VERSE Hang on, Sir Hillary!.Johannes Eff

to pure challenge, the heresy of orthodoxy before the orthodoxy of heresy indicates that heterodoxy itself is using the instruments of its enemy in order to entrench itself. In so doing the “open society” pays its compliments to the “closed society.” Orthodoxy is nothing other than a law of being.

A society, given the proper historic and cultural antecedents, can and should accept the pluralist principle within the context of its own orthodoxy. A society can see its institutions as embodying a responsibility and allegiance to God while permitting a wide variety of opinions on just what man or which church concretely represents the voice of God within history. But the proposition that a society—a political society— must abstract itself from all questions concerning the ultimate can only be entertained by a naive rationalism that fails to see that men can live and act together only if they are bound together by code and custom, myth and legend, sculpture and song— all bespeaking some common confrontation of the Absolute. Where such an underlying orthodoxy is lacking we find ourselves in the midst of an aggregate of ghettos, not a society; we find ourselves in Hong Kong or Casablanca, not Washington, New York or London.

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to pure challenge, the heresy of orthodoxy before the orthodoxy of heresy indicates that heterodoxy itself is using the instruments of its enemy in order to entrench itself. In so doing the “open society” pays its compliments to the “closed society.” Orthodoxy is nothing other than a law of being.

A society, given the proper historic and cultural antecedents, can and should accept the pluralist principle within the context of its own orthodoxy. A society can see its institutions as embodying a responsibility and allegiance to God while permitting a wide variety of opinions on just what man or which church concretely represents the voice of God within history. But the proposition that a society—a political society— must abstract itself from all questions concerning the ultimate can only be entertained by a naive rationalism that fails to see that men can live and act together only if they are bound together by code and custom, myth and legend, sculpture and song— all bespeaking some common confrontation of the Absolute. Where such an underlying orthodoxy is lacking we find ourselves in the midst of an aggregate of ghettos, not a society; we find ourselves in Hong Kong or Casablanca, not Washington, New York or London.