L. William Countryman's Blog

Leigh Fermor

I've recently read the long-awaited third volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor's narrative of his trek across Europe in the early 1930s: The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos. For those who don't know these volumes, you have a treat in store, starting with A Year of Gifts and continuing with Between the Woods and the Water. They offer a door into a very different world, one somewhat less devastated by nationalism and ideology than our own, but already shadowed by the forces that would destroy it during WWII, the Cold War, and the resurgent nationalisms that followed on the fall of the Soviet empire. The first two volumes are Leigh Fermor's mature reflections on his youthful experience; the third is partly this and partly extracts from recovered journals, edited by two associates. The story is not only fascinating for its own sake; it stretches one's imagination and encourages hope to meet people maintaining humane perspectives despite great difficulties.

Finitude (cont.)

30. The finite world, of course, is full of efforts to circumvent this reality of our existence. Western history is full of moments in which a community has formulated its grasp of truth in rigidly defined terms and shown itself willing to enforce itto the point of executing inconvenient people who refuse to accept the formulae. Whether one thinks of the Late Roman Empire's persecution of Christians, of the Crusades (both internal and external to Europe), of the Inquisition of the Medieval and Renaissance periods, of the Wars of Religion in the seventeenth century, or of the more modern atrocities of Nazism and Soviet Communism, the picture is fundamentally the same in terms of its dynamics: those who claim possession of the truth regard themselves as authorized to inflict it on others by any means possible. They set themselves, consciously or not, on the side of the infinite (as if any finite being could ever embody that reality) and thus clothe themselves with an authority that knows no bounds. Torture and murder then become nothing more than the execution of righteousness. We should like to think of this behavior as exceptional, and, in its worst manifestations, it may be. But it persists at less dramatic levels through human society in general. (Since I know Western history better than that of other parts of the world, I have drawn my examples from there. But I have seen no evidence that other cultures are immune to these temptations.)

Finitude (cont.)

29. The closest to an adequate formulation of the truth in human language is perhaps Jesus of Nazareth's combination of two phrases from the Torah: first, to love God with the whole self; second, to love one's neighbor as oneself. Notice that they are not propositions, but indications of a certain stance toward the world around us. First, to treat our finite experience as related to a creative purpose that is above and beyond our finitude; we thereby acknowledge that the finite world is a creative endeavor, not a mere arena for gladiatorial combat. Second, to regard other people with a consciousness that their existence is, in all fundamental ways, comparable to our own. No further account of the truth can be offered that does not honor these basic elements of our finite reality.

Finitude (cont.)

28. The rejection by some post-modern thinkers of the very idea of truth is a category mistake. It mistakes the claims to truth for the reality of it. As long as there is such thing as a lie, there is also such a thing as the truth. But it is perfectly possible for what is claimed as the truth to be, in practice, a lie. Even if it technically accurate, it may still function as a lie if it is being used in such a way as to assert my community's absolute and unique possession of this thing we call "the truth."

Finitude (cont.)

27. Acknowledgement of our limits should give us warning that to absolutize the doctrines of any human community is absurd. Every community, like every individual, is subject to turning its finitude into an occasion of sin. The claim to know all truth (or, at least, its indispensable outlines) is absurdly at odds with our own littleness and limitations. The point is not that truth is relative. It is that our grasp of truth is relative.

Finitude (cont.)

26. In what does this sin consist? The is the movement in which the poisoned soul no longer understands itself as one among many finite beings. It awards itself the role of center. It holds itself accountable only for what pleases itself. This is the core of sin, from its most extreme examples in the Hitlers and Stalins and Maos, large and small, right down to the bad driver in each of us, willfully ignoring the safety, peace, and well-being of those around us. (Not that all sins are equal. Only that they share the same root.) The soul obsessed by fear can no longer see anything of value, anything of kinship, in the rest of the finite world. Fear thus becomes enmity and eventually hatred.

Finitude (cont.)

24. It is fear that makes of our finitude the nursery of sin. But then we still have to ask, "What finite being can dispense with fear?" Isn't it necessary in a finite world in order to protect ourselves from being destroyed by other finite beings? Yes, of course. Yet, fear becomes the nursery of sin when it begins to become our normative stance in relation to the world around us. It embodies the grandiosity of a tiny being trying to assert total control of its world. And such grandiosity is so patent a lie that it can only poison the soul in which it takes up residence. The soul poisoned by fear becomes sinful.

Finitude (cont.)

23. If "the flesh" is, as Paul suggests, the key problem in human existence, to what extent is it simply an inevitable component of being human? And, conversely, to what extent can it be considered a sin—as if to say, "something that violates our essential humanity"? Christians have typically wanted to separate these two things sharply, often on the ground that, after all, we cannot be culpable for faults that lie in our deepest nature. Human life is full of faults that are the consequence of ignorance or other inability on our part. We do a great deal of harm to one another and to the world around us without fully realizing what we are doing. We may be hustled along by the force of circumstances, blinded by misconceptions built so firmly into our culture that we cannot recognize them as harmful, either inhibited or catapulted into action by psychological quirks that override further reflection.
The cause of these wrongs is our finitude, but the harm is not the less grave for that. Insofar as all finite life is life in the flesh, there can never be a perfect human life. There cannot even be a perfectly examined life, since the self-understanding of even the most self-critical among us will never be more than partial.

Finitude (cont.)

22. If we take our images of the infinite too literally, they are likely to come into conflict with one another. If the infinite is "fortune" (as many people would have said in Late Antiquity, when Tyche was a great goddess), in what sense is it also "justice" or "wisdom" or "love"? Fortune is arbitrary. Justice is purposeful. Wisdom contemplates. Love attracts. All of them seem to be elements in the what-is-greater-than-our-control. Yet, that infinite cannot be reduced to any one of them.

Finitude (cont.)

21. None of these names for the infinite is precisely accurate. And they are certainly not exhaustive descriptions. They reflect particular finite human experiences of the infinite or reflections on that experience and they give us the rudiments of a language (composed of images and words) for talking about our experience. They are therefore useful and meaningful even though they cannot fully capture or define that of which we speak. They point to what seems particularly important for us about the infinite—the substrate by which the finite exists.