Learning from Bosnia: Approaching Tradition

Chapter 3. The Apprenticeship of Submission and Freedom

3. The Apprenticeship of Submission and Freedom Human potential derives from the existence or absence of interdiction in the openness of the self to Eternity and Infinity. But there are also two possible ways in which the self may be closed off—again, with or without interdiction. Each of these possibilities of the self is counter to the society that directs it or that it illumines, and in neither of them does the self evade suffering and death. It can resolve them in Absolute Plenitude, beyond the self and the outer horizons but also through them, as, indeed, it can all forms of suffering and disorder, of ugliness and evil, in transcendent beauty and good. Or it can repudiate this resolution and accept a role in the world of sickness and death, without the least submission to the transcendent absolute. Evil is manifest in every human modality, but the ways in which it is confronted and its presence explained are diverse. In the case of Bosnia, as in other similar cases, the issue of this diversity cannot remain apart from the quest for a response to the killings. Previous discussions have shed light on the three human types—those who are under the complete rule of First Intellect, who can advise themselves because they are open to God, Who places the interdiction upon them and thereby transfigures both them and the world into a temple; those who in their uncertainty and trouble see cause to seek and heed the advice of the first type; and those who have the nature of neither the first nor the second type, who lack inner selfexamination and are as a result readily inclined to evil. Aristotle’s slave by nature and Hesiod’s useless man belong—the latter at least partly—to a kind of social substratum, while our 38 / Learning from Bosnia problem is that the useless man exists at all levels of society up to its highest ranks, including pastors, prelates, generals, industrialists , and so on. So I would suggest the neutral expression ‘‘rabble’’ for this. There are men who are rabble in the sense that they neither have the authority of spirit or of reason, nor are they able to respond to reason or spirit, if it emerges advising or reminding them.1 In the ethnonational programs that are each structured by an elite, an ideology, and an organization, the ‘‘rabble’’ may even compose the very highest social stratum—and such a link from the top down to the lowest stratum produces an ethos of ruthlessness. For this reason, the issue of the collapse of the social framework that acts as a restraint on the rabble and its influence on the self, so that there might be a preponderance of the first two human types, is crucial to an understanding of the ‘‘Bosnian response’’ to the killings and destruction. The universal nature of the human self, in its relation to itself, society, and the cosmos, with all its inclination to evil, must be recognized in the all too familiar way in which neighbor turned on neighbor in a frenzy of killing. This, as Eric Voegelin sees it, is a matter ‘‘of the simple man, who is a decent man as long as the society as a whole is in order but who then goes wild, without knowing what he is doing, when disorder arises somewhere and the society is no longer holding together.’’2 It then becomes evident how far humanity is held under restraint in the self of each individual and within the social framework. But if the relationships between the modern and the traditional language discourses as to the potentials of the self are to be defined, one must return to the issue of freedom.3 This need is imposed by the modern notion that the traditional idea of servitude is unacceptable. To be free means to receive from someone or something a position that is so described. To embrace freedom means to eliminate the obstacles on the way to the goals set by human desire. But if the goal is the absolute, there remains the unresolved question of whether the totality of existence is an obstacle to this goal. And this gives rise to yet another question: is this world, as the self, society and nature, the only stage on which human freedom can be attained? Freedom that is accepted or embraced must be viewed from the perspective of submission to the First and...