Finding and Seeking: Ethics as Theology, vol. 2

by Oliver O'Donovan

God attested in the goodness of his works, yet unrecognized and unacknowledged. This paradox is intelligible, but only as a moment in the exercise of freedom and discernment. Either the works must decay and lose their goodness for us, or the immortal goodness from which they spring must come to be acknowledged. The good unbeliever, we may say, exists, but does not subsist. A sense of obligation and unbelief in God may occur together in one mind, but it is not a stable condition; it will evolve one way or the other, since the decision about the reality of good must finally be encountered and made.

When we speak of the subject of a history, we speak of a capacity to create a coherent narrative around oneself by directing and taking responsibility for one’s active powers so as to own one’s doing and living, planning what one does, acknowledging what one has done, sustaining a policy of doing one thing from one circumstance to the next, and so on.

The concept of “person” points in two directions: on the one hand, to the individual hypostasis that is presupposed in the very condition of human existence; on the other, to its expression in the sphere of responsibility and action, the realm of “personality.”

Ancient Israel offered living beasts, which represented not what the worshipers had done or made, but the essential resource on which their existence depended. And so in Christian liturgy we bring our offering in the form of money, the point of which is that it is nothing concrete at all. Our money is the unexploited potential for whatever we may become capable of, the pure symbol, the unactualized resource, which represents the material conditions of our being and doing.

Conversion is the first act of freedom. Misunderstanding of conversion arises when it is forgotten that a beginning must envisage a continuation, the logic of the initial act worked out and elaborated.

“Abba, Father, all things are possible to you!” the prayer begins in Saint Mark (14:36). The act of self-giving is founded on the confession of a world governed by God’s good purpose, a world in which nothing is purely tragic, but all serves the good that the Father ordains.

The assertiveness of self-protective instincts against the readiness to do God’s will is the very meaning of temptation as inner division.

“faithfulness.” “Faithfulness,” which we sometimes speak of as “keeping faith,” is a consistent adherence to an acknowledgment once made.

Yet it is a consistency with ourselves. If we break with the unity of life that has been given us — “reinventing ourselves” as we call it scornfully — we destroy ourselves.

No one truly makes a decision who cannot stand by one; the decision is “made,” finally, only when it is carried through.

What is the categorical undertaking that does not change when it encounters change? It is the commitment of the self to the service of God. To stand by that commitment, putting ourselves at its service and growing with it and into it as it unfolds before us, is what brings us into unity with ourselves.

Even the successful acquisition of knowledge can trap us in ignorance and deception. Discovery can dazzle, blinding us to other things we should have known. To realize ourselves as knowing and loving agents, then, it is not enough to acquire items of knowledge or objects of appreciation. It requires the organization and critique of our knowledge and love. Wisdom as “master-workman” demands of us a reflective and critical relation to knowledge, exercised in judging what this or that item of knowledge is worth, how it is contextualized among other items, what it licenses us to conclude and what it does not.

Augustine guilty. Yet against the temptation of worldlessness he had a strong defense in the conviction that love was inseparable from knowledge.

Paraphrase statement, “Love is inseparable from knowledge.”

to hold oneself before one’s eyes is the central core of memory,

Augustine thought, to try to get to neighbor-love too quickly, taking too much for granted, assuming we knew what the neighbor was, and therefore what he needed. In a sermon contemporary with the Confessions, he asked why it was not enough to say, “You shall love your neighbor,” and replied that if we did not know how to love ourselves, we should go wrong in loving our neighbor. “So the Lord resolved to give you a form for your love of yourself in the love of God, and only then entrusted you with your neighbor, to love him as yourself.”6 Without a self-love shaped to the love of God we are not equipped to care for a neighbor’s welfare.

Whether publicizing oneself or shrinking from publicity, one hopes to avoid the candid gaze that sees through one’s self-image.

To refuse self-knowledge is to refuse to find ourselves in the world God loves, to refuse to love ourselves for the sake of God’s love for us.

Any fool can change his mind; the difficult thing is to enlarge it.

The discovery of the world is precisely the discovery of other “centers,” other views on the world that are irreducibly different at point of entry, but are able to make contact and form a common field of reference with ours.

A plurality of centers of vision are effective precisely as they offer multiple points of access to a unified and common reality.

Modernity generated two rival myths-of-origin about the I and the we, both constructivist. According to the one the individual constructed society, according to the other society constructed the individual. Each took one pole of the dialectic for granted and problematized the other: what we call “individualism” is a theory of how society is generated, while “social behaviorism” is an account of individual self-consciousness. Contractarians interest themselves in politics, social behaviorists in psychology. A Christian belief which understands the agent-self as suspended on the call of God can settle with neither myth, for it takes neither of the poles for granted.

Individual freedom shrinks if it lacks the capacity to imagine itself part of a wider common agency. It must look for the Kingdom of God.

Human equality is a matter of being equally human, and being human of itself demands a diversity of kinds of engagement.

The negative view of the person becomes, or from its inception always secretly is, a refusal of the universe of meaning, the law of God which forms the criterion of whatever is good or bad in his or her action.

Anger for a short time — until sunset, as the apostle briskly suggests (Eph. 4:26) — may help us over the shock of injury. It can open the way within our thoughts for an active pursuit of just reckoning and just reaction, which will draw us away from the one-sided grief of an injured plaintiff to a fuller understanding of the wrong that was done, and may lead us in the end to the most positive action imaginable in the face of wrong, which is clear-headed, unsentimental forgiveness. So it may help us to recover our capacity for action. Yet once the fire of anger has died, it may leave behind a deposit, a smoldering pile of cinders. Here is the anger C. S. Lewis described as “the anesthetic of the mind,” which continues to find comfort in holding someone to blame for the hurt received.

All things are excellent to the extent that they manifest godlikeness.

When things are good, they are so not by communication from above, but by imitation from below.

It is God, we may say, who is so in possession of the truth of the world that he can love it, without distortion or falsification, for its salvation. But for us to love the world is to constrain the real world within the dimensions of our restricted conception, and so to betray it.

However much we try to expand our mind to see things from the point of view of eternity, what we see and love will not be what really is, but a simulacrum.

truth. Hence the fundamental opposition between these two loves: to love anything as “from the world” is to exclude loving it as “from the Father.” It is a matter of where we draw the grounds of our appreciation from.

To fix our love and action upon the object of God’s will is to engage in the world of God’s creation really, and not in fantasy.

Exploitation, as Augustine knew, is “abuse,” employing a thing for what it is not, in order to serve some end that has nothing to do with it.

no good is good solely in relation to its own kind, but in relation to other kinds, too, and so in relation to other goods.

The answer to the question, “What is to be known here?” cannot be disentangled from the answer to the question, “What is to be loved here?”

The refusal of the call of Wisdom is described by the biblical wisdom writers as folly. It is a sin that is possible only to those who were born to know and love, a failure to know what we love, and to love what we know, rightly. It is not a failure of natural capacity to know, but a failure to deploy that natural capacity well.

To speak of virtue is to highlight the good as distinct from the right.13 It is not first set before us as an object to attain, but as a model to admire.

Tradition involves representation: someone exists before me in a manner that communicates to me a secret promise of myself; someone is empowered to speak to me of myself and my destiny. But not empowered to speak to me directly, but only suggestively and indirectly, by speaking of human life in the world as it has been lived and is known. As the prophet knew, tradition must be superseded by direct knowledge.

The reason we do not all develop the same virtues is that we do not all suffer the same things. So moral reason cannot terminate in the acquisition of a virtue or a skill. It can begin, but not end, with reading biographies and novels, watching period dramas and admiring bricklayers or pilots.

The awareness of the self within the loved and known can shrink the imagined world to the dimensions of what is gratifying and reinforcing, confined to the circles where we have found our comfort zone, and on guard against whatever might point beyond it. The prejudiced inquirer is one whose interrogation has ceased to be led by its object.

It would be better, perhaps, not to use the word “prejudice,” for what is actually a necessary moment in the process of rational appropriation, the marshaling of presumptions that bear upon the truth of new claims. The offer of new insight cannot be tested and validated without questioning, and in order to frame questions we must draw on our acquired understandings.

Prejudice is a refusal to receive the human communication, to learn from what our fellows can show us. That is what distinguishes it from real conviction, ready to venture forth from its affirmations to see what light they shed on the unknown.

Understanding is what Charles Taylor christened an “imaginary” — not meaning that it is fictional, but that objective reality is held in our minds in a manner that we never immediately perceive it.

Progress in knowledge is consistent growth in understanding, expansion of the scope of what we see and of our competence to see it. It is not accumulative and not deductive. We do not simply pick up more and more pieces of knowledge, but integrate what we learn with what we have known already.

Objectivity and subjectivity are necessarily co-present in knowledge. On the one hand, pure subjectivity is not knowledge; it is only feelings of pain, joy, and so on. The most self-referential knowledge we can imagine must encounter an object, even one no more remote than a mother’s breast. On the other, the idea of an objectivity won by leaving subjectivity behind is a chimera. Knowledge becomes no truer, only more superficial, if it discards subjective awareness.

In erotic experience we discover our own future opened up to us by the recognition of the good. The object of our love is not ourselves, but the other. Yet the longing which accompanies love for the other is directed to a larger and fuller self: possibilities for constructive action, for creative performance, for enjoyment, for growth of various kinds.

It is the world we are given to know and love, not a representation of the world.

theoretical positions are subject to the censure of reality.

Judgment is essential to secular life and public order. Like death, it must be viewed as one of the nonnegotiable conditions of mortal life. Like death, however, it cannot be viewed as a fulfillment; if we confuse the two, treating the negative as though it were positive, the penultimate as though it were ultimate, we inflict unbearable oppressions on ourselves and others.

The ideological society is fueled by its own dread of the freedom of faith, which it cannot distinguish from arbitrariness, preferring the illusory freedom that a mechanized world-order can confer.

Yet if it is science that provides the ultimate justification for the world-picture of late-modernity, it is not science as a practice of inquiry, the forming and testing and improving on hypotheses, but science as a dogmatic system, offering us certainties we should never presume to question.