Religion Report

Moral philosopher Leszek Kolakowski is the inaugural winner of a million-dollar prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Stephen Crittenden: The United States Library of Congress has just announced the inaugural winner of a major new prize, the John W. Kluge prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Kluge Prize is worth one million U.S. dollars, and it's intended to complement the Nobel Prize, which isn't awarded for areas of philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, and so on.

And the first recipient is Polish philosopher and Oxford professor Leszek Kolakowski. Kolakowski is now in his mid-70s. He was educated at Warsaw University, and started out as a Marxist, but travel to Moscow in 1950 opened his eyes to what he would later describe as "the enormity of material and spiritual desolation caused by the Stalinist system". Soon his books were being banned. In 1966 he was dismissed from the Party, and then in 1968 from his professorial post. He left Poland, teaching first in the United States, and later at Oxford, where he was made a Fellow of All Souls College.

Kolakowski has written more than thirty books on philosophy, politics and religion. His most influential work is a three-volume Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution. A great book to start with is Metaphysical Horror, a little book that traces the history of metaphysics in Western philosophy as clearly and elegantly as you could ever wish. And he's also written brilliantly on the history of religious thought in the 17th and 18th centuries. God Owes Us Nothing traces the dark idea that only the elect will be saved, in a line that leads from St Augustine to John Calvin, and then to the Jansenist movement in the Catholic church.

In announcing the prize, the Library of Congress described Kolakowski as a true humanist who had always asked big questions - defending the human instinct for the transcendent, and values like tolerance and diversity.

Well, here is Leszek Kolakowski giving a lecture in the United States last year, on one of his favourite topics: Natural Law.

Leszek Kolakowski: A critic might argue that the American Constitution - which establishes religious freedom, freedom of speech, the illegality of slavery - is good, because it is impossible to deny that peace is better than war, and freedom is better than slavery and so on. But his critic would say "no, not at all. For centuries slavery was considered a part of the natural order of things, including the United States under the rule of this very Constitution. For centuries war was praised as well, and seen as a part of the natural order, and religious freedom in the Christian world - not to speak of the Muslim world - is a recent novelty, by no means accepted by all, even today".

However, Thomas Aquinas believed that the rules of natural law - the distinction between good and evil - were, according to him, inscribed by God in our minds. Within this way of thinking, the rules concerning good and evil are as valid as the laws of chemistry. And in God, who is the absolute unity, there is no difference between a truth that describes some natural regularities, and the truth of God's words about good or evil. Both kinds of laws are true, and both kinds of laws are of divine origin.

Stephen Crittenden: Leszek Kolawski speaking in the United States. I think Kowalaski is a Protestant, but it would be very interesting to trace his intellectual development in comparison with John Paul II.