Tonsor: Intellectual History: Goethe I

I.

To the chagrin of one who'd spent practically his entire life in America's sunbelt, that first winter in Ann Arbor was brutal: The sun didn't shine. From my neighbors I learned it hardly ever came out in winter. Between Thanksgiving and Easter, Michiganders might as well have been living in the gray exile of northern Siberia.

But this Saturday morning the sun did shine and, feeling extra energy, I decided to go to the Library Book Sale. Tonsor had told me about this venerated local institution held every Saturday morning in the basement of the downtown Ann Arbor library. He suggested it would be an inexpensive way to build up my professional library. 

I cannot forget the way he intoned: "If you are serious about pursuing history, Mr. Whitney, you must have two things: self-discipline and a personal library."[1] 

It was serious business, the Library Book Sale. Patrons including many grad students lined up before the 9 AM starting bell, grocery bags in hand, quivering, ready to do combat with the other patrons to snatch up $1 hardbacks. The naked displays of bestiality put even my dogs to shame.

Tonsor already had a collection of 10,000 books.[2] He went to the Library Book Sale not to expand his professional holdings but to buy picture books for his grandchildren. That was sweet. And sure enough, on this Saturday morning he and Caroline showed up after the initial throng had charged the basement.

Goethe spent virtually his entire
adult life writing Faust,
from 1769-1832, a span of
more than 60 years.

We hailed each other from a distance but stuck to our work because patrons elbowed their way to the front if you showed any distraction or weakness. After about a half hour of jockeying, I'd managed to fill two grocery bags and queued up to pay. The Tonsors were right behind me. When he saw that I had picked up Goethe's Faust, his eyes lit up through his thick glasses.

"That is a very fine edition, Mr. Whitney. I hope you profit by it as much as I have. Every morning I start my day reading Goethe and the German missal."[3]

Caroline added with a good-natured chuckle: "Yes, Stephen starts his day reading about the Devil in us, then steels himself to do battle with the Devil in us the rest of the day!" 

"That's true," Tonsor said with a quick gust of laughter. "The Devil is part of us all, as is the angelic. As Goethe said, Wo viel Licht ist, ist starker Schatten. Where there is much light, there is stronger shadow."[4]

"Goethe -- every morning," I said, making sure not to sound incredulous.

"Every morning," he repeated with barely suppressed pride. "To have spent a long life reading the poet is a beautiful thing. I am reminded of what Goethe himself said to his friend, Eckermann: 'I am like one who in his youth has a great deal of small silver and copper money, which in the course of his life he constantly changes for the better, so that at last the property of his youth stands before him in pieces of pure gold.'"[5]

Goethe's words provided an apt segue to pay the cashier for our books. On the way to the exit, Tonsor lavished more praise on his idol: "Goethe, it has been said, was 'by far our greatest modern man' -- the last great classical writer of European civilization, as Virgil was the last great classical writer of ancient Rome. He grasped the tragedy of the modern age, perceiving that the very civilization we have created is Faustian. That's why Matthew Arnold called Goethe the most helpful thinker of modern times -- the thinker who, more than any other, interpreted the modern world to itself."[6]

Whoa! These were superlatives that make you lean into a speaker, especially if he's your dissertation advisor. Here I had been studying European intellectual history yet did not know of Goethe's world-historical importance. How had I missed it? 

Often in conversation with Tonsor, I worried that I did not know enough. Now, on yet another topic -- Goethe -- I was going to have to move out of the shallows and into the depths. It helped that I was discerning a pattern in Tonsor's thinking when it came to the confrontation of modernity: In his head he communed with a circle of the dead dominated by Goethe, Acton, Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Parkman -- cosmopolitans and liberal conservatives all. 
  
I couldn't think of anything to say that matched the profundity of Tonsor's observation about Goethe. So I resorted to the cheapest currency of conversation, autobiography: "I had the opportunity to study a bit of Goethe in my German classes back at Colorado State, but I didn't read him at all when I lived in Germany, which I now regret."

"That is to be regretted," Tonsor said disapprovingly. Caroline's sympathetic instinct kicked in and she frowned at him: "Maybe Gleaves had other things he needed to read!"

"When in Germany, one should read Goethe," Tonsor said firmly, determined to win the point.

"Well, I hope to correct my negligence now," I said. "I had a great German professor guide us through The Sorrows of Young Werther in the original. But I'm afraid I'll have to undo some of the instruction I received from the English professor who taught us Faust. One of the last Old Marxists in the academy, Dr. Bates presented Goethe's tragedy as a critique of the admen on Madison Avenue -- the capitalists who manufacture, manipulate, and multiply consumer desires -- desires that can never be satisfied. People are just so many consumers who have the potential to become addicted to shopping. Bourgeois life is the endless desire for never-ending stuff. The Marxist Mephistopheles, it turns out, is a very dapper adman, nothing at all like the horned Devil of medieval folklore." 

Tonsor grunted. "Vulgar Marxists: Johnny-one-notes who bleach all the color out of life! To see Goethe's Devil as a glorified adman makes even the demons howl with scorn. Mephistopheles is not on Madison Avenue. He is on Main Street. He is on the Diag. He is you!"[7]

"Really, Stephen!" protested Caroline, her frown returning. She looked at me sympathetically.

Tonsor dismissed her: "I don't mean my comment to be taken personally. It's the universal message of Goethe's Faust."

"You'll have to tell me what it means," I said with a forgiving grin.

II.

When we walked out into the sun, things had warmed up a bit but none of the snow on William Street was melting. My professor didn't seem to notice the cold. Now that he had the opportunity to talk about Goethe, he started breathing in little puffs as his mind revved to a white heat. I had been around Tonsor enough to know that he saw his confrontation with modernity through the lens of a few great authors: Tocqueville, Acton, Burckhardt, Parkman -- they informed his approach to intellectual history. Now, out on an icy Ann Arbor sidewalk, I was about to learn how to see modernity through Goethe's gimlet eye. 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832),
Germany's greatest humanist and one of Stephen Tonsor's
most important guides to comprehending,
confronting, sifting, and testing the modern world.

"Goethe," Tonsor said -- and once the name escaped his mouth, Caroline saw a lecture coming and escaped back into the library -- "Goethe is like quicksilver. Just when you think you get him, he slips away. That is the quality of all great poets. As you know, Goethe's Faust was Western civilization's most brilliant poem after Milton's Paradise Lost. Because of his singular achievement, Goethe stands in the same relationship to the modern age as Shakespeare does to the Renaissance, Dante does to the Middle Ages, Virgil does to ancient Rome, and Homer does to ancient Greece. To come to an adequate understanding of modernity, one must retrace the steps along the trail blazed by Germany's greatest poet.

"And what should I look for along that trail?" I asked.

"The prophet who interprets modernity to itself," he said with assurance. "The humanist who challenges the assumptions of the twentieth-century. The tragedian who cautions modern man to tame his civilization's Faustian spirit."

"Goethe" continued Tonsor, "grasped the modern psyche in all its maddening complexity -- its tangle of complementarities and contradictions, its tensions and frustrations, its desires and aspirations. His integral humanism challenges the reductionist that one always encounters in the ideologue -- whether that ideologue is your Marxist professor who sees man only as a materialistic consumer on the make, or the Gnostic who hates man's very flesh.

"Goethe helps modern readers understand that this complexity is both the glory of our humanity and the source of our woe. You see it in Faust, who is ever desiring. Because of his desire to know, he mastered all the branches of knowledge and tried to find the key that would unlock the secrets of nature, without success. His infinite desire clashed with his status as a finite creature, someone who was both an angelic beast and a beastly angel, and therefore limited."

"Faust," I ventured, "seems to be on a quest like that of Aldous Huxley, who also sought self-transcendence beyond the ordinary boundaries of nature. Like all mystics, he wanted to find out what's on the other side of the door."[8]

"That is a very interesting point you bring up," Tonsor responded darkly, and the tone in his voice made me immediately regret my digression. "Despite what his legions of epigones may think, Huxley's hallucinatory escapades did not unlock the secrets of nature -- they were too personal, too subjective, too silly. Recall that on his 'trip' he grew terrified of his own lawn chairs! Huxley learned the hard way what we all must, that it is not for human beings to see what is on the other side of the door, not in any objective, communal, universal sense. The hippies never learned that private revelation, like copulation, should stay in the dark." 

Tonsor's unexpected exclamation mark made me laugh.

Egged on now, he continued: "Huxley's friend, Thomas Mann, wrote a scathing private review of Huxley's book. In it he observed that mystical experience does come to some, for reasons we cannot plumb, and each religion tries to order such experiences. But chemical mysticism? For a middle-aged man to encourage young people to experiment with psychedelic drugs is both scandalous and stupid."[9] 

The digression into Huxley's experiments with mescaline was working Tonsor up into a lather, and he was practically breathless as he spat out one last insult: "It's obvious that Huxley for all his intelligence turned out to be as dumb as Faust. What a pity. Brave New World is such a fine book." 

"Now," Tonsor said, mission accomplished with the insult, "all human beings should be able to identify with Faust's existential frustration. We are not totally at home with the beasts because we have too much reason, too much spiritual aspiration, to live like an animal. Yet we are not totally at home with the angels because we have a body with a body's desires -- too much earthiness, too much libido dominandi. So we are neither the one thing nor the other but something in between -- now pulled up toward Heaven, now pulled down to the dust. The conflicts between the two cause us considerable dis-ease and misery, to the point that we feel alienated even from ourselves. 

"Caught in a cobweb of desires, we can never find any peace. We want to love, but are smacked down by selfish desires. We want to be altruistic, but once our motives are unmasked we just play for the crowd's applause. We want to possess the light of knowledge, but at every turn encounter the darkness of unfathomable mystery. It goes the other way, too. We go on a binge of buying at the mall, or of sexual debauchery in the bedroom, and before long we have to stop either because of physical exhaustion or because our conscience pricks us to stop. We are constantly reminded that we are an in-between creature who can never settle, never be satisfied, never be happy.[10]

"Man," I said chiming in, "the biped who walks the Earth not with four legs but with two so that he can look up at the stars. Still, he's an animal. It's reminiscent of Paul's theology in the New Testament where he writes of the never-ending battle between our animal and spiritual selves --"

"What I do, I do not understand" said Tonsor, breaking in. "For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate."[11] 

"And that reminds me," I said, "of a brilliant metaphor that captures man's material and spiritual complexity. I think it was the Catholic humanist E. I. Watkin who pointed out that man's contrary desires are symbolized by the Cross, which is made both of the horizontal crossbeam that points out toward creation as well as the vertical post that points up toward Heaven --"

"And down toward Hell," added Tonsor quickly. 

"And down toward Hell," I duly added. "So, applying Watkin's metaphor, we could say that this in-between creature, man, belongs exclusively to neither the horizontal nor the vertical; that the two principles are hardly ever harmonized; so the resulting tension between them creates constant dissatisfaction, conflict, and misery."

"Yes, Watkin's metaphor captures the reality of the human condition," said Tonsor in his definitive way. "The Christian would point out that the horizontal clash with the vertical is ultimately reconciled by Christ's death and resurrection: the great consummatum est[12] -- It is accomplished -- which gets us back to Faust's striving soul, his Tätigkeit: activity, exertion, movement. One could see Faust as an allegorical figure for modern man, never resting, feverishly chasing down the false remedy, vainly trying to quench unquenchable desires."  

III.

"Yes," continued Tonsor after a brief pause, "Goethe's genius commands our attention still, for he early comprehended the psychological and historical implications of modernity. By that I mean Goethe understood modernity's relationship to man's inner conflict. He observed that modernity has dramatically expanded the possibilities of our horizontal experience but not of our vertical existence. The past five hundred years have seen spectacular developments in the horizontal possibilities of our lives, brought about by a succession of world-historical events -- the Age of Exploration, Commercial Revolution, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, and French Revolution. Each promised man a more satisfying life on the horizontal plane of his animal existence. Each stoked the flames of his desire -- for more territory, more purchasing power, more command over nature, more self-knowledge, more economic growth, and more self-determination. But where during the past five centuries were the corresponding ethical or spiritual advances? The existential gap between monumental material advances on the one hand, and perceived spiritual stupor on the other, perfectly frames the modern problem that so many of our elite thinkers experience. 

"Thus in Faust we see a profoundly important truth: None of the spectacular material advances of the past five centuries really satisfies the longing in the human heart. Not a one. We fulfill one desire only to feel a stronger desire take its place. There's no end to it, only frustration. The only remedy to the addiction to desire comes in the final scene of the play, when Goethe pulls the curtain back and surprises his audience with what is really going on. It is the rather traditional Christian rendering of the Final Judgment. 

"Now, this interpretation is controversial -- it goes against the usual glosses on Faust, that it all takes place within the bounds of nature. But if you think about it, the Prologue in Heaven is above and beyond nature. The Final Judgment is above and beyond nature. The paean to the Virgin Mary at the very end is above and beyond nature. The two wagers Mephistopheles makes -- first with God and then with Faust -- only make sense in an afterlife that is above and beyond nature. What is at stake is Faust's eternal soul. If Faust loses the wager, he forfeits his soul and goes to Hell. If he wins the wager, he is assured of salvation and goes to Heaven. I defy anyone to explain the meaning of the play strictly in terms of nature, without reference to the transcendent above and beyond nature. 

"To reinforce this point, look at one of the most telling structural elements of the tragedy: the link between the end of Faust I and the end of Faust II. Both direct our attention to Faust's lover, Gretchen. During the last critical moments of Part I, when we wonder if Gretchen's soul will be damned for drowning her newborn, she is assured of salvation. This corresponds to what happens during the final critical moments of Part II, when Faust's soul is hanging in the balance: Gretchen offers intercessory prayers from Heaven on behalf of Faust's soul. It is at this point that the play pivots -- pivots from being a human tragedy on Earth to a divine comedy in Heaven. 

"With this pivot Goethe is making a profound statement to modern man. Scientific discovery is not enough. Enlightenment rationality is not enough. Romantic desire is not enough. Technological progress is not enough. Utopian dreams are not enough. To cope with tragedy, modern man needs to learn that progress on Earth is chimerical, often illusory. Men pursue their technological wonders and utopian schemes without truly understanding the costs -- because we are limited. With every step forward something good is left behind. Tragedy always stalks progress.  

Mephisto, by Mark Antokolski (1884)

"Given man's complex anthropology and the developments of the last five centuries, we can now better appreciate Goethe's Devil, Mephistopheles. He is not like the medieval Devil who is alien to you and me. Rather, Goethe's Devil reminds us ... of us ... because he is us. Goethe's genius was to pull Mephistopheles out of the breast of his very own readers, that part of ourselves that is lured by the excitement of material possibilities: the physical sensations, recurring pleasures, and unleashed animal desires. And as the representative of the animal in us, Mephistopheles makes a bargain with God. Mephistopheles wagers that he can get Faust to feel so completely satisfied with his earthly nature, that the good doctor will forget his spiritual origin that connects him to God. Mephistopheles wagers that Faust will busy himself so completely on the horizontal plane that he will neglect, abuse, and forget the vertical plane. Mephistopheles wagers, in other words, that Faust will become thoroughly modern -- and dehumanize himself.

"Now you see why Goethe's Faust is so prophetic: Modern man has been seduced by his growing material power to dehumanize himself.

"You will note that the nature of this wager is quite different from that found in the Book of Job. In the Old Testament, Job must lose all things on the horizontal plane in order to gain what is necessary on the vertical plane. By contrast, in Goethe's Faust the protagonist will gain everything he wants materially but lose it all spiritually -- until the very end. At the end it is clear that Faust cannot save himself. Despite all he does, he cannot save himself. It is only God's mercy that saves him." Tonsor paused, looked me straight in the eye, and enunciated each word slowly: "Is this not a very spiritual message for post-Enlightenment Europe?

"Mephistopheles represents something else that would resonate in the husk of a Christian culture. When called upon to explain who he is, he declares, Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint -- I am the everlasting 'No,' the spirit who always denies. My purpose is to undo the work of creation. 

"But, as we see at the end of the drama, Mephisto is the one who is denied. He fails because he does not fully understand what a man is. No matter how intense are the earthly, sensual desires of a man; no matter how tempting the wealth and power and worldly successes he might achieve; they can never leave a man entirely satisfied. There is always the desire for more. And perhaps that is what makes Faust always raise up the earthly thing to the heavenly plane. It's because man, in his maddening in-betweenness, nevertheless has conscience, imagination, and the spark of the divine. He has the capacity to combine his contradictions and make something better of them. So, for instance, Faust cannot just have sex with Gretchen and be content with the physical satisfaction of the act; he has to raise the experience to a higher level and fall in love with her!

"For all these reasons, one can with justification say that Faust defines the modern human being.[13] And the word "Faustian" defines the civilization we call Western. It was Oswald Spengler who, reading Goethe, discerned the distinctive character of Western culture: It was Faustian because of the way it inspired the striving soul to engage in unceasing efforts to conquer nature -- including human nature. But it's a roll of the dice. For when the godly myth of love is displaced by the demonic myth of power, there is a near certainty that the consequences will be disastrous. And yet that precisely is the mythic displacement which characterizes the modern world."[14]

Tonsor's words hit me like a blast of wind. But there was no time to linger. Caroline, who had checked out a book, was emerging from the library. 

As the game clock ran down to zero, Tonsor wasted no time wrapping up: "Make no mistake: Goethe was no orthodox believer -- he did not give a full act of faith to the God of the Christians. But his Faust teaches us what the loss of Everyman's faith in the transcendent would mean to the Western spirit, much as Nietzsche would do, even more forcefully, several decades later. With the arrival of the modern age -- which supplanted the Age of Faith and along with it medieval scholasticism and Renaissance Platonism -- Western man crossed a threshold that has given him abundance on the horizontal plane of his bestiality, yet poverty on the vertical plane of his spirituality. Grasp this existential fact, and you have the key that unlocks so much that has vexed man during the last five centuries. As the years pass, the distance between modern man's seduction by the horizontal and his memory of the vertical only widens. It is that existential gap that goes far to explain why modern man in his dissatisfaction chooses to be distracted by his newfound Promethean capabilities -- whether to use the state to extend his power, or to use violence to eliminate the other, or to use ideology to justify his exquisitely refined hypocrisy."

IV.

At this final thought Tonsor offered Caroline his physical support so that she would not slip on the ice -- just as he'd offered me his intellectual support so that I would not slip on ideology. 

As the couple said goodbye, I hurried down William Street toward the bus stop, aware of the cold wind on my face and feeling that Goethe might have correctly diagnosed my poverty and misery. 


_____________________

Notes

[1] This advice parallels that of Fr. James V. Schall, at URL https://home.isi.org/students-guide-liberal-learning?utm_source=Intercollegiate+Studies+Institute+Subscribers&utm_campaign=5e15c982d3-IR+Weekly+August+24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3ab42370fb-5e15c982d3-93104597&mc_cid=5e15c982d3&mc_eid=dc3cbdd0a3.  

[2] Ann Tonsor Zeddies conversation with GW, East Grand Rapids, MI, June 17, 2017.

[3] Caroline Tonsor conversation with GW, Chelsea, MI, July 7, 2017.

[4] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen, Act 1, 1773.

[5] Eckermann was to Goethe as Boswell was to Johnson. See Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe, December 6, 1829, trans. John Oxenford, Kindle ebook ed., loc. 6636.

[6] Matthew Arnold, "A French Critic on Goethe," Mixed Essays, quoted by Helen C. White, "Matthew Arnold and Goethe," PMLA, vol. 6, no. 3 (September 1921): 438.

[7] Paul A. Bates, ed. Faust: Sources, Works, Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969).

[8] Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954.)

[9] Thomas Mann letter to Ida Herz, March 21, 1954; from Mann's Letters, 1948-1955 (Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer, 1955), p. 332; in Donald Watt, ed., Aldous Huxley (London: Routledge, 1975), p. 394.

[10] Reminiscent of Tonsor's interpretation of Faust is Rüdiger Safranski, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art, trans. David Dollenmayer (New York: W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2017), ch. 33.

[11] Paul, Romans 7:15, New American Bible translation.

[12] John 19:30, Latin Vulgate translation.

[13] Cf. A. N. Wilson, "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans: They Gave Us Goethe and Bach," Independent, July 12, 2008, at URL http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/a-n-wilson-dont-lets-be-beastly-to-the-germans-they-gave-us-goethe-and-bach-866386.html. 

[14] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Use and Abuse of Myth," Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 184.

Tonsor #10 -- Enlightenment and Liberalism

"Modernity is the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment is modernity," Tonsor proclaimed in his Shermanesque cadence from the lectern later that morning. "I exaggerate only slightly. In the second half of the seventeenth century and certainly by the first half of the eighteenth, Europe was seeing powerful new forces overtake the traditional thought and culture of Christendom. One of these forces, liberalism, was instantiated in the salons, writings, and reforms of the Enlightenment.

"I would like you to note two things. First, the Enlightenment was revolutionary. It was revolutionary because it would establish a competing source of authority in the European mind and thereby change the fundamental character of our civilization. Henceforward there would be not one source but two sources competing for intellectual and moral authority -- the ancient and medieval source of religious values that developed in Christendom, and the modern source of secular values that developed in the Enlightenment. The former was oriented to the things 'above'; the latter to the things 'below.' The struggle between these two competing sources of intellectual and moral authority would raise the pivotal question in the West's inner history: What should the relation between these two sources of authority be?[1]

"Note, further, that this shift in the fundamental character of our civilization did not follow the French Revolution but preceded it. Indeed, it was the Enlightenment that made the French Revolution and so many subsequent upheavals possible because men had already changed their minds. On our side of the Atlantic, John Adams made a similar point when he said the American Revolution had occurred in the minds of men at least a decade before any shots were fired. This point brings to the fore what I told you in our first class. Ideas have consequences. It is when men change their minds that other changes become possible. Our Marxist friends get it backward."[2]

There I sat in my chair, marveling at what my professor was saying. If we had been at the Met, Tonsor's intellectual dash in the opening minute of class would have been regarded as a bravura performance. The way he laid out "the pivotal question in the West's inner history" gave me the chemical fix I craved, the giddy frisson of discovery.  So, I thought, today's lecture[3] will be the Rosetta Stone, the sacred tablet that encapsulates Tonsor's take on the modern problem. We will see his fierce intellect[4] in all its brilliance reveal his intellectual task to understand modernity and his ethical task to confront modernity. In tandem these tasks comprised the civilizational mission of Stephen J. Tonsor.

Stirred with anticipation, I gripped my pen tightly and pressed down on my looseleaf paper with so much force it became crinkly. It was time to take a deep breath: Reverting to the days when I practiced Transcendental Meditation, I slowly exhaled my mantra to calm myself down.

Suddenly -- an intrusion. As Tonsor was saying, "Our Marxist friends get it backward," a woman with a longish ponytail walked up to the near side of the blackboard and wrote, in large chalk letters, "Learn or die." She coyly smiled at Tonsor, who was staring at her wide-eyed, then slipped out of the classroom. I had never seen anything like this display of audacity, certainly not before an old-school professor. We all wondered what would happen next as Tonsor walked to the end of the blackboard and scowled at her message. His face was red. "Yes," he growled, "learn or die." Just as he was about to rub out her words, he paused, put down the eraser, and said in a brighter register, "A wise one, she!"

We laughed. Her words would survive but she would not. Apparently she was dropping his class because we never saw her again. Tonsor returned to the lectern and resumed as if nothing had happened.

"You may have taken a survey course in Western civilization that has led you into error. If you were taught that the Enlightenment was a unified movement, then you have the wrong idea. Now, it is true: There were certain convictions that were found in virtually all the different manifestations of the Enlightenment -- in France, England, Scotland, Germany. Let us listen to the great intellectual historian and student of the Enlightenment, Sir Isaiah Berlin, tell us what elements the diverse strands had in common:

These were, in effect, the conviction that the world, or nature, was a single whole, subject to a single set of laws, in principle discoverable by the intelligence of man; that man was capable of improvement; that there existed certain objectively recognizable human goals which all men sought after, namely happiness, knowledge, justice, liberty, and virtue; that these goals were common to all men as such, were not unattainable, nor incompatible, and that human misery, vice, and folly were mainly due to ignorance either of what these goals consisted in or of the means of attaining them -- ignorance due in turn to insufficient knowledge of the laws of nature.

Moreover ... it was by and large believed that human nature was fundamentally the same in all times and places; local and historical variations were unimportant compared with the permanent central core in terms of which human beings could be defined as a single species.... Consequently the discovery of general laws that govern human behavior, their clear and logical integration into scientific systems -- of psychology, sociology, economics, political science, and the like [were central to the Enlightenment project].... [A]ll discoverable facts would, by replacing the chaotic amalgam of guesswork, tradition, superstition, prejudice, dogma, fantasy, and 'interested error' that hitherto did service as human knowledge and human wisdom (and of which by far the chief protector and instigator was the Church), create a new, sane, rational, happy, just, and self-perpetuating human society....   

This is the noble, optimistic, and rational doctrine and ideal of the great tradition of the Enlightenment from the Renaissance until the French Revolution, and indeed beyond it, until our own day.

"What interested Berlin even more than the conventional view of the Enlightenment that students get in survey classes were the many important divisions within the movement. I shall give you three. (1) On the question of human nature, not every French Encyclopedist or German rationalist believed that man is by nature good, ruined only by the follies and wickedness of priests and crippling institutions like the Church. Voltaire, for instance, believed that man was quite possibly cruel by nature. (2) When it came to religion, some of the philosophes were devout theists, while others were militant atheists. (3) And when it came to politics, some championed enlightened despotism, others democracy. So the first thing to keep in mind is that the Enlightenment is not one theological, philosophical, social, political, and economic program.

"When I ask you about the Enlightenment on, say, the midterm examination, don't give me the bumper sticker slogans you learned in AP history or college survey. You must specify which Enlightenment, which thinkers, you are referring to."

*     *     *

"Recall how in our first meeting I said that ideas have power; they have consequences when men seize on them and act with the conviction that they are true. If you see how liberalism informed the intellectual and institutional life of the modern West -- if you also see the fierce reaction against liberalism in the modern age -- then you will be well on the way to understanding the last three centuries.

"By liberalism, I do not here mean the politics of Ted Kennedy. I have plenty to say on the politics of Ted Kennedy and his family,[5] but there is not enough time in our class to chase that rabbit down the hole."

Tonsor looked up from his notes: "For you city slickers who do not know, rabbits burrow in holes, and the allusion is to an early scene in Alice in Wonderland."[6] The sarcasm!

"The term 'liberalism' came into existence in the nineteenth century. It serves as a convenient device that intellectual historians use to identify a pattern of behavior and a habit of mind that are historically significant. Note that 'liberalism' is an -ism; that is to say, it is an ideology. Simply defined, an 'ideology' is a system of integrated beliefs, theories, and aims that constitutes a sociopolitical program. Every ideology expresses some deep desire in man to realize a good. Yet in the process every ideology ends up isolating one or two elements of human nature at the expense of others. Marxism, for example, responds to man's envy and desire for equality with others. When such an ideology ossifies into a sociopolitical program, it may capture something essential to the moment. But it becomes just another period piece, it fails to be universally applicable, and it falls into Trotsky's proverbial ash heap of history. Note this paradox about every ideology, every -ism. Every ideology seeks to order the human condition but does so at the cost of disordering some aspect of our human nature."

Those last words struck me and I wrote the sentence down carefully. It was the meat of the nut. It was why the Enlightenment inevitably involved an "endarkenment." Tonsor, again: "Note this paradox about every ideology, every -ism. Every ideology seeks to order the human condition but does so at the cost of disordering some aspect of our human nature."

Tonsor punched his critique of modern ideologies and -isms -- liberalism included -- with lines of verse by the poet, Walt Whitman:

     Do I contradict myself?
     Very well then I contradict myself,
     (I am large, I contain multitudes).[7]

"Now, the modern ideology of liberalism seeks to order the human condition. It is the modern instantiation of an older spirit of liberty that resides deep in the constitution of man. The liberal spirit is ever on the lookout to free the individual -- free him from oppressive authority, outworn customs, arbitrary rules, unfair regulations, and tyrannical taboos. It is premised on man's free will. It rejects determinism. Above all, it recognizes the individual's freedom of conscience, his decision to choose between right and wrong, his freedom to order his life as he chooses within the framework of the historical options available to him. As we shall see, it can also refer to the many misguided things individuals do to liberate themselves from an otherwise reasonable order. In short, liberalism tries to account for the sum total of decisions individuals make when they elect to diminish the realm of necessity and to enlarge the realm of freedom. It is thus no artifice or windy abstraction. It is grounded in historical evidence that strongly suggests the human preference for freedom. Again and again we see the instantiation of freedom in very concrete actions. I shall give you examples.

"Some ten thousand years ago, man chose to quit the paleolithic lifestyle and instead adopt the neolithic lifestyle. Beginning in Asia Minor, he made the decision to stop hunting and gathering in a Hobbesian state of nature, and instead to focus his energies on growing crops. By doing so, he was electing not to get up every morning wondering where his next meal would come from. I emphasize that it was a choice because there was nothing inevitable about the Neolithic turn. Man chose to diminish the realm of necessity imposed by hunger, and to enlarge the realm of freedom made possible by storing surplus food in ceramic pots and granaries. Of course, it was not a linear development. The neolithic era arrived across the face of the earth in fits and starts. It experienced setbacks during droughts and shortages caused by war and pestilence. Yet the point stands: Men apparently calculated that the net result of their preference for the neolithic lifestyle would yield greater liberty. The anthropological evidence shows that once the choice was made, man never voluntarily went back, en mass, to hunting and gathering."

Tonsor paused: "The deer heads mounted in suburban houses suggest that middle-class men miss the call of the wild. Apparently so do the intrepid hunters who travel up to Canada to experience the wilderness by shooting wildlife from a helicopter!" A few of the outdoorsmen in the class laughed.

"Some five thousand years ago, man chose to quit the neolithic lifestyle and instead adopt civilization. Beginning along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, he decided to build walls and provision armies. He apparently did so to diminish the realm of necessity: He sought to buy time before his death and avoid being enslaved in the first organized wars. So he chose to enlarge the realm of freedom made possible by greater security. I again emphasize that it was a choice because there was nothing inevitable about this turning point. Yet civilization spread across the face of the earth, from Sumer to Egypt to India to China to Central and South America. It grew in fits and starts. It experienced setbacks when city walls were breached and when armies invaded, but man apparently calculated that the net result of his choice would be greater liberty. The historical evidence shows that once the choice was made, he never went back voluntarily, en mass, to the neolithic lifestyle.

Tonsor again paused: "I know a few flower children who tried to do so back in the sixties, without success. Today they are all on Wall Street."

The students laughed at Tonsor's display of sarcasm.

"What we call Europe -- the westernmost extension of the Eurasian land mass with its numerous peninsulas and isles -- was a locus of the spirit of liberty. We see it in the democracy of ancient Athens and in the republic of ancient Rome. We see it among the Saxons in the time of Hengist and Horsa (as Thomas Jefferson was at pains to point out). We see it in the interminable struggle between church and state, as well as in the emergence of the medieval commune.

"Beginning in the 1300s and 1400s -- and gathering momentum during the Enlightenment in the late 1600s and 1700s -- the liberal spirit expanded into sphere after sphere of human activity. Men began to see increasing opportunities to diminish the realm of necessity and to enlarge the realm of freedom. In economics, politics, and society -- slowly but surely -- oppressive authorities were overthrown. Dead customs were cast off. Restrictive laws were repealed. Marketplace regulations were lifted. Social taboos were relaxed. All these developments were intended to free the individual from anything that oppressed, anything that kept him down. That impulse to free the individual from arbitrary oppression would always be the true north of the liberal spirit.

"At the dawn of the modern age, in the Renaissance, artists, writers, and men of intellect seized on the opportunity to diminish the realm of necessity and enlarge the realm of freedom. Beginning in the fourteenth century, clerics did a radical thing. They embraced pagan classicism at the inevitable expense of Christian scholasticism. In doing so they inadvertently raised paganism to the point that it almost rivaled Christianity. Now, these men were not apostates -- they regarded themselves as good Catholics. But their love of the classics of ancient Greece and Rome started an intellectual revolution within Christendom, a revolution that would legitimate two sources of civilizational authority where only one had existed before. To the Renaissance mind, the Greco-Roman classics spoke almost as much to the human condition as did Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. Because paganism was elevated, it rivaled Christianity as a source of authority. Men now had a choice in how they would mediate the two. This is the key to understanding how the Renaissance expanded freedom. Indeed, if Jacob Burckhardt's thesis is correct (as developed in his groundbreaking cultural study, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy), then it was this freedom that emerged hand-in-hand with a radical new concept: the individual. Now Renaissance Man could publicly laud both the pagan hero and the Christian saint. Each type presented a model of human excellence. Each type generated its own criteria of human flourishing. Renaissance Man accepted both these models of excellence and held them in a state of tension. All the while the Church went along with the development. There was no Albigensian crusade to stamp the pagan ideal out, and even the popes went along with the new pagan humanism. Never before had Christendom given this degree of license to intellectual, moral, and spiritual freedom. You can now see how the Renaissance, by embracing two different sources of authority in paganism and Christianity, and by lauding two different models of excellence in the hero and the saint, became a dress rehearsal of the Enlightenment.

"In the early modern age, men also saw the opportunity to diminish the realm of necessity and enlarge the realm of freedom when it came to shaping their fundamental worldview. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the Age of Exploration, the Europeans' encounter with new worlds opened men's eyes to the proliferating variety of human cultures. Believers lost their innocence. Now they were aware of the possibilities of other worldviews. Were some truer than others? The resulting pluralism opened the way to an a la carte skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism on a scale never before seen in world history. To understand what I mean, I would refer you to a book that is often assigned by my colleagues, The Cheese and the Worms (1980), by Carlos Ginsburg. It is the true story of Menocchio, a sixteenth-century Italian miller who was put on trial for his heretical musings. Contrast Menocchio's story to that of the more radical philosophes in the Enlightenment, men like Baron D'Holbach and Denis Diderot, who two centuries later could openly proclaim they did not believe in God. The taboo against atheism had been lifted. In the Enlightenment, freedom of conscience and of religion was dramatically expanding.

"In sphere after modern sphere, men willed themselves into greater states of freedom. The spread of freedom did not occur because of some abstract force of history. It was not Hegelian nonsense. Rather it was due to men making the choice, again and again, to be more free.

We see the spread of freedom in the new town charters, the new constitutions, the evolution of Parliament, and newly articulated rights. We see it in marketplace reforms and free labor contracts. We see it in the decline of arranged marriages as well as in the abolition of entail, primogeniture, and ultimogeniture. We see it in religious reforms and in many other concrete actions. To know this quest for freedom is to know the modern age in a major key. The Enlightenment was its spearpoint. None of this should surprise you -- we Americans know it well because the quest for liberty rallied the patriots of the American Revolution.

"Diminishing necessity, enlarging freedom -- these can be good things befitting the nature of man. 'Can be,' because when men enlarge freedom, they do not lose the need for order. Indeed, it is precisely when they enlarge freedom that they need to be attentive to order -- to what Tocqueville called the "habits of the heart." Such habits are formed by family life, religious communities, civil society, and participation in local politics. Think of these habits as part of a culture's unwritten constitution, which is the foundation of the written Constitution.

"Now, there can be too much of a good thing. Liberalism promoted freedom, but its individualism did not reinforce the moral and social restraints that are needed to sustain freedom.When man's freedom outruns his self-imposed restraints, when he has experienced the anxiety that arises from political anarchy and personal licentiousness, he feels the rage for order. Yes, the rage for order. Men will not tolerate chaos. It is not in our nature to tolerate chaos. Chaos has erupted in the modern age and this has provoked numerous reactions against liberty. We have seen chaos when men are uprooted from their traditional communities. We have seen it in the new industrial economy with its ant-heap societies. We have seen it in the wars of competing -isms, so many that fewer and fewer men knew what to believe. We have seen it in political revolutions, first in England, then in America, then in France -- and ultimately in the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany. What is Nazi Germany but the rage for order after the mounting chaos of World War I, hyperinflation, depression, and confusion in the Weimar Republic?

"Any questions?"

Oh, yes, there were questions, but before anyone could raise a hand, Tonsor seemed to want to plow forward. "Let's next consider rationalism," he said, putting one set of notes into a folder and removing another set from a different folder. As he scanned yellow ruled pages of handwritten notes, he stuck his lower jaw out. His face projected a bulldog determination.

____________________


[1] Stephen J. Tonsor credited Friedrich Heer with the above-below struggle at the heart of "Europe's inner history"; see Tonsor's essay, "Gnostics, Romantics, and Conservatives," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 263-64. If the West's "inner history" created the tension between classical, medieval Christianity and the modern Enlightenment, an additional tension came about in the 1960s when both classical medieval Christianity AND the modern Enlightenment were overthrown by postmodernism, which rejected both the norms of faith and reason. Adding to the tension was the simultaneous rejection of Western worldviews and the adoption of non-Western worldviews such as Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, and other forms of Eastern thought. Today it is clear that our civilization's inner tensions arise from the fact that large parts of the population now recognize one of three authoritative sources. Nowadays there are Christians, scientists, and counter-cultural thinkers.
[2] Tonsor consistently emphasized how mental, moral, and spiritual changes preceded material changes. See his essay, "Gnostics, Romantics, and Conservatives," in Equality, pp. 266-67.
[3] My reconstruction of Tonsor's lectures is an amalgamation that combines (1) my notes taken during the lecture; (2) further research I undertook to prepare for his midterm and final examinations; and (3) later reading of Tonsor's essays, research in the archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and at the University of Minnesota, and interviews with those familiar with Tonsor's work.
[4] I am grateful to the intellectual historian Seth Bartee for this characterization of Stephen Tonsor as a "fierce intellect," conveyed in private correspondence, October 16, 2016.
[5] At the time Tonsor was giving this lecture, during the fall of 1987, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was leading the campaign in the U.S. Senate against Justice Robert Bork, who had been nominated by President Ronald Reagan to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. Conservatives like Tonsor went on record to charge Democrats, who held the majority in the Senate, with being so hostile to Bork that they could not give the nominee a fair confirmation hearing. In the heat of the battle, conservatives coined a new verb, "to bork." To bork means to engage in relentless personal and misleading professional attacks against a judicial nominee to prevent the nominee's advance. Tonsor's public view was expressed as a signatory to Sidney Hook's letter of support of Bork in the Congressional Record, October 22, 1987, and October 23, 1987.
[6] See URL https://aliceproject4.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/down-the-rabbit-hole-what-does-it-mean/, accessed October 18, 2016.
[7] Excerpt from Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," 51, at URL http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/27, accessed October 24, 2016; quoted in Tonsor, "The Conservative Search for Identity," in Equality, p. 247.