Sense and Nonsense: The Horizontal Man

A cartoon in the New Yorker puts us in the office of a “Mob Psychologist.” The psychologist is dutifully sitting in his armchair, notebook in hand, rather innocent-looking in glasses. He turns slightly to the patient. There, horizontal on the proverbial couch, lies a middle-aged Mafioso in pin-striped suit, fedora, dark glasses, bearing a certain anguish on his face as if he has suffered an unaccustomed spiritual crisis. To reassure the troubled mobster, the psychologist says to him soothingly, “So, while extortion, racketeering, and murder may be bad acts, they don’t make you a bad person.”

Those of us who still recall our common sense Aristotle—and if we don’t, we will miss the humor—will recognize in the cartoon the exact opposite philosophy to that on which our civilization is based, namely, that the only things that can make us “bad persons” are precisely our own “bad acts.” While it is true that our essential being remains good, even in Hell, still for the sort of beings we are, rational and free finite persons, we decide what we do with our given goodness. We implicitly deny it or affirm it by our thoughts and our deeds.

In his extraordinarily enlightening encyclical Redemptoris Missio (8) John Paul II wrote,

In the modern world there is a tendency to reduce man to his horizontal dimension alone. But without an openness to the Absolute, what does man become? The answer to this question is found in the experience of every individual, but it is also written in the history of humanity with the blood shed in the name of ideologies or by political regimes which have sought to build a “new humanity” without God.

We should not forget, I think, to ponder this last phrase of the Holy Father, as it is a picture of our own time, including too often, of our democratic time. We should not fail to wonder what a “new humanity” constructed obviously by ourselves but explicitly “without God” might look like.

The Holy Father often uses this imagery of “horizontal” and “vertical” because it is an apt one to clarify what is at issue in the modern world. The horizontal dimension of “man alone” means simply that the mobster was wrong to have bad feelings about his actions. Whatever he might do, he remains “a good person.” The link between what caused the person to be and the person’s actions following on his reality is broken. If we eliminate any “vertical” dimension of man, any direct and personal relation to God as to what man is in his being and in his actions, we receive, admittedly, a certain kind of “new freedom.” This new freedom separates us from a morality of action itself based on being, on what is, in which we are not creators of ourselves or completely independent formulators of what we ought to do.

On Thursday, April 8, 1773, Boswell tells us that he sat a good part of the evening with Samuel Johnson, who was “very silent.” However, Johnson interrupted his silence to remark that “Burnet’s History of His Own Times is very entertaining. The style, indeed, is mere chit-chat. I do not believe that Burnet intentionally lied; but he was so much prejudiced, that he took no pains to find out the truth.” Finding out the truth, in other words, takes “pains,” even when we are not intentionally lying and enjoy the “chit-chat.”

I bring Samuel Johnson up in the context of “the horizontal man” and the mobster who does not want to be “a bad person” because we often forget that we have an obligation not merely to avoid bad acts like “extortion, racketeering, and murder” but also to think properly, to think truly. This is why we are given minds in the first place. We live in a time, I think, when the very notion of “thinking properly” or “thinking the truth” is looked upon as a contradiction or impossibility. “Truth” discourse becomes, cynically, “whose truth”? That is to say, “truth discourse” does not exist; there is only “interest discourse.” This is the contemporary ideological party line.

At the very first address he gave to the jury, Socrates told them: “Think only of the truth of my words, and give heed to them: let the speaker speak truly.” Our civilization is based on Socrates in this sense, that truth, its telling, its pursuit, is the center of what we are. A man who “takes no pains to tell the truth,” as Samuel Johnson pointed out, is not to be praised, not because the truth cannot be found, but because he does not want to take any pains to find it. But if we think there is no truth, if we implicitly repeat as our own Pilate’s retort to Christ, “what is truth?”, then we will not know why the mobster is not right, why being a good person has something to do with our deeds.

We are not, ultimately, horizontal men, however much we are concerned with our world. Of course, it is best to say that we are both horizontal, concerned with the world, and vertical, concerned first with God. In one of his letters to Nancy Mitford, August 26, 1946, the British novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote:

Saints are people who have a peculiar intimacy with God and as a result give evidence of sublime virtues and usually of miraculous powers. You can never understand them unless you start with God, then go to man as his creation—a special order of being with unique limitations, opportunities & obligations. Saints are simply men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God. It is in that that all mankind has a different nature from the rest of the animal kingdom.

The special nature of man, intimacy with God—these are things we do not hear so often. Indeed, many would deny such truths as they understand both the possibility of an exclusively horizontal relation of man to man and the possibility that we can be good in our order of being no matter what we do.

“A ‘new humanity’ without God” is not only not possible, it is not even desirable. This is the truth of the matter. John Paul II, as usual, has it right:

The temptation today is to reduce Christianity to merely human wisdom, a pseudoscience of well-being. In our heavily secularized world a “gradual secularization of salvation” has taken place, so that people strive for the good of man, but man who is truncated, reduced to his merely horizontal dimension.

The “pseudoscience of well-being,” the “gradual secularization of salvation” have indeed taken place. This reductionism is what our media and our politics are basically about in one way or another. The noble language of “striving for the good of man” is largely the good of horizontal man, the man truncated, the man reduced.

We can never understand saints, we can never understand men and women, unless we start with God. The Holy Father’s question remains to haunt us—”Without an openness to the Absolute, what does man become?” The fact is, we are finding out. This discovery is the meaning and history of our time, that the new humanities without God are lethal, that the truth of man includes the truth of God’s creating him to be of “a different nature from the rest of the animal kingdom.”

“So while extortion, racketeering, and murder may be bad actions, they don’t make you a bad person.” “I do not believe that Burnet intentionally lied; but he was so much prejudiced, that he took no pains to find out the truth.” “Think only of the truth of my words, and give heed to them: let the speaker speak truly.” “The temptation today is to reduce Christianity to merely human wisdom.” “Saints are men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation, which is to approach God.”

Our style, in other words, should not be “mere chit-chat.” Yet “truth talk” can be entertaining. Even in cartoons with mobsters and psychologists can we grasp the truth of things. There is thus a “history of our times.” We should, knowing our prejudices, seek with great pains the truth, that there is no explanation of humanity, new or old, without God. In the end, even the word horizontal implies the word horizon.

Author

  • Fr. James V. Schall

    The Rev. James V. Schall, SJ, (1928-2019) taught government at the University of San Francisco and Georgetown University until his retirement in 2012. Besides being a regular Crisis columnist since 1983, Fr. Schall wrote nearly 50 books and countless articles for magazines and newspapers.

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