Finding and Seeking: Ethics as Theology, vol. 2

by Oliver O'Donovan

liberalism is a disappearing creed, overcome by tensions that it formerly knew how to balance within a framework of faith. In its place arises the late-modern idea of a public truth maintained by constitutional fiat,

If we presume to speak of a worldview formed in faith, it must be of something different in spirit and manner, not only in detail, from the intellectual pattern-making of society.

The Gospel answers the dilemma of nature and history with a word — not a philosophical or world-describing word, but a narrative, which finds sense not only in the shape of creation-order, but in events, too.

The disciple is, literally, a “learner,” but at the same time, given the patterns of rabbinic learning current in Jesus’ day, a “follower.” The cognitive and affective are bound together in the life of the disciple who learns by following and follows by learning.

The life to be gained is not, simply and solely, the self as such, which is God’s prior gift to us and does not need to be gained, but the fulfillment of the self in agency.

Jesus’ summary of the law within the scope of the two loves, of God and neighbor, encouraged the Western tradition, following Augustine, to assume that whatever needed to be said about Ethics could and should be said in terms of love. This was correct if understood in one way, incorrect if understood in another. The correct understanding is that since there is nothing in heaven or earth that God has not made good, we can rest in the love of whatever reality presents itself to us, heavenly or earthly, demonic or angelic. The incorrect understanding is that any such love will ipso facto fulfill what God has commanded us to be and to do. Love is a spectrum of affective responses to God’s works, from lowest to highest, from origin to destiny. But because it is so, it needs the dynamic impetus of faith and hope to move it upward through its range of objects, to prevent it from settling down to rest prematurely.

Love, therefore, has a pilgrim’s path set before it, to which it is directed by faith and hope.

If we are to speak seriously of God’s initiative in redeeming our loves through his love for us in Christ, we must have in view the whole arc of love from the most commonly instinctual to the most godlike and self-outpouring.

An account of love divorced from an account of knowledge drags the good apart from cognition.

To confront the whole truth, Balthasar tells us, of man and world and God, of the historical Gospel, church and Kingdom, “in the night of our present and the uncertainty of our future,” one must choose a first word that will not need to be taken back and twisted into shape later on, one broad enough to nourish, clear enough to irradiate all the words that follow it. It is a word theology has marginalized, philosophy has postponed, the exact sciences have never had time for. The word is “beauty,” the point of junction between the good and the true, the “primal phenomenon” underpinning the attractiveness of good and the cogency of truth.

“As against a thief you have come out with swords and staves to arrest me? Each day in the temple I sat teaching, and you did not lay hold on me” (Mark 14:48-9 and parallels). In the synoptic narrative this occurs at the moment of Jesus’ arrest, following his refusal to offer resistance. It is his testimony to the disparity between truth and force, which the authorities have acknowledged by not arresting him in public.

In response to the high priest’s question, “Are you the Christ?” Jesus says “I am” (reported with variations), and continues: “And henceforth you shall see the Son of Man seated on the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62 and parallels).13 The indirectness with which the high priest’s question is answered throws all the light upon God’s purposes for history.

(c) In reply to Pilate’s question, “Are you the king of the Jews?” (upon which Saint John lays the weight of his trial scene) Jesus answers in the Synoptics only, “You say so” (Mark 15:2 and parallels).14 An indirect response, again, but a positive one. God’s purposes for the world and its history have at their heart the restoration of Israel. If the universal confrontation of truth and power is central for Saint John, the synoptists keep sight of the calling of Israel and national restoration.

A community is constituted by a communication. The communication of any specific thing, whether food, care, or human affection, is founded on a communication of meaning, the shared intelligence of the reality. In this great chain of communication all who believe are empowered to participate. It is the founding “work” of love to receive the communication and to share it with one another.

Hearing admits us, for good or ill, to a community of thought.

Literary communication thrives on distance, for writing postpones the encounter with truth, allowing it the time to take place when the conditions are ready:

Divine act and self-testimony come first, Scripture follows; there can be no inversion of that order.

Reading of Scripture proceeds on the basis that this text has been received, with all its remoteness and all its nearness, with its immediate appeal and its strange distance, that it has been received from a source that cannot be ignored, and that it cannot simply be taken up in any way and from any point of view that happens to strike us, but must be read interrogatively by a community that looks to it for its identity. In the church’s worship the lectern is at the center. No act is so fundamental to its catholic identity as reading. This is not to devalue preaching, singing, prayer, let alone sacramental act, all of which find their authorization through reading — and if we hesitate over that, we may be reassured by the good sense of Thomas Aquinas, for whom the word is the “form” of every sacrament.

the heart of the matter is that all readers are interpreters and interpretation is necessary for reading. Good interpretation never struggles against the text, reading, as the fashion is, “against the grain,” deconstructing the textual surface and showing it up as a confidence trick. Good interpretation never tries to bargain with the text, forging a compromise between what it says and what we would like to hear from it. It never supplements the text, overlaying it with independent reflections that head off on their own devices, never invokes a higher wisdom to cover the text’s nakedness. Interpretation is the cheerful acceptance of the text’s offer of more than lies on its surface, its invitation to come inside, to attune ourselves to its resonances and its dynamics, its suggestions and its logic.

The idea that thinking for ourselves must always be a new beginning free of the influence of text and tradition would be a foolish one — as though thought could ever arise in the sealed hermetic chamber of our own mind!

Theology founds its thinking on the reading of Scripture, not thereby restricting or inhibiting the texts that may instruct it or the subject matter that may occupy it, but referring the widest explorations back to the central authoritative narrative of God’s dealings with mankind.

What confession speaks of is precisely what Jesus and the apostles spoke of, the coherence of the world and its history in bringing to perfection the works of God in Christ’s resurrection. We are not invited to testify to our own struggles, thoughts, and relationships in place of that unique and irreplaceable content, but we can supply a distinctive point of view on it, won from the experience of living under the guidance of the Spirit in this context rather than that, surrounded by these people rather than those, confronted by these problems and questions and not others.

We do not acknowledge our faults rightly unless we appreciate the commonplace ineffectiveness and insignificance of all sin.

It is the generic character of sin that makes confession of sin a communicative task, something we may owe to another and not merely brood on within ourselves. “Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed” (James 5:16). The mutuality of the exercise turns on the discovery of community in sin, a discovery only possible, breaking free of the separations and demarcations of judgment, when we know ourselves to be a community of God’s forgiving and restoring grace. This is the knowledge that makes moral teaching a central element of Christian community, free of the suspicion of esotericism that accompanied the ancient search for wisdom.

The themes of Christology and redemption are notably absent. Yet of all the New Testament texts none follows so closely the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and especially the Sermon on the Mount.

Evernote Book of James

James’s letter, as a moral treatise, begins where a doctrinal treatise would end. The verb chairein, “rejoice,” appears for the first time in Romans at 12:12, the noun chara, “joy,” at 14:17. But it is James’s first word (1:2), for joy is the creature’s natural assent to creation, the form of the rational agent’s participation in the work of providence.

Journal

Joy is the implication of recognizing the trial as a trial. But it is not given immediately to experience; it must be “reckoned,” realized in the affective life through reflection. The sufferer must take a view of the suffering, learn to see it within the goodness of God’s deeds. The trial must bring the sufferer to him- or herself, for it is in the gift of self-attainment that joy appears.

To frame a purpose is to look forward; to act on a purpose is to enter a future.

The fourth petition asks for the condition of freedom. We who grasp at the opportunity of today must be set free from yesterday. The metaphor of “debt” speaks of liability from the past, something still owing to what we have been, blocking out the future horizon.

When we speak of God’s foreknowledge or foreordination of the future, we assert faith in its coherence, notwithstanding its inaccessibility to our view.

For Ethics the important thing is that a coherent future is, implicitly if not explicitly, essential to coherent action.

Hope, to recall the famous mixed metaphor, is “the anchor within the veil” (Heb. 6:19). In offering us the one thing about the future we may trust, it allows us to act in the knowledge that, whatever is uncertain, the future holds the coming of the Son of Man. In that knowledge our purposes may be formed this side of the veil, as we seize an occasion to do something, however modest. Hope assures us that what we do in witness to God’s faithfulness will be worth doing, will endure before the throne of judgment.

There is a “methodological atheism” appropriate to philosophy, perhaps, but not to theology, and the virtue which bears witness against it is the virtue of hope.

Hope is our grasp of the promise that the God who rules the world we love will let his reign appear universally, and the only universal and unequivocal way we can and should describe hope is as courageous endurance in doing God’s will, a refusal to be distracted or disheartened in pursuit of the end in which action can rest.

The struggle against seduction is understood by Saint Luke as a question of mastering impatience. His sequence of three temptations ascends from the goods of the body to the goods of the soul and then to the goods of the spirit: impatience for the sustaining of life, impatience for the political destiny of the world, and impatience for the public disclosure of God’s glory.

An anxiety-free existence could mean only that we were inattentive to the peril of opportunity, either inertly forgetful of our agency or failing to appreciate how our fate must hang on it.

Impatience likes to be ahead of the game, and although it seems to suggest an admirable attention to the promise of the future, it is, in fact, unsure of it.

Wrestling in prayer is wrestling with ourselves, not with God.

At this point it may help to introduce the term “decision.” If “purpose” refers to the thought from which the action flows directly, “decision” refers to that “cutting off” (de-cidere) which the forming of a purpose imposes upon the train of thought leading up to it.

Decision is not an act of “judgment,” finding for one claimant and against another. It cuts off only the potentially indefinite play of imagined future possibilities, and does so for the sake of realizing itself in one actual future.

Yet the goal of deliberation is not simply to eliminate impossibilities, leaving every moral possibility in play. What it seeks is an objective determination, one possibility which (for me, at this juncture) is the right one.

The priority assigned to the “great commands” was due to their being comprehensive. They encompassed all the more specific kinds of actions that may be required of us.

The teaching of a unified moral law is the vindication of monotheism.

Here we encounter the notion of history as a theater of “progress,” a notion which, as has often been said, only Christianity could have given birth to, since only Christianity finds an ultimate validation of all human action in a final state of all affairs which is also a state of happiness, yet in its modern form relating to Christianity as a heresy, taking as perspicuous what Christians know only as an object of promise.

ultimate utility could only be understood in relation to the Kingdom of Heaven, and as such was not a transparent criterion for concrete actions.

That the moral life is “more than just keeping laws” is one of those truisms from which it is hard to dissent; even confining ourselves to the exploration of prudence, we shall see many ways in which it is true. But “more than” is not “less than.”

The more remotely consequences follow, the less informative they are about the act that lay behind them. Which is why the words “I told you so!” are so utterly unhelpful to moral reflection, even if it happens that they are true. Anything may have been foretold in advance if our imaginations were busy enough, but only some anticipations were material to the deliberation.

Prudence is not a pudding whose proof lies in the eating, but an illumination shining into dark corners and distinguishing solid shapes from shadows.

It is by attributing false definiteness to remote or ultimate futures that prudence is corrupted to the devising of practical means to a goal of history that is taken as somehow given.

Waiting and discerning is not an experience peculiar to the religiously attentive. It is part of the ordinary discourse of decision-making that we “see our way” to doing something, or “follow the obvious course.” What these common phrases have to tell the theologian is that self-consciously religious experiences of being led by God are no departure from ordinary patterns of moral thinking, but a heightening of certain features of them. What it has to tell the general theorist of norm and decision is that a theory of moral discernment must not be squeezed beyond recognition simply to gratify a prejudice against loose ends.