Stjohn's Review
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE StJohn's Review Editor: J. Walter Sterling Contents Managing Editor: Thomas Parran, Jr. 2 Student Rebellion and the Nazis: "The White Rose" in its Setting Editorial Assistant: Beate Ruhm von Oppen Susan Lord 22 The Christian Origin of Modern Science Editorial Board: Alexandre Kojeve Eva Brann S. Richard Freis, Alumni representative 26 ..... A Comment on Alexandre Kojeve's "The Joe Sachs Christian Origin of Modern Science" Cary Stickney Curtis Wil>on Curtis A. Wilson 30 What Good and What Harm Can Psychoanalysis Do? Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome, but should be accom~ TtOlfgang Lederer panied by a stamped, self~addressed envelope in each instance. Reasoned 39 Cordelia (Poem) comments are also welcome. Elliott Zuckcrman The St. John's Review (formerly The Cal lege) is published by the Office of the 40 Aristotle's Account of the Intelligibility of Being Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis, James Carey Maryland 21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Samuel S. Kutler, Dean. Published thrice yearly, in the winter, 51 Chameleons (Poem) spring, and summer. For those not on John Fontaine the distribution list, subscriptions: $12.00 yearly, $24.00 for two years, or $36.00 for three years, payable in ad OccASIONAL DiscouRsEs vance. Address all correspondence to The St. John's Rem'ew, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland 21404. 52 Intellect and Intuition Eva Brann Volume XXXV, Number 1 Winter 1984 59 Beyond the First Hundred Years: Some Remarks on the Significance of Tristan ·Elliott Zuclrcrman © 1984 St. John's College; All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. 63 In Memoriam John Gaw Meem, 1895-1983 ISSN 0277-4720 William A. Darkey Composition: Fishergate Publishing Co., Inc. Printing: The John D Lucas Printing Co. ON THE COVER: Johannes Kepler; a portion of Kepler's Epitome of The kind permission of Harper & Raw to Copernican Astronomy, translated by Charles Glenn Wallis; and an use the pictures on pp. 3 and 12 is grate image of the derivation of the number of the planets or orbits about fully acknowledged. the sun from the five regular solid figures. ST. JoHN's REVIEW Winter 1984 Student Rebellion and the Nazis: "The White Rose" in Its Setting Beate Ruhm von Oppen I The Rise and Rule of Hitler hardly any open protest; and that the first three of the famous group of Munich students who protested in "public" against the Nazi regime and its war were dead ere someone to ask why I am giving two within a few days of being caught, the rest following a lectures in a row instead of the traditional few months later. single lecture, I might give as a reason A helpful colleague, a theologian and church an experience I had some two years ago. historian, then jumped into the breach and explained W It was in May 1970, just after the that Nazi Germany was a police state-and what that American incursion into Cambodia, at a university meant. I must confess I had taken that as read. But the specializing in theology- one that had theology as one incident showed me that one cannot take it as read any of its three main divisions. There was student unrest all longer and that any description of resistance must start over the country and talk of "revolution:' There was with that which is resisted. something like that going on at that university on the Also it could be that a term like "police state;' being day I spoke there. My subject was the relationship of the misused too much, has lost its meaning and like other Nazis and the churches, a subject, I had been told, of such terms ~'genocide;' for instance, or "fascism" or special interest to the people there. "totalitarianism'~ no longer conveys anything precise or But perhaps not on that disturbed day. The question distinct. But meanings and distinctions have to be kept period was dismal; discussion impossible. One questioner clear, or, if they have been blurred, have to be made clear got up and asked: "What about student protest?" It was again, not just for love of pedantry, but for tbe sake of not a sly question; it was quite innocent and proceeded liberty, perhaps of life itself. from pure ignorance, such ignorance as I was unprepared Lies work best when there is a grain of truth in them. for in a middle-aged questioner. So I gave a brief and The best precaution against being taken in is the cultiva brutal answer on the history of student protest in Ger tion of the habit of looking for tbat grain of truth and many: that, indeed, loud and massive and effective pro trying to see what has been done with it. Denying or ig test existed in the period bifore the Nazis came to power, noring the grain of truth or the facts of a matter may and that the protesters Were Nazis, or at any rate mili be magnificent ideology and rousing rhetoric, but that tant nationalists, who exercised considerable pressure on is no defence against the better liar. And Hitler may have the academic establishment of the Weimar Republic been the best liar there ever was. and, incidentally, even more, on that of the Austrian That is one reason why we are having two lectures, Republic; that once the Nazis were in power, there was the first on the police state or whatever other name one may find more appropriate for Nazi Germany, and the second on a group of students who opposed it and a pro Beate Ruhm von Oppen is a tutor at St. Jolm's College, Annapolis. This ar fessor who supported them and died with them. ticle is a slightly revised version of two lectures given at Annapolis on February 18 and 25, 1972. Her publications include &li"gion and Resistance to Nazism, I must take note of two elements of risk in offering (Princeton 1971); "Nazis and Christians" in "World Politics, vol. XXI, No. 3, such lectures as these, here, at St. John's. Firstly, St. John's April 1969; and "Trial in Berlin" in The College, January 1977. does not do "history." It is not one of our liberal arts. We 2 WINTER 1984 The ji'rst students to be executed. Lift to right, Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst, july 1942. read Homer and Herodotus and Thucydides; Virgil and discussion lacks feeling, passion -lacks, apparently, ex Tacitus; Plutarch and Gibbon; Tocqueville and Tolstoi perience; I mean: lacks the qllfllity of talk about something and Marx. We read quite a lot of political philosophy. We one has really experienced; it lacks the conviction that read much that made history, from the Bible to the church this is something really evil and dangerous-and should fathers to the reformers and debunkers; from Aristotle be resisted or counteracted to the best of our ability. The to Rousseau and Kant to Hegel and Darwin to the raw material of experience abounds. But the mental, in documents of American constitutional history. Yet we do cluding the emotional, engagement rarely seems to take not have "history" as a subject, or a disipline. place. I cannot here go into the question of what the The second risk is rather peculiar to our moment in reasons for this inattention may be. Quantity of comment history, but here, at St. John's, it is probably the lesser on the phenomenon of misused language proves of the two risks. The temper of many of the more vocal, nothing- certainly it does not prove a realization of the more audible and visible of our contemporaries is a seriousness of the matter. historical or anti-historical. There is no patience with Neither does a concern for the purity and impeccabil history. It is regarded as "irrelevanC-unless, of course, ity of language necessarily ensure the best politics and disjointed bits of it can be used, torn from their context, the most just and decent polity. But certain peccabilities as ammunition in some campaign. are more dangerous, more insidious in their effects, than The two risks may, to some extent, cancel each other others. The more serious linguistic sins seem to me to out, although they may also reinforce each other. We be very closely related to the subject at the core of these cultivate, perhaps over-cultivate, rationality here. By two lectures: slavery and freedom, the manipulation of "over-cultivate" I mean a development of the reasoning men (and women, and children) and the resistance to faculty at the expense of other faculties. Here we stand manipulation -a resistance that is needed at all times opposed to the temper of our time which is, increasingly, and is always fraught with risks and renunciations, but anti-rational-a rebellion against the shallow "functional" which in bad times may involve the readiness to stake rationalism of the mechanised, mass-educating, manip one's life. ulative age. Our rationalism here, at St. John's, is different- more reflective and comprehensive-and fter this short introduction, let me begin in a most therefore few of us are driven into this reactive irra simple way and speak of the ways in which poli tionalism, in fact most of us are quite good at resisting it. A tics began to impinge on me at the time when But I often sense a divorce from reality, from human things were bad and getting worse. For the students I reality; from psychological, political, historical reality. For am going to talk about were roughly speaking my con instance, seminar discussions of Thucydides on the temporaries, my vintage, belonging to the same "cohort;' revolution in Corcyra and the attendant linguistic revolu as I believe the trade now calls it.