Christ’s divine nature and triumph over death. Images of the crucifixion showed Jesus alive and healthy on the cross. For this reason, his killers were not major focuses in Christian thought. No anti-Jewish polemics were composed during these centuries

In an effort to spur compassion among Christian worshipers, preachers and artists began to dwell in vivid detail on Christ’s pain. Christ morphed from triumphant divine judge to suffering human savior. A parallel tactic, designed to foster a sense of Christian unity, was to emphasize the cruelty of his supposed tormentors, the Jews.

The “Goad of Love,” a retelling of the crucifixion that is considered the first anti-Jewish Passion treatise, was written around 1155-80. It describes Jews as consumed with sadism and blood lust. They were seen as enemies not only of Christ, but also of living Christians; it was at this time that Jews began to be accused of ritually sacrificing Christian children.

Ferocious anti-Jewish rhetoric began to permeate sermons, plays and polemical texts. Jews were labeled demonic and greedy. In one diatribe, the head of the most influential monastery in Christendom thundered at the Jews: “Why are you not called brute animals? Why not beasts?” Images began to portray Jews as hooknosed caricatures of evil.

the First Crusade had called only for an “armed pilgrimage” to retake Jerusalem from Muslims, the first victims of the Crusade were not the Turkish rulers of Jerusalem but Jewish residents of the German Rhineland. Contemporary accounts record the crusaders asking why, if they were traveling to a distant land to “kill and to subjugate all those kingdoms that do not believe in the Crucified,” they should not also attack “the Jews, who killed and crucified him?”

At no point did Christian authorities promote or consent to the violence. Christian theology, which applied the Psalm verse “Slay them not” to Jews, and insisted that Jews were not to be killed for their religion, had not changed. Clerics were at a loss to explain the attacks. A churchman from a nearby town attributed the massacres to “some error of mind.”

But not all the Rhineland killers were crazy. The crusaders set out in the Easter season. Both crusade and Easter preaching stirred up rage about the crucifixion and fear of hostile and threatening enemies.

Sometimes the perpetrators were zealous holy warriors, sometimes they were opportunistic business rivals, sometimes they were parents grieving for children lost to accident or crime, or fearful of the ravages of a new disease.

Some may well have been insane. But sane or deranged, they did not pick their victims in a vacuum. It was repeated and dehumanizing excoriation that led those medieval Christians to attack people who had long been their neighbors.

What happened to me demands explanation. Modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided. Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference, physics tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation. Before my experience these ideas were abstractions. Today they are realities. Not only is the universe defined by unity, it is also—I now know—defined by love. The universe as I experienced it in my coma is—I have come to see with both shock and joy—the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.

Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself. But I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all: truth.

there’s that exquisite verse, one of the most beautiful in the Bible, the one that says if God cares deeply about sparrows, don’t you think He cares about you? One is so accustomed to dwelling on the second, human, half of the equation, the comforting part, but when you put your hand over that and consider only the first, it’s a little startling: God cares deeply about the sparrows. Not just that, He cares about them individually. “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?” Jesus says. “Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight.”

The modern conversation on animal consciousness proceeds, with the rest of the Enlightenment, from the mind of René Descartes, whose take on animals was vividly (and approvingly) paraphrased by the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche: they “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.” Descartes’ term for them was automata

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin made the intriguing claim that among the naturalists he knew it was consistently the case that the better a researcher got to know a certain species, the more each individual animal’s actions appeared attributable to “reason and the less to unlearnt instinct.” The more you knew, the more you suspected that they were rational. That marks an important pivot, that thought, insofar as it took place in the mind of someone devoted to extremely close and meticulous study of living animals, a mind that had trained itself not to sentimentalize.

The sheer number and variety of experiments carried out in the twentieth century—and with, if anything, a renewed intensity in the twenty-first—exceeds summary. Reasoning, language, neurology, the science of emotions—every chamber where “consciousness” is thought to hide has been probed. Birds and chimps and dolphins have been made to look at themselves in mirrors—to observe whether, on the basis of what they see, they groom or preen (a measure, if somewhat arbitrary, of self-awareness). Dolphins have been found to grieve. Primates have learned symbolic or sign languages and then been interrogated with them. Their answers show thinking but have proved stubbornly open to interpretation on the issue of “consciousness,” with critics warning, as always, about the dangers of anthropomorphism, animal-rights bias, etc.

If we put aside the self-awareness standard—and really, how arbitrary and arrogant is that, to take the attribute of consciousness we happen to possess over all creatures and set it atop the hierarchy, proclaiming it the very definition of consciousness (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote something wise in his notebooks, to the effect of: only a man can draw a self-portrait, but only a man wants to)—it becomes possible to say at least the following: the overwhelming tendency of all this scientific work, of its results, has been toward more consciousness. More species having it, and species having more of it than assumed.

The animal kingdom is symphonic with mental activity, and of its millions of wavelengths, we’re born able to understand the minutest sliver. The least we can do is have a proper respect for our ignorance.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay in 1974 titled, “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”, in which he put forward perhaps the least overweening, most useful definition of “animal consciousness” ever written, one that channels Spinoza’s phrase about “that nature belonging to him wherein he has his being.” Animal consciousness occurs, Nagel wrote, when “there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” The strangeness of his syntax carries the genuine texture of the problem. We’ll probably never be able to step far enough outside of our species-reality to say much about what is going on with them, beyond saying how like or unlike us they are. Many things are conscious on the earth, and we are one, and our consciousness feels like this; one of the things it causes us to do is doubt the existence of the consciousness of the other millions of species. But it also allows us to imagine a time when we might stop doing that.

these three convictions do not include the belief that the specific teachings of the Catholic Church provide the fundamental truths of human life.  What I do believe is that these teachings are very helpful for understanding the human condition.  Here I distinguish three domains: metaphysical doctrines about the existence and nature of God, historical accounts from the Bible of how God has intervened in human history to reveal his truth and the ethics of love preached by Jesus.

The ethics of love I revere as the inspiration for so many (Catholics and others) who have led exemplary moral lives.  I don’t say that this ethics is the only exemplary way to live or that we have anything near to an adequate understanding of it.  But I know that it has been a powerful force for good. 

As to the theistic metaphysics, I’m agnostic about it taken literally, but see it as a superb intellectual construction that provides a fruitful context for understanding how our religious and moral experiences are tied to the ethics of love.  The historical stories, I maintain, are best taken as parables illustrating moral and metaphysical teachings.

I reverse this order, putting first the ethics of love as a teaching that directly captivates our moral sensibility, then taking the history and metaphysics as helpful elucidations of the ethics.

Catholicism too has reconciled itself to the Enlightenment view of religion.

First, the Church now explicitly acknowledges the right of an individual’s conscience in religious matters: No one may “be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters”  (“Catechism of the Catholic Church,” citing a decree from the Second Vatican Council).

Second, the Church, in practice, hardly ever excludes from its community those who identity themselves as Catholics but reinterpret central teachings (and perhaps reject less central ones).  The “faithful” who attend Mass, receive the sacraments, send their children to Catholic schools and sometimes even teach theology include many who hold views similar to mine.   Church leaders have in effect agreed that the right to follow one’s conscience includes the right of dissident Catholics to remain members of the Church.

there is deep disagreement within the Church about how its core doctrines, including those about the hierarchy’s authority, should be understood.  With the Second Vatican Council, the hierarchy began a move toward the liberal position, which the successors of John XXIII have tried to reverse.  But history shows that Catholics play in a very long game, and there is no reason to give up hope for a new blossoming of the liberal buds.

Critics outside the Church will ask how I adhere to an institution that has so many deep flaws.  My first response is that the Catholic tradition of thought and practice is the only stance toward religion that, in William James’s phrase, is a “live option” for me — the only place I feel at home.  Simply to renounce it would be, as I said at the outset, to lose my self-respect — to deny part of my moral core.

My second response is that the liberal drive for reform is the best hope of saving the Church.  Its greatest present danger is precisely the loss of the members whom the hierarchy and the rest of the conservative core want to marginalize.  I’m not willing to abandon the Church to them.

“It’s just a curious bias of the media around here. It’s wonderful. One person says something negative and the media rushes and covers that. The wonderful balanced media that I love in this community.”

Santorum had reason to be peeved. He was running against the Democrat Bob Casey. He was trailing by double digits and knew he was going to lose. He was not a happy camper, but then he rarely is.

As he has shown in the Republican debates, Santorum can be equable. The anger usually flares on matters closest to his heart: faith, family and morals. And if, by chance, you get him started on the role of religion in American life, get ready for a Vesuvius moment.

Outside of these areas, he was more pragmatic. Then and now, Santorum held predictably conservative views, but he was astute enough to bend on some issues and be — as he put it in the Arizona debate — “a team player.”

In the Senate, he represented a state with a relentlessly moderate-to-centrist electorate so when campaigning he emphasized the good deeds he did in Washington. Editorial board meetings with Santorum usually began with him listing federal money he had brought in for local projects.People who don’t know him — and just see the angry Rick — don’t realize what a clever politician Santorum is. He didn’t rise to become a Washington insider through the power of prayer. He may say the Rosary, but he knows his Machiavelli.

That said, Santorum’s anger is not an act.  It is genuine. It has its roots in the fact that he had the misfortune to be born in the second half of the 20th century. In his view, it was an era when moral relativism and anti-religious feeling held sway, where traditional values were ignored or mocked, where heretics ruled civic and political life. If anything, it’s gotten worse in the 21st, with the election of Barack Obama.Leave it to Santorum to attack Obama on his theology, of all things. He sees the president as an exemplar of mushy, feel-good Christianity that emphasizes tolerance over rectitude, and the love of Jesus over the wrath of God.

Like many American Catholics, I struggle with the church’s teachings as they apply to the modern world. Santorum does not.