Finding and Seeking: Ethics as Theology, vol. 2

by Oliver O'Donovan

Here, for the third time, we encounter ourselves. We met the self first as an agent responding in faith to the summons of God, and then again as a human participant in the created world — one among many. Now we encounter the self in the future, not yet realized, offered in the moment available for action, unique to us and different from all others.

The life of the poet or theologian may be a poor thing to recount at the last, shrunk in upon its preoccupations while relationships are poisoned and opportunities missed, while the life of the odd-job-man may contain a thousand dramas that display the grace of God to perfection.

The only way to confront the future is in freedom, prepared to determine the indeterminate. But that means confronting it in ignorance of what “success” will amount to.

The difference between “my people” and “other people” depends on a special and particular gift, a narrative identity; and a narrative identity is a temporal meaning that is only to be received as a gift, not discovered as a truth of nature or imposed as a fiat of will.

We have been here before. It is apparent that the most reflective types of the three forms of “possible sin” — doubt, folly, and anxiety — converge upon one reflective sin, of which each is an aspect, the substitution of gnosis for action, a gnosis which is, at the same time, the falsely constructed identity of an imaginary “we,” a supposed collective viewpoint representing no concrete community.

The media’s “new every morning” (quickly becoming “new every moment”) is, one may dare to say, in flat contradiction to that daily offer of grace. It serves rather to fix our perception upon the momentary now, preventing retrospection, discouraging deliberation, holding us spellbound in a suppositious world of the present which, like hell itself, has lost its future and its past.