God and the Moral Life [1 ed.] 1138308447, 9781138308442

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: God and the moral life • Myriam Renaud and Joshua Daniel
1 Three arguments for the dependence of morality upon religion • John Hare
2 Moral concepts of God in an age of globalization and contingency • Myriam Renaud
3 God and the human good • William Schweiker
4 Ethical reflection on ‘God’: making sense of things • Pamela Sue Anderson
5 Emptying God: the ethics of theology in Merleau-Ponty’s work • Mayra Rivera
6 An Edwardsian theoethical aesthetics of recognition • Joshua Daniel
7 Trinity, virtue, and violence • Aristotle Papanikolaou
8 God as infinite: ethical implications • David Tracy
9 Plumblines in the vastness: measures without measure • Michael Fishbane
10 Mascot or judge: God and the mores of church and society • Marilyn McCord Adams
Index

Citation preview

God and the Moral Life

How do various concepts of God impact the moral life? Is God ultimately required for goodness? In this edited collection, an international panel of contemporary philosophers and theologians offer new avenues of exploration from a theist perspective for these important questions. The book features several approaches to address these questions. Common themes include philosophical and theological conceptions of God with reference to human morality, Trinitarian accounts of God and the resultant ethical implications, and how communities are shaped, promoted, and transformed by accounts of God. Bringing together philosophical and theological insights on the relationship between God and our moral lives, this book will be of keen interest to scholars of the philosophy of religion, particularly those looking at ethics, social justice, and morality. Myriam Renaud is completing her Ph.D. in religious thought and ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her dissertation focuses on advancing a systematic method to construct validly moral concepts of God. She is a former Managing Editor of Sightings, the University of Chicago’s online, general-audience publication. Her research has appeared in scholarly journals such as Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science and the Anglican Theological Review; she has analyzed religion in public life for popular media outlets such as The Atlantic (online) and Religion Dispatches. She is Principal Investigator and Project Director of the Global Ethic Project at the Parliament of the World’s Religions and on the teaching faculty of Claremont Lincoln University. Joshua Daniel is a theological ethicist on the teaching staff of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago’s Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. His recent book is Transforming Faith: Individual and Community in H. Richard Niebuhr, and his articles have appeared in the Journal of Religious Ethics, the Journal of the Society for Christian Ethics, the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, and Political Theology.

God and the Moral Life Edited by Myriam Renaud and Joshua Daniel

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Myriam Renaud and Joshua Daniel; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Myriam Renaud and Joshua Daniel to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Renaud, Myriam, editor. Title: God and the moral life / edited by Myriam Renaud and Joshua Daniel. Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017035787 | ISBN 9781138308442 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315142975 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: God. | Religious ethics. | Conduct of life. | Ethics. Classification: LCC BL473. G485 2017 | DDC 205—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017035787 ISBN: 978-1-138-30844-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14297-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This volume is dedicated by Myriam Renaud to Paul and Sidney who bring me much joy and by Joshua Daniel to Megg, Agnes, Isaiah, and Irene.

Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgements

Introduction: God and the moral life

ix xiii 1

MYRIAM RENAUD AND JOSHUA DANIEL

  1 Three arguments for the dependence of morality upon religion

13

JOHN HARE

  2 Moral concepts of God in an age of globalization and contingency

27

MYRIAM RENAUD

  3 God and the human good

47

WILLIAM SCHWEIKER

  4 Ethical reflection on ‘God’: making sense of things

63

PAMELA SUE ANDERSON

  5 Emptying God: the ethics of theology in Merleau-Ponty’s work81 MAYRA RIVERA

  6 An Edwardsian theoethical aesthetics of recognition

95

JOSHUA DANIEL

  7 Trinity, virtue, and violence

115

ARISTOTLE PAPANIKOLAOU

  8 God as infinite: ethical implications DAVID TRACY

135

viii Contents   9 Plumblines in the vastness: measures without measure

157

MICHAEL FISHBANE

10 Mascot or judge: God and the mores of church and society

171

MARILYN MCCORD ADAMS

Index

185

Contributors

Marilyn McCord Adams (d. 2017) was Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Prior to joining the faculty at Rutgers, she held other academic positions including Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University and Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology at Yale University. Ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A., she served as residentiary canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford (2004–2009). She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2015. Her research focused on medieval philosophy and the philosophy of religion. Recent books include two volumes entitled William Ockham and Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham (2010). Pamela Sue Anderson (d. 2017) was Professor of Modern European Philosophy of Religion at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Regent’s Park College. Her recent books include ­Re-revisioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Our Epistemic Locatedness (2012) and, with Jordan Bell, Kant and Theology: Philosophy for Theologians (2010). At the time of her death, she was working on a book entitled In Dialogue with Michèle Le Doeuff. She is best known for her monograph, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief (1998). Joshua Daniel is a theological ethicist on the teaching staff of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago’s Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. His recent book is Transforming Faith: Individual and Community in H. Richard Niebuhr, and his articles have appeared in the Journal of Religious Ethics, the Journal of the Society for Christian Ethics, the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, and Political Theology. Michael Fishbane is Nathan Cummings Distinguished Service Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Fishbane has authored many monographs. Among these are Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (1985). His Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures were

x Contributors published under the title The Kiss of God: Spiritual and Mystical Death in Judaism (1994). He is also the author of The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology (1998), Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (2003), Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology (2008), and The JPS Commentary: Song of Songs (2015). He won the National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship (1986) and for Jewish Thought (1994). In 2005, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for Contributions to Jewish Scholarship by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. In 2013, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Science. John Hare is the Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School. His monographs include God and Morality: A Philosophical History (2009) (which gives a framework for a history of ethics, emphasizing the theological premises in the main types of ethical theory) and God’s Commands (2015). His best-known book, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance, develops an account of the need for God’s assistance in meeting the moral demand of which God is the source. In God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, and Human Autonomy (2000), Hare discusses the divine command theory of morality, analyzing texts in Duns Scotus, Kant, and contemporary moral philosophy. In Why Bother Being Good? (2011), he gives a non-technical treatment of the questions, “Can we be morally good?” and “Why should we be morally good?” Aristotle Papanikolaou is the Archbishop Demetrios Professor of Orthodox Theology and Culture at Fordham University and Co-director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center. His monographs are The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy (2012) and Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communication (2006). Most recently, he co-edited, with George Demacopoulos, Christianity, Democracy and the Shadow of Constantine (2017). Papanikolaou’s areas of expertise are Eastern Orthodox theology, Trinitarian theology, and political theology. His current research focuses on theological anthropology, specifically to the dynamics of truth-telling (confession) and what it means to be human. Myriam Renaud is completing her Ph.D. in religious thought and ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her dissertation focuses on advancing a systematic method to construct validly moral concepts of God. She is a former Managing Editor of Sightings, the University of Chicago’s online, general-audience publication. Her research has appeared in scholarly journals such as Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science and the Anglican Theological Review; she has analyzed religion in public life for popular media outlets such as the Atlantic (online) and Religion Dispatches. She is Principal Investigator and Project Director of the Global Ethic Project at the Parliament of the World’s Religions and on the teaching faculty of Claremont Lincoln University.

Contributors  xi Mayra Rivera is Professor of Religion and Latina/o Studies at Harvard Divinity School where she is affiliated with the Committee on Ethnicity Migration Rights, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and American Studies. One of her books, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (2007), explores the relationship between models of divine otherness and ideas about interhuman difference. Her most recent monograph, Poetics of the Flesh (2015), explores the connections between theological, philosophical, and political metaphors of body and flesh. Her research in religious studies engages key themes in current philosophy and theories of gender, coloniality, ethnicity, and race. William Schweiker is the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of Power, Value, and Conviction: Theological Ethics in the Postmodern Age (1998), Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds (2008), and Dust that Breathes: Christian Faith and the New Humanisms (2010). He is Chief Editor and a contributor to the three-volume Encyclopedia of Religious Ethics (forthcoming) and is working on a monograph, Religious Ethics: Meaning and Method. Schweiker’s current research focuses on ethics and the integrity of life. He was the 2015–2016 President of the Society of Christian Ethics and, from 2014 to 2017, he was the Director of the Enhancing Life Project supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. David Tracy is Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies and Professor of Theology and the Philosophy of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School; he is also in the Committee on Social Thought. Monographs by Tracy include The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (1998); Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (1996); On Naming the Present: Reflections on God Hermeneutics and Church (1995); Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (1994); and Dialogue with the Other: The InterReligious Dialogue (1991). Tracy has taught a wide variety of courses in contemporary theology as well as in philosophical, systematic, and constructive theology and hermeneutics. He is currently writing a book on God.

Acknowledgements

The genesis of this project was our desire to put important thinkers in conversation with each other about the question of God and the moral life. From the start, William Schweiker, a leader in the field of theology and ethics, gave us his enthusiastic encouragement. He proved a generous mentor over the years required to move from initial wish to final publication. Scholarship advances through the laborious but time-tested process of carrying out research, sharing one’s findings in public gatherings, and responding to feedback by revising one’s thinking and written work. In keeping with this process, versions of this collection’s essays were shared at a conference, God: Theological Accounts and Ethical Possibilities, held at the University of Chicago Divinity School, April 9–11, 2014. Several University of Chicago Divinity School graduate students offered formal responses to the presented essays. They were Willa Lengyel, Timothy Hiller, Jawad Qureshi, Rick Elgendy, Kyle Rader, Lisa Landoe Hedrick, Herbert Lin, and Kristel Clayville. In addition, faculty, students, and members of the general public asked probing questions and offered informal responses. We thank these interlocutors for making the essays stronger. Given the far-flung location of many of the essays’ contributors, this gathering in Chicago – a key step in shaping this work – would not have been possible without generous funding from the University of Chicago Divinity School, the Aronberg Fund of the University of Chicago Center for Jewish Studies, the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion, the Norman Wait Harris Memorial Fund of the University of Chicago Center for International Studies, and the University of Chicago Franke Institute for the Humanities. We are grateful for Julia Woods and Terren Wein’s cheerfully provided logistical and communications expertise. We appreciate the support we received from Routledge’s Joshua Wells and Jack Boothroyd. Many others made this collection of essays possible. Thank you all.

Introduction God and the moral life Myriam Renaud and Joshua Daniel

Why God still matters Is there a relationship between God and the moral life? Answers to this question have been advanced and debated for thousands of years, as shown by the oldest scriptures of the world’s religions and by the writings of ancient philosophers and early theologians. What is new is that many contemporary people dismiss the relevance of this question because of the seeming decline of God-centered religions in the Americas and Europe. In the United States, pollsters and the news media have, for several decades, documented defections from mainstream Christian denominations and from Reform Jewish synagogues. A great number of the defectors have joined the growing ranks of the “Nones” (because they reply “none” when asked about their religious affiliation).1 The God-centered religions face an unprecedented crisis, as more and more people abandon their congregational memberships. Observers of this crisis make the reasonable assumption that belief in God is on the wane. However, surveys show that Americans believe in God at levels that have remained consistent at about 92% for the past three generations.2 The common misconception that the “Nones” are unbelievers is not borne out by empirical data.3 In the same way that worship-service-attending religionists ask questions about God and the moral life, it is likely that many “Nones” ask such questions, even if they seek answers outside of traditional religious frameworks. In 22 nations out of 39 polled, the majority of people believe that it is necessary to believe in God to be a moral person and to have “good values” (on the whole, this view is more prevalent in poorer countries).”4 Even for those with no interest in religion or in God, the question of the relationship between God and the moral life cannot be sidestepped. Disputes over the rights of privately held corporations to deny reimbursement for contraceptives and abortions, for example, are based on the Godcentered moral convictions of the corporations’ owners, who believe that women should refrain from sexual activity except when legally married and for the purposes of conceiving. These convictions affect the corporations’ female employees and their families regardless of the employees’ religious convictions.

2  Myriam Renaud and Joshua Daniel Similarly, disputes over the rights of children to protection from potentially lethal diseases are engendered by the God-centered moral convictions of medical-intervention objectors such as Christian Scientists, who entrust their health to God. Their refusal to vaccinate their children has contributed to the return of illnesses not seen since the 1950s. By exposing their children to disease, Christian Scientists turn their progeny into carriers who endanger other children with whom they come into contact, some of them “too poor, too young, too immuno-compromised to have received the full suite of immunizations.”5 The beliefs of Christian Scientists affect other children and their families without regard for religious affiliation. The bottom line: views about the relationship between God and the moral life are not always private affairs. They impact others, whether those others are atheists, non-theists, agnostics, deists, or theists, and, hence, they warrant attention from believers and non-believers alike.

The challenge of the enlightenment In the West, dismissal of the relevance of the question regarding the link between God and the moral life is often traced to the Enlightenment, especially the writings of the philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who set into motion a profound paradigm shift. Today, when discussing theology and the moral life, Kant continues to be invoked in defense of positions that draw on his work or, more often, as an acknowledged opponent. Kant argued that God was not a necessary component to the moral life – one could devote a lifetime to carrying out one’s (self-determined) duties to the best of one’s ability regardless of religious conviction. Human beings were endowed with the ability to identify, using their inborn ability to reason, their moral duties to themselves and to others. Thus they did not require moral principles to be revealed to them by God or by any other source outside of themselves. After he severed morality from theological and religious considerations, Kant worried that agents would slip into despair when they failed to lead a moral life. It could be empirically observed that the morally virtuous rarely reaped rewards for doing the right thing. Would they then stop trying? He concluded that humans had a practical need for God. By postulating the existence of God who could grant happiness after death in equal measure to one’s moral striving in this life, Kant sought, in part, to address the possibility of despair. The morally virtuous could be inspired to maintain or renew their commitment to duty, he argued, based on the hope that God would grant them the happiness they deserved after they died. Kant also concluded that humans had a practical need for religious communities. The primary role of these communities was to comfort despairing agents and to help restore and vivify their commitment to the moral life. Religion, properly conceived, brought people together who were invested in being virtuous so that they could support each other’s efforts to achieve this goal.

Introduction: God and the moral life  3 Although Kant argued for the practical need to postulate the existence of God, he also showed – and some thinkers find his demonstration to be definitive – that standard philosophical proofs, such as the ontological or Anselmian proof of the existence of God are false. God, he argued, cannot be known through the senses like a chair or a glass of water. As long as empirical evidence is not available, the matter of God’s existence cannot be settled. In light of Kant’s arguments, most theologians since the Enlightenment develop their theologies based on other premises (such as the fact that there is anything at all) and assume that their readers believe, as they do, in the reality of God. Others address the question of God’s existence by treating, as Kant did, the word “God” as a symbol referencing a divine being about whom they can know nothing empirically, or as a concept or idea, a sort of placeholder for content that may, or may not, refer to something objectively real. Besides Kant’s influential views on the absence of a demonstrable link between God and the moral life, there are other, broad-stroke negative answers to the question of whether such a link exists. The “empiricist” or “naturalist” answer, for example, asserts that moral principles “naturally” emerge from a dialectic process when humans are confronted with the complex task of living together in community. The evolution of these principles can be traced diachronically and can be explained in terms of biology and culture. The “empiricist” answer thus sunders morality from God except perhaps in the limited, deistic sense that God created human beings with minds capable of developing moral principles. In contrast to the “empiricist” answer, the broad-stroked “transcendentalist” option ascribes to the view that moral principles exist independently of the human mind. This option is compatible with the belief that a relationship between God and the moral life exists. Conflicts over “empiricist” and the “transcendent-alist” options are ongoing. In the end, the worldview that commands the most attention by scholars of religion and ethics depends not on which view is correct but on which is “more widely perceived to be correct.”6 For billions of people, what is perceived to be correct is that God is the ultimate reference point of their religious and moral lives. Whether non-affiliated, or grounded in the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or philosophical traditions, theists ask about the relationship between God and the moral life because God is central to their religious and moral life and to that of their religious community. Their answer to the question of whether there is a relationship between God and the moral life is a definite “yes.”

What God is impacts the moral life One’s understanding of the relationship between God and the moral life depends on how one conceives of God. The theist wonders: What does God call upon me to do? Not to do? For what moral actions or intentions does

4  Myriam Renaud and Joshua Daniel God consider me responsible? What are the limits of my responsibilities? Is my conscience the means by which God communicates what is right and good? Does God expect me to pattern my moral behavior on the example set by Jesus or Muhammad? What will happen to me if I fail to live up to God’s demands? These questions reveal implicit views about God, about what counts as a moral life, and how they intersect. Claims about God and the moral life include the following intersecting lines of thought. For the sake of brevity, the illustrative examples offered are simplified versions of highly sophisticated answers:7 1 God as the source of the human good and the source of the right Example: God, in whom the good and the right inhere, commands us to do what is good and right. It is not for us to question those commands, but rather for us to obey them, trusting that God will not lead us astray, even if what is commanded by God does not always match our intuitions. 2 God as the supreme end of the moral life Example: The goal of life is to improve our adherence to moral principles with the goal of attaining moral perfection so that we might be ready to stand before God after we die. This process is called, by some religious traditions, sanctification. 3 God as the guarantor of the human good Example: The principal human good is happiness. Though it is possible to exercise control over our moral decisions, we cannot exercise control over our happiness. God, by contrast, can secure happiness for us. A fair God will grant us a level of happiness commensurate with our moral effort. 4 God as enabling and empowering a good and righteous life Example: Humans are born confused about what is good and what is right. We selfishly love only things, including people, which are of service to our needs and desires. God helps and guides us toward the good and the right, which we, under our own power, are unable to achieve. Many of the relationships between God and the moral life described in the chapters in this volume fit into one of these categories. Although the category to which a given author conforms may not be immediately clear, by the end of the chapter, the sort of intersection between God and the moral life being described comes into view. Even when a chapter draws on two categories, one category is primary, and the other is of lesser importance. Just as questions about the role of God in the moral life are not new, and just as their answers have been debated throughout the ages, these intersecting lines of thought have a long pedigree. Indeed, the examples provided

Introduction: God and the moral life  5 earlier were drawn from the Jewish Scriptures (1), the writings of John Wesley (2), Kant (3), and St. Augustine (4). Each age seeks answers keyed to and inflected by its particular social and cultural realities. In this, the early twenty-first century is no different. Distinct challenges to contemporary society frame the question. Among this age’s features include widespread cultural and religious pluralism, increased globalization, endemic epistemic doubt, resistance to hegemonic religious claims by some and embrace of religious dogmatism by others, and so on. Though debates continue, many individuals today agree on what counts as moral – on which actions are “wrong” (or false) and which are “right” (or true). Most of us hold that torture is morally wrong, so is rape and slavery and genocide. For this reason, the chapters in this book do not explore the particular content of what is right and what is wrong. Rather, the authors assume, for instance, that killing human beings, even in wartime, can wound the conscience, that the oppression and exploitation endured by previously colonized peoples continues to be the source of various social ills, and that having enough to eat is non-negotiable – it is a common good that must be secured. The question confronted by the chapters’ authors is this: How does God, conceived in a particular way, help us understand and respond to these moral issues?

Brief descriptions of responses The following are brief descriptions of the responses to this central question proposed by this volume’s contributors. Chapter 1.  John Hare proposes a version of “divine command theory.” Like Kant, he worries that if we don’t believe in God, morality becomes unstable. Lest we lose hope and abandon our moral efforts, we can place our trust in the super-sensible author of nature, God, who rewards us by creating the conditions for our happiness. Hare argues (as Kant does) that God can grant us happiness in equal measure to our virtue. Still following Kant, Hare argues that God makes the moral law and gives it to us. Though we are able to identify our moral obligations and honor them for their own sake, a “moral gap” exists between how we ought to live and the way we can live without “outside” assistance from others including God. This “outside” assistance is an effect of divine grace. To the question of why we should be moral, Hare turns to the philosophical theologian, Duns Scotus, who argued that to love God is to obey God; in other words, to love God is to will what God wills for us to will: our obedience. Chapter 2.  Myriam Renaud is interested in the ways that God serves as the ultimate reference point, guiding and orienting human lives. Renaud elects to “think with” the American theologian Gordon Kaufman (1925– 2011) who argues, like Kant, that no knowledge of God is certain; for Kaufman, the God of whom theists speak is an imaginatively constructed concept. Based on the assumption that a moral ultimate reference point is

6  Myriam Renaud and Joshua Daniel more likely to promote a moral life, Renaud asks: How can we identify which concepts of God are validly moral? She argues for the need for a moral test, the Declaration Toward a Global Ethic in particular. The Global Ethic whose four directives are based on the Golden Rule was drafted by Hans Küng, vetted by religious ethicists from various traditions, and ratified by several thousand delegates at the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions. Renaud agrees with its authors and ratifiers that it captures the norms shared by the world’s religious and secular traditions. Chapter 3.  William Schweiker asks what we mean when we speak of the highest good. To answer this question, he “thinks with” Kant and “with” the English co-founder of Methodist Protestantism, John Wesley (1708– 1791). Happiness, for Kant, results when our basic needs are met and human life can flourish. Christian happiness, for Wesley, results when we perceive “the divine life animating one’s own life.” Both Kant and Wesley argue that we need God to secure happiness: to procure the goods that meet our basic needs (Kant) and to animate our lives with the divine life (Wesley). Schweiker adds his own twist: he maintains that happiness requires two conditions – sufficient goods to meet our basic needs and the divine life to animate our own. For him, the good, grounded in this life, is “bound to the responsibility of persons and communities to exercise and enhance the integrity of life, human, non-human, and even divine life.” Chapter 4.  Pamela Sue Anderson describes how reflection has undermined the plausibility of a perfectly free, perfectly good, perfectly omniscient, male God. She focuses on God as an action-guiding concept that can help us make ethical sense of things. Reflection leads us to reject the allknowing, all-good, all-powerful “He” God and reflect anew. In general, when we try to make sense of anything, we find it necessary to reflect. Reflection in contemporary times, Anderson holds, has led us to understand that bodies and gender matter and that since this is the case, God cannot have a male body. In other words, reflection has killed the traditional, allpowerful, all-good, all-knowing, “He” God. The death of this concept is appropriate, Anderson argues. Destruction is not necessarily bad – rejecting certain concepts can be liberating. Still, the death of the traditional concept of God is now an experience of which we must make sense. Anderson suggests that we accept God’s death and start anew, developing thick concepts of God for ourselves. Her recommendation? A form of rationalism or a concept grounded in nature. Chapter 5.  Mayra Rivera notices the shame and guilt of some theologians over the harm wrought by colonial and modern ideologies. Seeking to help them, she finds inspiration in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), a French, Roman Catholic philosopher. As she “thinks with” Merleau-Ponty, she notes that he wrestled with his religious tradition’s complicity in the Holocaust. The Catholic view of God contains an ambiguity – God is both interior and exterior. We assume that by going inward, God is immediately accessible, but when we go inward, we turn away from the poor and the stranger. In God’s incarnation, Merleau-Ponty sees a prescription.

Introduction: God and the moral life  7 By becoming flesh, God consented to become externalized. God became flesh, not in the sense of “body,” but in the sense of the relationship between our bodies and things in the world. God thus privileged the world and calls on Christians to do the same. Rivera concludes that her friends’ shame and guilt are best externalized through actions in service of this world. Chapter 6.  Joshua Daniel ponders whether the recognition of others entails reducing their difference and foreclosing novel interactions or if it can lead to relations that delight in difference. To answer this question, Daniel turns to the American Protestant theologian Jonathan Edward (1708–1758). In Daniel’s interpretation of Edwards’ss psychological analogy of the Trinity, God can be understood as a structure of recognition: God is God insofar as God the Father recognizes himself in God the Son, whose mutual delight generates the Holy Spirit. God shares this recognition by drawing us to become participants. Daniel, following Edwards, argues that virtue is a matter of such participation. Insofar as we become virtuously recognitive, we can relate to others as potentially divine, thereby unsettling our finite, human identities. At the same time, we recognize that in situations of historical-social disparity, particular identities might need to be affirmed and delighted in, rather than disrupted. Chapter 7.  Aristotle Papanikolaou explores theological resources for war veterans suffering from moral injury from within his Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition. He turns to Maximus the Confessor (b. 538–d. 662) who was preoccupied with the ontological gap between the transcendent God and not-God (creation). For Maximus, the “bridge” connecting God and creation is love, the highest virtue, which is also theosis, or the experience of God. Papanikolaou notes that, in cases of moral injury, the problem is self-hatred. He asks: Is self-forgiveness possible without transcendence? No, he concludes. One cannot will forgiveness; one becomes forgiveness (not a forgetting, but a learning to move through violence) by learning to love. Papanikolaou explores how it is possible to commune with the transcendent God to make self-forgiveness possible. Like Maximus, Papanikolaou proposes that as we acquire virtue, especially love, the highest virtue, we commune with God in an embodied “presencing” of the divine. Chapter 8.  David Tracy writes that God is infinite love. Tracy traces the history of ideas, identifying moments when God, conceived as infinite, intersects with ethics. The arc drawn by Tracy begins with Plotinus (204/5– 270), who first conceives of God as the infinite One, the dynamic source of all reality but is impersonal, uncaring, and ineffable. Tracy then focuses on Gregory of Nyssa (335–95). Unlike Plotinus’ss infinite One, Gregory’s Christian God is infinite love. For Gregory, Christians who live ethical and spiritual lives of authentic freedom (their chief attribute since they are imago dei) move out of themselves (ecstasis) toward ever-greater loving desire for God and love of neighbor. Tracy’s retracing of history ends with the ­twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, who, unique in his time, developed an ethics of the infinite. For Levinas, the Other (person) makes an infinite moral claim on us. Tracy brings Levinas in conversation

8  Myriam Renaud and Joshua Daniel with Plotinus and Gregory of Nyssa because, by comparing them, he argues that we may discern a distinctive ethics of the Infinite. He hopes that attention to the concept of the infinite will become standard in theological ethics because God, as infinite, opens, rather than resolves evil and tragedy. Chapter 9.  Michael Fishbane asks: What do we do in the face of atrocities? Our response, Fishbane argues, is tied to the level of self. He identifies three levels. As a natural self, our drive to keep going, our ability to interpret the world, and our experiences are intertwined. Sometimes horrors reduce us to near paralysis, and we rely “on small gestures.” Other times, we turn toward our condition and open up to the world. As a cultural self, we participate in the interpretive work of our community and are characterized by multiple loops of entwinement. We learn about ourselves by studying the sacred texts of our religious community. Faced with horrors, we may seek to save our faith – because its framework provides us with stability. Alternatively, our attitude may be transformed into one of compassion. The highest level, the theological self, breaks through our religious tradition’s sacred texts, exploding self-serving paradigms in favor of God-centered ones. We are reformed into a disposition of humility and are graced by endless intimations of God’s name: “I Shall Be.” Chapter 10.  Marilyn McCord Adams has long been preoccupied with soul-destroying horrors and suffering. God seems absent when we are so afflicted, and we are angry that God has abandoned us. God infiltrates societies and institutions, working with us to co-opt and uproot systemic evil, bringing us closer to utopia. She insists that the proper attributes of God are wisdom and knowledge. She is certain that God is “with us,” always trying to meet us where we are, sharing wisdom with us and drawing us into harmony with God’s self. Often, we are not aware of God’s attempts to communicate because revelatory messages can’t be received by us and remain pure. We humans are, by nature, partial. Our motivations are distorted by Darwinian impulses. God is also “with us” in our institutions but is coopted by them, and thus we associate God with their systematic evils. Even in the Bible, God experiences communication difficulties because scriptural teachings arose out of particular social contexts with moral insights and failings. God, according to Adams, can most clearly and accurately be perceived as “with us” in the “good” and in the “subversive” – for example, in the work of civil rights and AIDS activists. The real God “aims at societies” in which the common good is achieved for all.

The question of God and the moral life This volume features contributors whose answers to the question posed earlier is informed, to a significant extent, by one or more philosophers or philosophically inclined theologians. The designation “philosophical theology” is contested, but it helps locate the interlocutors and sources of authority that undergird the chapters. This designation sets the collected chapters

Introduction: God and the moral life  9 apart from other collections grounded in biblical theology or historical theology or mystical theology, etc. Several approaches to the question of the relationship between God and the moral life are featured. Rather than articulate, promote, and defend a particular account of God and the relationship of God to the moral life that follows from this account, the chapters demonstrate that answers to the question depend radically on the author’s particular views about God. With enough points in common to make conversation between them possible – all of the contributors are informed by the West’s history of philosophical and theological thought – their nuanced views on God and God’s relationship to the moral life illustrate the significant variety of ideas that may nonetheless emerge. Some chapters take the legacy and challenge of Kant seriously. These chapters presume, in various ways, that accounts of God ought to be constrained by what counts as moral. This presumption does not necessitate the replacement of theology by philosophy. As John Hare points out (but many modern philosophical ethicists fail to appreciate), Kant was a philosophical theologian in his own right and, as William Schweiker emphasizes, Kant’s account of God and the moral life has interesting parallels to that of theologian John Wesley’s. The presumption, put simply, is that religious authorities, in an institutional sense, are not the only sources of understandings of God. Moral reason, accessible to all humans insofar as they are reasonable beings, is its own source of theological reflection. Taking Kant’s legacy and challenge seriously means taking seriously morality’s claims over our understandings of God. What Kant’s legacy and challenge demands is the disciplining of religious reflection by moral reasoning. Such discipline can take a social direction – e.g., checking whether our views of God conform to the trajectories of social progress and the common sense that ensues. The chapters by Pamela Sue Anderson and by Myriam Renaud exemplify this direction. Other chapters are less vexed by Kant’s critiques. This is not to say that their authors are straightforward classical theists, ignoring post-Kantian intellectual history, nor is it to say that their authors affirm the ontological or cosmological proofs for the existence of God that Kant refuted or deny the moral proof that Kant affirms. Rather, it is to say that they don’t share his anxiety about God’s existence. The conceit of these chapters is that theological reflections – whether anchored in particular traditions, theologians, or conceptualities – are sources of moral reflection. If for Kant morality demands a particular account of God, then for these contributors, particular accounts of God suggest certain moral comportments or attitudes. Hence, rather than constrain our accounts of God, they seek to see what happens when such accounts are let loose. For these authors, the question of the relationship between God and the moral life is first and foremost answered by attending to the nature or character of God, and then tracing the ethical implications that follow.

10  Myriam Renaud and Joshua Daniel They assume, again in various ways, that our understandings of God imply particular ways of understanding and addressing moral issues. For instance, particular Trinitarian accounts of God imply something about how to respond to violence with love (as in Aristotle Papanikelaou’s treatment) or about how to practice intersubjective recognition amid human difference (as in Joshua Daniel’s treatment). Mayra Rivera shows how the incarnation promotes the affirmation of materiality and, thereby, the goodness of our natural environments, and for David Tracy, we stretch toward the one God – constituted of the three infinite relations of Infinite Being, intelligence, and love – with never-quenched ethical and spiritual desire. Additional chapters take seriously the fact that accounts of God are the products of human communities. This means that the question of the relationship between God and the moral life can only be answered with reference to how communities are shaped, promoted, and transformed by (and how they themselves shape, promote, and transform) accounts of God. As Marilyn McCord Adams and Michael Fishbane recognize, agents too easily reduce God to a reflected image of their communities. Hence, although our religious communities shape our understandings of God, we must also conceive of God as transcending those communities such that God works against or breaks through a community’s oppressive and soul-deforming structures. The authors of those chapters are also informed by the horrors that beset human life. To attend to the God in which actual communities of faith place their trust, rather than to metaphysical accounts of God, is to attend to the real-life challenges that many people confront in and with their communities. While the temptation, in the face of horrors, is to settle for the current state of one’s community and to shore up its place in the world for the sake of safety, the authors insist that God calls us to disrupt the status quo. Kant, Trinity, and community: in a real sense, these provide rough and ready answers to the question of God and the moral life – confronting the Enlightenment, mining the resources of a particular tradition, and paying attention to the communal contexts of human life. The diversity of methodological approaches in this volume is an index of its comprehensiveness.

Notes 1 Pew Research Center. “ ‘Nones’ on the Rise.” Religion & Public Life, October 9, 2012, Polling and Analysis. www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/.   See also Pew Research Center. “America’s Changing Religious Landscape: Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population; Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow.” Religion & Public Life, May 12, 2015, Demographic Study. www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/. 2 Frank Newport. “More Than Nine in Ten Americans Continue to Believe in God: Professed Belief Is Lower Among Younger Americans, Easterners and Liberals.” Gallup, June 3, 2011. www.gallup.com/poll/147887/americans-continue-believegod.aspx. 3 Pew Research Center. “ ‘Nones’ on the Rise.”

Introduction: God and the moral life  11 4 Pew Research Center. “Worldwide, Many See Belief in God as Essential to Morality: Richer Nations Are Exception.” Survey Report, March 13, 2014, Global Attitudes and Trends. www.pewglobal.org/2014/03/13/worldwide-many-see-beliefin-god-as-essential-to-morality/. 5 Michael Schulson. “Herd Heroism in an Age of Rebels: The Cultural Roots of the Anti-Vaxxer Movement.” Religion Dispatches, April 7, 2015. Accessed April 10, 2015. http://religiondispatches.org/herd-heroism-in-an-age-of-rebels-the-culturalroots-of-the-anti-vaxxer-movement/. 6 Ibid., 4. 7 These categories are proposed by William Schweiker in Chapter 3 of this volume.

1 Three arguments for the dependence of morality upon religion John Hare

In this chapter, I am going to describe three arguments for the dependence of morality upon religion.1 All three come from Kant, the first two directly and the third indirectly. The first argument is that morality becomes rationally unstable if we do not have a way to assure ourselves that morality and happiness are consistent, and that believing in God provides such assurance. I will call this ‘the argument from providence.’ The term “unstable” here is Immanuel Kant’s.2 Kant is not arguing that a life committed to meeting the moral demand is impossible without belief in God, but that there is a certain kind of rational instability in such a combination.3 We know many more people than Kant did who combine a morally good life with unbelief in God, and indeed the lives of some of them put the lives of many believers in God to shame. Nonetheless, I will try to argue that this combination betrays a lack of rational fit. Sometimes people who know Kant’s moral theory but do not know his moral theology wonder why he would bring in happiness at all. Is he not committed to the view that morality is to be pursued for its own sake, and that requiring a connection with happiness would be a pollution of this kind of purity? To reply to this worry, it is helpful for us to see how he distinguishes his view from the views he attributes to the Stoics and the Epicureans. The Stoics, he says, held that happiness is simply being virtuous (and knowing that one is virtuous). The Epicureans held that virtue is simply the dispositions that lead to happiness, whatever they are. But Kant objects to both schools. We humans are not merely rational, but also creatures of sense and creatures of need. If we were merely rational, perhaps our highest good would be purely a life of virtue. But because we are this combination, our highest good is a union of virtue and happiness, which are two different things. Virtue is the disposition to live by duty or the moral law, and happiness is the satisfaction of our inclinations as a sum, or where everything goes the way we would like it to.4 (From this definition, we can see that complete happiness is not available on earth for beings with our limited capacities, since we always tend to misidentify what will in fact give us this satisfaction.) Since these are different, the Stoics are wrong to try to reduce happiness to virtue. But the Epicureans, in reducing virtue to the means to

14  John Hare happiness, are also wrong, because they fail to give us morality at all; morality requires that we seek to do our duty for its own sake, and not for the sake of happiness. Since we are both rational beings and creatures of sense and of need, our highest good requires a union of virtue and happiness. This union is not merely for us as individuals, but our morality gives us the end or goal of the happiness of all, proportional to the virtue of all. This end is the combination of our own happiness, and the happiness of others, and our own virtue and the virtue of others.5 But since our morality gives us this end, the highest good, we must, if we are to pursue the morally good life in a way that is rationally stable, believe that this highest good is really (and not merely logically) possible. Real possibility has to be founded on what is actual. But we do not see that we have the capacity to bring this highest good about. What we see, on the contrary, is a world in which people who are not committed to the moral law get large amounts of what they wish and will, and those who are committed to it often end in misery and frustration. Nature, Kant says in one of his most purple passages, is indifferent to our moral purposes, as far as we can tell from our sense experience.6 In order to sustain our belief in the real possibility of the highest good, we, therefore, have to postulate the existence of a “supersensible author of nature,” who can bring about the conjunction of happiness and virtue, and thus “morality inevitably leads to religion.”7 Kant says throughout the corpus that we have to recognize our duties as God’s commands.8 His reason relates, primarily, to the first argument I have given. We have to recognize our duties as God’s commands, because it is only if they are God’s commands that we can rationally believe in the real possibility of the highest good, which is the end that morality itself gives to us. When Kant defines religion as “recognizing our duties as God’s commands,” the notion of religion is of a moral faith that how things ought to be is sustained by how things fundamentally are, by the governance of the universe.9 Kant thus subscribes to the scholastic picture of the three roles of God as sovereign, distinguishing God’s legislative, executive and judicial authority.10 On this picture, God makes the law and promulgates it by command, runs the universe in accordance with this law, and then judges our success in keeping this law. Not only Kant but also the utilitarian tradition in moral theory have, in some of its classical authors, endorsed a version of the argument from providence. J. S. Mill, in his Essays on Religion, said that we need hope with respect to the government of the universe if we are to sustain the moral life. Otherwise, we are kept down by what he called “the disastrous feeling of ‘not worth while’.”11 Henry Sidgwick, in Methods of Ethics, recognized that the only way to reconcile enlightened self-interest with aiming at the maximum balance of happiness for all sentient beings present and future, whatever the cost to oneself, was to bring in a god who desires the greatest total good of all living things and will reward and punish in accordance with this desire.12 Belief in such a god was necessary, Sidgwick thought, to restore coherence to our beliefs, but he did not commit himself one way or the other about whether this was sufficient reason to believe.

Three arguments  15 We can always escape the force of this argument, however, if we deny that morality gives us the end of the highest good, and so requires us to believe in its real possibility. We can always think of the moral demand, like Camus’s portrayal of the command to Sisyphus to roll the rock up the mountain, as absurd, and we can shake our fists at the gods who have given us this task.13 But my guess is that if we really thought morality was absurd, we would not in fact sustain our attempt to live morally. Consider the possibility of an evil demon, rather like the evil demon Descartes imagines, who brings about evil roughly 70% of the time when we try to carry out what is morally good. Would we sustain the moral life in such a world? The second way of establishing a dependence relation of morality upon God is by means of what I will call ‘the argument from grace.’ I will again use an argument from Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. To explain this argument, I need to mention that Kant recommends that we see revelation as two concentric circles, with historical revelation (the revelation to particular people at particular times and places) in the outer circle and the revelation to reason (supposedly to all people at all times and places) in the inner circle. The project of Religion is then to see if the doctrines in the outer circle can be translated into the language of the inner circle by means of the moral concepts. Each of the four parts of the work ends with a general remark on a topic that Kant says belongs in the outer circle, but in the area of the outer circle that borders upon the inner one. At the end of part one, the topic is “effects of grace.” Kant is here discussing a problem he elsewhere refers to as “Spener’s problem,” after the great Lutheran Pietist.14 We humans are born, Kant says, under the evil maxim, which subordinates duty to happiness. Evil is not, though we are sometimes tempted to think so, simply the product of our sensory inclinations. Rather, it is a choice in the will to rank happiness over duty. Kant is here in the tradition of Luther, who denies that the source of evil is in the “lower and grosser affections” and locates it instead in “the highest and most excellent powers of man, in which righteousness, godliness, and knowledge and reverence of God, should reign – that is, in reason and will.”15 Since we are born under this ranking of happiness over duty, we cannot reverse the ranking by our own devices, for this would require a choice that was already under the opposite ranking. Kant says that the propensity to evil is “not to be extirpated through human forces, for this could only happen through good maxims – something that cannot take place if the subjective supreme ground of all maxims is presupposed to be corrupted.”16 Here we have the problem that I have elsewhere called the problem of ‘the moral gap,’ a gap between how we ought to live and how we can live by our own devices; ‘ought’ implies ‘can,’ but in this case, we ought to give duty the priority ranking, but we seem to have a radical incapacity to do so. By presenting the problem in this way, Kant puts himself again in the tradition of Luther and Augustine. Augustine says that God bids us do what we cannot, in order that we might learn our dependence upon God.17 In On Free Choice of the Will, he says both that we have lost our freedom to choose to act rightly and that we do have the ability to ask God for

16  John Hare assistance. “In the midst of their ignorance and difficulty he leaves them the free will to ask and seek and try. He will give to those who ask, show himself to those who seek, and open to those who knock.” The key to a solution to the problem of the moral gap is to see that, while ‘ought’ implies ‘can,’ ‘ought’ does not imply ‘can by our own devices.’ There are things we can do, but only with assistance from outside. Kant thus appeals to God’s assistance in accomplishing what he calls “a revolution of the will,” by which the ranking of happiness over duty is reversed. This divine assistance is an effect of grace.18 Kant says, “We can admit an effect of grace as something incomprehensible, but we cannot incorporate it into our maxims for either theoretical or practical use.”19 The reason we cannot make theoretical use of effects of grace is that they go beyond the limits of the understanding, and Kant thinks we need to confine the theoretical use of reason within these limits. The reason we cannot make practical use of effects of grace is that they are things God does and not things we do. Nonetheless, the appeal to effects of grace is the solution to what would otherwise be a contradiction in practical reason, namely that we both ought to and cannot live by the moral law. I would add, though this goes beyond Kant, that one of the effects of grace that makes the moral life livable is that grace makes forgiveness possible, in cases where we cannot forgive ourselves for moral failure, because we do not have the right moral status to do so. The view of the effects of grace I am defending here is that God intervenes in our situation, and enables us to live by the moral demand that God puts upon us by divine command. Not only Kant but also many of the theologians and philosophers who preceded him recognized the presence of the gap between the moral demand and our natural capacities. The picture is basically Augustinian, inherited by Kant through Luther and the Lutheran Pietists.20 It can also be found outside Christianity – for example, in Aristotle and in the neo-Confucian Chu Hsi.21 It is always possible to evade the conclusion of the argument by denying the premise about the stringency of the demand. There are many ways to make this demand less stringent by distancing it from the categorical imperative.22 For example, the Kantian formulation requires us to treat humanity in every person as creating obligations for us, so that we are to share the morally permitted ends of all those in need, wherever they are in the world, whose lives we affect by our actions. One way to reduce the demand is to say that, unlike the Good Samaritan in Jesus’s parable, we should consider that we have obligations only to the people we know, who are related to us in special relations of family or friendship or community.23 But this reduction will end up with an ethics that is unacceptably parochial (though I do not know of any non-question-begging way to establish this). The third way of establishing a dependence relation of morality upon God is by means of what I will call ‘the argument from justification.’ We can ask what Christine Korsgaard has called “the normative question,” which is “Why should I be moral?” or “Why should I accept morality as a proper demand upon me?”24 Here I will not rely upon an argument from Kant,

Three arguments  17 because Kant does not think he can give a justification of the moral demand. At least in the Second Critique, he simply starts from what he calls “the fact of reason,” that we are under the moral law. I will end, however, by claiming an indirect justifying connection with Kant’s view that our dignity as humans resides in our responsiveness to the moral law. A divine command theorist will say that the answer to the normative question is that I should accept morality as a proper demand upon me because it is God who places this demand. This statement is, however, incomplete. A justification of a normative claim cannot be derived from a factual claim alone. To say that I ought to live a certain way because God tells me to do so requires, for completeness, the claim that I ought to do what God tells me to do. This feature of justification has led some philosophers, indeed Korsgaard herself, to think that a divine command justification is questionbegging. They ask, “Why should I do what God tells me to do?” The difficulty that they raise can be put in terms of a dilemma: either obedience to God is itself a moral obligation, or it is not. If it is, then to justify moral obligation as a whole by appealing to it is viciously circular. If it is not, then again it seems no justification is available by this route. For it seems impossible that we could justify the claim that we have an obligation by appealing to something that is not itself a higher obligation. But then the project of justifying our moral obligations as a whole seems hopeless. There is a reply to this difficulty, however. Here I will use the distinction Scotus draws between natural law, strictly speaking, and natural law in an extended sense. He thinks that the command to love God-given in the first table of the ten commandments, the law brought down by Moses on two tablets from Mt. Sinai, is natural law strictly speaking.25 It is known to be true just by knowing its terms (or follows from propositions known in this way). But he thinks the second table, which concerns our various duties to the neighbour, is natural law only in an extended sense. It is true, but only contingently so. For our present purposes, we need to focus on the first table. It is necessarily true, Scotus holds, that God is to be loved. We know this just by knowing the terms ‘God’ and ‘to be loved.’ This is because we know that if God exists, God is supremely good, and we know that what is supremely good is to be loved.26 It is also true that we know that to love God is to obey God.27 We know this because we know that to love God is to will what God wills for us to will.28 But willing what God wills for our willing is obedience. So it is necessarily true not just that God is to be loved, but that God is to be obeyed. Justifying the claim that the moral demand is a proper demand upon me by saying that God’s command makes something obligatory does not terminate in something that itself requires justification, except in as far as we have to justify the claim that God exists. This Scotist solution to the justification problem means that we need to revise the claim of divine command theory that all obligations are produced by divine command. It now turns out that there is one obligation that is not so produced—namely, the obligation to obey God. We know that we have that obligation from its terms, and not because it is itself produced by God’s command.

18  John Hare I will take the good as being desirable in the following sense: if I say that something is good, I express the fact that I desire or love it, and I claim that it merits such desire or love.29 If we accept this proposal, we will have an account of the supervenience of goodness upon being: to say something is good – for example, a strawberry – is to say that it is good because of its natural properties – for example, sweetness, redness, ripeness, firmness (these are the criteria for goodness in strawberries), but this description is not implied by the evaluation that the strawberry is good without the prior endorsement of this set of descriptive criteria. We can now return to the answer to the normative question that the demand of morality is a proper demand upon me because it is God who makes the demand. This answer is, I said, incomplete and depends upon the addition of the claim that the principle that God is to be loved is known from its terms, and is natural law strictly speaking. We can tie this to the sense of ‘good’ as follows. When I say that God is good, I am expressing my desire or love for God, and I am claiming that God is worthy to be desired or loved. But if God is worthy to be loved, the love of God is itself good. We can now see that there can be two seemingly opposite priority relations between what is obligatory and what is good. On the one hand, the good has priority over the obligatory, because the justification relation is as I have just been explaining it; I should try to meet my moral obligations because God gives them to me, and obeying (or loving) God is (necessarily) good. Moreover, separately, God commands only good things.30 On the other hand, the obligatory has priority over the good, because there is an enormous number, probably an infinite number, of good things, and God, in prescribing some obligation, selects some of these goods and neglects others. Only the ones God selects for prescription are obligatory. If we agree with Karl Barth that God’s prescriptions are paradigmatically to particular people at particular times, this makes it easier to see how God, in prescribing, is selecting some goods and neglecting others, for the goods central for one person at one time may be different from those that are central for another person, or for the same person at a different time.31 The two priority relations are the opposite way round, but there is nothing contradictory in this because we have two different kinds of priority. The first kind of priority is what Aristotle calls priority ‘in account,’ and the second is something more like ‘overridingness.’ The good has priority to the right because everything that is right is good, though not vice versa. The right has priority to the good because the goods that God selects as mandatory for us are, so to speak, trumps. In this account of the two different priority relations, we can see already a reply to one typical objection to divine command theory, namely that it makes morality arbitrary. This objection is sometimes tied to Plato’s account in the Euthyphro of Socrates’s question, “Is the holy holy because it is loved by the gods, or do they love it because it is holy.”32 Socrates is clear that the answer to this question is the second alternative, that the gods love the holy because it is holy. But this answer has seemed to many philosophers

Three arguments  19 to be fatal to divine command theory. If the gods love the holy because it is already holy, then they do not make it holy by loving it. I have elsewhere argued that Socrates’s argument for his conclusion leaves a great deal out.33 But I now want to make a different point that Socrates has a truth here, but one that is consistent with divine command theory as I have been describing it. God’s commands are not arbitrary, because what God commands is good, and the goodness is not made good by the command. This does not, however, make God’s command redundant, because only those good things that are commanded are obligatory.34 The justification of moral obligation by God’s command is more intimate than I have yet explained, and I will end with this point. God’s command gives us not only moral obligation but also obligations of other kinds: in Judaism, for example, ceremonial and dietary obligations; in Christianity obligations about baptism and Eucharist; in Islam obligations about pilgrimage and daily prayer. But with moral obligation, we might say that being recipients of God’s command gives us the status that moral obligation responds to. I need to explain what I mean by this. Kantian morality requires that we give equal moral status, or dignity (as opposed to price), to all human beings. But it has proved hard to justify this status. I will start with some brief remarks about Kant’s own view. But I will then suggest that the theist can locate human dignity in our call by God, where a call is a kind of command. If I can make good this suggestion, then divine command will not merely give us a justification for the claim that we are under obligation, but it will ground the particular kind of obligation that is peculiar to morality. Kant scholars disagree about how Kant grounds his views about human moral status. He says in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Morality is the condition under which alone a rational being can be an end in itself, since only through this is it possible to be a lawgiving member in the kingdom of ends. Hence morality, and humanity insofar as it is capable of morality, is that which alone has dignity.35 But does this mean we have to exclude many human beings as insufficiently rational?36 If we take Kant’s language about the predisposition to the good seriously, we have a partial answer to this difficulty.37 The language of ‘predisposition’ suggests strongly that he has reference to the species in mind. This is why he can say, in Religion, that the predisposition to good is essential to us and the propensity to evil is not. This would explain why in The Metaphysics of Morals he says, Children, as persons, have from procreation [aus der Zeugung] an original innate (not acquired) right to the care of their parents until they are able to look after themselves, and they have this right directly by law (lege), that is, without any special act being required to establish this right. For the offspring is a person, and it is impossible to form a

20  John Hare concept of the production of a being endowed with freedom through a physical operation. So from a practical point of view it is a quite correct and even necessary idea to regard the act of procreation as one by which we have brought a person over into the world without his consent and on our own initiative, for which deed the parents incur an obligation to make the child content with his condition so far as they can. (Kant, MdS 6: 280–1) Kant holds that we only have obligations to persons, and he here commits himself to the view that humans are persons from conception. This means that what makes something a person is not the manifestation of respect for the law, but it is membership in a species in which some members have the potentiality for this kind of respect.38 If this is Kant’s view, he can overcome some of the objections that I have mentioned. Two-month old infants and adults with Alzheimer’s disease belong to the human species, and so have moral status. There is a difficulty, however. It is unclear why we should give status to members of a species who do not themselves have the relevant capacities – for example, infants born with severe mental retardation – if it is the existence of just those capacities in some of its members that is supposed to make the species valuable in the particular way that moral status implies. I myself do not see how to overcome this difficulty. Are we then left without a good way to ground human dignity? I want now to suggest that within the Abrahamic faiths we have a way to do this. I will proceed by setting aside two ways that have been used within the traditions of these faiths, and then I will propose a third that takes us back to divine command. Suppose we ground human dignity in the fact that humans were created in the image of God.39 I am not setting this aside. But the trouble is that the passages that mention this tell us very little about what the image of God in a human being amounts to. Speculation has been continuous and manifold, ranging from our rationality or our freedom, to our capacity for dominion, or our capacity for relation (as between male and female). The problem with all these accounts is that they are based on the capacities we can exercise in this life. This is the first way I am setting aside, because it is not clear how any such this-world, capacity-based account can cover all human beings and give them the same basic dignity.40 Consider, for example, the capacity for dominion. Even if we take this to mean something like ‘stewardship’ rather than ‘mastery,’ there are many humans who do not have any significant capacity to look after or steward creation. One response to this point is to look for a theistic account of the basis of human dignity not in human this-world capacities but in God’s activity of conferring or bestowing value. This is the second way I am setting aside. Nicholas Wolterstorff says, What we need, for a theistic grounding of natural human rights, is some worth-imparting relation of human beings to God that does not in any

Three arguments  21 way involve a reference to human capacities. I will argue that being loved by God is such a relation; being loved by God gives a human being great worth. And if God loves equally and permanently each and every creature who bears the imago dei, then the relational property of being loved by God is what we have been looking for.41 Wolterstorff goes on to give an analogy. My friend shows me a particularly decrepit stuffed animal, a rabbit, but tells me that this is the animal loved by his son, Nathan. Nathan “may acknowledge that lots of others are ‘nicer.’ But this is the one he loves, not any of those. This is the one he is attached to; this is the one he is bonded with.”42 Wolterstorff suggests that God loves every human being equally and permanently with the love of attachment and that this is just what respect for human worth requires. There is a problem with this account, however. We want an account of human value that makes it intrinsic to us. In the Genesis account, God created over the six days, and after each day, God looked at what had been created and “saw that it was good.” After the creation of human beings, God saw everything that God had made, “and indeed, it was very good.”43 God is not portrayed here as reflecting upon the divine attachment, but seeing something good in the created order, and especially in the human life. Paul Weithman makes this objection to Wolterstorff’s analysis, focusing on the analogy of the stuffed animal. If an adult abused the stuffed animal, she “would do something very hurtful to Nathan. In performing the act, the adult would be failing to give appropriate consideration to Nathan’s love for the rabbit and to the feelings to which that love makes Nathan liable. In performing the act, the adult would be under-respecting Nathan, and failing to value Nathan highly enough.”44 But would the adult be failing to respect the stuffed animal itself? It is hard to see that she would be. The analysis of human value as imparted value makes this value too transparent, as though we see through it to God’s value without any value added. A successful theistic account of human value needs to accommodate both the relation to God, who is the ultimate source of all value, and the intrinsic value of what God creates.45 There is an account that meets these conditions. I take it from David Kelsey, but an ancestor can be found in Karl Barth.46 Kelsey writes, “ ‘Human beings’ inherent accountability for their response to God provides the theological basis on which the peculiar dignity of human creatures is to be understood. . . . Human dignity is thus ex-centric, grounded and centered outside human creatures.”47 But if dignity is centered outside human creatures, how can it be intrinsic to the human creature? Kelsey asks what is the justification for ascribing this kind of value to human beings, and he answers that the justification is not from our this-world capacities, but from God’s calling us to a certain vocation. This calling is particular, different for each concrete human person. In this way, the ground is not something abstract or universal, like Kant’s ‘personality.’ There is a good reply here to the charge that locating the ground of human value in God’s attachment to

22  John Hare us makes our value extrinsic. On this conception, there is a call by God to each one of us, a call to love God in a particular and unique way.48 We can think of the value of each of us as residing in us, in the particular relation to God into which we are called. What we have here is an intrinsic good in a slightly odd sense, not that we have value, each of us, all by ourselves (which is one thing the phrase ‘intrinsic value’ might mean), since I have said we have value in relation.49 But the value is not reducible to the valuing by someone outside us, on this account, but resides in what each of us can uniquely be in relation to God. In order that this account can escape the objection to a this-world, capacity-based account, we have to be able to believe that God proportions or fits the call to each human being, and there may not be much we can recognize as cognitive capacity in this life that is a precondition of such proportioning. I recognize that to non-theists this belief will seem merely an attempt to escape from harsh reality.50 A difficulty might be raised here. Am I saying that the uniqueness of the call is necessary for our dignity? Is it not sufficient that we are all human beings with the same nature, even though this nature is, as Scotus would put it, perfected by our ‘thisness?’ But this difficulty can be resolved by bringing together the uniqueness and the sameness in the way that Kierkegaard does in Works of Love: And now the differences between human beings! How infinite! If it were not so, then humanity would be degraded, because humanity’s superiority over animals is not only the one most obviously mentioned, the universally human, but is also what is most often forgotten, that within the species each individual is the essentially different or distinctive. This superiority is in a very real sense the human superiority.51 I would want to modify the view here by acknowledging the possibility that there are other species with this same kind of distinctiveness. The claim, in any case, is that our common nature makes our particular kind of uniqueness possible, and this is its ‘superiority.’ I claimed at the beginning of this section that this theist reply to the request for a justification was indirectly from Kant. I will end by trying to support that claim. Kant’s view throughout his published corpus is that we should recognize our duties as God’s commands.52 But in Religion he undertakes a translation project as a philosophical theologian, translating historical revelation (given to particular people at particular times) into the revelation to reason (the same for all people at all times), using the moral concepts. On my view, he does not mean to reduce historical revelation to the revelation to reason, but to leave what he calls ‘Biblical Theology’ as it is (Rel 6:9). In the course of this translation, he proposes to talk about the Trinity in relation to the problem of our falling short of the life we ought to lead, the problem that I call ‘the moral gap.’ “The law says: ‘Be ye holy (in the conduct of your lives) as your Father in Heaven is holy,’ ” and Kant translates this goal as “the conformity of the conduct of one’s life to

Three arguments  23 the holiness of the law.” (Rel 6:66). With this translation in mind, we can see Kant’s language about our dignity residing in our responsiveness to the moral law as a translation of more traditional language about responsiveness to God’s command. Kant indeed is willing to talk of “the call of human beings to be citizens of an ethical state,” though he insists that we do not understand how beings can be both created and free (Rel 6:142–3). I am not saying that Kant has the idea of the particularity of the call; I think he does not. But he does have the idea that what gives us our dignity is our being receivers and potential responders, but not our actual response. As I tried to show earlier, he ties this potential responsiveness to our membership in the human species. The basic idea of locating our dignity in our being receivers and potential responders to God’s call is already in Kant and is part of his inheritance from the Lutheran catechisms of his youth.

Notes 1 This chapter is a version of an argument made with more detail in Chapter 1 of my God’s Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 2 The term ‘unstable’ comes from Volckmann’s notes on Kant’s Lectures on Natural Theology, 28: 1151. I will cite Kant from the volume and page number of the Berlin Academy Edition (Berlin: George Reiner, later Walter de Gruyter, 1900). The translations are from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 3 In Critique of Judgment (henceforth KU) 5: 452, Kant describes Spinoza as a famously good person, but one who does not believe in God. This may not be fair to Spinoza, but that is not my present concern. There is a version of this argument in R. M. Hare, “The Simple Believer,” in Essays on Religion and Education (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 1–36. 4 Metaphysics of Morals (henceforth MdS) 6: 480, and see Critique of Practical Reason (henceforth KpV) 5: 22. 5 See MdS 6: 391–8, where the matter, as opposed to the form, of the duties of virtue is said to be my own perfection, my own virtue, the happiness of others, and (negatively) the virtue of others. The pursuit of my own happiness is taken to be natural, and not a duty. 6 KU 452. 7 Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (henceforth Rel) 6: 6. It is important to bear this sentence in mind when reading the first sentence of Rel. I have discussed this in my book titled God and Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 162–65. This argument is implicit already in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (henceforth Gl), in which Kant distinguishes between the ordinary members of the kingdom of ends, to which all humans belong, and the head of this kingdom, who, unlike us, has “unlimited resources adequate to his will” Gl 4: 434. 8 See John Witherspoon Collins’s Lectures on Ethics, Classic Reprint (Forgotten Books, 2012), 27: 274, 283; also KpV 5: 130 and Rel 6: 154. 9 See Andrew Chignell, “Rational Hope, Moral Order, and the Revolution of the Will,” in Divine Order, Human Order, and the Order of Nature, ed. by Nancy Cartwright and Eric Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 197–218. 10 See Francisco Suarez, De Legibus 2. 15. 20. 11 See John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion (London: Henry Holt, 1874), 249–50.

24  John Hare 12 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (Indianapolis: Hacker, 1981), 509. 13 See Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 90, “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” The novels of Camus contain heroic characters who do persevere in this way, but the question is about life outside the novel. 14 Conflict of the Faculties (henceforth SF) 7: 54. 15 Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1957), 280. 16 Rel 6: 37. 17 Augustine, On Grace and Free Will 16.32. 18 One difficulty here is that Kant also says, at Rel 6: 44, “The human being must make or have made himself into whatever he is or should become in a moral sense, good or evil.” I have discussed this in “The Place of Kant’s Theism in His Moral Philosophy,” in Kant on Practical Justification, ed. by Mark Timmons and Sorin Baiasu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 300–14. The key is to see that Kant takes self-production to be required by moral improvement, but not by improvement in general. 19 Rel 6: 53. 20 See John E. Hare, “Augustine, Kant, and the Moral Gap,” in The Augustinian Tradition, ed. by Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 251–62. 21 John E. Hare, Why Bother Being Good? (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2002), 31. Aristotle said (Nicomachean Ethics X, 7, 1177b26f) that we should not agree with those who exhort us because we are human, to think of human things, or because we are mortal, think of mortal things; we ought rather to take on immortality as far as possible. Chu Hsi held that we should think of human beings (at least most of them) as prevented from a clear view of right principle (of which heaven is the source) because they are like pearls lying in muddy water. 22 I have described some of these ways in The Moral Gap, op. cit., 142–69. 23 Luke 10: 25–37. I have in this paragraph mentioned just one way to escape the argument from grace. There are many. I could argue, for example, that moral goodness is an ideal, rather than a binding norm. In that case, what would be binding is the goal of getting closer to, or approximating, moral goodness. In the same way, I might say “I ought to sing like Caruso,” where my goal is not in fact to do that (which would not be possible for me) but to sing more like Caruso than I currently do. Kant is right not to accept this, because living out of respect for the moral law is itself the goal and to reduce the demand to merely trying to get closer would be an evasion. 24 Christine Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16. 25 Scotus says that what is natural law strictly speaking is that God is not to be hated. But this is because Scotus is regarding the principle ‘God is to be loved’ as meaning ‘God is at all times to be the intentional content of our loving,’ and this seems to him false. If we took ‘love’ dispositionally, we could take the principle that God is to be loved as natural law strictly speaking. 26 See also Ockham, In Sent., I, 4, “It is because God is the greatest good that He is to be loved above all.” (Dico quod solus Deus est summe diligendus, quia est summum bonum.) 27 See John 14: 23–4, “Those who love me will keep my word . . . Whoever does not love me, does not keep my words.” Biblical translations are from New Revised Standard Version (Grand Rapids, Zondervan: 1991). 28 See also Ockham, In II Sent., 7, “In the act of charity I love God and everything that God wills me to love” (Objectum caritatis sit totum istud: Deus et omne quod Deus vult diligi.) Our love for God is different in this way from our love for other human beings, where we share joys and sorrows, and so the friend is,

Three arguments  25 in Aristotle’s term, ‘another self.’ In the case of our love of God, there is a disproportion since we are finite beings and God is infinite. Loving God is not simply to repeat God’s will in our will, because there are things God wills that God does not will for us to will. So what we are to repeat in our wills is God’s will for our willing. See Scotus, Ordinatio 1. Dist. 48. 29 See A. C. Ewing, The Definition of Good (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1947), Chapter 5, who defines ‘good’ as ‘a fitting object of a pro attitude’ and ‘bad’ as ‘a fitting object of an anti attitude.’ I take the idea of the good as desirable from Aquinas, ST Ia, 5, 1. I discuss the following notion of supervenience in “The Supervenience of Goodness upon Being,” in Metaphysics and God, ed. by Kevin Timpe (New York: Routledge, 2009), 143–56. 30 This claim needs to be discussed in relation to ‘tragic’ situations, but this is not the place for this. See God’s Command, op. cit. 43f. 31 See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2009), III/ 4, 59. See also S. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 230, a passage which I will quote at the end of this paper. 32 Plato’s Euthyprho 10d6. 33 In Plato’s Euthyphro (Bryn Mawr, Pa: Bryn Mawr Commentaries, 1985), I argued that Socrates relies on a missing premise, one he has persuaded Euthyphro to agree to earlier, that we love things on account of properties that they have. 34 This solution to the ‘Euthyphro problem’ is already worked out in John Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1977), 229–32. 35 Gl 4: 435. 36 I am following here Patrick Kain, “Kant’s Conception of Human Moral Status,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (2009): 59–102. Of the different schools of interpretation here, he identifies one school as including all humans under moral status, one as excluding many, and one as treating the question as pragmatic, not based on theoretical or empirical considerations. 37 See Kain, op. cit., 75. 38 I am talking here about what Aristotle calls ‘second potentialities’ or ‘first actualities’ (De Anima II 1, 412a22–8) such as the potentiality to think about something I know, when I am not thinking about it. 39 There are two passages from Genesis that suggest that humans are created in the image of God. According to Genesis 1: 26–7, “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ ” The other passage is Genesis 9: 6, “Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed; for in his own image God made humankind.” 40 I have been influenced here by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 342–61. However, Wolterstorff takes a different view of Kant, following Allen Wood, and he also proposes that we get our dignity from ‘conferred value,’ and I am going to deny this in what follows. 41 Genesis 1:31, emphasis added. In the Septuagint, kai idou kala lian. 42 See Wolterstorff’s response to this objection in “Justice as Inherent Rights: A Response to My Commentators,” Journal of Religious Ethics 37, no. 2 (2009): 274–5. Wolterstorff, op. cit. 352. 43 See Gerald McKenny, The Analogy of Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 229, who discusses Karl Barth’s view that responsiveness (Verantwortlichkeit) is “the most precise description of the human situation in the face of the sovereign decision of God,” Church Dogmatics, op. cit., II/2 713.

26  John Hare 44 Wolterstorff, op. cit., 352. 45 Wolstertoff, 359. 46 Paul Weithman, “God’s Velveteen Rabbit,” Journal of Religious Ethics 37, no. 2 (2009): 206. 47 David Kelsey, Eccentric Existence (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2009), 275–7. 48 There is a biblical picture of this at Revelation 2: 17, “and [I] will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it.” We can think of this name, like ‘Peter’ meaning ‘rock,’ the name Jesus gives to Simon, as giving us the character of the particular way of loving God into which we are being called. 49 G. E. Moore, “The conception of intrinsic value,” in Philosophical Studies (London: Kegan Paul, 1922), 253–75. 50 I have been careful to say that what I am rejecting is a ‘this-world, capacitybased’ account. The account I am offering instead is still capacity-based, in the sense that it presupposes that we then have a capacity for the unique kind of loving God that we are called into. It does not, however, assume that we now have the capacity for doing this now. It is perhaps helpful to see the unique kind of loving into which we are called as a final cause. 51 Works of Love, op. cit., 230. 52 E.g. KpV 5: 130, Rel. 6: 154.

2 Moral concepts of God in an age of globalization and contingency Myriam Renaud

In this chapter, I focus on identifying a set of ethical norms with which to test concepts of God in order to determine whether these concepts are validly moral. Why take up the question of ‘concepts’ of God, as opposed to that of God tout court? Convinced by Immanuel Kant’s argument that God’s existence can neither be proven nor disproven and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s claim that God-talk references something beyond language and thus beyond certainty, I adopt an agnostic stance on the issue of God’s reality and treat God’s existence as an open question. I assume that when persons speak of God they are describing the content of their concepts of God which may, or may not, map to the particulars of the actual God, if God exists. I also assume all claims about God as provisional and revisable. In the increasingly globalized, pluralistic world in which we live, the diversity of vibrant and compelling beliefs about God remind us that our own beliefs, as well as those of our religious communities, constitute but a few possibilities among many live options. For some, globalization has destabilized religious convictions and led to questions about the very possibility of ‘God-talk.’ American theologian Gordon Kaufman (1925–2012) explains that God, as a concept, “is typically taken to stand for or name the ultimate point of reference or orientation for all life, action, devotion, reflection.”1 Kaufman concludes that God remains the “most profound symbol in our culture.”2 Recent surveys support his contention: 92% of Americans believe in God – a number that has remained constant for three generations.3 Though religious pluralism is a fact of contemporary life, sociologist of religion Hans Joas argues that what is unique about the twenty-first century is contingency. The term contingent, as used by Joas, “is the counter-concept of necessary” and “covers the experience of our own freedom of decision and action and its consequences.”4 Applying Joas’s notion of contingency to the work of constructive theology, we exercise our freedom of decision and action when we craft our concepts of God and bind ourselves to them. These concepts, forged from various sources,5 give expression to our personalities and affinities. To the degree that any of us are aware that our concepts of God are, at least partly, constructed by us, we hold them dear with contingent certainty – a phrase coined by Joas to mean “a certainty felt in full awareness of its contingent foundations.”6

28  Myriam Renaud Why does it matter whether concepts of God are validly moral? If believing in God, as Kaufman argues, “means practically to order all of life and experience in personalistic, purposeful, moral terms,7 validly moral concepts of God are more likely to orient us toward validly moral lives than invalid ones.” Kaufman succinctly expresses a commonplace and reasonable intuition – namely, that a relationship exists between our concepts of God and the ways in which we lead our lives.8 Several examples come to mind that illustrate this link and illustrate how a validly moral concept differs from a moral concept of God. Though many, if not all, theists would argue that their concepts of God are moral, some embrace a concept of God that relegates lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ) people to second-class status and condones discriminatory hiring practices; others embrace a concept of God that permits violence against women who refuse to obey male members of their households. Such conceptions, I argue, do not quality as validly moral and must be re-constructed.9 On the flip side, some theists conceive of God as calling them to serve the greater good and to set aside a certain portion of their time and treasure to address issues of poverty or to join a religious order and dedicate their lives to assisting others. Such conceptions qualify as validly moral. Kaufman, and others who argue that concepts of God impact our moral behavior usually do not base their assumptions on empirical evidence – their claims are based on logical inference or on “opinion and anecdote.” In 2003, based on their review of 30 years of data from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics, research psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Zaim Shariff showed that such logical inferences were well founded. Norenzayan and Shariff discovered “complementary results across the disciplines” showing that thoughts about an omniscient God for whom the moral behavior of human beings is of interest “reduce levels of . . . selfish behavior.”10 According to the researchers, religiously inspired virtuous behavior, in the form of generosity and helpfulness, “has likely played a vital social role throughout history.”11 Given the continued importance of concepts of God and the role of these concepts in motivating virtuous behavior, I return to the question posed at the start of this chapter: what set of moral norms can help us identify which concepts count as validly moral? To answer this question, I will proceed as follows: 1 I discuss Kaufman’s theological method – an example of a method designed to construct validly moral concepts of God that orient us toward a moral life and inform our ideas about what counts as a good life. 2 Following Max Stackhouse, I argue that ethics plays a key role in identifying validly moral concepts of God and for correcting those that are not. 3 With Will Kymlicka, I discuss the reasons that, in this age of globalization and contingency, a global ethic is needed to test concepts of God. I also explain why the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions’ Declaration Toward a Global Ethic (authored by Hans Küng with input from

Moral concepts of God  29 leaders and scholars from the world’s religions) is a strong candidate for such an ethic. 4 I describe the indicators used by the UN Development Program to measure human development or the good life. I then cross-check the assumptions about the good life embedded in the formal directives of the Parliament’s Global Ethic against the UN Development Program’s empirically based metrics. 5 I offer concluding remarks about turning to the Parliament’s Global Ethic to ascertain whether concepts of God are validly moral.

Constructing a moral concept of God Gordon Kaufman focused on the question of God during the entirety of his academic career. Some of Kaufman’s views changed significantly over the course of that long career. In this chapter, I draw on Kaufman’s writings between 1972 and 1993, a phase of his theology that begins with the publication of God the Problem, and ends with In Face of Mystery. During this phase, Kaufman argues that demonstrable information about God is beyond the capacity of the human intellect; as a result, whether they realize it or not, theists develop concepts of God for themselves. For Kaufman, as for Kant, theological construction “involves a frank acknowledgment that religious beliefs and theological analysis and reflection are human activities, engaged in for human reasons to achieve certain human ends.”12 Theology, Kaufman holds, “is (and always has been) essentially an activity of imaginative construction.”13 Kaufman’s term for the human-constructed God is the ‘available’ God, in contrast to the ‘actual’ God of whom theists can have no definite knowledge and who thus remains a mystery. Though imaginatively constructed, available concepts of God enable theists to orient their lives in ways that lead “to fulfillment of [their] potential.”14 Here, again, he agrees with Kant: Since human beings lack the ability to determine whether and how a particular, imaginatively constructed God correlates with an actual God, Kaufman writes, “[u]ltimately the only justification for speaking of God is the one that Kant endorsed, the hope of a moral world.”15 For Kaufman, God is the corrective of – that is, “God” is the name for that, whatever it might be, which serves to transform and correct – all our relativities, biases, and corruptions . . . Faith in God, if God means the ultimate point of reference in terms of which all else is to be understood and relativized, means living with a certain tension in all our moral and intellectual convictions and judgments, a tension demanding that we always take into account their questionableness and thus the necessity to revise, correct, and refine them.16 Kaufman developed a theological method to assist self-critical and reflexive theists construct (or, more likely reconstruct) their concepts of God. In

30  Myriam Renaud broad strokes, the methodologically sound work prescribed by Kaufman for constructing a concept of God includes three mutually adjusting steps (or moments, as he calls them, to signal that they can be used recursively). This method is useful to those who, for any number of reasons, wish to explore their concepts of God in a thoughtful and intentional manner and who wish to test the moral validity of their concepts of God.

Moment #1:  Construction of the concept, ‘world’ By ‘World,’ Kaufman means a phenomenological description of reality. World, for him, is a concept used to order and organize human experience and knowledge of objects into a ‘unified totality.’17 Since the world “as a historical interaction of people and societies is undergoing a dynamic transformation called ‘globalization,’ ” when we offer a description of reality, we must take into account “what appears to be the creation of a new, encompassing, and highly complex civilization.”18

Moment #2:  Construction of the concept, ‘God’ Kaufman anticipates that individuals constructing a concept of God are likely to incorporate terms, concepts, and metaphors drawn from their relationships, everyday experiences, and familiar images. Though Kaufman makes allowances for God to include person-like characteristics, he does not require them. This is the moment on which this chapter focuses.

Moment #3:  Adjustment of the concept, ‘World’ The concept, ‘World,’ may require adjustment to insure that the reality it unifies is properly aligned with the concept, ‘God.’ Some scholars view Kaufman’s conception of God as the ultimate point of reference as overly abstract. This concept cannot, these critics argue, be identified with the “living” God or be made relevant “to the world in which we witness the death of thousands by a tsunami, children dying of cancer.”19 Such claims fail to take into account the role that Kaufman accords to the imagination. Kaufman encourages users of his theological method to draw on personal experiences, familiar terms and concepts, and meaningful relationships when constructing their concepts of God. Though he rejects anthropo-centric concepts of God, Kaufman finds that humanly relevant concepts of God will almost inevitably be, in some respects, person-like (anthropo-morphic) in order to be grasped and understood. He is not surprised that metaphors like ‘divine creator giving birth’ or ‘powerful savior’ arise in God ‘talk’ because they are existentially meaningful. For Kaufman, the more individuals respond and order their lives in a way that is congruent with a humane and humanizing ultimate point of

Moral concepts of God  31 reference, the more likely they are to imagine the world as purposeful and humane, and the more likely they are to move toward humaneness. Though Kaufman’s theological method is designed for maximum flexibility when it comes to imaginatively constructing God, he places moral restrictions on the resulting concepts.20 For Kaufman, God’s role in transforming and correcting our lives is so important that, he writes, “the problem of developing criteria for choosing among [concepts of God] is among the most difficult and urgent facing contemporary theology.”21 In response to this urgent problem, Kaufman develops universal, moral-pragmatic criteria to identify validly moral concepts of God and to guide the reconstruction of those that are not. He calls these criteria, together, the criterion of humanization: We must be open to all, in conversation with all. But we must not be uncritically receptive to every claim that is made, whether by perspectives strange to us or by the traditions we ourselves hold dear. Each must be examined and assessed in light of the criterion of humanization.22 This criterion is made up of two components: the first component requires that concepts of God contribute to a humanized life with proper moral orientation, well-being, and genuine fulfillment in loving and humane communities; the second requires that concepts of God call into question goals, projects, values, and norms, compelling a continuous re-evaluation of them in light of what counts as a humanized life.23 Kaufman advocated testing all concepts of God with his criterion of humanization – whether generated by his method or some other means – to identify the concepts that promote “moral orientation, well-being, and genuine fulfillment in loving and humane communities.” If a concept of God advances these features of human life, then Kaufman deems it “justifiable and good.” By contrast, if a concept of God undermines them, Kaufman deems it detrimental to a good and moral life and insists that it is to be “judged negatively.”24

The role of ethics in constructing concepts of God Kaufman’s attention to subjecting concepts of God to a moral test makes his theological method especially useful in light of the contemporary hybridity and plasticity of religious thought. In the realm of ethics, globalization, and pluralism can result in moral relativism. To some, basic moral norms may appear to be constructions limited to specific communities; though holding our own moral norms dear, because we call their ‘universality’ into question, we refrain from taking strong moral positions with respect to the worldviews or concepts of God of others. But as professor of philosophy and political science, Carol Gould insists this relativistic stance is problematic because it leaves us unable (and perhaps unwilling) to respond when we fundamentally disagree with the norms of others even when others “act in ways that we judge to be oppressive.”25

32  Myriam Renaud Theologian of class Joerg Rieger argues against the tendency of postmodernist and postcolonial thinkers to dismiss moral dualities. He rejects the view of the postcolonial biblical scholar R. S. Sugirtharajah, who warns against presenting “stark choices between right and wrong, truth and falsehood,” because this “is unhelpful to people whose lives are inherently untidy and . . . marked by messy and mixed-up realities.”26 Rieger agrees with Sugirtharajah that messiness is a reality for the working class but Rieger counters that a sense of what is wrong can be helpful, especially for people who are on the receiving end of the pressures produced by the harsh realities of top-down class struggle and other differentials of power. In many cases, survival may depend on it.27 Though theological and normative claims may appear, to some, unrelated or in tension with each other, a both/and position is warranted. As religious ethicist Max Stackhouse noted, “Theology and ethics are mutually supportive, even necessary to each other.” At the same time, they are distinct enough for one to correct the other. Stackhouse holds that ethics is “indispensable in investigating the relative validity of various religious claims about how we should live in this life.”28 For Stackhouse, “valid ethical criteria find ultimate sanction in what is truly universal and enduring,” as opposed to “what is religiously and temporarily ‘mine’ or ‘ours’ at the moment.”29 Without such “critical principles,” he adds, “Theological ethics is tempted to be little more than an idiosyncratic folkway, and theology is tempted to be the ideological megaphone for what a group believes or practices.”30 Ethics, then, is “indispensable in investigating the relative validity of various” concepts of God since these, as ultimate points of reference, ramify for “how we should live in this life.” Since concepts of God play a central role in the practical orientation of the lives of theists, regressive features associated with various theological claims need to be identified and rectified.31 As Stackhouse insists must be the case, Kaufman resists the moral relativism that considers all concepts of God equivalent or that refuses to pronounce on their moral validity. Still, Kaufman’s criterion of humanization is too broad to identify which concepts qualify as morally valid. Though his criterion calls for concepts that promote moral orientation, well-being, and genuine fulfillment in loving and humane communities, Kaufman does not provide details about what he means by “moral orientation,” or “wellbeing,” or “genuine fulfillment,” or “loving and humane communities.” As a result, the criterion cannot accomplish the aims that Kaufman has in mind. Problematic also is the source of the criterion of humanization – Kaufman acknowledges that his criterion arises out of a particular religious tradition – namely, Christianity. It corresponds, he explains, to a “secularization and universalization of certain fundamental Judeo-Christian themes.” Nonetheless, Kaufman is convinced that the criterion is embraced universally because it reflects the kind of life every human being desires. He

Moral concepts of God  33 claims, “The worldwide demand for more humane social institutions, for greater economic justice and equality [and] for liberation from every sort of oppression . . . is evidence of an emerging consciousness of the criterion of humanization in many different settings.”32 Since Kaufman is the sole author of the criterion leaving it open to charges of Euro-American-centrism and parochialism. Traditional ethics grew out of rigorous analysis and theorizing. Leading approaches such as rights-based, consequentialist, and communitarian “frameworks, rules, and practices . . . were developed primarily for relations among individuals within nation-states.”33 These and other approaches confront difficulties when relations extend across borders. For example, though purchasing cheaper products may make it easier to meet our family budget, we must make a moral decision: Are we willing to benefit from the forced labor of Chinese prisoners working in sub-human conditions, or from the cheap wages of Bangladeshi citizens working in unsafe and polluting factories? Globalization has profoundly restructured human life and widened the range of ethical challenges. For this reason, the political philosopher, Will Kylimcka, writes, “As globalization increases, ethics must itself become globalized.”34 If ethics takes globalization into account, as Kymlicka insists must be the case, a trans-religious, trans-cultural ethic – in other words, a global ethic – is required to identify validly moral concepts of God. A global ethic enables theists to assess whether concepts of God provide valid moral guidance when negotiating the questions and dilemmas that emerge from a “more interdependent, interconnected, pluralistic, and contingent world.”35 To avoid charges of Euro-American-centrism and parochialism, a global ethic must undergo a vetting process that includes public conversation between representatives of the worlds’ religions and cultures. This is the view of Nigel Dower, an academic philosopher and past president of the International Development Ethics Association. He writes, “If a global ethic is an ethic widely shared across the world,” then this global ethic will be “the product of negotiation, consultation and transnational dialogue.”36 Religious studies professor Rebecca Todd Peters also argues that since, in part, the task of a global ethic is to provide a set of “reasonable standards” necessary to “adjudicate” between competing moral visions, the process entails communities – including scholars, businesspeople, religious leaders, and elected officials – engaging in public debate to develop a set of negotiated moral norms.37 Several global ethics have been formulated, but they were advanced by individuals or groups of people whose particular ethic they would like to apply to everyone.38 The “Declaration Towards a Global Ethic,” ratified in 1993 by representatives of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, is the sole global ethic currently in existence that is a product of significant negotiation, consultation, and transnational dialogue. It is on this ethic that I focus in this chapter. For brevity’s sake, I will, from now on, refer to the “Declaration Towards a Global Ethic” as the Global Ethic.

34  Myriam Renaud

The Parliament of the World’s Religions Global Ethic The Global Ethic purports to identify and articulate the already existing values, standards, and principles shared by the world’s religious and cultural traditions. Its authors assumed that their goal – “a better global order” – could not be imposed by creating or enforcing “laws, prescriptions, and conventions alone”; rather, it could be fostered by stating longstanding, but implicit, areas of moral agreement.39 The process of identifying these common moral norms and of setting them down began when the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Küng40 was asked by the Council charged with preparations for the Parliament of the World’s Religions to draft a global ethic in time to present it to representatives attending the Parliament in September 1993.41 Over a period of several months, Küng developed a draft of the Global Ethic, seeking input from his extensive network of colleagues and from religious leaders and scholars from the world’s religions. Küng then sent a revised draft to the Council, whose members in turn circulated it among many additional religious leaders and scholars.42 Finally, of the 5,500 representatives from 55 countries and 60 religious traditions who attended the Parliament,43 an “overwhelming majority . . . supported the text without change.”44 The Global Ethic identifies four irrevocable, unconditional directives. The directives are deemed irrevocable in the sense that they represent “concrete standards.” They are deemed unconditional in the sense that all human beings are called to “hold firm” to them.45 The four directives are as follows: 1 2 3 4

Commitment to a culture of non-violence and respect for life Commitment to a culture of solidarity and a just economic order Commitment to a culture of tolerance and a life of truthfulness Commitment to a culture of equal rights and partnership between men and women

Each is clear and strongly worded. Like Kant’s categorical imperative, the directives call upon human beings – religious or not – to adopt and act on them for their own sake, not in order to be rewarded with commensurate happiness or some compensating ‘natural good.’ The Global Ethic acknowledges that the four directives are too often disregarded. Nonetheless, it also maintains that the directives are held in common across the globe and have always inhered in the worlds’ religious and cultural traditions – Küng merely articulated them; hundreds of scholars of religion and religious ethicists refined them through discussion, and thousands of representatives from the world’s religions ratified them. That this process led to a general convergence on the content of the Global Ethic supports the claim that the Global Ethic’s directives accurately reflect what is shared – an ‘overlapping consensus’ of moral norms.

Moral concepts of God  35 The directives draw only standard cross-cultural concepts and terms since some of the world’s religious traditions are non-theistic. The absence of overt theological and religious language is also designed to support the religious traditions as they turn to their own resources (such as sacred texts, rituals, and symbols) to frame the directives in compelling and meaningful ways for adherents of their traditions. I will say more later about this feature of the Global Ethic. The Global Ethic not only offers moral directives but also sets forth the features that are most conducive to a “good” life. Humans “flourish,” the Global Ethic indicates, in communities that respect life (including that of non-human species) and that are characterized by non-violence, economic justice, solidarity, helpfulness, tolerance, truthfulness, and by equal rights and partnership between men and women. These are, according to the Global Ethic, the conditions for the possibility of flourishing by human beings. Thus, the Global Ethic describes a state of affairs toward which individuals and communities can aspire and can work to instantiate. Conflicts are bound to occur between the demands of the Global Ethic’s moral directives and its aspirational dimension regarding the human ‘good.’ Here, turning to Kantian thought to refract such tensions will be helpful because he anticipated such difficulties. According to Kantian scholar Allen Wood, Kant’s anthropology identifies two separate standpoints, which operate at the same time: 1) the moral standpoint and 2) the natural-social standpoint.46 We, human beings, Kant noted, adopt a moral standpoint when adjudicating decisions of a moral nature, and we adopt a naturalsocial standpoint when adjudicating decisions related to our well-being and to the ‘good’ life. When conflicts arise between the moral standpoint and the natural-social standpoint, we must, Kant insisted, give precedence to the demands of the moral standpoint. By extension, our moral standpoint adjudicates decisions related to the directives of the Global Ethic, while our natural-social standpoint adjudicates decisions related to securing the kind of life the Global Ethic implicitly describes. The moral standpoint with its interest in following the directives has priority over the natural-social standpoint with its interest in pursuing the human ‘good.’ We may seek to bring about the ‘good’ life, as long as we do so within the constraints of the directives. For example, we may not jeopardize human lives (which would violate the directive to respect life) in order to secure equal access to education (which would actualize one of the conditions necessary for human flourishing). We must follow the Global Ethic’s directives, while its implicit description of a ‘good’ life offers parameters that we may implement to improve our welfare and that of other people. The Global Ethic’s understanding of the human ‘good’ is consistent with the vague understanding of the human ‘good’ in Kaufman’s criterion of humanization. For Kaufman, the humanization that the criterion is intended to secure includes proper moral orientation as well as a ‘good’ life characterized by well-being and genuine human fulfillment in loving and humane

36  Myriam Renaud communities. However, whereas his criterion’s definition of ‘human flourishing’ is too broad to serve as an effective test to identify validly moral concepts of God, the Global Ethic’s directives are specific enough to accomplish this task. Thus, Kaufman’s theological method could be improved by using the Global Ethic, instead of the criterion of humanization, to test concepts of God. The validly moral concepts of God identified by the Global Ethic qualify ‘humanizing’ concepts of God capable of orienting theists toward the kind of moral commitments and ‘flourishing’ that Kaufman had in mind. Whether using Kaufman’s theological method or not, those who seek to identify validly moral concepts of God can rely on the Global Ethic to identify such concepts. To return to the examples in the introduction to this chapter, a God conceived as relegating LGBTQ people to second-class status and condoning discriminatory hiring practices fails to meet the directives that call for a culture of tolerance, solidarity, and a just economic order. A God conceived as encouraging violence against women when they refuse to obey male relatives fails to meet the directive that calls for a culture of equal rights and partnership between men and women.

‘Human development’ indicators: an empirical cross-check for the Global Ethic To recap, the Global Ethic offers a set of directives that reflect a particular understanding of ‘human flourishing.’ It purports to express the conditions for the possibility of the kind of life for which most human beings have aspired and continue to aspire. These hopes, one could assume, would have made their way into the religions’ evolving texts, rituals, and concepts and remained consistent over the generations. If so, features associated with the ‘good life,’ such as non-violence, economic justice, solidarity, helpfulness, tolerance, truthfulness, and equal rights and partnership between men and women, would manifest themselves in many forms. I analyzed the Global Ethic to identify embedded features, or indicators, used to describe human flourishing. I found 32.47 To ascertain whether the Global Ethic accurately depicts human flourishing, I decided to cross-check the Global Ethic’s features of the human ‘good’ against the features established by United Nations Development Program (UNDP). The metrics used by this UN agency to measure and track human well-being emerged, in part, from its extensive studies of populations around the globe. As such, I argue, these metrics offer an empirical means of verifying the accuracy of the features of a ‘good’ life embedded in the Global Ethic. In the early 1990s, the UNDP, working closely with the Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen and the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, studied the link between economic growth and human development.48 Until then, economic growth had been treated by the UN as equivalent to human development. But it became clear that economic growth, at least at times, increases human suffering or negatively impacts dimensions of human life

Moral concepts of God  37 that are associated with well-being.49 The ‘essential truth’ that economics is only one feature of human well-being and that the human, not economics, “must be at the centre of all development” was “rediscovered.”50 As a result, since 1990, the UNDP charts economic growth and human development separately, using different sets of indicators for each.51 The objective of human development, according to the UNDP’s 1990 report, “is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy, and creative lives.”52 Currently, the UNDP generates a score for every country based on its (UNDP’s) human development indicators and that country’s available “social and human data.”53 To compare human development throughout the world, the UNDP calculates and reports on the Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI is a composite of three measures of human life: “Life expectancy, educational attainment, and command over the resources needed for a decent living.”54 If the Global Ethic’s overarching understanding of ‘human flourishing’ were to correlate to a significant extent with the UNDP’s general findings about human well-being, this would increase confidence in the claim that the Global Ethic captures the contours of a ‘good’ life in a reliable way. Though the Global Ethic has been endorsed by hundreds of religious scholars, clergy, and representatives from the world’s religions, a favorable comparison between the Global Ethic and the UNDP’s human development indicators would lend support to the claim that the Global Ethic succeeds in articulating the human ‘good’ to which most people aspire. Philosopher and ethicist M. S. Ronald Commers studied several UNDP reports and, based on these reports, identified 29 indicators of human development.55 Commers’s indicators have the benefit of being finer-grained than the ones used by the UNDP; for this reason, I selected them over the HDIs. In Table 2.1, I compare Commers’s UNDP-based 29 indicators of human development to the 32 indicators of the ‘good’ life that I identified in the Global Ethic. The Global Ethic’s indicators appear on the left of the table while Commers’s appear on the right; sometimes more than one of Commers’s indicators appears in a given row because each seemed a possible match for a given Global Ethic indicator.56 The assignment of indicators to a row reflects my personal judgment; other correlations are plausible. Though the table depends on my subjective choices, this approach does not undermine its main goal: to explore the overlap between the two sets of indicators. Juxtaposing the list of implicit human ‘flourishing’ indicators that I identified in Global Ethic with the list of human development indicators that Commers identified in the UNDP’s reports highlights a significant level of agreement between them regarding what counts as the human ‘good.’ My list of ‘good’ human life indicators embedded in the Global Ethic – the result of trans-religious, trans-cultural, and transnational conversation maps closely to Commers’s list of human development indicators in the UNDP – the result of global, empirical studies conducted by experts using transparent research methods.

Table 2.1 The Global Ethic’s ‘human good’ vs. *Commers ‘human development’ metrics‡ Global Ethic’s ‘human good’

Commers ‘human development’ metrics

  1 A culture of non-violence

Care, solidarity; social securization; common good; opportunity enlargement: social, cultural, political Social and environment economy; care

  2 Respect for life (including that of non-human species)  3 Economic justice  4 Solidarity   5 Helpfulness in private and public life  6 Tolerance  7 Truthfulness  8 Equal rights   9 Partnership between men and women 10 Safety 11 Free development of personality 12 Conflicts resolved within a framework of justice whether for individuals or for states 13 An international order of peace

14 Protection, preservation, and care of animals and plants 15 Protection and support of minorities whether racial, ethnic, or religious 16 Authentic fulfillment of one’s vocation 17 A spirit of compassion for those who suffer, with special care for the children, the aged, the poor, the disabled, the refugees, and the lonely 18 Mutual respect and consideration 19 A reasonable balance of interests 20 Moderation and modesty

Corporate social responsibility; stakeholdership Solidarity Well-being; solidarity; creative responsiveness; life experience at the grassroots level Creative responsiveness; solidarity; care Open source information; corporate social responsibility Solidarity; human rights Solidarity; self-determination in civil society and community life; contextual adaptability Social securization; care Human capabilities; opportunity enlargement: social, cultural, political; contextual adaptability Common good; horizontal governance conception Solidarity; well-being; human rights; common good; opportunity enlargement: social, cultural, political; embedding of market regulations Sustainability; social and environment economy Opportunity enlargement: social, cultural, political; solidarity; human rights; self-determination in civil society and community life Self-determination in civil society and community life; opportunity enlargement: social, cultural, political; well-being; human capabilities Duty centered; solidarity; human rights; social securization; human capabilities; opportunity enlargement: social, cultural, political Reasonableness; solidarity Self-determination in civil society and community life; common good; embedding of market regulations Solidarity; sustainability

Moral concepts of God  39 Global Ethic’s ‘human good’

Commers ‘human development’ metrics

21 Mass media’s freedom and obligation to objectivity, fairness, and preservation of human dignity 22 Academic and artistic freedom for artists, writers, and scientists 23 Support of politicians who speak the truth at all times

Knowledge access; opportunity enlargement: social, cultural, political; human rights

24 Teach young people to think, speak, and act truthfully 25 Information and education for young people 26 Resistance against domination of one sex over another even in the name of religious conviction 27 Sexuality as creative and affirmative 28 Responsibility for caring for another’s happiness 29 Sexuality expressing and reinforcing a loving relationship by equal partners 30 Mutual support for families whether to husband, wife, or children 31 Intrinsic dignity 32 Develop up to date codes of ethics for particular professions

Knowledge access; common good; education Knowledge access; education; common good; life experience at the grassroots level Reasonableness; knowledge access; education Education; opportunity enlargement; human rights; common good Human rights; solidarity; selfdetermination in civil society Common good; care Solidarity; common good; care; stakeholdership Solidarity; common good; care Embedding of market regulations Human rights Reasonableness; social corporate responsibility; contextual adaptability

* Renaud’s metrics for the human ‘good’ based on assumptions embedded in the Global Ethic. ‡ Commers’s metrics for human development based on data provided by UNDP reports.

The overlap of the two lists is of interest because their understandings of human ‘flourishing’ were advanced independently, using different approaches. The Global Ethic’s description of human flourishing correlates, broadly speaking, with the research-driven, transparent, and empirical indicators used, according to Commers, by the UNDP. This overlap supports claims about the soundness of the Global Ethic’s articulation of the human ‘good,’ and, by extension, about the soundness of its articulation of shared moral directives.

A critique of the Global Ethic The Global Ethic, for all of its strengths, is nonetheless the target of critique by moral particularists. These critics reject claims that the Global Ethic’s directives and the UNDP’s human development indicators are shared universally. For moral particularists, no single set of moral directives can apply to every person.57 When the internal norms of a community or society conflict

40  Myriam Renaud with the norms of other communities, moral particularists give priority to the internal norms of a given community. In its most extreme form, particularism leads to a moral relativism, making communities the sole source of valid moral norms. Though, for particularists, the external assessment of concepts of God proposed by this chapter – assessment based on shared moral norms – is problematic, Dower emphasizes that individuals, states, and global organizations already operate out of a shared set of values, duties, and ideas. Based on his research he concluded the following: 1 A global moral community already exists as demonstrated by “levels of agreement about core values and duties of mutual aid.” 2 “[M]any global organizations are made up of individuals” who, internal to the organization, share global ideas that they work together to promote. 3 When the people within a particular community share “concerns for the outside world,” these shared concerns “become part of the traditions” of that community.58 Moral universalism, in its most extreme form, holds that a community’s norms are irrelevant when considering the validity of universal moral norms and principles; if the community’s norms don’t match universal norms, then the community is held to be in error.59 The Global Ethic formulates an ethic midway between a universalism whose extreme, totalizing manifestation flattens important differences and a particularism whose extreme, totalizing manifestation leads to quietist moral relativism. It adopts a balanced approach that incorporates both universalist and particularist elements. The Global Ethic’s universalist element consists of its four shared, universal directives, and its particularist element consists of the expectation that these directives will be interpreted differently by each religious or cultural tradition, expressed in a manner familiar to that tradition and “embedded in [its] particular behavior and practices.”60 The Global Ethic’s directives are specific – they focus on particular areas of human life – but broad enough to encourage conversation and interpretation. Küng formulated the Global Ethic as a shared, intentionally minimal, universalist ethic. Its minimal formulation enables it to be integrated (or its shared directives identified) into the world religions’ sacred texts, narratives, rituals, and sources of authority, and developed into a maximal ethic reflecting that religion’s particular resources and context. Compared to the maximal ethic of Sacred Scriptures, the Global Ethic can only offer a minimal ethic. But that does not of course mean an ethical minimalism, though it would already be a great gain if only this minimum of common values, criteria and basic attitudes were realized. What I mean is the minimum of what is now already common to the

Moral concepts of God  41 ethic of the religions of the world and which hopefully can be extended and deepened.61 The Global Ethic avoids the risk of a particularism that underestimates the impact of exclusionary moral directives embedded in communal and cultural practices because its directives, already present in all religious and cultural traditions, provide a basis for their critique. At the same time, the Global Ethic avoids the risk of an abstract universalism that fails to take into account the religious and cultural traditions’ unique ways of negotiating questions about the meaning of life and death, the burden of suffering, and the forgiveness of wrongdoing. The Global Ethic, by eliminating explicitly theological and religious language, respects moral practices that characterize particular religious and cultural contexts – theistic or not – and gives each religious and cultural tradition the opportunity to turn to its particular resources – rituals, texts, symbols – to represent the Ethic’s directives.62

The role of the Global Ethic in testing concepts of God Kaufman’s theological method enables reflective theists to develop concepts of God, which incorporate, among other sources, personal experiences, favored metaphors, teachings from religious traditions, and sacred texts. His method acknowledges the central role of concepts of God in orienting the lives of theists; it is designed to assist those willing to reconstruct these concepts in ways that address the moral problems of our times. Kaufman developed a criterion of humanization to test concepts of God and to identify which are validly moral. Unfortunately, this criterion is too broad to operate as he desired. Concepts of God – ultimate reference points – provide theists with moral guidance; hence, validly moral concepts are more likely to promote validly moral lives. For this reason, as Kaufman insisted, it is important to assess these concepts and determine whether they are validly moral. Given the importance of securing validly moral concepts, a moral test is required. The fundamental changes that globalization and contingency have wrought on contemporary human life suggest that this test’s ethical norms should be global. The best candidate for testing concepts of God for moral validity, the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions’ Declaration Toward a Global Ethic, because it was subjected to a process of vetting and cross-checking by religious ethicists and representatives of the world’s religions. The directives provide a strong test to establish whether a given concept of God is validly moral regardless of whether that concept has been generated by Kaufman’s method or not. The concepts of God that satisfy the moral constraints of the Global Ethic’s directives provide valid, ultimate points of reference that can properly orient theists in their day-to-day practical choices.

42  Myriam Renaud The Global Ethic has a universal dimension – it claims that all religious and cultural traditions share its directives even if these are merely implicit and unevenly honored. The directives are intentionally general. Intentionally a minimal ethic, the Global Ethic expects each religious and cultural tradition to turn to its own resources to identify where in the tradition the Ethic’s directives inhere. Each tradition is also tasked with converting the directives into a maximal ethic by expanding their presence in its sacred texts, liturgies, rituals, symbols, narratives, etc. Thus, the Global Ethic includes both a universal dimension and a particularist dimension. I explored the assumptions about human flourishing that are embedded in the Global Ethic, teasing out the features of human life required the possibility of ‘flourishing’ and identified 32 indicators. I argued that if a correlation between these assumptions and the indicators used by the UNDP to measure human development exists, the validity of these assumptions would be confirmed, or at least made more convincing. Because the HDI used by the UNDP is rather coarse (it only takes three metrics into account), I chose instead to examine the more granular indicators developed by Commers based on his reading of UNDP reports. An informal comparison between Commers’s UNDP-based indicators of human development and the indicators of the human ‘good’ implicit in the Global Ethic shows significant overlap. The Global Ethic’s assumptions about what constitutes the human ‘good’ have empirical heft. The soundness of the Global Ethic’s understanding of the ‘good life’ demonstrated in this chapter translates into confidence in the soundness of its moral directives. The Global Ethic functions as Kaufman intended his humanization criterion to function. Whether produced using his theological method or not, the Global Ethic can serve as a test for concepts of God to ascertain whether they are validly moral or not.

Notes 1 Gordon Kaufman, Essay on Theological Method, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 17. 2 Gordon Kaufman, God the Problem (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1972), 14. 3 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life/U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, “Summary of Key Findings,” 2007. Accessed May 26, 2014. http://religions.pewfo rum.org/pdf/report2religious-landscape-study-key-findings.pdf. 4 Hans Joas, Do We Need Religion? On the Experience of Self-Transcendence (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), 24–5. 5 These sources include, but are not limited to, the theist’s 1) past and current social contexts; 2) religious tradition(s) (if any) in which the person was raised; 3) experiences linked to, or associated by analogy with, the Other; 4) psychological disposition; 5) value-goal-norms; and 6) familiar and favored texts. As a result of the sources shared by a particular religious community (numbers 1, 2, 5, 6), the basic contours of the members’ concepts of God will bear points in common, though some features of each person’s concept will be unique (because of numbers 3, 4, 5, 6). 6 Ibid., 30. 7 Kaufman, God the Problem, 107.

Moral concepts of God  43 8 Recent survey data shows that worldwide, people continue to see a link between belief in God and morality. Pew Research Global Attitudes Project, “Worldwide, Many People See Belief in God as Essential to Morality,” March 13, 2014. Accessed May 26, 2014. www.pewglobal.org/2014/03/13/ worldwide-many-see-belief-in-god-as-essential-to-morality/. 9 Concepts of God that motivate moral lives through fear of punishment do not qualify as validly moral any more than human beings who compel certain behavior, even if admirable, by force and intimidation count as moral. 10 See Media Release by the University of British Columbia, “Religion Makes People Helpful and Generous – Under Certain Conditions: UBC Researchers,” October 2, 2008: www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/media/releases/2008/mr-08-132. html. See also Media Release by the University of Oregon, “Different views of God may influence academic cheating,” April 20, 2011: http://uonews.uoregon. edu/archive/news-release/2011/4/different-views-god-may-influence-academiccheating. Social scientists have, so far, allocated few resources to studying the role of religious beliefs on what they call prosociality: “The idea that religions facilitate acts that benefit others at a personal cost” (Science, see the following for full citation, 58). In recent years, however, a small, but growing, amount of empirical data has become available. See Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff’s “The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociology,” Science 322 (3 October 2008):58–62, and by the same authors, “God Is Watching You: Priming God Concepts Increases Prosocial Behavior in an Anonymous Economic Game,” Psychological Science 18, no. 9 (2007): 803–9. Some of this data has been collected across the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, experimental psychology, and experimental economics. Unfortunately, scholars of religion had no consulting role in the elaboration of Norenzayan and Shariff’s studies or in the assessment of the collected data. When Norenzayan and Shariff “examined the effect of God concepts specifically on selfish and prosocial behavior,” they designed their experimental procedure to “implicitly prime” study subjects with “God concepts” using Srull and Wyer’s scrambled-sentence paradigm (Psychological Science, 803–4). The scrambled sentences contained the “priming words,” “spirit, divine, God, sacred, and prophet” (“God Is Watching You,” 804). Norenzayan and Shariff’s published studies indicate that they did not interview the test subjects about the content of their beliefs about God prior to being “implicitly primed” – the test subjects were merely asked whether they considered themselves “religious, spiritual, agnostic, or atheistic.” Persons identifying themselves as religious were then asked to identify themselves as Christian or Jewish, etc. (“God Is Watching,” 805). In addition, the subjects were not asked about the content of their post-priming “God concepts.” Norenzayan and Shariff may have expected wide agreement (from the scientific community?) that all “implicitly primed” God concepts would have similar content; as a result, they did not feel compelled to specify what this content might be for their test subjects. 11 Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff, “Religion Makes People Helpful and Generous – Under Certain Conditions: UBC Researchers,” media release by the University of British Columbia, UBC News, October 2, 2008, accessed September 2, 2017, https://news.ubc.ca/2008/10/02/archive-media-releases-2008-mr-08-132/. 12 Gordon Kaufman, The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press,: 1981), 182. 13 Kaufman, God the Problem, 73 14 Kaufman, Theological Imagination, 155. 15 Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950–2005 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 313. 16 Ibid., 7–8. 17 Ibid., 242–3.

44  Myriam Renaud 18 Max Stackhouse, introduction to God and Globalization: Volume 1: Religion and the Powers of the Common Life, ed. by Max Stackhouse with Peter Paris (New York: T&T Clark International, 2000), 3. 19 Michael Welker, conference presentation, April 11, 2014, University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, IL. 20 Immanuel Kant wrote, “Although it certainly sounds questionable, it is in no way reprehensible to say that every human being makes a God for himself, indeed, he must make one according to moral concepts.” See Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, ed. by Alan Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1998), §6:169, 165, emphasis mine). 21 Kaufman, Essay on Theological Method, 14. 22 Kaufman, God – Mystery – Diversity, 40–1. 23 Kaufman, The Theological Imagination, 155–6. 24 Ibid., 184. 25 Carol Gould, “The New Global Ethics and Its Three Faces,” in Ethics in an Era of Globalization, ed. by M. S. Ronald Commers, Wim Vandekerckhove, An Verlinden: 13–26 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008), 19. 26 R.  S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Commentary on the New Testament Writings, quoted in Joerg Rieger’s “Instigating Class Struggle? The Study of Class in Religion and Theology and Some Implications for Gender, Race, and Ethnicity,” in Religion, Theology, and Class: Fresh Engagements After Long Silence, ed. by Joerg Rieger: 189–211 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 195. 27 Joerg Rieger, “Instigating Class Struggle? The Study of Class in Religion and Theology and Some Implications for Gender, Race, and Ethnicity,” in Religion, Theology, and Class: Fresh Engagements After Long Silence, ed. by Joerg Rieger: 189–211 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 195–6. 28 Stackhouse, 7. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 8. 31 Gould, 19. 32 Kaufman, The Theological Imagination, 168–9. 33 Gould, 15. 34 Will Kymlicka, “Introduction to the Globalization of Ethics,” in The Globalizqtion of Ethics: Religious and Secular Perspectives, ed. by W. M. Sullivan and W. Kylimcka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1. 35 Stackhouse, 7. 36 Nigel Dower, “Cosmopolitanism and Community,” in Ethics in an Era of Globalization, 127. 37 Rebecca Todd Peters, “Justice in a World Gone Mad: Assessing the Ethical Landscape of Globalization,” in Ethics in an Era of Globalization, 70. 38 Christien van den Anker, “Bridging the Gaps in Global Ethics: Grounded Cosmopolitan Praxis,” in Ethics in an Era of Globalization, 41. 39 Hans Küng, “The History, Significance and Method of the Declaration Toward a Global Ethic,” in A Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, ed. by Hans Küng et al. (New York: Continuum, 2006), 20–1. 40 See Richard Morgan’s “Peace Among Religions: Hans Küng’s Analysis of Christian and Muslim Paradigms of Social Justice in Search of a Global Ethic,” Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table 7, no. 3 (2011): 2. 41 Küng, “The History, Significance and Method of the Declaration Toward a Global Ethic,” 48. 42 Ibid., 52. 43 Numbers given by Bloch based on the Executive Summary: 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions (Chicago: Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, 1993), 616.

Moral concepts of God  45 44 Karl-Josef Kuschel, “The Parliament of the World’s Religions, 1893–1993,” in A Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, ed. by Hans Küng et al. (New York: Continuum, 2006), 96. 45 Hans Küng et al., eds., A Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions (New York: Continuum, 2006), 24. 46 Allen W. Wood, “Kant vs. Eudaimonism,” in Kant’s Legacy: Essays Dedicated to Lewis White Beck, ed. by Pedrag Cicovacki (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2000). 47 Declaration Toward a Global Ethic. 48 M.S. Ronald Commers, “Global Ethics and World Citizenship,” in Ethics in an Era of Globalization, 79. 49 See Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up, The Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (New York: The New Press, 2010). 50 Human Development Report 1990, pub. for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), iii. Accessed May 9, 2014. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/219/hdr_1990_en_ complete_nostats.pdf. 51 “From then on,” ethicist M.S. Ronald Commers writes in Ethics in an Era of Globalization, “The annual global reports kept emphasizing the weight of the ‘human face’ of growth and development indicators,” 81. 52 Human Development Report 1990, 9. 53 Ibid., iii. 54 Human Development Report 2013, The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World (Geneva: United Nations Development Programme Press, 2013), 23. Accessed April 21, 2014. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/14/ hdr2013_en_complete.pdf. 55 Commers. See Table 5.1 Ethics in an Era of Globalization, 81. Commers developed his list of signifiers based on UNDP Reports 1990, 1993, 1996, 2006, 2007. 56 Commers. See Table 5.1 “Human development and economic development signifiers,” in Ethics in an Era of Globalization, 82. Commers used UNDP Reports as sources and Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus’ Macroeconomics, 18th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2005), 555–79. 57 See Van den Anker, 42. 58 Nigel Dower, “Cosmopolitanism and Community,” in Ethics in an Era of Globalization, 127. 59 Kymlicka, 9. 60 Van den Anker, 41. 61 Küng, 73. 62 Declaration Toward a Global Ethic, 36.

3 God and the human good William Schweiker

Introduction In what follows, I present an account of the relation between God and the highest human good by drawing on philosophical and Christian theological resources. By the end of my chapter, I hope that it is clear why I do so. One reason to proceed in this way is because it entails a specific conception of Christian existence. However, my basic task is to address from within these philosophical and theological resources what I see as major challenges to the religions and certainly the Abrahamic religions. The challenges are, on the one hand, what is called “practical atheism” and, on the other, hypermoralistic religion too often expressed in violent ways. These two interrelated challenges, I believe, demand a response from within the religions and this chapter is my attempt to do so with respect to Christian sources. Other thinkers will have to do the same thing in their traditions. The core of my argument will be for a particular conception of the highest human good and its relation to both the divine and human perfection. At its deepest level, then, the chapter is a meditation on the meaning of our humanity from the perspective of our being agents who must figure out how responsibly to conduct our lives with others, on earth, and before God. Let me begin by setting out in more detail the direction of my argument. In a second step, I clarify the challenges posed by practical atheism and hyper-moralistic religion. Those matters in hand, I turn to offer a response to those challenges by drawing on two modern thinkers, John Wesley and Immanuel Kant, who have helped to shape, but not determine, my own theological ethics. I am fully aware that in some circles, Kant is seen as the chief problem with modern ethics, and, likewise, I know that Wesley is rarely taken seriously among theologians. In this chapter, I wrestle with their thought in order to explore the meaning of our lives as moral beings, as agents. I conclude by returning to the challenges that provoked these reflections. But, first, a few words on the direction of my argument.

Direction of the argument The orienting question of this volume of chapters – that is, the relation, if any, between accounts of God and the moral life, is as debated as it is broad.

48  William Schweiker The topic ranges through moral philosophy, natural theology, law, politics and political theology, theological ethics, social theory, moral and religious psychology, moral theory, and even into debates about the “god gene” and the biological roots of morality. It is also important to note that the question of this volume grips the popular imagination. Oft repeated is the claim that without God there is no morality and the claim that beliefs about God in the Abrahamic traditions are inherently immoral and rife with sexism, tyranny, and violence. In the history of Western thought, the relation of God to what is morally right, just, and good has been a flashpoint among thinkers within as well as between religious traditions. The debate carries on. In our time, it has taken on global reach and too often lethal force. The global scene is alive – maybe ablaze – with our question, and it is thereby part of the public responsibility of thinkers to address it. My reflections unfold at the intersection of moral philosophy and Christian theology. These two disciplines intersect both in their examination of the human life and in their reflection on the human highest good and human perfection. The claim that the highest good requires human perfection is longstanding in Western thought. Plato imagined a journey of the soul to the good. Thomas Aquinas taught that the Beatific Vision was the elevation and perfection of the soul through the infusion of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. Certainly, in Orthodox Christian thought, the idea of theosis is also a conception of human perfection. There are also modern philosophers and Protestant theologians who advance their own distinctive claims about the highest good and human perfection. That being said, the idea of the highest good is nowadays often seen to entail a “comprehensive doctrine,” in John Rawls’s words, and thus is supposedly to be bracketed in reflections on justice in liberal democracies. As for perfection, it is roundly criticized in our day as part of the modern “rage for order,” as Charles Taylor calls it, the imposition, as feminist and liberation theologians note, of a conception of the ideal “Man” on others while claiming to be universal, and the denial, as Jean Bethke Elshtain would put it, of the quotidian features of our lives with all their messiness. Finally, in a highly consumerist culture and one marked by moral diversity, the belief that the human good would demand something of human beings and so would require some transformation of our lives is against the grain of the age. Mindful of the worries about ideas of “perfection,” many of which I share, I want, nevertheless, to explore how the human highest good exposes an antinomy in life, but is also an ethical possibility for thinking about human perfection and the living God. But given my focus on the link between the highest good and perfection, what is the distinctly theological orientation of this volume? Insofar as theology is an interpretation of an interpretation – that is, in as much as theology must articulate, interpret, and assess a religious tradition’s narratives, symbols, and practices as they articulate the human relation to the sacred or to the divine – what resources does the Christian tradition hold for thinking about the highest human good?

God and the human good  49 Typically, claims about God and the human good have been addressed along intersecting lines of thought: God as the source of the human good and the source of the right; God as the supreme end of the moral life; God as the guarantor of the human good, and God as enabling and empowering a good and righteous life. Each of these conceptions of the relation between God and the right and the good can be found in the history of thought as well as various combinations of the different accounts. In Christian theology, these ideas about God’s relation to the human good are often understood in Trinitarian terms. God the Father is the source of created goodness and is pure righteousness; God the Spirit empowers a life of goodness and righteousness; God the Son is the divine promise and guarantee that the highest good, God’s will, is done on earth as it is in heaven, to use the language of prayer. Further, the plenitude of the divine being pours forth in creation, the fons bonorum, the fountain of goodness. A genuine theological ethics thereby relates the divine to the human good in and through the many dimensions of the moral life, and, conversely, the moral life is the prism for the perception and experience of the divine here and now. Given the complexity of a theological account of the highest good, ethics needs to account for the demands of finite, practical life. In this light, what we are exploring in ideas about the highest good has a parallel in religion when it is understood as the transformation of indeterminate complexity into determinate complexity, as the social theorist Niklas Luhmann would put it.1 That is, every social system must respond to a wild array of possibilities and limitations and make some selection among them in order to actualize any of them. Each selection is an exclusion of possibilities but also the inclusion of some into social life. While Luhmann limits that account to the social function of religion, I want to exploit its meaning for theological ethics. We are looking at human moral agents in relation to God, others, and their environments that confront the tragic element of decisions among competing goods due to the limitations of finite life. That is, we are seeing how an appeal to God enables a thinker – Kant, Wesley, myself – to transform the wild diversity of ways of thinking about happiness and the equally complex array of moral norms into a determinate ordered conception of the highest good capable of orienting human life. This transformation of complexity not only discloses the contribution of religious thinking, or theology, to social life. It also provokes, I contend, reflection on the fundamental dimension of ethics – namely, to articulate what it means to be an agent with others and in the world. To act at all, to orient one’s life, is to bring into being through action a determinate complexity of one’s life, other’s lives, and the world as well. In this way, the moral life is the living interpretation of the meaning of human agency. Further, in different ways, Kant and Wesley demonstrate the human practical need for God in the conduct of life. Stated in that way, theological and ethical reflection on the human highest good and perfection allows us to connect a social world and our lives as agents under a normative theological and ethical perspective.2

50  William Schweiker Now, insofar as I am talking about theological ethics, the relation between God and the human good is approached practically rather than, say, speculatively or sociologically. This practical approach to theology accords with deep strands in ancient thought and also modern philosophers like Kant and theologians like Wesley. The theologically relevant problem is not the speculative denial of the being of God or some idea of the secularization of modern differentiated societies, but, rather, the denial that God cares about virtue and righteousness and thus defines and sustains the moral space of human life. Sometimes called “practical atheism,” the conviction, objectively viewed, is that God is not involved in the lives of human beings as moral agents. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once made the point from the view of the agent: And you know, there are two kinds of atheism. Atheism is the theory that there is no God. Now one kind is a theoretical kind, where somebody just sits down and starts thinking about it, and they come to a conclusion that there is no God. The other kind is a practical atheism, and that kind goes out of living as if there is no God. And you know there are a lot of people who affirm the existence of God with their lips, and they deny his existence with their lives.3 No matter what speculative arguments can be made or sociological observations advanced, the force of this kind of atheism is that theistic claims are irrelevant for the conduct of our lives, and, in fact, religious beliefs might well be detrimental to living a good and virtuous life. One assumption backing this chapter is that practical atheism is nowadays rather widely held even among supposedly religious people. I judge this to be a more pressing issue theologically and ethically than debates about secularization and the so-called post-secular age. Let me next explain this point since it is part of the socio-cultural context for my argument.

Forms of practical atheism There seems to be, historically speaking, three reasons for current forms of practical atheism. The first reason was the bloody reality of the twentieth century and especially the Shoah and other genocides. In the face of horrific and mindless evil, God seemed absent, unconcerned, or impotent. Indeed, it seems obscene to speak of God as the human good in the shadow of death camps or suicide bombers. Mass graves are a good argument for practical atheism. The second reason for current forms of practical atheism is that often claims about the human good seem to trump other forms of life. The idea that God guarantees and is the source and end of the human good has rightly come under searing criticism for being wantonly anthropocentric.4 It seems to smack of impiety by putting the human good as the divine purpose. If that is the case, not only is the worth of finite existence limited to

God and the human good  51 human life but also it moves the question of the meaning of the highest good from a theological or an environmentally holistic question to a decidedly narrow anthropological one. Not only is this a dangerous limitation of moral responsibility in an age of ecological endangerment but also hard to sustain in the face of scientific evidence. After all, no matter how grand and complex our lives are to us, they do not seem to be the point of the universe. A third and final reason for current forms of practical atheism is an odd entanglement between the rejection of God and violent forms of theistic belief and practice. Ironically, practical atheism – the source of which is the Godless West, “The Enlightenment,” or whatever – provokes hyper-­ moralistic forms of religion among suicide bombers, the censorship and pulping of scholar’s books, or the bombing of medical clinics in the name of the sanctity of life. Violent and murderous religious forms are drastic rejections of the kind of practical atheism rife in cultures around the world. Yet they also provoke, dialectically, the rejection of God seen in the forms of practical theism. It seems morally obscene to believe in a God who commands violence. Hyper-moralistic religiosity, I am suggesting, is the sibling of the kinds of practical atheism now playing out in our global age. Both of these forms, we should see, are strategies to reduce indeterminate complexity for some more determinate and monistic perspective. If the problems of the practical irrelevancy of God and the violence of monotheistic conviction defines something of the moral and religious atmosphere of our age, then a theologian interested in ethics must retrieve religious ideas and show their meaning for the actual orientation of life in ways that respect and enhance the integrity of life, our own and that of others. Accordingly, I offer an account of the ethical possibilities found within strands of Christian and also Western philosophical thought. I will retrieve and reconstruct a specific conception of the human highest good and its correlate idea of human perfection. What do I mean? The account of the human highest good developed here is, to be precise, a synthetic concept and thereby demarcates a determinate complexity about human existence. That is, this conception of the highest good draws together and combines two more basic ideas that in themselves seem indeterminate: righteousness and well-being, or, in other terms, virtue and happiness (eudaimonia). As history and current experience show, there are endless conceptions of “happiness”: some think it is utility and pleasure, while others imagine wealth and power and still other self-sufficiency. The same is true of virtue and righteousness: some ground it in God’s commands, others in social conventions, and still others in the individual conscience. This idea of the human highest good seeks to transform that complexity of beliefs about happiness and virtue into a determinate, and thus livable, practical form. I suggest that the human highest good be conceived as the felicity of pure justice where righteousness and happiness combine. The highest good is not to become God-like; it is not a supernatural elevation of the believer in the Beatific vision; the conception here is also not a Platonic idea of the Good. The conception I am setting out can be interpreted

52  William Schweiker as a thoroughly human one interrelated with a conception of the moral meaning of our being human. In this respect, it is more time-bound and finitude-bound than some other Christian and non-Christian conceptions of the highest good. The gain to theological ethical thinking is that this interpretation is more determinate, or so I claim. We can now link the two sides of my argument. Theologically, I want to explore the idea of God as the guarantor of the human highest good meaning by this the guarantor of the combining of righteousness and happiness. Other ideas of God, say, God as the source, end or empowerment of the human good will have to be explored at another time, but, for me, they would need to be explored within the framework I am trying to work out in this chapter. Ethically, I want to show how that idea of the highest good entails an interpretation of human perfection. Importantly, there is a twist I put on the conceptions of Wesley and Kant since both of them connect thinking about God with the highest good and claims about human perfection. In light of the absence of God in our time of mass murder and also runaway violent religion, the twist in my argument is to show God conceived as the guarantor of the highest good is not wantonly anthropocentric, but, to the contrary, is a way to respect and to enhance our being finite creatures in our finitude. The ethical possibility in this account of God, I am saying, is to keep human life thoroughly human with the proviso that our responsibility for the integrity of human and non-human life is itself part of the human highest good. The root question is then the character of our finitude and how our practical lives, our being agents, is a key to the answer of that question. In order for the highest good to have any practical meaning, it must present a determinate and yet complex and possible account of our being human with others and on earth. My argument thereby needs to articulate a robust conception of human well-being and ideas of duty, righteousness, and justice as integral to good human life. And I need to show how an account of “God” is practically relevant for addressing the existential fact of the clash between righteousness and happiness, a clash that stalks human life. The account of God that I am giving means that any conception of the divine, the highest good, or human perfection that demeans or destroys the integrity of finite life is morally evil. Conversely, any idea of human perfection and the human highest good that elides respect for others and even love for human and non-human others is theologically invalid, perhaps sinful. This is how I want to get at and to respond to the fact of practical atheism in our time but also its horrific sibling of hyper-moralistic religion. So, I turn to explore, next, perfection and the antinomy of the highest good in Kant’s and Wesley’s thought. And as Wesley put it, we are engaging “men of reason and religion.”

Perfection and the highest good Although I entitled this chapter “God and the Human Good,” it should now be clear that the title is not quite correct. If I were to explore the “human

God and the human good  53 good” in the full meaning of the idea, I would have to set out and unfold in detail a range of types of basic goods and the needs they answer. Elsewhere I have called these types bodily, social, local, and reflective goods, as well as identified sub-types in each.5 Exploring basic goods can be undertaken from a naturalistic perspective by trying to isolate and identify the needs that must be met for a living being to flourish in some manner rather than to be diminished and eventually to die. One of the moral tasks of human beings is to integrate the range of goods in an individual way such that one both intends and also feels one’s life as one’s own. Different persons and different communities integrate their lives in wildly different ways and, from this perspective, that is a very good thing indeed. Yet to focus on those types of basic goods alone would deflect from the argument I am trying to make – that is, to forward a conception of the “highest good.” We need, therefore, to include along with basic goods a conception of the distinctly moral good. We call acts and agents morally good when they respect and enhance the integrity of life, one’s own and that of others as well. Moral goodness is to be understood in relation to basic goods about which we must make decisions and judgments needed for life to flourish in some way. But the moral good is not reducible to basic goods because it is about agents and actions that respect and enhance the integration of those basic goods with and for others. The moral good is then not a natural attribute of an agent or act. It is predicated of an agent in terms of the relation manifested in action between who one is and one’s conduct of life. This is why we need to speak about respecting and enhancing the integrity of life as reasons held by an agent for living in a specific way – that is, living morally. The question then becomes, and I will have to return to it later, whether or not a new form of integrity comes into existence with the moral conduct of life. Sad to say, one can, of course, integrate into a form of life types of basic goods and yet fail to enact the moral good. Insofar as the range of basic goods allows for an indeterminate complexity of ways of fashioning one’s life, they need not be integrated morally even though that too is a human possibility. The complexity of basic goods, in other words, does not determine the choice of which basic goods to endorse and realize. One might make social goods basic to the integrity of one’s life or even bodily goods. The ancients often made reflective goods in the form of the via contemplativa the way to integrate life. One might also seek the integration of basic goods solely and simply for one’s self or one’s community contrary to and at the expense of others. To be sure, there have been thinkers in the legacy of Western thought who held such a view. Generally speaking, those positions recognize that the increase of one’s power is the necessary condition to one’s own flourishing and this can include the domination of the weak by the strong, as Callicles puts it in Plato’s Gorgias, or the striving for self-­overcoming in the “will-topower,” as Nietzsche thought, or even the rational surrender of the natural right to kill others in order to escape violent death, in Hobbes’s terms, the “war of each against each.” My task is not to refute those counterarguments to morality. It is clear that too often acting with moral integrity or with power does not assure, let alone

54  William Schweiker attain, the integration of basic goods, that is, happiness. However, we cannot leave out the question of power in formulating our ideas about basic goods, moral goods, or even the highest good. At this point, we can say, then, that the highest good for human beings can be understood in relation to basic goods and the moral good as well as the power to integrate these. These ideas are meant to bring nuance to the older terminology of Wesley and Kant – that is, the integrity of basic goods is to happiness what moral integrity is to virtue and righteousness. The highest good is the combining of basic and moral goods on the outlook we are elucidating. The question will be about the kind of power or even whose power can integrate these goods and thus enact the highest good. And here I can start to engage Kant and Wesley around the themes of happiness, the moral law, the highest good, and perfection. In the second part of his Critique of Practical Reason, the so-called Dialectic, Kant defines happiness as the unity of wish and will and “consciousness of the agreeableness of life as a whole.” This is a complex idea of happiness – that is, there are seemingly endless possibilities we can wish for and maybe even will from which we need to make some selection in order to orient our lives, and yet taken together, there is a reduction and determination of complexity. What can I realistically choose and what can I realistically bring about? Put in Kant’s terms, “happiness,” as the unity of wish and will, entails choices with respect to determinate range of possible choices. Happiness is when my wishes are achieved by my will and, correlatively, when my will is powerful enough to realize my wishes. We do not count someone happy whose wishes are unfulfilled due to weakness of will, bad luck, some form of coercion, or the inability to select among goods, the image of Don Juan, for instance. Disappointment and frustration are features of finite human life and they are characterized by a disproportion between wish and will. An increase of power as well as proper wishes seems the path to happiness as a kind of self-sufficiency in the face of the constraints of life. Little wonder that the increase of power, or will, or the cessation of desire – that is, wish – have been major trajectories of thought about human felicity. Yet those approaches are neither as complex nor as determinate as the unity of wish and will. There must be, it would seem, some way to combine power and desire, will and wish. That demand strikes us, according to Kant, as a fact of reason. For Wesley, the fact of reason does not define true happiness. “Christianity,” he writes, “begins just where heathen morality ends.”6 That is, Jesus teaches the “art of happiness” but this art is a radical transformation of non-Christian morality. “Heathen” morality, as he calls it, begins with a rational belief that God is and that God rewards those who seek and glorify him along with the practice of virtue. Heathen morality is a decidedly rational theistic faith aimed at human excellence. But Christian faith, he claims, “Is not barely a speculative, rational thing, cold, lifeless assent, a train of ideas in the head; but also a disposition of the heart” (Wesley 1975: Sermon I). More pointedly, Christian faith has a complex double structure. General faith is defined, following Hebrews 11, as “the evidence of things

God and the human good  55 unseen, the assurance of things hoped for” that coheres with the injunction to “Know Thyself!” The first glimmer of faith is an awakening to the spiritual depth and scope of existence. It is, for Wesley, a kind of perception and sensation and has been called his account of “perceptible inspiration.” It is a Christian form of enlightenment. At a higher level, true Christian faith is saving faith. This imparted righteousness is “the life of God in the soul, the mind which was in Christ Jesus; the image of God stamped upon the heart, now renewed after the likeness of Him that created it.”7 Given this, Christian happiness is not the combining of wish and will, but an inversion or transformation at the level of affections and disposition which are, contra-Kant, perceptions of the divine life animating one’s own life. The power of combining happiness and holiness as the attributes of the highest good is not, as for Kant, warrant for postulating God; it is the being and activity of the divine in one’s life as a moral agent, as spiritual beings. Like Christian thinkers throughout the ages, Wesley claims that God is the source, end, and empowerment of the moral life. The “art of happiness” taught by Christ focuses, as we have it in the Sermon on the Mount, focuses on humility, poverty of spirit, holy joy, patience, and meekness as presented in the “Beatitudes.” This “divine temper” of saving faith is to abide and increase day by day. The differences between Kant and Wesley are striking. Happiness is the unity of wish and will for Kant, but that is the self’s felicity and the self’s will, specifically one’s autonomy. The power of combining wish and will is freedom as a postulate by practical reason of the transcendental condition of moral action. Wesley, making a more naturalistic and empirical argument, thinks that the power or will of the Christian life is the “inner Kingdom of God” along with the believer’s affections and freedom. Further, the Christian vision of “happiness” is a transformation of common morality expressed through the blessings and the inversion of ideas about happiness in the Beatitudes. Kant would hardly admit that “meekness” is a form of “happiness” since that would be an inversion of the self-power. And yet it is crucial to see, before we turn from happiness to righteousness and virtue, that Kant and Wesley each seek to keep happiness human. They are not seeking a from of happiness beyond our ilk but with respect to our existence as rational, feeling, willing agents. The moral question, in Wesley’s and Kant’s minds, focuses not on wish but on love or will, the motive forces of distinctly moral action. For Kant, only the good will, a will whose maxims are formed by the objective practical law, the categorical imperative, deserves happiness, for only a good will deploys human power in respect for persons and in striving for the kingdom of ends, a community of respect and justice. Accordingly, Kant must formulate, in the Second Critique and The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, the supreme principle of morality, the categorical imperative, in terms of universalizability, respect for persons, and the kingdom of ends. For an action to be genuinely moral, it must be from duty – that is, taking the moral law as a maxim of one’s action and not simply acting out of duty.

56  William Schweiker For Wesley, the supreme moral law is found in Matthew 22: 36–40 (NRSV): 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. While Kant denied that “love” could be commanded, that is precisely Wesley’s point, and in doing so opens the possibility of obedience to the moral law to a wider, more complex range of emotions and dispositions than Kant would accept. This is also why, as we have seen, the Beatitude’s are important since they articulate the dispositions and affections of the heart that can and should motivate the moral life. What Wesley thinks is the moral law, Kant would contend are merely hypothetical imperatives grounded, ultimately, in self-love. Yet Wesley’s point is that the witness of God’s spirit with one’s own spirit does not deny freedom but is its true condition of possibility and actualization. The divine spirit is the possibility of true moral freedom. Kant and Wesley are wrestling with an old problem. One must do the right thing for the right reasons. To do the right thing but not for the right reasons is morally deficient and in some cases an evil action. It has been long recognized that the moral good, true moral virtue, right duty, the good will – call it what you want – means acting on some maxim, sentiment, or disposition not reducible to self-interest or self-power at the expense of or domination over others. What we are trying to get at, then, is the relation between righteousness – that is, acting on the right maxim, sentiment, or disposition, and the integration of basic goods into a flourishing life, into some measure of happiness. The unity of these, I have said, is for Wesley and Kant the human highest good. It is a type of goodness that comes about by way of an agent acting on the right maxim, sentiment, or disposition in relation to the integration of basic goods of others and of the agent himself or herself. It gives rise to a new form of existence, namely, virtue or moral integrity. And we are asking now how, if at all, God should be understood and worshipped as the guarantor of precisely that idea of the human highest good. Notice further that this entails a conception of human existence that is at root an antinomy – that is, being human on this account is the interaction, even struggle, between two seemingly incompatible laws, the demands of morality, and the demands to meet basic needs and the goods that fulfill them. The antinomy is between happiness and virtue that articulates the core of our being as moral agents. It was Kant, of course, who used the term “antinomy” in his critiques, although, as noted and explored further in a moment, he is not alone in this

God and the human good  57 claim about being human. To draw on Kant again, he writes in the Critique of Practical Reason, virtue and happiness together constitute the possession of the highest good for one person, and happiness in exact proportion to morality (as the worth of a person and his worthiness to be happy) constitutes that of a possible world, the highest good means the whole, the perfect good, wherein virtue is always the supreme good . . . while happiness . . . is not of itself absolutely good.8 And Kant is so bold as to claim that it “is a priori necessary to produce the highest good through the freedom of the will.”9 That is, the highest good as a synthesis of happiness and virtue is the necessary object of a free will, and, further, this means, socially, a conception of a Kingdom of Ends as the point of social life that also functions as a regulative ideal for judgments about our current social life. The task of the “Analytic” of the Critique of Practical Reason was to establish the supreme principle of morality, the categorical imperative, which warrants the “postulate” of freedom as the transcendental condition of the possibility for acting morally. Yet it is the synthetic idea of the highest good, Kant holds, that justifies the postulates of immorality and God. Immortality is the postulate of endless time in which we can and must make ourselves worthy to be happy, that is, to combine wish and will under the moral law, to act from duty and not just out of duty. And God – or, better, the idea of God the reality of which exceeds our powers of knowing – is, nevertheless, rightly postulated as the all-knowing and all-powerful judge who sustains the perfect justice of the moral order– that is, rewards virtue with happiness and, inversely, must punish the wicked. As Kant writes, the eternal being, to whom the temporal condition is nothing, sees in us what is to us an endless series the whole of conformity with the moral law, and the holiness of his command inflexibly requires in order to be commensurable with his justice in the share he determines for each in the highest good is to be found whole in a single intellectual intuition of the existence of rational beings.”10 It is here as well, Kant tells us, that practical reason is conceived of extending pure reason while remaining within the limits of reason. The rational warrant for the postulate of God and of immortality is purely practical and in the service of the highest good – the combining of virtue and happiness – and the social good as well, the kingdom of ends and the struggle for eternal peace. We might say, with echoes clear back to St. Augustine, the highest good is rest in the soul, since the struggle between wish and will is resolved, and it is peace in the community of rational human agents. Kant seems to suggest, then, that the human highest good is the triumph over the

58  William Schweiker struggle of life into a different modality of existence in perfection; call it the holy will. For us who exist in time as sensible and yet moral, free creatures, the possibility is, as he says in the Groundwork, the good will. As is well known, Kant argues that in order to sustain the validity of the synthetic a priori idea of the highest good as combining happiness and moral goodness, we postulate time enough to perfect ourselves and also an all-knowing, all-powerful, and just God to judge rightly human action. Religious ideas, God and immortality, are essential, on my reading of Kant, to the transformation of indeterminate complexity found in common sense ideas about happiness and duty, into a determinate complexity, that is, the moral law which ought to be the test for all maxims of action. By testing one’s maxims – one’s subjective principles of action – by the moral law, the indeterminate possibilities for happiness and duty are rendered determinate with respect to the selection of courses of action. Religion in the form of the ideas of God and immortality is essential to the transformation of complexity in a morally praiseworthy way. This is why, we can see, Kant defines religion as acting as if all one’s duties are commands of God. God is not the source of the good or the right; God is the guarantor of the highest good. But Kant’s conception of the highest good in relation to the divine is, importantly, a way to keep human life human, that is, a way to confront the tensions and complexity in human finite, temporal existence. It is, I am claiming, a need of human beings rightly to integrate their lives and thereby gives rise to a higher self, a virtuous person on the way to perfection. Wesley’s idea of perfection is again similar yet different. In A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, sec. 27, he writes regarding perfection, In one view, it is purity of intention, dedicating all the life to God. It is giving God all our heart; it is one desire and design ruling all our tempers. It is the devoting, not a part, but all, our soul, body, and substance to God. In other view, it is all the mind that was in Christ, enabling us to walk as Christ walked. It is the circumcision of the heart from all filthiness, all inward as well as outward pollution. It is a renewal of the heart in the whole image of God, the full likeness of Him that created it. In yet another, it is the loving of God with all our heart, and our neighbors as ourselves. For Wesley, perfection is another name for holiness, that is, the complete love of God and love of the neighbor as one’s self. There are stages of the Christian life, a going on to perfection, as he puts it.11 The highest form is to be born from above, and so born of God, and thus to be renewed in one’s created nature. By the power of the divine spirit, one is freed from the necessity of sin – that is, freed from the temptation to despise God and to hate the neighbor, free from evil thoughts and tempers. This perfection and the laws of love are not, to use Kant’s terms, heteronomous. God’s action and presence in a believer’s heart does not contravene one’s freedom;

God and the human good  59 it restores and vivifies human freedom. It is closer to what later theologians called “theonomy.” But unlike those theologians, say, Paul Tillich, Wesley’s thought holds to the possibility of perfection in this life and, like Kant, finds a necessary place for human happiness, human eudaimonia, in a vision of the moral life. Here too we see the human need for the divine in order to integrate life since, if I have read Wesley correctly, God is the power of fully integrated existence, the combining of basic goods with the moral good. Notice too that Wesley holds that a holy temper, the power of God abiding in oneself through faith and lived in love, is oriented towards the restoration of one’s created nature, towards the renewal of the image of God in the person. Insofar as that is the case, then the highest good is not contrary to finite existence, but, rather, the transformation of human existence into the embodiment of its loves. This is “heart religion,” “true, scriptural, experimental religion” and the “way to heaven” as he puts it. Importantly the highest good is not delayed until heaven nor is heaven a denial of our humanity. The first step is to “awaken” to one’s condition and the Christian life is a growth in grace that is a moving into greater and greater life. Wesley’s would see Kant as an “almost Christian” and someone with a profound vision of the height and glory of “heathen morality.” Wesley’s account of the highest good and perfection is the transformation of indeterminate complexity into determinant complexity. That is to say, one’s highest good is seen as the combination of happiness and holiness, as Wesley usually puts it. True religion is a transformation of indeterminate into determinate complexity in order to orient life in and not against this world and our humanity. It is found in personal holiness and also, necessarily, social holiness and the demand to transform human community to embody happiness and holiness, a state that remains an eschatological hope. This conclusion brings me back to our point of departure – that is, the ethical possibilities of theological and religious claims in an age of practical atheism. I will thereby conclude with some reflections on the meaning of my argument for the current situation.

God and the human good The argument I have presented has several dimensions. First, I have tried to explore the topic of this volume in relation to the contemporary scene where practical atheism and violent hyper-moralistic religion stalk the public byways of our globe. This required that I engage the volume’s topic practically – that is, with respect to our being moral agents. Second, I have done so in what might have seemed a curious way. I focused on accounts of God as the guarantor of the highest good, but I have done so in such a way that the divine good does not trump the human good or the good of other forms of life. That is, I have tried to outline an argument that seeks to respect and enhance the human good, the integrity of human life, but precisely within the limitations and indeterminate character of our

60  William Schweiker human lot. The human highest good is therefore bound to the responsibility persons and communities exercise to respect and enhance the integrity of life, human, non-human, and even divine life. In making the argument I have suggested, but not dwelt on, revisions needed in Kantian and Wesleyan thought that center on the interrelation of types of goods and the moral imperative to respect and enhance the integrity of life. Third, I have shown that specific ethical arguments appeal to the idea of God, in Kant’s case, or the living presence of God, as Wesley holds, to render determinant the indeterminate complexity that besets human life. Their way of doing so sought to protect the human good from either religious fanaticism or practical atheism. In this way, I have tried to speak to “men of reason and religion.” I have not tried to equate Wesley and Kant, but, rather, to isolate analogies by presenting an argument in both philosophical and theological terms. Behind that strategy is a deeper and more complex claim. My intention was to think within a certain conception of Christianity. Kant and Wesley in their different ways articulate the relation between eudaimonistic ethics that owes it origins to Hellenistic forms of moral philosophy with a more biblical emphasis on God’s commands, duty, and justice. In this light, Christian faith is itself a synthetic reality that gave rise to what Paul Ricoeur once called “the third man” – that is, the Christian as the believing Gentile.12 This is, I hold, the ethical possibility of Christian faith. To borrow from St. Paul, a Christian is neither Jew nor Greek because one is both a Jew and a Greek. Elsewhere I call this Theological Humanism, but I do not want to rehearse that argument here. What then are we to conclude from the argument of this chapter? I have tried to unfold in several steps a basic human need for God that arises within our practical lives, that is, the need to render determinant the complexity of the integrity of our lives which is the human highest good. That practical human need can be articulated philosophically in ways argued by Kant and answered with the postulates of God and immortality; it can be given Christian form in ways developed by Wesley in terms of the divine power to combine happiness and holiness. In this way, I have tried to unfold an ethical vision that is both eudaimonistic and deontological. And it provides a way within the Christian tradition to counter both practical atheism and hyper-moralistic, violent religion. By shifting the focus of God-talk from God as the source or end of the good and the right to that of God as the guarantor of the human highest good, not only is the good humanized, as it were, but so too is religion. And given the interpretation of the relation link between the highest good and human perfection, this commits believer and non-believer alike to a way of life that respects and enhances, rather than deems and destroys, the integrity of life. This allows us, I suggest, to defuse forms of practical atheism and its lately born and violent sibling of hypermoralistic religion. In sum, I have tried to meet the demand noted at the outset of the chapter. The global scene, I noted, is alive – maybe ablaze – with the question of this volume, and it is thereby part of the public responsibility of thinkers to address it.

God and the human good  61

Notes 1 Niklas Luhmann, Religious Dogmatics and the Evolution of Societies, trans. Peter Beyer, Studies in Religion and Society, vol. 9 (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1984). 2 Luhmann, as is well known, thinks that “psychic systems” (human beings) are the environment of “social systems.” That is, social systems, as processes and structures of communication, do not have human persons as their foundation or core. My claim is thereby somewhat different insofar as moral agents (persons) can and must act within social systems by orienting their lives responsibly. I am suggesting, contra Luhmann, that ethics, theological or philosophical is thereby concerned with the relation of persons to social systems. Religious ethics, stated abstractly, is thereby the transformation of indeterminate into determinate ­complexity – the function of religion – in relation to the actions and relations of moral agents in a moral and social space. 3 I owe this reference to Maria Antonaccio. See Martin Luther King Jr., “Making a Way Out of No Way:” Martin Luther King’s Sermonic Proverbial Rhetoric, First Printing Edition, ed. by Wolfgang Mieder (New York: Peter Lang Inc., 2010), 164. 4 See James M. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 5 William Schweiker, Responsibility and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); also, David E. Klemm, Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). 6 John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions, First Series (London: Epworth Press, 1975), Sermon XXI. 7 Wesley, Sermon XVI. 8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy), trans. Mary Gregor, intro. Andrews Reath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 115. 9 Ibid., 95. 10 Ibid., 103. 11 Wesley, Sermon XXXV. 12 Paul Ricoeur, “Faith and Culture,” in Political and Social Essays, ed. by David Stewart and Joseph Bein (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1974); see also William Schweiker, Dust That Breathes: Christian Faith and the New Humanisms (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

4 Ethical reflection on ‘God’ Making sense of things Pamela Sue Anderson

The concept of ‘God,’ metaphysics, and ethics In this chapter on the concept of God – its theological accounts and ethical possibilities – I will approach the topic with a style of ‘ethical reflection,’ which is appropriated from the philosophical writings of Bernard Williams. The focus of my ethical reflection will be a particular concept of God. For the purposes of this chapter, I am assuming the theological account of the theistic God, which continues to be the central concept in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of religion and, more recently, in analytic theology. So, I approach the ancient question concerning the relation of God and goodness by way of ethical reflection on ‘God’ who is omnibenevolent. In addition, this ‘concept’ will be understood in terms of A. W. Moore’s helpful account of Williams’s own ‘thick ethical concept’; this means that ‘God,’ understood as a thick ethical concept, has both descriptive and normative content. The reverse is equally true: perfect goodness as a thick ethical concept both describes (this) God and is a normative guide for the social world of western Christianity. To the extent that this social world is homogeneous, due to sharing this thick (theistic) concept, or cluster of theistic ethical concepts, I will assume that this is, in Williams’s terms, ‘a hypertraditional society.’1 I have taken for the subtitle of this chapter, ‘making sense of things,’ from A. W. Moore’s The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things.2 With this, I assume Moore’s working definition of metaphysics as ‘the most general attempt to make sense of things’3 and apply this to theistic metaphysics. Moore himself explains metaphysics in terms of making sense of things, and I suggest that theistic metaphysics as understood by certain philosophers of religion (and analytic theologians) makes sense of things at the highest level of generality. And I take theistic metaphysics to be a way to make sense of things, which in Moore’s terms, can embrace either “finding something that is worth living for, perhaps even finding the meaning of life” or “discovering how things work, for instance by ascertaining the relevant laws of nature.”4 Moreover, to attempt to make sense of things is, according to Moore, “necessarily to reflect on one’s own activity, and to try to make sense, in

64  Pamela Sue Anderson particular, of the sense that one makes of things.”5 We see that ‘reflection’ is crucial here, and it is a conception of ‘reflection’ that Moore himself takes from Williams’s use of it in relation to knowledge. So Moore is well aware that, for Williams, in ethics we reflect on thick ethical concepts – like what I suggest is God’s ‘perfect goodness.’ Crucial for my own ethical reflection on this ‘old’ concept of God is Moore’s original proposal in The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics that “[one] way in which metaphysics is able to make a difference, and the one that seems . . . the most important and the most exciting, is by providing us with radically new concepts by which to live.”6 Later in The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, Moore explains, “When I talk about our ‘living by’ a concept, I am alluding to the fact that some concepts are action guiding in the sense that even to use them is to be motivated in certain ways.”7 As a thick ethical concept, ‘God’ is an action-guiding concept. His perfect goodness offers a motivating reason for action, say, trusting His goodness, and this concept, or the cluster of concepts including all of God’s omni-perfect attributes, is socially located playing a role within a certain way of making ethical sense of a world.8 Now, this use of thick ethical concepts – including giving up an old concept and learning to live by a ‘radically new concept’ – assumes a form of art: that is, Moore describes learning how to live by a concept an art. My choice of God as a thick ethical concept, or perhaps it might be more accurate to say God with his omni-perfect attributes (especially omnibenevolence and omnipotence) as a cluster of concepts, enables us to assess our own grasp of that concept. If we follow Moore and employ his further distinction between an ‘engaged’ and a ‘disengaged’ grasp of concepts, then we will find that making sense of things applies to the attempt made by contemporary Christian analytic theologians (in following analytic philosophers of religion) to understand their life, their actions, the things and people in their world, in relation to a personal Creator God who is without a body, eternal, omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient, and free. Ultimately, in my conclusion, I will suggest that we complete this process of making sense of things by reflecting upon our own activity in trying to make ethical sense and, in particular, upon the ethical sense that we make of things. It will be clear that my style of ethical reflection comes from Williams’s explicit claim that “in ethics, reflection might destroy knowledge.”9 I risk this ethical reflection, in order to consider how traditional theism makes sense of things, and, if after reflection, knowledge of perfect goodness is so to speak ‘destroyed,’ this concept will no longer be action guiding for me (at least); I would no longer have an engaged grasp of it. After this ethical reflection, we will be in a position to ask – or, so I am proposing – whether Williams’s further claim that “reflection might destroy (a) religion” comes into play for traditional (Christian) theism as a result of rejecting a concept, ‘God.’10 It is important to understand that, in Williams’s words, “ethical reflection becomes part of the practice it considers, and inherently modifies it.”11 This will mean something like what once was a thick ethical concept – an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God – by which we theists have lived might, after

Ethical reflection on ‘God’  65 reflection, no longer guide an agent’s action. In this way, I suggest that a feminist philosopher might find that reflection has destroyed ethical knowledge of perfect goodness, destroying knowledge and what once was her religion. The step for that feminist philosopher to atheism (or, deism) and humanism would be easy.12 This destruction of traditional theism might go something like this. A feminist philosopher of religion reflects on the attributes of the omni-­perfect, personal God. She realizes, in particular, that God as perfect goodness is no longer action guiding for her and possibly, not for other feminist and non-feminist philosophers either; that is, omnibenevolence can no longer serve as a reason for her/their confidence in acting, even though it did once guide (her) ethical activities in a world of Christian theists. After reflection, the feminist philosopher has realized that (ethical) claims made in the name of the omni-perfect God have all too easily been used to justify the ‘right’ or ‘morally good’ on the grounds of His perfect goodness and perfect power. However, at the same time this omnibenevolent and omnipotent God allowed no possibility for a woman (philosopher) to speak against claims to the good or the right when it came to ratifying centuries of women’s innocent suffering on the basis of her sex. The problem, then, is that the assumption of rightness (justness) or goodness justified by the normative authority of a thick ethical concept harms that ‘knower’ who tries to speak against theistic/sexist assumptions; the sexism harms a female knower precisely because it is justified on the grounds of the omnipotent authority of an all-good male God. For a rough example, a stereotypical claim is that a woman suffers physically more than a man as evident in childbirth simply because she was created as ‘a woman’ by a perfectly good God – as if women deserve to suffer simply because of their sex, as a fact of birth. But this reasoning no longer makes ethical sense of things as far as a feminist philosopher is concerned, and it no longer makes sense of things as far as a particular feminist philosopher of religion is concerned. Most helpful for this feminist philosopher is Moore’s discussion of what it was for Friedrich Nietzsche to reject a concept: it was a way of making sense of things by “calling time on something with a history, something which . . . [had] run its course.”13 Moore goes on to explain that Nietzsche’s rejection of ‘God’ is a “brand of atheism”; it is “a break, in its time but not of its time.”14 Similarly, I intend to argue that what a feminist is doing in rejecting a concept – ‘God’ – is one way of making sense of things: “It is a break, in its time but not of its time . . . with a major cultural force in western civilization.” As I am attempting to demonstrate, the cultural force is Christian patriarchy along with the absolute metaphysics of its anthropomorphized God.

A feminist philosopher: Nietzsche’s madman and Sartre’s survivor We will have all heard of Nietzsche’s madman in the Gay Science, who asserted: “God is Dead!” But then, the madman exclaims, “And we have

66  Pamela Sue Anderson killed him!” Not too different from Nietzsche’s madman is Jean Paul Sartre’s ‘survivor’ of the ‘death of God.’15 Consider Sartre’s words about the survivor(s) of this death: There are people you might call survivors. Early on, they lost a beloved person – father, friend, or mistress – and their lives are merely the gloomy aftermath of that death. [X] is a survivor of the death of God. And, when one thinks about it, it would seem that our entire age is surviving that death, which [X] experienced, suffered, and survived. God is dead. We should not understand by that that He does not exist, nor even that He now no longer exists. He is dead: he used to speak to us and he has fallen silent, we now touch only his corpse.16 Again, the crucial thing for my account is the reflection on God, which in this case realizes His death. In Sartre, who is here close to Nietzsche, the loss of God does not depend upon a proof that God does not exist. Instead, ‘the death of God’ is an experience, like a bereavement, which survivors suffer. As a personal loss, it is a loss in making sense, which will require the mourner(s) – Friedrich Nietzsche in Moore’s case, and George Bataille in Sartre’s case – to create sense. Whether by murder or by a different cause, God is dead. In response to His death, it is necessary for the survivor to write an account of both the life and the relations of the omni-perfect, personal Creator, God. In fact, such an account, or story, might tell us what it is for a feminist philosopher to reject this concept. This account would tell of ‘God’ who, since without a body, was not supposed to have a gender. Yet (Christian) theistic philosophers and theologians nevertheless chose to call their personal God, ‘Him,’ ‘He,’ and ‘Father.’ So, since ‘personal’ as a divine attribute is implied in the definition of ‘theism,’ and since all our other personal relations are given a gender, He is given a masculine gender and/or male sex. This account of rejecting a concept is not so much about gender exclusive, or inclusive, language, but it is about the ethical judgments, which are made in applying omnibenevolence or any of God’s attributes to make ethical sense of things. To reject this concept is to reject a way of making sense of the world, and in this case, to reflect on God’s perfect goodness results in rejecting the attempt to make ethical sense of things in terms of a personal Creator God who is free, perfectly good, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, and without a body, yet gendered male.17 By now, my focus should be clear. It is one feminist philosopher’s rejection of a concept, ‘God,’ including the cluster of concepts, which makes up this thick ethical concept. The attributes of omnipotence and omnibenevolence come under particular scrutiny because I am considering theological accounts and ethical possibilities of God. Rejecting the traditional theist’s God/goodness is an attempt to make ethical sense of things by admitting the story about the death of this God. This implies a change in metaphysical commitments. In the end, the feminist outlook on the world

Ethical reflection on ‘God’  67 no longer needs to depend upon the anthropomorphized perfectly good and all-powerful personal Creator God to make sense of things, and ‘He’ is not necessary to guide her to act with confidence or, generally, to give her confidence. At this point it is necessary to demonstrate why a new way of making sense of things will require an ethical understanding of how theistic ‘religion’ can be ‘destroyed’ by reflection on knowledge of God, especially knowledge which is dependent upon the thick ethical concept of omnibenevolence. Let us consider carefully the question posed by Bernard Williams’s Nietzschean critique of morality. In Williams’s words, Why should religion be judged in terms of ethical understandings [thick ethical concepts] that are ranked as more or less sophisticated or mature in secular terms? The answer must be, presumably, that the original crude idea of God as an omnipotent law enforcer was itself gained through our (crude) ethical understanding. But then, if ethical understanding is going to develop, and if religion is going to understand its own development in relation to that, it seems inevitable that it must come to understand itself as a human construction.18 In other words, this concept of ‘God,’ especially ‘His’ attribute of perfect goodness might upon reflection be rejected in Williams’s terms, as elaborated by Moore and now me, as a thick ethical concept.19 It follows that this theistic concept would no longer be both action guiding and worldguided, which it once was when our ethical understanding depended on an all-powerful divine lawgiver and law enforcer. To explain further, for a concept to be ‘world-guided’ means that it is capable of expressing knowledge and, in turn, the concept would also be ‘action guiding’ within that world-outlook, but this means that the thick ethical concept is vulnerable to reflection. So, ethical reflection might destroy knowledge when the thick ethical concept no longer expresses knowledge from the evaluative outlook, which had guided, in the present case, the theist’s action. As made clear already, this traditional concept of God has more than the normative attributes of an omnibenevolent and, as I will further elaborate, of an omnipotent ‘lawgiver.’ As already mentioned, ‘He’ is described as “a person without a body . . . who is eternal, is perfectly free, omnipotent, perfectly good, omniscient, creator of all things.”20 My general concern, ‘God,’ encompasses ‘His’ other attributes, which as predicates form a cluster of concepts traditionally applied to ‘Him.’ The danger of gender bias arises when ‘He’ becomes the norm for what ‘men’ claim to be, as if the malegender were a universal, as if there were a task to become perfectly – that is, to become a perfect, divine man. Here I will resist the alternative of a perfect, divine woman, which I have resisted in a number of my previous publications.21 In particular, I reject the Irigarayan idea of “becoming divine,” and so, I reject the alternative of becoming a divine man or a divine woman.22

68  Pamela Sue Anderson

Ethical self-understanding and epistemic injustice With my conception of a feminist philosopher, I assume that she or he would ask questions concerning human constructions of deity-moralitygender, within philosophy as a humanistic discipline.23 A focus on human self-understanding and the human origin of our ethical concepts in theistic religion becomes a critical concern for a feminist philosopher of religion, since these ethical understandings and concepts are precisely what have been most resistant to change; that is, unjust norms of sex and/or gender have been resistant to change when sanctioned by God who is personal, but without a body, perfectly free, eternal, omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient.24 To my feminist and Williams-influenced conception of philosophy as a ‘humanistic’ discipline, I would like to add a Kantian Enlightenment concern for humanity. Basically, with Kant, I assume that the most pernicious25 form of immaturity is ‘religious immaturity.’26 But generally I employ ‘Kantian’ rather than strictly ‘Kant’s’ terms, in order to include women as much as men.27 In particular, a feminist philosopher who is informed by Kant’s essay, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ ” will recognize the urgent need to emerge from “self-incurred immaturity”: and this is despite the (socalled) ‘difficulty’ and ‘danger’ this emergence would pose for ‘women’ or, in Kant’s own words, “the entire fair sex.”28 Clearly today, emergence from religious immaturity will require emerging from religious bias and ethical injustice concerning the gender(ing) of humanity. Appropriating Kant for contemporary feminist philosophy of religion means assuming that religious immaturity includes pernicious religious attitudes toward gender’s ‘intersection’ with sexuality, race, ethnicity, other material, and social mechanisms of oppression.29 My argument in this chapter is not dependent on Nietzsche, nor do I defend any close study of his atheism. Instead, I am appropriating for contemporary feminist philosophy the twentieth-century ethical understanding of Nietzsche developed by Williams who, in turn, informs Moore. Two passages from Williams and Moore contain my main points of concern. First, picking up where I left off after the earlier quotation from Williams, he goes on to contend, [I]f the self-understanding of religion is not to be left behind by the ethical consciousness, it has to move in a direction that will destroy religion.30 The centre of the matter does not lie in purely logical questions. In fact, the logical or structural questions about religious ethics, like many questions about God, are interesting only if you believe in God.31 I will return to William’s surprising, perhaps initially shocking claim that “reflection will destroy religion,” when I return to Williams’s equally perplexing claim that “reflection can destroy knowledge.” Perhaps, it is not all religion, since it is not all knowledge that Williams says is ‘destroyed.’ We

Ethical reflection on ‘God’  69 might even like to say that Kant’s own reflections so to speak destroyed the Pietistic religion of his upbringing; yet Kant continued to maintain the role of ‘religion within the boundaries of mere reason.’ One possible response would be to construct new knowledge by creating new thick religious concepts. The latter would be a task for a future paper. Second, I pick up the relevance for a feminist philosopher of what, following Williams,32 Moore describes as “Nietzsche’s brand of atheism:” What Nietzsche is doing is rejecting not a hypothesis but a concept: a way of making sense of things. . . . the crucial point is that Nietzsche’s brand of atheism is not just a piece of abstract metaphysics. It is a break, in its time but not of its time, with a major cultural force in Western civilization.33 Notice how the sense of ‘time’ changes when we go about making sense of things. The role of time is crucial to my proposal today that we do and can change the way we make sense of ‘things.’ giving up thick ethical concepts, changing our grasp of facts and norms (roughly, from an engaged grasp to an disengaged one). These are a critical concern for a feminist philosopher who seeks “a break in [her] time but not of [her] time” in our knowledge of sex/gender and sexual orientation, and also, in our pernicious use of religion to enforce social mechanisms of sex, gender, race . . . oppression.” In asking what is it to reject a thick ethical concept like God’s perfect goodness, a feminist philosopher will find contemporary analytic philosophy of religion and analytic theology lagging behind the aforementioned analytic philosophers – Williams and Moore – when it comes to ethical and epistemic issues. Ethical reflection might help us not only to consider what we know, but whether our theistic knowledge has concealed ‘epistemic injustice.’34 Basically, there is epistemic injustice when someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower, say, in unfair differential treatment of witnesses. For example, there is the well-known case of Tom Robinson, the black man in To Kill a Mocking Bird, who is accused and convicted of rape despite the facts that witnesses give to prove that Tom Robinson could not have raped Mayella Ewell (these include the physical facts about Tom’s body not corresponding to the evidence of the rapist; and also that he was not in the right location to do this rape).35 In fact, this sort of epistemic injustice is all around us.36 So, we could think of more everyday examples. But more generally feminist philosophers have uncovered the greater epistemic reality of this injustice in the unequal relations of a woman witness to knowledge and how this knowledge is constrained for women by their social and material locatedness. In other words, material and social power will give (unfair) advantages to some men over other men and women for acquiring knowledge and for certain epistemic practices.37 More precisely, epistemic injustice in (i) its generic form refers to what is unfair (unjust) about undermining a subject of knowledge. Such epistemic

70  Pamela Sue Anderson injustice occurs more specifically in (ii) the form of ‘testimonial injustice.’38 This form of injustice undermines a speaker in her capacity as a giver of knowledge. In addition, epistemic injustice occurs specifically in (iii) the form of ‘hermeneutical injustice.’39 This hermeneutical form undermines a subject in her capacity for intelligible social experience. Now, all three of these forms of epistemic injustice – i.e., generic, testimonial, and hermeneutical injustice – also disable women as subjects who could contest claims to knowledge.

Rejecting a thick ethical concept: ‘God’ in a hypertraditional society Feminist analytic philosophy has in the past few years motivated some of the most significant work in the epistemic debates of contemporary analytic philosophy, raising political and ethical issues. This work has been philosophically significant in requiring analytic philosophers and theologians to consider their own gendered locatedness, and this has meant digging deep into their own assumptions about their concepts and claims to knowledge. The result has been substantial activity at the interface of cognition, ethics, and politics. In turn, this activity is generating new and vital material for the field of epistemology, including religious epistemology. Admittedly, the relevance of this new material in feminist epistemology and ethics might not initially seem conceptually clear or transparently visible. Nevertheless, insofar as change requires confronting epistemic injustice in the field of philosophical theology, we need to be willing to accept the limits to what is conceivable, while carving out new terrain for the inconceivable, and if tackling obstacles like pernicious ethical norms, then we need to strive to touch what has been un-touchable. Basically, one feminist philosophical challenge to the theistic account of God is to uncover the subjects, speakers and social experiences of knowledge, which have been excluded, or missed, out of fear or resistance in the field of Christian analytic philosophy of religion and, more recently, analytic theology. In fact, I contend that the strongest motivation for writing distinctively ‘feminist’ philosophy of religion is the urgent need to articulate and address epistemic injustice, especially testimonial injustice in religious epistemology. Feminist philosophers have worked to tease out the facts and norms that continue to prevent testimonies of many women as well as some nonprivileged men from being truthfully heard; this includes the testimonies of many uneducated or otherwise disadvantaged women and men. To address testimonial injustice40 in philosophy of religion requires demonstrating that the social and material locatedness of women and men matters to those philosophers who care about truthfulness and justice. In brief, ‘gender’ should matter in philosophy. Analytic philosophers more generally have become increasingly aware of epistemic locatedness in their use of philosophical concepts and arguments. In turn, this philosophical awareness is a crucial step in awareness of gender

Ethical reflection on ‘God’  71 bias and epistemic injustice, that is, in awareness of the critical role of feminism in ethical reflection. In other words, feminist analytic philosophy is no longer an oxymoron. So, Christian and non-Christian philosophers of religion might also find this new philosophical work changing their branch of the field.41 To begin to break ground for making new ethical sense of things, elsewhere I chose to appropriate freely the philosophical discussions of Nietzsche by both Williams and Moore.42 I apply neo-Nietzschean critiques of the concept, ‘God,’ to the current tradition of Oxford analytic philosophy of religion, but also to analytic theology. In one place, Moore has described his own contribution to the analytic tradition as ‘conceptual’ philosophy.43 In the same spirit, we can focus on (new) conceptual possibilities and nonconceptual tools for feminist conceptions of ‘God.’44 I have in mind here the non-conceptual tools of, say, learning how to use a language, or to form a new concept. Elsewhere I discuss this in terms of the non-conceptual as ‘ineffable.’45 Most helpful for understanding what it is to reject the theistic concept, God, is Moore’s critical engagement with Williams’s thick ethical concepts, as well as the latter’s two claims that ‘reflection can destroy knowledge’46 and that ‘reflection will destroy religion.’47 Ultimately, ethical reflection on theistic knowledge, as expressed by certain theistically thick ethical concepts, might lead to the fairly obvious need – if following this line of argument – to give up the distinctiveness of such theistic predicates as omnipotent and omnibenevolent. And once knowledge of these predicates is destroyed, the rejection of God as the thick ethical concept at the heart of theistic metaphysics – at a high level of generality – becomes the crucial step to a larger social phenomenon of ethical change from a hypertraditional society to a critically open social outlook. Thus, it is important for contemporary theologians to realize that, although a person has reflected on the thick ethical concept, ‘God,’ and has realized that she or he no longer has the outlook that that concept requires, she can still understand that theistic outlook. Here I recall the distinction mentioned at the outset between an engaged grasp of a thick ethical concept and a disengaged grasp of that same concept. In other words, like a historian or social scientist, she can understand the outlook, even though she no longer shares it. In addition, please note that Williams’s claim “that in ethics, reflection can destroy knowledge,” does not imply only the evaluative outlook implicit in a thick ethical concept is destroyed, as if the evaluative could be separated from the factual content of the concept. Admittedly, this last point has created much debate and confusion. But crucially there is no mere loss of normativity, since to give up a concept could mean changing from having an engaged grasp to a disengaged grasp of a thick ethical concept. Thus, we cannot separate the evaluative outlook of, what Moore helpfully clarifies, as an ‘engaged grasp’ of a thick ethical concept, in order to distinguish this from a ‘disengaged grasp’ of a concept.48 Even a disengaged

72  Pamela Sue Anderson grasp of a thick ethical concept involves both descriptive (factual) and evaluative content.

A feminist philosopher’s grasp of ethical concepts Building on the previous section, I note that the commentary that Moore wrote on Williams’s complex conception of thick and thin ethical concepts is useful for understanding what, I contend, a feminist philosopher finds difficult in tackling these concepts. The difficulty arises from both the descriptive and the evaluative dimensions of these concepts, generating a deeply embedded obstacle to addressing the sexism in philosophy of religion. It is not easy to tease out the sexism penetrating the content – both the facts and norms – of world-guided and action-guiding theistic concepts precisely because their embedded and interlinked content has rendered theism resistant to change on a social level at least; the strength of theistically thick ethical concepts can be recognized in the fear which prevents actually becoming critically open to social and material blind spots in our conceptual knowledge. To overcome more or less pernicious bias requires critical openness to changing the facts and the norms, which have determined our ethical outlooks and actions. So, in attempting to recognize what needs to be changed, if sexist, homophobic, and other violent forms of epistemic injustice are to be addressed, Williams’s philosophical account of concepts that are both world-guided and action guiding becomes extraordinarily helpful. Saying that theistically thick ethical concepts are world-guided means, to repeat, that they are capable of expressing knowledge and action guiding means, to repeat, that they are vulnerable to reflection. So, ethical reflection will destroy theistic knowledge when the theist’s thick ethical concepts no longer express knowledge and so, no longer guide action according to the omni-perfect norms of the man-God relation. Theistic concepts, which after reflection are found to fail to express knowledge of the world, will necessarily fail to motivate the reflecting subject to act as the world-outlook of traditional theism has required. Nevertheless, although reflection destroys knowledge, so that concepts are no longer grasped in an engaged way, these concepts can still be employed and grasped in a disengaged way in discussions with Christian philosophers of religion, say, by non-theists. For example, one might apply omnibenevolent to God as one of ‘His’ traditional attributes in an engaged way as a thick ethical concept. If so, this concept would be world-guided, expressing knowledge of God as perfectly good, along with his other attributes, and it would be action guiding as long as God’s goodness gives us confidence to know and do the good. Now, precisely because God’s perfect goodness is vulnerable to reflection, the latter might destroy knowledge of what is perfectly good, and then we would no longer have that knowledge motivating good deeds. Similarly, when reflection destroys knowledge of omnipotence as a thick ethical concept, the reflecting subject will no longer

Ethical reflection on ‘God’  73 have knowledge of a world in which divine power is supreme for the human outlook, and divine power and perfect goodness are no longer reasons for confident ethical action. But of course, this does not negate the disengaged grasp of non-world-guided, ‘thin’ concept of ethical action. Williams himself describes a ‘thin ethical concept’ in contrast to a thick ethical concept. The former is similar to the latter, having both factual and evaluative content; however, the thin ethical concept is distinctive in not being world-guided. Instead, the thinness of the ethical concept means it is shareable across the different outlooks of ethically specific social worlds. And yet, even a thin concept – say, ‘integrity (of life)’ – requires a normative constraint. Now, it is my contention that the necessary relation between factual and normative content of both thin and thick ethical concepts can help (us) to articulate how the ‘sexism’ (similarly, the racism; the homophobia) of a concept is bound to both its factual and its normative content. So, roughly, when it comes to sexism in the use of philosophical concepts there is no neutral fact or value: to claim neutrality is to be self-deceived. For example, some philosophers have said that logic is a ‘male’ subject. If so, there is a gender or sexist bias in that view of logic. In this way, we can understand how feminist ethical reflection, like Williams’s self-conscious ethical reflection, becomes part of the philosophical practice it considers, and such reflection will inherently modify that practice. To illustrate how a particular philosopher might reject another ethical concept, let us turn to a brief passage from a philosophical text, where reflection destroys knowledge: after this reflection, a thick ethical concept will no longer be capable of either expressing knowledge or guiding action. Take the concept ‘femininity’ in Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, where reflection on ‘femininity’ shows the extent to which time changes the grasp of this concept. In Korsgaard’s words, If someone says that aggressiveness is not feminine the response to him will not be that aggressiveness is feminine or that aggressiveness is great. The response is “let’s not talk that way.” The complaint that has been launched against [the values embodied in the evaluative concept ‘feminine,’ or equally ‘masculine’] is not that they were false or misleading but that they were straitjackets, stunting everybody’s growth. It is that people who hold themselves and others to these ideals do not flourish. [The concepts] must therefore be abandoned or revised.49 We might say that ‘femininity’ as a thick ethical concept made unintelligible experiences of particular women who experiences were simply impossible to make intelligible due to the straitjacket of this concept of gender. A hermeneutic injustice will arise when femininity as thick ethical concept generates a wrong done to apparently un-feminine social experiences, and ethical reflection would, then, have made it possible to reject this concept as inadequate for the social experiences of some women, where the concept had been grasped in an engaged way. In turn, recognizing this hermeneutic

74  Pamela Sue Anderson injustice will have opened an outlook for new action guiding concepts (i.e., new thick ethical concepts), which would, in turn, help to cultivate epistemic justice. Let us take additional example of a thick ethical concept or, perhaps we might also call it, a theistically thick ethical concept. ‘Moral obligation’ is the concept on which the twentieth-century philosopher and Christian Elizabeth Anscombe reflected: Anscombe urged her philosophical readers to reflect on moral obligation for its role in contemporary ethics.50 After reflection, she claims that it is apparent that moral obligation has its origin in Christian ethics; and this means that moral obligation in modern moral philosophy has merely assumed a divine lawgiver, God, as the necessary condition for moral action. She concludes that without God as the divine lawgiver, this moral obligation will not make sense, or, what we might say in light of what has been said already, it no longer guides moral action for those philosophers who no longer grasp the concept of divine lawgiver in an engaged way (as was the case in previous ethical societies). In Anscombe’s words, The concepts of . . . moral obligation and moral duty . . . ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible: because they are survivals or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it . . .51 To have a “law” conception of ethics is to hold that what is needed . . . is required by divine law. Naturally it is not possible to have such a conception unless you believe in God as a law-giver . . . But if such a conception is given up, it is a natural result that the concepts of “obligation,” of being bound or required as by a law remain though they had lost their root.52 In the same context of twentieth-century moral philosophical debates about moral obligation, Williams argues that ‘morality’ itself is ‘a peculiar institution’ with its historically contingent origin in Christianity.53 In a later context, and with the help of a Nietzschean methodology, Williams writes a genealogical story about the origin of morality in Christianity: Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay on Genealogy54 enables reflection on our knowledge of morality, demonstrating that what we have accepted as morality has relied upon God as an omnipotent lawgiver for what it is to be moral and good. Here, if following Williams’s genealogy, reflection destroys knowledge in concluding that morality (as a system of obligations) is completely contingent on a particular history of western philosophy or, if you like, of philosophical theology. (Note that Williams opts for ‘ethics’ rather than ‘morality.’) Now, if we no longer have that moral knowledge, it is more likely that ‘reflection will destroy religion’ too. At least the Nietzschean genealogy demonstrates that Christianity is not a necessary part of our ethical outlook. Thus, we find that religious like ethical practice is vulnerable to reflection.

Ethical reflection on ‘God’  75 It seems to follow from Williams’s Nietzschean genealogy of a concept – the omnipotent lawgiver God – that reflection destroys knowledge, and that it will destroy religion. Yet we – or some of us – also begin to realize that this use of ‘destroy’ is not necessarily a negative, inasmuch as such destruction is about time changing how we make sense of things. I submit this ‘negative’ is in fact liberating when it comes to ethical reflection. A feminist philosopher rejects a concept – like an all-powerful, perfectly good, law-enforcing God – and she becomes free to try to make sense of gender, gender relations, and facts and norms in philosophy and in theology in new, non-oppressive ways. Crucially, the (feminist) philosopher who rejects a concept on sexist grounds will not be tied to contingent and oppressive social and material relations (which have been determined and enforced by an anthropomorphized divine ideal).

On reflection: looking back and looking forward The motivating question for me in this chapter has been what is it to reject ‘God’ as a thick ethical concept? And I hope to have given it some sort of answer. But whatever my answer, I believe that analytic philosophy of religion – and so, philosophical theology – as a feminist-humanistic discipline could fruitfully become more aware of its sex/gender constraints by encouraging ethical reflection and critique in this branch of philosophy. A feminist critique of philosophy of religion considers both how some of our theistic concepts have trapped women (and men) in patterns of thinking and living, and why these can no longer be sustained, if we are to tackle exclusions of women and some non-theistic men from contemporary philosophical theology. Basically, I have argued that, in philosophy of religion, reflection might destroy knowledge for a woman (or man) who reflects on her (his) own possession of theistically thick ethical concepts and who confronts an implicit gendering.55 These are concepts that have guided action in a world where some subjects have outlooks constrained by self- or other-destructive understandings of their own or another’s sex/gender, sexual orientation, race, and so on. A feminist philosopher who finds that reflection destroys knowledge expressed from a gender-biased outlook faces the wholly positive possibility of creating new concepts for contemporary ethics and theology. We have briefly considered the reality of epistemic injustice. Theistically thick ethical concepts, often held in ignorance of their origin and content, have disadvantaged women. This injustice has undermined certain subjects of knowledge; in particular, testimonial injustice means that the testimonies of certain subjects have not been heard. (I would like to do more work on testimonial injustice, exploring specific examples.) It is important that both women and men should be enabled to contest injustice, and for this, we need better ethical understandings of our social and material locatedness. I hope it was clear at what point my own feminist philosophical interpretation builds and perhaps implicitly criticizes Williams and Moore for not

76  Pamela Sue Anderson looking forward to a re-visioning of our understandings of gender; we need to understand how gender intersects with religion, sexual orientation, race, other social, and material mechanisms of oppression. That reflection might destroy religion, which has been guided by false facts and norms about human knowers, is not the end of the story. A contemporary philosopher who comes to reject a concept can complete the Nietzschean assertion that ‘God’ is dead, as Nietzsche’s madmen also says, “and we have killed Him!”56 In this light, it is time to consider Williams’s contention that we write a honest biography of God, to allocate His legacy as a person who left a wealth of concepts, myths, and stories about the relations between human and divine, between man and ‘his’ god, between good and bad, evil and good, between women and gender. However, it is also time to realize that feminism as ‘a brand of atheism’ creates a break in time. Admittedly, although it is ‘not of its time’ this atheism, as we have seen, is held by both feminist and non-feminist analytic philosophers who think it is time for change, especially when it comes to the concept ‘God.’57 In the end, we have a break with Christian patriarchy, which has been supported by an absolute metaphysics of traditional theism, and this means rejecting the thick ethical concept – of God’s perfect goodness – which has been justified in the face of the innocent suffering of at least half the human race simply on the grounds of a woman’s sex. This perfect goodness, in the face of what appears to be the inexplicable suffering in simply being born a woman, is rejected precisely when the theist’s ‘God’ is no longer actionguiding concept. Thus I conclude this chapter, having attempted, in Moore’s terms, “to reflect on one’s own activity” by trying “to make sense, in particular, of the sense that one makes of things.”58 To repeat, what Moore also says, “[One] way in which metaphysics is able to make a difference, and the one that seems . . . the most important and the most exciting, is by providing us with radically new concepts by which we live.”59 So, too, for a feminist philosopher to reject a concept is to begin a truthful account of how we might make sense of things through new concepts that are not constrained by normative gender violence or by an unbridgeable gulf between ‘man’ and ‘His’ divine ideal. For an alternative example of a possible concept of ‘God,’ contemporary theologians might turn to the divine, which is immanent in this life.60 Or we could turn to a suggestion made in Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness: “Instead of traditional theism we [might] discover . . . a form of rationalism, which has ‘god or nature’ (deus sive natura) as its ground: [then] no personal, male-gendered deity is implied here, yet a creative corporeality is.”61

Notes 1 A. W. Moore, “Maxims and Thick Ethical Concepts,” Ratio XIX (June 2006): 129–47; Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics Things (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 20–1; also see Bernard Williams, Ethics and

Ethical reflection on ‘God’  77 the Limits of Philosophy, with a Commentary by A. W. Moore (London: Routledge, 2006), 142–8 and 218. Concerning this concept of God, or the cluster of concepts, I leave open to the readers the question about whether ‘God’ with all ‘His’ traditional (omni-perfect) attributes should be considered to be “a cluster of concepts” or “a cluster concept”: for the former use, see A. W. Moore, The Infinite, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–2; and for the latter use, see Natalie Stojlar, “The Politics of Identity and the Metaphysics of Diversity: Conceptions of Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy,” in The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, vol. 8, ed. by D. Dahlstrom (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, 2000), 21–32. (I roughly follow Moore’s use of cluster of concepts.) 2 Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things, 1–22. 3 Ibid., 1. 4 Ibid., 5. 5 Ibid., 7. 6 Ibid., 20 emphasis added. 7 Ibid. 8 For question about whether ‘God’ with all ‘His’ traditional (omni-perfect) attributes should be considered to be ‘a cluster of concepts’ or ‘a cluster concept,’ see note 1. 9 For a very helpful study – and clarification – of Williams’s claim, see A. W. Moore, “Williams on Ethics, Knowledge and Reflection,” Philosophy 78 (2003): 337–54. 10 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 148, 167–9, 218–19, 223–4. Here is a helpful quotation concerning how ‘reflection might destroy knowledge’: “Earlier I said that reflection might destroy knowledge because thick ethical concepts that were used in a less reflective state might be driven from use by reflection, while the more abstract and general ethical thoughts that would probably take their place would not satisfy the conditions for propositional knowledge. To say that knowledge is destroyed in such a case is not to say that particular beliefs that once were true now cease to be true. Nor is it to say that people turn out never to have known the things they thought they knew. What it means is that these people once had beliefs of a certain kind, which were in many cases pieces of knowledge; but now, because after reflection they can no longer use concepts essential to those beliefs, they can no longer form beliefs of that kind. A certain kind of knowledge with regard to particular situations, which used to guide them round their social world and helped to form it, is no longer available to them. Knowledge is destroyed because a potentiality for a certain kind of knowledge has been destroyed; moreover, if they think about their beliefs, they will now see them as the observer saw them, as knowledge they do not share” (169). 11 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy,168. 12 Pamela Sue Anderson, “ ‘‘God’ is Dead:’ What it is for a feminist philosopher to reject a concept,” paper delivered to the British Society for Philosophy of Religion, 11 October 2013, Oriel College, Oxford, UK. 13 Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, 387–8. 14 Ibid., 388. 15 In this case, ‘the survivor’ whom Jean Paul Sartre has in mind is George Bataille. 16 Jean Paul Sartre, “A New Mystic,” in Critical Essays, trans. by Chris Turner (London and New York: Seagull Press, 2010), 234; cf. Jean Paul Sartre, Cahiers du Sud, Paris, 1943. 17 Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 8. 18 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 33. 19 Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, 20–1; cf. A. W. Moore, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes and Variations in Kant’s Moral and

78  Pamela Sue Anderson Religious Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2012), ‘Variation One;’ Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, with a Commentary on the text by A. W. Moore (London: Routledge, 2006), 140ff. 20 Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 8. 21 See Pamela Sue Anderson, “Feminist Challenges to Conceptions of God,” Models of God and Alternative Realities, ed. by Jeannine Diller and Asa Kasher (Dordrecht-New York-London: Springer, 2013), 1013–24; cf. Luce Irigaray, “Divine Women,” Sexes and Genealogies, 57–72, “Toward a Divine in the Feminine,” Women and the Divine: Touching Transcendence, ed. by Gillian Howie and J’annine Jobling (New York; Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 13–26. 22 Luce Irigaray, “Divine women,” Sexes and Genealogies, trans. by Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 57–72. Cf. Pamela Sue Anderson, “Transcendence and Feminist Philosophy: On Avoiding Apotheosis,” Divine Women: Touching Transcendence, ed. by Gillian Howie and J’annine Jobling (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 27–54. 23 Bernard Williams, “Philosophy as a humanistic discipline (2000),” in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline selected, edited and with an introduction by A. W. Moore (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 180–99. 24 For a discussion of the sex/gender distinction, see Pamela Sue Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Rationality and the Myths of Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell), 5–13. 25 I assume at a minimum, consistent to Kant’s practical philosophy, that ‘pernicious’ immaturity includes failing to respect another human being by treating her as mere means. 26 Pamela Sue Anderson, “In/Sincerity: Scholar, Clergy(man), Teacher,” keynote paper given at the UK Kant Society Conference, Heythrop College, University of London, August 2013. For a brief, critical discussion of the various English translations of Unmundigheit see Henry E. Allison, Essays on Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 230–1. Note that Unmundigheit is translated ‘immaturity’ by H. B. Nisbet, ‘minority’ by Mary Gregor and ‘tutelage’ by Lewis Beck; Allison follows Beck, translating Unmundigheit as ‘tutelage’ (230n6), but I have followed Nisbet, using ‘immaturity’ as the translation of the German. 27 For background this highly significant distinction between ‘Kant’s’ and ‘Kantian’ ethics, see Onora O’Neill, “Kantian Ethics,” in The Blackwell Companion to Ethics, ed. by Peter Singer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 175–85. Also, for the distinction between ‘themes’ and ‘variations’ in Kant’s moral and religious philosophy, see A. W. Moore, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty (London: Routledge, 2003). 28 Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: ‘what is Enlightenment?’ (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 1–2. 29 Pamela Sue Anderson, Re-Visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2012), 44–6, 128, 206–9, 214–16. 30 For the claim that ‘in ethics, reflection can destroy knowledge,’ see Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 148, also 147–8, 167–9, 218–9, 223–4. This claim includes rejecting an old concept for a new one, as does Williams’s account of moving “in a direction that will destroy religion,” see A. W. Moore “Williams on Ethics, Knowledge and Reflection,” Philosophy 78 (2003): 337–54. 31 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 33. 32 Ibid., 33. 33 Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, 387–8. 34 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5–8. 35 This example is discussed in Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 23–9 and 94–8.

Ethical reflection on ‘God’  79 36 For further discussion of the pervasiveness of epistemic injustice in epistemology, see Jose Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice and Resistant Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12–24, 90–109. 37 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5–7, 39–59, and Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 12–24. 38 Following Judith Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 7; Miranda Fricker points out that ‘injustice’ is “a normal social baseline,” that is, “testimonial injustice is a normal part of discursive life”; see Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 39; also 39–58. 39 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 147–69. 40 Again, I borrow the terms of ‘epistemic injustice’ and ‘testimonial injustice’ from Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 147ff. 41 Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Sally Haslanger, Resisting Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 42 For technical terms and concepts developed in discussion of epistemic injustice, see Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, pp. 6–7, 146ff. 43 I discuss Moore’s definition of ‘conceptual philosophy’ in Anderson, Re-Visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion, 66–87; cf. A. W. Moore, “Arguing With Derrida,” Ratio: An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy, social issue, ed. by Simon Glendinning, XIII/4 (December 2000): 381–6. 44 Anderson, Re-Visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion, 113–33. 45 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Guest Editor’s Introduction,” Sophia (2014). 46 Moore, “Williams on Ethics, Knowledge and Reflection,” Philosophy, 337–54. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, with a commentary on the text by Moore, 147–8, 167–9, 218–9, 223–4. 47 For reflection destroying ‘knowledge’ and ‘religion,’ see Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 148 and p. 33, respectively. 48 Moore, “Williams on Ethics, Knowledge and Reflection,” 337–54. 49 Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 76–7. 50 Elizabeth Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in Virtue Ethics, ed. by Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, Oxford Readings in Philosophy series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 26–44. 51 Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 26. 52 Ibid., 31. 53 Bernard Williams, “Morality, the Peculiar Institution,” in Virtue Ethics, ed. by Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, Oxford Readings in Philosophy series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 45–65. 54 Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay on Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 55 By gendering, I mean the generally hidden process of determining the qualitative (as distinct from the numerical) identities of bodies in their culturally recognized relations to sex, gender, and other material and social factors; the latter have been mechanisms of oppression in determining what it is for non-privileged women to become sexually specific subjects within a particular location. This gendering is implicit in philosophical and religious texts. Yet the gender of women and men needs to be made apparent; see Anderson, Re-Visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion, 1–27. 56 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 181 (paragraph 125). 57 I have appropriated Moore’s description of Nietzsche’s ‘brand of atheism’ for a feminist philosopher: there is a close rapport to a Nietzschean philosopher as described here; see Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, 387–8. If

80  Pamela Sue Anderson I replace ‘Nietzsche,’ ‘he,’ ‘him’ with ‘feminist philosopher,’ ‘she,’ ‘her’ this gives us the following: “What [a feminist] is doing is rejecting not a hypothesis but a concept: a way of making sense of things. [She] is calling time on something with a history, something which [she] thinks has run its course. This may seem to be belied by the fact that [she herself] makes use of the concept to achieve [her] end. . . . [T]he crucial point is that [a feminist philosopher]’s brand of atheism is not just a piece of abstract metaphysics. It is a break, in its time but not of its time, with a major cultural force in Western civilization.” 58 Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, 7. 59 Ibid., 20. 60 Pamela Sue Anderson, “An Eruption of Mystical Life in Feminist Action: Mysticism and Confidence After Bergson,” in Mysticism in the French Tradition: Erupstions from France, ed. by Louise Nelstrop (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2015), 37–58. 61 Anderson, Re-Visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion, 152.

5 Emptying God The ethics of theology in Merleau-Ponty’s work1 Mayra Rivera

“There is a scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words. Is that surprising?”2 With these words, Zadie Smith begins an article in the New York Review of Books in which she reflects on what is being lost each and every day through global warming. Each country has its “local sadness.” The outlook for her small island of Jamaica is one of devastation, for example. How can we respond to the loss of whole islands and peoples? We, like Smith, would expect Christians to be particularly inclined to protect the earth they affirm as God’s gift. But to her surprise, Smith sees Christians trapped in cycles of guilt, shame, and apocalyptic doom that keep them unresponsive. Smith imagines herself facing her future granddaughter – repeating with irony a common trope of the elegies to worldly destruction – as she wrestles to explain our slowness to act. It would not suffice to explain, “That we’d just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking.” Nor would it be enough to say that we knew things could change, but we could only imagine it as an infinitely deferred apocalypse. None of these would help us move from asking, “What have we done?” to asking, “What can we do?” We need to relate more closely to what is happening, she suggests, to experience the changes in seasons through our daily practices, to miss the presence of that particular bird, or to taste this particular fruit. We need practices and words that help us sense the intimacy of the loss and move us to more sustainable ways of living. Smith’s words inspire me to reflect on the practices that connect me intimately with the earth – with the northern city where I live as well as with the Caribbean island of my birth and each one’s local sadness. But how would such an orientation inflect the way I address the question “What can theology do?” I call it an “orientation,” because I think it demands more than merely including climate change as a valid topic for our ethical discussions – and for Christian ethical discussions in particular. Seeking an ethical vision that engages our own material and affective imbrications in the devastation and the losses that it brings about also requires exploring the ontologies that inform our understandings of theology and ethics.

82  Mayra Rivera I approach the topic of the ethical possibilities of theology by focusing on the relationship between ethical principles, moral subjects, and the worlds in which we act. Smith’s account of the obstacles to meaningful personal responses to climate change points to the limitations of undergirding visions of human beings simply as subjects informed by external principles – and thus marked by guilt and shame – or simply the objects of external historical, planetary, or metaphysical forces – and thus doomed. Both cases assume the independence between the moral human being and the environment, the devastation of which she may or may not address. I explore here the ethical possibilities of a different way of looking at these relationships, one that foregrounds the constitutive material links between human life and the world and, therefore, the necessities and not just the possibilities for our involvement. Interest in materiality was already part of liberation thought in the 1970s. Thinkers like Enrique Dussel recognized that an ethics of liberation required theologies that move beyond spirit/matter or soul/body dualisms that tend merely to separate religious pursuits from social commitments. The aim was not to privilege the social over the religious, but rather to return theology to the teachings and practices of Jesus, which emphasize the material elements of life by healing the sick, feeding the poor, protecting the stranger. It is from these practices, liberation theologians argued, that Christians can infer the characteristics of the reign of God that Jesus proclaims and thus can come to know God. I rehearse this well-known history here because the tendency to equate talk of “material concerns” with discussions of social class may lead us to forget the embodied dimensions of liberation. And although they follow different intellectual paths, the focus on embodied life converges with feminist commitments.3 The work of Pamela Sue Anderson articulates this orientation for a feminist philosophy of religion as “striving for a joyful continuation of bodily existence,” of bodily relations.4 A joyful bodily existence requires material sustenance as well as social environments – and these are ultimately inseparable from each other. Concerns with food, water, health, and protection lead us today to think about materiality more broadly. We recognize the links between poverty and vulnerability to the effects of climate change. The recently released report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states, Throughout the 21st century, climate change impacts are projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security, and prolong existing and create new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger.5 To take embodied life as a point of departure thus implies attending to the complex imbrication between human practices and the material constitution of the world. This chapter builds on liberation and feminist approaches that take embodiment as their starting point, and it explores the potential of a view

Empty God  83 of incarnation as “emptying God” as grounds for a broader material ontology. My argument unfolds as a dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty in four movements. First, it discusses divine emptying as the grounds for a turn toward the world – indeed toward the flesh. Second, it addresses the implications of that turn toward the world for knowledge and then unpacks the qualities of “flesh.” The last section turns to questions of language, to what an ontology of flesh suggests about ways of naming God. Why Merleau-Ponty? The philosopher wrestled with the ethical failures of Christianity in a significantly different context – in the face of the holocaust and other atrocities of the twentieth century. When he engaged Christianity explicitly, he did so by assessing the ethical implications of such ideas. He refused to equate faith with good faith. He refused either to dismiss Christianity or to justify it. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the emergence of his philosophy of flesh without understanding his debt to Christian theology. Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of an ethical orientation as emerging from an incarnational theology is only part of the reason I chose to engage him here. For reasons that are not only a matter of choice, in the past, I have addressed the question of the relationship between ethics and theology in dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas and the reception of his work in Latin American liberation theology. I continue to return to Levinas’s interpretation of the third commandment – “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of God” – as an ethical prohibition. You shall never name God except on the basis of ethical responsibility encountered in the face of another human being.6 However, recently I have sought the company of Merleau-Ponty rather than Levinas, in search of a more broadly material framework for envisioning the grounds of ethical responsibility – in other words, to help me understand terms like “ethics,” “politics,” “ideology,” and the like as inextricable from materiality. I have found Merleau-Ponty’s work valuable for this purpose. His work analyzes the political consequences of separating the realm of ideas and values from the material, and moves from there to phenomenological explorations and finally to a critical and constructive engagement with prevalent understandings of being and knowledge – ontology and epistemology. These philosophical discussions concern Christian theology both because theology has often assumed the very positions that Merleau-Ponty criticizes, and because it has traditions that resist them. For Merleau-Ponty, this was the implication of the incarnation, understood as the emptying of God in the flesh of the earth.

Grounding Christian ethics Beginning with his early writings in the 1930s, Merleau-Ponty took to task Christian teachings that seemed to undermine Christianity’s commitments to social justice. He defended Christianity against charges that it could foster an impoverished life. But he also challenged Christianity. He noted, for instance, how the devaluation of works in the doctrine of justification by faith fostered a preoccupation with the relation between “each soul and

84  Mayra Rivera its God,” and thus a turn toward the self.7 “From there,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “one is easily led to abandon love of one’s neighbor and to invest the moral functioning of society with ‘authority’.” He concedes, “There is perhaps not a necessary sequence here,” but the abandonment of responsibility toward society appeared to be a historical fact.8 The link between this idea of the inner self and the orientation away from social responsibility that he had merely identified before, he explored more robustly in his 1946 essay, “Faith and Good Faith.” The essay opens by lambasting Catholicism as an institution for its inconsistent stance in relation to social problems.9 Merleau-Ponty is not content, however, to locate the problem solely in the contingencies of institutional history, to regard the failures of the church as accidental. Instead, he contends, “There must be an ambiguity in Catholicism as a spiritual way of life to correspond to its ambiguity as a social phenomenon.” The source of the ambiguity, he suggests, is nothing less than an inconsistent view of God. Christianity holds on to “a belief in both an interior and an exterior God.”10 The interior God dwells in the inner man. Merleau-Ponty traces this interior God in the inner man to Augustine – and thus the resonances with Luther’s teachings, which he critiqued a decade earlier, are not coincidental. There are important differences between Augustine’s soul, which is always dependent on God, and the autonomous self of modernity, of course. But Merleau-Ponty worried that the belief in a God accessed through the inner self implies that one seeks God by turning away from things.11 “Whether God is the model according to which my spirit was created or whether I experience and, so to speak, touch God when I become conscious of myself as spirit, God is in any case on the side of the subject rather than on the side of the world,” he says.12 Merleau-Ponty is referring to Christian notions of imago Dei and the spiritual senses, respectively, but his main concern is with the general tendency to imagine interiority as a site of immediacy. The assumption of an immediate connection between the self and a God imagined as clarity and light ultimately makes God indistinguishable from the interior self where it is found, and which it founds. And it detaches the self from the world. In this model, one is obedient to God by assenting to the subject’s will and this makes faith necessarily good faith. While this God is conceived as immediately accessible to the individual who turns inwards, it is detached from and unaffected by the world in general. This God is always already complete and absolute. No human action or worldly strife would affect the interior God’s perfection. But “The incarnation changes everything.”13 In the incarnation, God is “externalized.” Merleau-Ponty’s description of the process follows Hegel: this event marks a transition from the reign of the Father, through the incarnation, to the reign of the spirit. From the outset, I note the supersessionist tone of this schema. In his later works, Merleau-Ponty would no longer adopt the logic of temporal progress ­ implicit in this description. In his 1952 essay, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” for instance, Merleau-Ponty critiques the contemporary

Empty God  85 tendency to draw parallels between the “ ‘horizontal transcendence’ of history and the ‘vertical transcendence’ of God and argues that an “idol of history” “secularizes a rudimentary conception of God.”14 He counters this notion of history, and its theology, offering his own reading of the Christian God. He states, Christianity is, among other things, the recognition of a mystery in the relations of man and God, which stems precisely from the fact that the Christian God wants nothing to do with a vertical relation of subordination . . . and Christ attests that God would not be fully God without becoming fully human.15 In this kenotic reading, the incarnation is thus evidence of the ongoing relationship between God and the world – one that is not circumscribed to one event in human history. Eventually Merleau-Ponty would focus on developing a philosophy of flesh, without rooting that philosophical turn explicitly on the Christ event. In “Faith and Good Faith,” Merleau-Ponty insists that the transformation brought about by the incarnation is a divine emptying without reserve. “God is no longer in Heaven but in human society and communication,” Merleau-Ponty says.16 God’s appearance in the world thus means that the search for God shall not be directed toward the heavens, but is reoriented toward the world. Yet this interpretation implies more than a spatial shift (from the heavens to the world); it also rethinks the nature of God and the way we seek God.

Knowledge of God This God is not a self-contained perfection, outside of or unmoved by the world. God is in the world. But this mode of presence does not imply immediacy to the self – as a view of an interior God implies. Indeed, neither “presence” nor “absence” seems to be an appropriate term to talk about knowledge of an incarnate God. Instead, it is a matter of pondering how one encounters God in the flesh – for which we need to be guided by our experience and knowledge of the sensible world. No knowledge of the sensible is ever absolute, unmediated, or devoid of mystery. In the incarnation, the divine mystery is not the effect of distance or separation, but rather of God becoming flesh. The task for human beings is “no longer a matter of rediscovering the transparence of God outside the world but a matter of entering body and soul into an enigmatic life, the obscurities of which cannot be dissipated.”17 Entering into that life means acknowledging that our complete being is caught up in and is part of that very world. All our knowledge of the world is embodied knowledge and it is necessarily entangled in the world of which it is part. There would be no knowledge without bodies and no bodies without their constitutive relations to the world.

86  Mayra Rivera Christians claim that the incarnate God was seen and left “words and memories” in the sensible world. These words and memories do not give access to God directly. Engaging their meaning always requires “commentary and interpretation of that ambiguous message whose energy is never exhausted.”18 Hence, the paradigmatic genre of the gospels’ teachings is the parable. Merleau-Ponty does not elaborate on the significance of parables or why he considers them particularly appropriate for knowledge of the incarnate God. But his reasons may be deduced from his philosophy of language, which closely links language to perception.19 So, for example, one may deduce that rather than communicating through abstract concepts, a parable foregrounds lived experiences. The message of the parable depends on the story it tells. Speaking of the sower and the seeds, a fig tree, the birds of heaven, laborers of a vineyard – these parables appeal to specific modes of work, communal expectations, features of local geography – even of a region’s “local sadness.” They invite the listeners to participate in the process of meaning making, which is always open ended. These traits of parables express a feature of incarnate knowing that Merleau-Ponty emphasizes: its emergence through engagements with the sensible world, engagements that are necessarily situated and constitutive of the knower. This world in which God empties Godself is not a collection of independent objects available for human manipulation, but rather a condition of knowing and becoming. Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the relationship between religion and philosophy reflects this view. He argues elsewhere, If matters of faith can in fact provide food for thought . . . we must admit that faith reveals certain aspects of being, that thought (which ignores them) does not “tie it all up,” and that faith’s “things not seen” and reason’s evidence cannot be set apart as two domains.20 Faith, like knowledge, is sought and exercised in and through embodied relationships. Placing faith in the midst of the sensible life, which is always enigmatic, entails admitting that faith is not certainty, that faith cannot be presumed to be good faith. This is not to dismiss faith, however, but to integrate it into all areas of life and knowledge. “Faith – in the sense of an unreserved commitment which is never completely justified – enters the picture as soon as we leave the realm of pure geometrical ideas and have to deal with the existing world.”21 This implies that all commitments are subject to revision and critique. For Merleau-Ponty, this principle is at the heart of Christianity expressed in the commandment against idolatry. Like Levinas, Merleau-Ponty relates this religious obligation to ethical responsibility. A saint negates a God who would be the only guarantor of the natural order, who would consecrate not only the world’s goodness but the world’s evil as well, who would justify the slavery, injustice, the tears of children, the agony of the innocent.22

Empty God  87 Like the saint, the philosopher has a duty to critique idolatry. Thus ­ erleau-Ponty proposes a negative philosophy modeled after a negative theM ology. In the political realm, this entails a critique of false structures – those that obstruct a person’s relationship with the world to which she belongs. It also entails the critique of false ideas. And here the judgment requires attention to the concrete realities of lived bodies. For example, the idea of liberty becomes false “as soon as it becomes only an idea and we begin to defend liberty instead of free people.”23 The criteria for such judgments emerge from assessments of how structures, ideas, and the practices that they foster contribute to or hinder a person’s engagement with the world. For the possibility of positive engagements with the world – a world that is both material and social – is essential for a “joyful continuation of bodily existence,” to invoke Anderson’s formulation once more. A negative philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty understands it, is not a turn to nothingness. Negation is only the beginning of attention, of a seriousness toward the world. Thus perceptual faith also implies affirmation: “Each of our perceptions is an act of faith in that it affirms more than we strictly know, since objects are inexhaustible and our information limited.”24 Each of our daily acts of relating in the world entails a commitment to what can never be fully justified. That affirmation is crucial for commitments to social justice, for it takes its place in the real and in the belief that we inhabit the same world – despite the limits of our situated knowledge.25 Merleau-Ponty concludes that Christianity does not follow the incarnation in all its consequences. Christianity is satisfied neither with an interior God nor with an incarnate divinity, moving inconsistently between the two. And here lies a source of its ambiguous political positions: “When it remains true to the Incarnation, it can be revolutionary, but the religion of the Father is conservative.”26 Merleau-Ponty’s argument is not simply about philosophical coherence, however. The ethical stakes are high. Because Christianity continues to cling to an “infinite Knowledge” that has “already settled everything,” its central teaching is undermined: “Love changes into cruelty, the reconciliation of men with each other and with the world will come to naught.” Ultimately, “the Incarnation turns into suffering because it is incomplete.”27 The incompletion stems from Christian attachment to the religion of absolute, detached knowledge, its insistence in looking for God in the heavens rather than on earth. This manifests in Christianity’s social commitments. “God will not fully have come to the earth,” MerleauPonty states, unexpectedly adopting a prophetic tone, “until the Church feels the same obligation toward other men as it does toward its own ministers, toward the houses of Guernica as toward its own temples.”28 Here the “incarnation” is more than God’s self-emptying action; it also denotes a possibility yet to be realized in the world – a self-emptying of Christianity toward the world. Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the incarnation as the complete emptying of God pushes against the limit of authoritative Christian interpretations – indeed beyond Christianity itself. But he is in good company in seeing the

88  Mayra Rivera incarnation as more than a description of God’s move toward the world, as a prescription for human life. It is as if it were necessary for God to become incarnate for human beings to understand who they are, to help human beings live. As if a carnal God were needed for human beings to consent to being flesh.29 This could be a commentary on the church fathers, but instead it is a scholar’s appraisal of the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s work. It is not that Christians decide to privilege the world, but that the Christian God has done so. The incarnation requires Christians to do likewise, to give themselves to the world. The relation implies obligation. Merleau-Ponty’s 1946 essay ends with little assurance that the most significant implications of the incarnation will be embraced, as I said before. Yet flesh becomes the central concept in Merleau-Ponty’s later works, as if the thinker himself had continued to follow the path toward the world through his commitment to a mode of philosophy grounded in the emptying of God in the flesh.

A carnal ontology Flesh highlights the materiality of all relations, while pushing against the tendency to reduce materiality to inert substance, fully graspable and controllable. That it is all gathered under the term “flesh,” rather than matter, is significant. “The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance,” Merleau-Ponty writes. Envisioning flesh as an element averts the dualisms that sneak in whenever terms such as matter, mind, spirit, and substance are used. Modern dualisms predispose us to associate matter with passivity or recalcitrance. And in such depictions, flesh tends to assume similar traits – as a passive, death-prone aspect of corporeality, even with resistance to the higher pursuits of life. An elemental poetics of flesh seeks to disrupt these modern tendencies. Merleau-Ponty’s relational ontology, flesh is an element that weaves together all things. Flesh twists and turns, constituting realities that never exhaust it. Flesh is relationship, the interweaving between bodies and things in the world. It is that which traverses and constitute us – materially. It connects the perceiving body and the thing perceived. Making possible the “communication” between the sensing and the sensed – a separation that joins. But the relationship it mediates is never between two self-identical, constituted things that then encounter one another. Flesh is constitutive of my body and of the world. Yet it does not belong to me and it does not belong to you. It is an element – like water or air – on which we all depend and to which we all contribute. There is a flesh of things, but it is not a thing contained within bodies – not even properly a thing. Although Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the incarnation relies on the apparent opposition between the inner God/

Empty God  89 man and the incarnate God, his ontology of flesh can be better described as countering the assumed isolation between the inner person and the outer world. Indeed, he had argued before that the incarnation reopens the distinction between interior and exterior. The flesh of our bodies is formed by multiple interactions with the world – directly by the food we eat and the air we breathe and indirectly by the social structures that shape the world around us and by our access to the world through laws and practices. Each of our bodies has its history, however, its own “memories of the flesh” – traces of our ancestry, of the places where we have lived, the work we have done, the accidents that we have suffered. All of this and more make a body more than the spontaneous creation of a moment; it has duration. Each body has its own rhythms and textures and thus its own ways of engaging the world – its own way of incarnating the flesh of the world. We cannot ignore this other side of bodies, the intricate constitution of which remains hidden from the world. It is an “inner” body, so to speak, but it is always in a unique dynamic relationship, interlacing with the world. It would be a mistake, however, to contrast a “subjective” interiority with an “objective” world – as if the world had no history, contingency, opacity. The world is not accessible to me as a fully transparent and graspable object. Nor do I ever see the world from the outside – I am not kosmotheoros, as Merleau-Ponty puts it. Instead, all my seeing and my knowing are shaped by and contribute to the flesh of the world – for good or ill. This is not a claim to immediacy, a sort of mystical assertion similar to those of a union between the individual soul and a world-spirit. Through my body I am in touch with the flesh of the world, I am of it, but this never erases our differences and discontinuities. It does not dispel the opacity and contingency of the world. Merleau-Ponty often associates this very opacity with the incarnate God. I experience the connection between my body and other bodies, and I have faith that we inhabit the same world – but the hinge between my touch and his touch “remains irremediably hidden from me.”30 There is much beauty in the Merleau-Ponty’s vision of a carnal ontology and the language through which he describes it. But the dependence of all life on material relations that vastly exceed each one of us is not simply positive. It is the condition of the emergence and flourishing of life; it is also a source of our vulnerability. And, as liberation and feminist theologians have long observed, vulnerability is unequally distributed. Oppressive systems structure relations between human beings as well as the differential access of certain bodies to the material resources they need for their sustenance. I have addressed elsewhere the detrimental elements of such arrangements (about which Merleau-Ponty says too little) by focusing on the material effects of racialization and gendering.31 Here I want to emphasize the ethical potential (and urgency) of the shift toward materiality – one that sees the bonds between human and non-human as sites of theological insight and obligation. The vulnerability of flesh is too often imagined as separable from or even opposed to divinity, but it is precisely the attempt to avoid such dichotomies

90  Mayra Rivera that I regard as the promise of flesh. I am suggesting that the term “flesh” may also help remind us of Christian traditions where it is irreducibly material and yet capable – vulnerable and glorious.32 Whether or not one is moved by theism, one may find inspiration in Christian visions where flesh names what the divine became, the same flesh that is said to be earth, and grass, and bread. “What is flesh but earth in a special form?” Tertullian wrote in the second century. He was opposing those who denied or undermined the reality of the flesh of Christ by insisting that the flesh of the incarnation was like our very own – dust from the earth. The relationship between the incarnate God and humanity is woven through the flesh.

Naming God I have traced the movement from the incarnation to the flesh, exploring its implications – conceiving knowledge as based on sensibility and obligation as emerging from material relations. I now return to the questions with which I started – a little differently, less linearly. What is the ethical orientation of a theology that understands itself as always already in flesh? I am suggesting that an account of an incarnate God implies consenting to being flesh in ways that make our ethical and religious responsibilities inextricable from each other. And, conversely, that for Christians naming God from this place of ethical responsibility (Levinas) implies that their account will be shaped by the material bonds that constitute the world, and this task might be inspired and guided by Christian traditions that highlight human connections to the earth as to flesh. Theology does have a unique and crucial role to play in responding to the ethical call of the earth – whether it recognizes it or not. It can call religious people to moral responsibility, of course. But I would use the term morality cautiously to avoid its associations with the view of an inner self essentially independent from the world – the view I have been problematizing. Consenting to being flesh implies acknowledging our constitutive connections, where we do not simply look from the outside and prescribe a course of action, but rather understand our seeing, saying, and acting as part of the flesh of the world – of its vulnerability and its glory. Asserting absolute norms prior to and unaffected by the complexities of material life may be politically expedient, but it misrepresents situated knowledge as universal, it construes the view of some as above and beyond the limitations of finite existence. In contrast, an incarnate knowledge does not presume to leave its material relations in search for another type of foundation that may protect its ethical actions from the limitations of finitude and the complexities of relations. It exercises faith in, not away from the flesh. This entails a faith that is not simply presumed to be good faith, a matter of good will or good principles, but rather one that expresses itself as commitment to a love of earth that requires knowledge, labor, criticism, and presence.33

Empty God  91 These commitments become the grounds from which God is named. In addition to denouncing idolatry – the absolutization of finite views or of death-dealing systems – an incarnate faith can be expressed in affirmative modes of speech about the world and about God. These are not absolute foundations, of course. But an incarnate theology implies that carnal knowledge is not devoid of insight about the divine – potentially. Still affirmations about the whole world or God are not just representations – attempts to mirror reality as it is. Instead, theological views strive to bring about what is not yet. For words may become flesh. Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on language highlight the links between perception and expression, between carnality and words. Drawing from his studies about perception and about the arts, he argues that poetic language, like painting, is a response to the world. Its newness arises against the backdrop of other speech. But productive writing goes beyond descriptions. “A language which only sought to reproduce things themselves would exhaust its power to teach in factual statements,” he observes.34 Its power of words does not emerge from a subject creating out of nothing, but always already in response to the call from the world of which she is part and which it transforms. Richard Kearney summarizes Merleau-Ponty’s distinctive position this way: Writing takes life to a literary style from a tacit style in sensible life itself . . . But in taking an implicit style toward a more expressive one, the artist at the same time transfigures – or to use Merleau-Ponty’s analogy, converts the bread of our quotidian life into a sacramental poetics.35 Words are imagined in terms of consecration and yet speech, like flesh, always incomplete, entwined with opaque, surrounded by silence.36 Even the best descriptions of the world would be approximations. All meaning is necessarily infused by the opaqueness of language, just as all life is marked by the obscurity of flesh. Art and poetry can teach us to be attentive to the silent voices and invisible aspects of the world. At its best, theology can be too. Other disciplines give us information about the functioning of the cosmos, the problems facing the planet, and the technical measures that we could take to mitigate the effects. Theology offers visions of the world and of us. It can be one of those forms of speech that does not conform with representing the world as it, but risks imagining the networks that sustain life, which vastly exceed our comprehension, and proclaiming more than can be fully justified, as existing or as yet to come. These include modes of expression, as well as religious ones – such as the appeals to the goodness of creation, the coming of the reign of justice and peace, – a reign of justice and peace, the “joyful continuation of embodied existence” for women and men, and the flourishing of all creation, to name just some examples from the theologies identified before. In this mode, theology does not shy

92  Mayra Rivera away from “intimate words” that invite others to embrace their passionate, vulnerable relations to the world. These imaginative or indirect modes of expression are not arbitrarily related to the world or to truth, but rather are modes of expression consonant with an incarnational ontology. Theology can help us to understand ourselves as related to the incarnate God precisely by being flesh. It can help us sense the loss of earthy life as intimate loss and move us to other ways of life – as Zadie Smith suggests. This requires theological words that lead us to attend to water, the earth, the air – for words emerge from flesh and will also become flesh. This requires seeing each of our practices – ritual and prayer, pilgrimage and protest, sermon and lecture – as our participation in the flesh of the world. Through these practices, we investigate and respond to the question “what can we do?”

Notes 1 I am grateful to Rick Elgendy for his insightful response to my presentation at the conference “God: Theological Accounts and Ethical Possibilities,” Chicago, Illinois, April 9–11 2014. 2 Zadie Smith, “Elegy for a Country’s Season,” The New York Review of Books, April 3 2014. 3 I have traced the trajectory in relation to feminist thought in Mayra Rivera, “A Labyrinth of Incarnations: The Social Materiality of Bodies,” Journal of the European Society of Women in Theological Research 22 (2014) 187–98. 4 Pamela Sue Anderson, Revisioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 141. 5 Justin Gilis, “Panel’s Warning on Climate Risk: Worst Is yet to Come,” The New York Times, March 30 2014. 6 Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 35. 7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Christianity and Ressentiment,” in Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, ed. by Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1992), 95. 8 Ibid. 9 There are obvious generalizations in Merleau-Ponty’s depictions of Catholicism or Christianity as if representing a single theological position. My interest here is not to attribute the position to a particular religious institution or theologian(s), but rather on the examination of the specific ideas. 10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Faith and Good Faith,” in Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1964), 173. 11 Note, however, that the subject’s will could be construed as only responding to God’s will and still claim access to unquestionable truths in its isolated interiority. On the relationship between Augustine’s and Descartes’s self see Stephen Philip Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 12 Merleau-Ponty, “Faith and Good Faith,” 174. 13 Ibid. 14 “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 70. 15 Ibid., 71. 16 “Faith and Good Faith,” 177. 17 Ibid., 175.

Empty God  93 18 Ibid. 19 For a detailed exploration of the relationship between language and perception see Richard Kearney, “Ecrire La Chair: L’expression Diacritique Chez MerleauPonty,” Chiasmi International (2013). 20 Merleau-Ponty, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” 141. 21 “Faith and Good Faith,” 179. 22 In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963), 47. 23 Merleau-Ponty, Cited in Diana Coole, Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 51. 24 Merleau-Ponty, “Faith and Good Faith,” 179. 25 This is related to Anderson’s affirmation of “confidence in life” as a feminist commitment. 26 “Faith and Good Faith,” 177. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 178. Italics mine. 29 Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, “ ‘L’incarnation Change Tout’ Merleau-Ponty Critique De La ‘Théologie Explicative’,” Archives de Philosophie 71, no. 3 (2008): 376. My translation. 30 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 148. 31 Cf. Mayra Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh 32 Kristine Culp traces this connection of vulnerability and glory and its significance for Christian theology. “The biblical notion that humans are creatures made of earth and breath . . . suggests vulnerability – but to transformation as well as to devastation” (Kristine A. Culp, Vulnerability and Glory: A Theological Account (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 3. See also Mayra Rivera, “Glory: The First Passion of Theology?” in Polydoxy: Theologies of the Manifold, ed. by Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), 167–85. 33 Coole’s description of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of “commitment.” 34 Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 77. 35 Kearney, “Ecrire La Chair.” My translation. 36 “There is . . . an opaqueness of language. Nowhere does it stop and leave a place for pure meaning.” Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 79.

6 An Edwardsian theoethical aesthetics of recognition Joshua Daniel

The claim I advance in this chapter is that Jonathan Edwards’s Trinitarian theology provides resources for considering life in a multicultural world. I will validate this claim by showing how one facet of Edwards’s Trinitarian thought – his psychological analogy – enables us to think through one particular issue that besets the practice of multicultural recognition. The issue I mean is articulated by political theorist Patchen Markell and concerns the relation between identity and agency.1 Historically disadvantaged groups have begun to demand the recognition of their particular identities as a social good without which justice remains incomplete. The idea is that, in order to be full participants in the public and political sphere, such groups require being perceived and valued for who they are truly, that is, according to the standards of their particular historical and cultural identities. This demand has raised a host of political-philosophical objections,2 but Markell’s objection, which I discuss, is moral-ontological. According to Markell, demands for recognition treat identities as entities stable and fixed enough to be perceived truly and valued accordingly, and yet since identities are forged in and through relations between human subjects – which the demand for recognition itself presumes – acts of recognition necessarily shape their subjects’ identities. Is it even possible to give the recognition that is demanded if my very act of recognition shapes the identity I supposedly recognize? Or can I only offer an alliance going forward? If the latter, isn’t there the danger that social disparities will inflect the offered alliance, that my offer itself will demand the other to conform to some unspoken identity that shapes the alliance I’m offering, thus re-provoking their demand for recognition? Markell’s solution is to promote acknowledgment of our shared finitude and vulnerability as agents, as an alternative to the recognition of our distinct identities. My claim is that such acknowledgment is grounded in a form of recognition that, despite Markell’s worries to the contrary, may empower rather than constrict shared agency. I will argue this claim with Edwards’s Trinitarian theology and a Trinitarian construal of his account of virtue. Rather than appeal to his social analogy of the trinity – the sort of account that seems ready-made to address the issue of relating difference, insofar as it involves understanding God

96  Joshua Daniel explicitly as a communion of distinct persons3 – I will utilize his psychological analogy. Here, I will articulate Edwards’s characterization of God along the lines of recognition, a psychological phenomenon with intensely social ramifications. God renders himself God by perceiving himself truly – as divine – and valuing himself accordingly – as deserving of glory. God expresses himself as divine by creating us to become participants in the act of recognition that joins the triune persons and constitutes triune deity, thus empowering us to recognize God. Meanwhile, to become truly virtuous is to become such a participant. What this entails on our part is the mutual unsettling of our finite, human identities in order to empower each other to create novel forms of recognition that bind us more intimately to each other. Such a practice is grounded in the mutual recognition of each other as potentially divine subjects, and paradoxically it might require, in particular situations of historical-social disparity, the affirmation of others in all of their historical-cultural particularity. What follows comes in three sections: a theological account in which God as Trinitarian is characterized as a structure of recognition, an anthropological bridge in which humans are characterized as in the image of Trinitarian recognition, and the ethical upshot in which human relations and practices of recognition are characterized as truly virtuous insofar as they are structured by divine recognition. My chapter is long on theology and short on application to multicultural recognition, but this distribution is intentional: theology can help us navigate the vagaries of contemporary life, but only by attending to its own.

I Edwards contends that deity is “begotten by God’s loving an idea of Himself.”4 My goal in this section is to construe this formulation through the notion of recognition. I will argue that triune deity is a structure of recognition, by reading Edwards’s psychological account of the Trinity through the lens of recent work on the concept of recognition. The point of this is to lay the theological ground for thinking about humans as practitioners of recognition. According to Edwards, there is deity at all because God has an idea of himself and loves that idea. Edwards formulates this in the course of explicating divine happiness: “God is infinitely happy in the enjoyment of Himself.”5 Such enjoyment entails that God beholds Himself and then values Himself accordingly. These two distinct but inseparable moments are what the concept of recognition combines. In a critical interpretation of Charles Taylor, Markell explains that, in one sense, “recognition brings together cognition and evaluation: it is a matter both of seeing who someone is and affirming (or negating) what we see.”6 Recognition involves knowledge that matters, responding axiologically to what we perceive. Hence, to say that God enjoys himself, beholding himself and thus loving himself, is to suggest that God recognizes himself. Markell delineates a second sense of

An Edwardsian theoethical aesthetics  97 recognition, a constructivist sense whereby recognizing others means establishing them with a particular status.7 The first time I said, “I love you” to my wife, I not only expressed a particular perception and evaluation of her, I also established her as having a particular status in my life, as one whom I could begin imagining as my wife. Recall the quote that initiated this section: deity is begotten by God’s loving an idea of himself. In other words, God establishes himself as God by recognizing himself – deity is constructed by God’s love to himself by way of his self-knowledge. Markell’s two senses of recognition – cognition plus evaluation and construction – coincide in Edwards’s account of God’s self-enjoyment. This is important to note because Markell discerns a tension between them as they play out in political practice. Recognition as cognition plus evaluation promotes an understanding of human agency and relations as expressive of and answerable to identities that are always already settled. To practice recognition in this sense is to recognize others according to a fixed identity. Recognition as construction promotes an understanding of identities as the result of a shared agency that is constitutively unpredictable and risky. In this constructivist sense, recognition less regards the truth of others’ identities, and more acknowledges the finitude and vulnerability we share with others and so becomes open to the mutual transformation of our identities. If the former practice privileges identity over agency, understanding our identities to constrain agency, the latter privileges agency over identity, since it understands agency to outrun any identities we achieve.8 For Markell, the former involves an aspiration to sovereignty: we attempt to overcome our cognitive finitude by binding our actions to our recognition of the truth of others. If we don’t ‘get each other wrong,’ we cannot treat each other wrongly. Constructivist acknowledgment, on the other hand, is a practice of non-sovereignty: openness to the unpredictability and novel results of our shared agency requires the renunciation of any claim to have overcome our finitude and thus the renunciation of any identity understood to be unchangeable. Instead of ‘getting each other right’ in order to exercise sovereignty over our shared world, we should support each other’s finite, vulnerable potency in the world. We best avoid treating each other wrongly by acknowledging that finitude is an unavoidable condition of our agency, and acting accordingly.9 What Markell opposes, coincides in Edwards’s account of God’s selfenjoyment. Markell discerns a gap between identity and agency bedeviling human existence, and the way to justice is by acknowledging this gap, not by attempting to close it through practices of recognition. Such a gap does not bedevil God. God’s identity is God’s act of recognizing himself. I will argue that the coincidence of identity and agency in God means that human practices of acknowledging mutual finitude are grounded in the recognition of something true about us as humans. That is, human openness to unpredictability and novelty vis-à-vis our various finite identities is grounded in the recognition of our shared destiny as participants in deity, in God’s selfenjoyment by way of divine recognition. Because such a destiny is different

98  Joshua Daniel than the sort of historical-cultural identities that Markell is keen to destabilize, recognizing it is different than recognizing our particularities. At the same time, under conditions of finitude and sin, the human practice of recognizing each other as potential participants in divine recognition involves the recognition of our human identities. What helps link these claims is Edwards’s account of deity as triune. Triune deity can be understood as a structure of recognition because the Trinitarian persons together enact God’s self-recognition. This can be articulated utilizing Edwards’s psychological analogy. While the Father is “deity in its direct existence,”10 the Son and the Spirit are deity’s knowledge and will, or idea and love, respectively.11 The Son is the idea that God beholds of himself, so as to enjoy himself. Grounding this account is Edwards’s particular metaphysical idealism. According to this view, all things exist only insofar as they are in some consciousness: to be is to be the object of some consciousness.12 Supposing a room empty of conscious beings, Edwards asserts that the things in it would exist only insofar as God is conscious of them.13 Hence, all things exist only insofar as God is conscious of them, including God himself.14 Edwards refers to the Father as “the deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated and most absolute manner,”15 but the logic of his idealism insists that deity absolutely subsisting is not yet deity with full being. Deity does not achieve full being without becoming the object of divine consciousness, and this is what the Son enables. As God’s idea of himself, the Son is the intra-triune object of divine consciousness. If referring to the Son as an idea seems impersonalizing, another aspect of Edwards’s idealism must be considered. The Son is God’s perfect idea of himself, and for Edwards this means that the Son is deity “truly and properly repeated.”16 On this view, a true and proper idea of something is that thing itself repeated.17 Edwards illustrates this with ideas of what he calls ‘spiritual things.’ To have an idea of a thought is to have that thought again; whenever I have an idea of my love for my wife, in involves me experiencing, to some degree, that very love.18 Since God’s idea are necessarily perfect, the Son as God’s idea of himself is truly and properly God himself: “The Son is the deity generated by God’s understanding, or having an idea of Himself and subsisting in that idea.”19 The Son helps ensure the full being of deity as the divine object of divine consciousness, which entails him being the second person of triune deity. But only with the Holy Spirit is deity’s being fully achieved. God not only beholds an idea of himself; he loves this idea of himself. What occurs between the Father and Son is not one subject’s sheer consciousness of another object, but rather mutual love and joy. As God’s divine object, the Son enables divine self-consciousness. As God’s divine object, God’s perfect idea of himself and so God himself, which is to say, as a person of triune deity, the Son achieves two further things. First, he is the ‘shining forth’ of God’s own glory,20 enabling the Father to delight in that glory. Thus, the Son begins to render deity aesthetic, not only conscious and existent. More accurately, the Son helps ensure the fullness of deity’s being by beginning

An Edwardsian theoethical aesthetics  99 to render deity aesthetic. As the shining forth of divine glory that provokes the Father’s delight, the Son reveals God’s beauty. Second, though programmatically the object of divine self-consciousness, the Son becomes a divine subject as well, since he comes to love and delight in the Father as the Father does in him. The character of the Son’s objectivity ensures his subjectivity. What accounts for the Son’s subjectivity is the Holy Spirit – not in the sense that the Father puts the Holy Spirit within the Son and thereby renders the Son a subject of love. Edwards is clear that the Holy Spirit arises between the Father and the Son as “a most pure act . . . an infinitely holy and sacred energy.”21 Rather, the Holy Spirit accounts for the Son’s subjectivity in the same sense that the Spirit accounts for the Father’s particular subjectivity. The Son is the object not simply of God’s self-consciousness, but more particularly of the Father’s love, characterized by Edwards along the lines of aesthetic delight. It is the nature of such love to flow out or breathe forth towards others. Thus, insofar as the Son receives the Father’s love, which demands to be shared, the Son is empowered to return that love. This divine love, mutually shared between Father and Son, is the Holy Spirit.22 Edwards refers to the Spirit as “deity subsisting in act,”23 meaning that the Spirit is deity insofar as it flows out, breathes itself forth. Just as the Son is God’s perfect idea of himself, so the Spirit is God’s perfect act: what breathes forth in the Spirit is nothing less than deity itself; the same deity repeated in the Son. In this way, the Spirit is the third person of triune deity, whereby deity achieves the fullness of its being. Importantly, the trajectory of the Holy Spirit specifies the character of deity’s fullness of being. The Spirit is the divine love of the Father and Son breathed out primarily towards each other, secondarily towards creatures. Thus, the fullness of deity’s being, specified by the Spirit, is the communion of the divine persons, which is opened to include human creatures insofar as we participate in the Spirit that joins Father and Son.24 In this sense, the Holy Spirit accounts for our subjectivity within the divine communion, since our participation in that mutual love between Father and Son enables us to be subjects of divine love. The fullness of deity’s being consists in its communication, which creates communion between the triune persons, and between God and humans.25 This communication is empowering: it is not the mere transfer of some reality or knowledge to another, but rather the investing of that reality and knowledge in another who thereby becomes their subject. Within deity, this occurs with the Son, who becomes the subject of divine love because he is the object of the Father’s love. Edwards contends that Christ is called the face of God because in the Son, God sees himself as though looking in a mirror.26 Edwards does not exploit the fact that the face of a person is not only what others behold of that person, but also how that person beholds others; as the face of God, the Son not only manifests divine beauty to the Father, but also beholds that very beauty as it is manifested in the Father. The Holy Spirit accounts for the Son’s subjectivity because, as the divine love mutually shared between Father and Son, the Spirit must be the mutual manifestation

100  Joshua Daniel and beholding of divine beauty between them. This dynamic also occurs beyond deity. Our creation is a communication of God’s being. Edwards famously asserts that God’s end in creating the world is his own glory, which he accomplishes by enabling creatures to behold that glory themselves: “’Tis a thing infinitely good in itself that God’s glory should be known by a glorious society of created beings.”27 Creation not only manifests God’s glory but also through humans participating in the Spirit, beholds that glory. Recall that Edwards articulates this Trinitarian account of deity in the course of explicating divine happiness. This is because the fullness of deity’s being, which can be achieved only insofar as God is triune, is divine happiness. God is happy insofar as God enjoys himself. God enjoys himself insofar as God is triune – that is, insofar as God loves the idea of himself. And God loves the idea of himself insofar as God communes with himself. Hence, Edwards’s assertion: “The happiness of the deity, as all other true happiness, consists in love and society.”28 Meanwhile, such ‘love and society,’ which can only be the divine communion of the triune persons, has a simultaneously aesthetic and empowering character. God’s self-enjoyment consists in the Father and Son’s mutual delight in divine beauty, which they accomplish by their reciprocal manifestation and beholding of God’s glory in the Holy Spirit. Thereby, the Son becomes the subject of divine love, not simply its object. Moreover, this aesthetic and empowering communion is communicated to us insofar as God creates us to become subjects of divine love, beholders of and delighters in God’s beautiful glory. This Trinitarian detour returns us to the notion of recognition. What I have called the aesthetic and empowering character of divine communion align with Markell’s two senses of recognition. Recognition as cognition plus evaluation is aesthetic recognition, perceiving someone truly and valuing them accordingly. To say that God beholds himself through the Son and loves himself in the Spirit, is to say that God recognizes himself through the Son in the Spirit. In this sense, the Son can be understood as the object of divine recognition – that triune person through which God is recognized as God – and the Spirit can be understood as the binding of divine recognition – that triune person in which God accomplishes self-recognition by the binding that joins the Father and Son to each other. Meanwhile, recognition as construction is empowering recognition, enabling those who are recognized to recognize others in turn. To say that deity is begotten insofar as God loves what he beholds of himself through the Son in the Spirit is to say that God begets himself as God insofar as he recognizes himself. This begetting recognition is accomplished in the Son becoming the subject of divine recognition by returning the Father’s recognition of his divine beauty and glory as something that binds them together. The Spirit remains the binding of divine recognition, but now its active sense is emphasized: the Spirit is the ongoing binding of Father and Son because the divine recognition that occurs between Father and Son is ongoing, since both are each other’s subject and object of divine recognition.29 Moreover, the Spirit’s work includes binding us to the divine recognition that binds Father and Son, by

An Edwardsian theoethical aesthetics  101 constituting us as subjects of that recognition. In order for us to recognize God aesthetically, we must become divine.30 Edwards describes this as the indwelling of the Spirit within our human faculties, becoming the soul’s new principle of action.31 I suggest that the Spirit becomes the principle of our soul’s actions insofar as its ongoing binding of us to the ongoing divine recognition that binds Father and Son empowers us to participate in that divine recognition as its subjects. To conclude: Triune deity is a structure of recognition, or, better, the ongoing structuring of recognition. God constitutes himself as God by recognizing himself in and through the recognitive activity shared by the triune persons. In turn, as I will argue ultimately, God structures our own practices of recognition, both of himself and of each other, not by modeling human relations according to the recognitive relations between the triune persons, but rather by shaping our human recognitive relations so that they become sites of divine recognition, where we can practice recognizing each other as God recognizes us – perceiving each other truly, valuing each other accordingly and enabling each other to keep this ongoing. This ultimately will bring me to Edwards’s virtue ethics. First, however, we need to see how this account of triune deity as the structuring of recognition works as a psychological analogy to the human.

II Edwards’s articulated psychological analogy between triune deity and the human is straightforward: “[Because] our souls are made in the image of God, we have understanding and will, idea and love as God hath, and the difference is only in the perfection of degree and manner.” Just as God exists (Father) in and through his idea (Son) and love (Spirit) of himself, so our souls exist in and through their ideas and loves of themselves. But whereas God’s understanding and will are simple and so accomplished in one act, ours are complex and diverse, each distinguished between their own power, habit, and act.32 This version of the psychological analogy turns on the faculties or activities of our soul, but Edwards’s own account of triune deity suggests a more sophisticated version relevant to the phenomenon of recognition. In this brief interlude, I will articulate this version in order to facilitate the move from divine recognition to human recognition. Recall that, for Edwards, the Son and the Spirit are not simply God’s understanding and will, but more specifically God’s idea of himself and God’s love of himself as mediated by that idea. This suggests a version of the psychological analogy that turns on the issues of identity that bedevil multicultural recognition: to say that the human is created in the image of this triune deity is not simply to say that humans are constituted in and through our possession and exercise of understanding and will, but rather to imply that we constitute ourselves as humans by having ideas of ourselves that mediate our affective self-relations. Just as God loves himself in and through his idea of himself, so we love (and hate) ourselves in and through

102  Joshua Daniel our ideas of ourselves. But this is just to say that humans live in and through our identities, for human identities can be understood as those ideas we have of ourselves as belonging to particular groups with life-guiding norms and ideals of behavior, by which we measure our worth. This notion of identities ends up underscoring the difference between God and humans within my articulation of the psychological analogy. Recall now that God’s idea and love of himself are perfect. God’s idea of himself so adequately captures his divinity that this idea becomes a divine person, the Son. Meanwhile, God’s love of himself so adequately expresses his divinity, since it arises from God’s begetting his own divinity, that it also becomes a divine person, the Spirit, whose characteristic work is the communication of divinity both between and beyond the Father and Son. What distinguishes humans from God is that our identities imperfectly capture and express our humanity. The imperfection of our identities is due to our finitude, and then exacerbated by sin. Regarding the finitude of our identities, two aspects can be distinguished: dependency and particularity. As finite, vulnerable creatures, we depend on others to care for us, and part of that care is the explicit or implicit provision of an idea of what it means to be a person within this particular community, which idea we then use to measure our worth to our caregivers, usually by conforming ourselves to that idea to some degree. Whereas God generates his own idea of himself, humans must rely on others for the identities that mediate our self-worth. Meanwhile, the identities that others provide for us are historically particular. To be finite is to live within a certain spatial-temporal context. The ideas that humans generate regarding personal existence are necessarily answerable to these contexts, to the varying geographical and social challenges and opportunities that confront us, and the historical traditions that articulate how we have in the past, and should now, respond to them. It is essential to appreciate that these ideas and our relations to them are not merely intellectual, but also affective. Just as God loves the idea he has of himself, since what the Father and Son behold of each other is their mutual beauty and glory, so human identities provide canons of beauty and glory as well as practical wisdom. In other words, human identities are not simply pragmatic responses to the vagaries of environmental situations, but more significantly comprehensive ways of action or life that promote particular standards of value. But whereas God’s love of his own beauty and glory ensures the unity of his divinity, humans’ various loves tend to pluralize humanity: value-controversy is the norm among humans. Even if we carefully distinguish pluralism and division, the former still tends to throw human unity into doubt. We can now say that God’s perfection consists in the equivalence between his being and his identity: he generates his own idea of himself and his love of it binds him to, with, and, thus, as himself. The divine life is the very structuring of recognition itself. Human imperfection, on the other hand, consists in the gap between our being as human, our humanity, and our multiple identities. Hence, human life is composed of various spheres of recognition, forms of social binding that group humans into historical

An Edwardsian theoethical aesthetics  103 communities with particular standards of perception and value that do not often neatly cohere with each other. That is, the various ideas that humans construct of and for themselves promote differing attributes and/or ideals of human life for their holders to love about themselves and each other. Each sphere of recognition promotes something different for humans to recognize (perceive and value) about each other and so constrains our behavior differently, even if the differences are not absolute. We ought to treat our coworkers differently than our family members because the values that each sphere of recognition promotes are different if complementary. Even when one is both a parent and a public school teacher, such that care characterizes one’s identity in each sphere, the concrete practices of recognition should differ in each case. A particular human life is thus constituted by a constant negotiation of various identities that demand different exercises of recognition – and the need for such negotiation marks us as imperfect vis-à-vis the triune deity. It is essential not to be pejorative about this human imperfection, because it is simply a matter of our finitude. My point here is that no one human identity fully captures our humanity, making it impossible to express our humanity through the performance of one identity. Unfortunately, this imperfection is exacerbated by sin. A full discussion of Edwards’s conception of sin33 is beyond the scope of this chapter, but a brief account will enable me to draw this interlude to a close and lean into the next, final section. Edwards describes sin as “self-love, in conjunction with the absence of the image and love of God.” Self-love in itself is not sinful, since it is “that natural and necessary inclination that man has to his own benefit.”34 Even God, as the prior section articulated, achieves the fullness of divine being by loving himself and drawing us into that divine self-love. Moreover, it is precisely by drawing us into divine self-love, empowering us to become subjects of divine recognition, that God joins our self-love to love of God. That is, humanity’s ‘own benefit’ is to become subjects of divine recognition, beholders of and delighters in God’s beautiful glory – in short, experiencers of divine happiness. Human self-love becomes sinful as it rejects divine love, which is to say, as it rejects its true benefit. The reason such self-love is specifically sinful and not just self-defeating, is that human self-love is meant to be joined to divine love, given God’s end in creation of promoting his own glory by creating other beings to behold and delight in that glory through participation in God’s self-love. Hence, to reject divine love is to reject God’s own end and so necessarily to put something finite in God’s rightful place in our affections.35 Such sinfulness exacerbates the imperfection of our identities. Identities mediate our self-love through our ideas of ourselves, which ideas are necessarily socially provided and particular. When human self-love rejects divine love, it replaces God’s idea of humanity as potential participants in God’s self-love, with a finite idea of humanity. This rejection of God becomes a rejection of humanity insofar as it imposes its idea of humanity on other humans; and in contexts of power disparity between groupings of humans – paradigmatically, those contexts marked by the legacy of colonialism – this

104  Joshua Daniel imposition is enacted in socially material manners. It is precisely this sort of imposition in multicultural contexts that has provoked demands for recognition. To impose a particular idea of humanity on others is necessarily to reject not simply God’s idea of humanity, but also other ideas of humanity. And when these imposed-upon others fail to live up to the imposed idea – which is likely given the weight of their own historical traditions, as well as the difference of their appearances, whether this takes place at the level of their skin, voice, clothing, etc. – those in power often develop and impose a deprecating idea of these particular humans as not fully human. Since these ideas mediates affective self-relations, the imposed-upon often come to hate themselves because of the imposers’ deprecating idea of them and to attempt to make themselves lovable by conforming to the imposers’ proffered idea of humanity. Frantz Fanon provides a profound phenomenological account of this experience. Such an imposition of identities thus exacerbates the imperfection of our identities by rejecting the particularity of the idea that is imposed and exploiting human dependency on others for identities – socialpolitical-economic dependence on those in power becomes cultural dependence on their false and deprecating ideas of humanity and of particular humans in relation to the ideas. If Edwards has helped us diagnose the problems of multicultural recognition theologically, suggesting that to be made in the divine image is to have ideas of ourselves that mediate self-affections, which ideas become tools for oppression under conditions of sin that warp our finitude, does he have resources for addressing these problems? The point of the next and final section is to argue that his account of true virtue does provide such resources, particularly if read through his Trinitarian theology.

III I have construed Edward’s account of triune deity as a structure of recognition in that God constitute himself as fully divine by the ongoing recognitive activity of the triune persons, diffused outward in creation and redemption. And I have construed the human made in God’s image as a recognitive creature, living through finite ideas of herself that mediate self-affection, but also a sinful creature, oppressing others through the imposition of such ideas. My task now is to construe his account of true virtue as a form of recognition, as a disposition to recognize God as divine and each other, in turn, as potentially divine, which has the potential to disrupt sinful practices of recognition. Edward contends, “To be truly virtuous is the same as to be spiritual,”36 meaning that we accomplish true virtue to the extent that the Holy Spirit indwells us as a principle of action. If the Spirit can be understood as the binding of divine recognition between Father and Son, then true virtue can be understood as our participation in that binding, empowering us to become subjects of divine recognition, beholding and delighting in God’s beautiful glory and in each other insofar as we participate in that glory. My exegetical strategy is to develop Edward’s work The Nature of

An Edwardsian theoethical aesthetics  105 True Virtue through the two prior sections’ ‘recognitive’ reading of his psychological account of the Trinity.37 According to Edwards, virtue is the moral beauty of intelligent beings, the beauty that attends beings with perception and will, whose dispositions and actions are praiseworthy or blameworthy.38 Recall that perception and will are the capacities that compose the aesthetic sense of recognition, cognition plus evaluation. Thus, virtue can be understood as the sort of beauty that attends ‘recognitive’ beings, while the praise and blame attributable to such beings can be understood to regard their manner of practicing recognition. Edwards’s object of inquiry is the nature of true virtue, which he distinguishes from ‘seeming’ virtue. The key to this distinction is that between particular and general beauty. Particular beauty is the beauty of something vis-à-vis its relation and tendency to others within a limited sphere; general beauty is the beauty of something vis-à-vis all of its relations and tendencies, that is, its relations and tendencies to all others in all spheres. These types of beauty can conflict: automatic obedience has a particular beauty within the military, but generalized to other spheres becomes ugly. For Edwards, true virtue is an instance of general beauty, so it attends recognitive beings who relate or tend to all other beings: “True virtue most essentially consists in benevolence to Being in general.” The truly virtuous are praiseworthy because the acts of their mind and the exercises of their love have ‘being in general’ as their “direct and immediate object.” This might seem to suggest that love for particular beings has no beauty or virtue at all, but Edwards insists that particular loves can be truly virtuous, insofar as they arise from benevolence to Being in general.39 If true virtue is the moral beauty that attends recognitive beings, then benevolence to Being in general can be understood as a form of divine recognition. Edwards explicitly clarifies that benevolence to Being in general is simply proper love of God. ‘Being in general’ is a philosophical locution for God, who Edwards describes as “the Being of beings . . . the head of the universal system of existence; the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty.”40 Hence, the true virtue of recognitive beings does not regard simply the extent of love, as though moral beauty increases incrementally as we relate to wider and wider communities of beings. Rather, and this is where Edwards’s Trinitarian thought becomes relevant, true virtue means loving that particular being who happens to be that communion of persons whose mutual love and delight flow out into the creation and redemption of recognitive beings. So understood, true virtue is participation in the divine recognition that occurs mutually between Father and Son in the Spirit. Responding to the criticism that God is not a proper object of benevolence, Edwards notes that the sense of benevolence we can hold toward God is not contributing to his happiness (which is impossible for us) but rather rejoicing in it, thus becoming instruments for the promotion of divine glory.41 Even in this sense, benevolence is impossible for us on our own; only the indwelling of the Spirit empowers us to rejoice in God’s happiness, because only in the Spirit do we become participants in God’s self-enjoyment. Hence,

106  Joshua Daniel to have benevolence to Being in general, which is to be truly virtuous, is to be empowered to be subjects of divine recognition.42 What Edwards suggests about benevolence aligns with Markell’s distinction between kinds of recognition; it has aesthetic and empowering senses. The benevolence we have toward God is aesthetic because rejoicing in the divine happiness involves perceiving God truly – as divine – and valuing him accordingly – as worthy of divine delight. Meanwhile, God so empowering us to exercise aesthetic benevolence, making us divine so that we may perceive God truly and value him accordingly is itself an exercise of benevolence. To understand this, we must understand Edwards’s distinction between benevolence and complacence. Complacence is loving something by way of delighting in its beauty. Benevolence is loving something by way of inclining to its well-being and delighting in its happiness. While complacence presupposes beauty in the beloved as its ground, benevolence does not. Edwards argues that the divine love that grounds the being and beauty of created things, that motivates creation and redemption, is benevolence.43 Just as the divine love by which God creates us cannot presuppose our being, since that love grounds our being; so the divine love by which God empowers us to become truly virtuous subjects of divine recognition, cannot presuppose our moral beauty, but rather grounds it. Hence, our capacity for aesthetically recognizing God results from God’s empowering recognition of us, but this must involve a true perception and fitting evaluation of us. I am contending, thus, that there is an aesthetic component involved in God’s empowering recognition – not as its ground, but as entailed by it. Edwards notes that if divine benevolence grounds creation, then God’s love extends to potential beings.44 I am suggesting that God’s empowering recognition of us as subjects of divine recognition involves perceiving us as potentially divine and valuing us accordingly, such that he treats us as future participants in triune deity. The truth about us humans that God recognizes, which is to say, the idea that God has about us, is that we can be divine. God’s empowering recognition of us constitutes us to be divine so that we can recognize God aesthetically. God structures divine recognition so as to include us as its subjects. The ethical issue is how God’s structuring of recognition shapes practices of recognition between humans. The first clue is Edwards’s discussion of the objects of truly virtuous love. The primary object of true virtue is Being in general, which I have argued should be understood as God in his triune deity. The secondary object of true virtue is benevolent being, being that exercises the benevolence to Being in general that constitutes true virtue. Hence, true virtue primarily loves God and secondarily loves love of God. Stated otherwise, a being that recognizes God as truly divinely beautiful, must recognize the recognition of God as truly divinely beautiful as well, since to recognize God is to participate in triune deity as a divine subject of recognition. This suggests that the beauty that humans ought to recognize in each other regards our exercise of divine recognition, which confirms God’s idea of humanity.

An Edwardsian theoethical aesthetics  107 This is a fraught enterprise, as Edwards well knew.45 Even beyond the epistemological and social perplexities that arise, such an enterprise seems beside the point given the social context that provokes questions of human recognition, multicultural difference. It is unclear that the insistence to recognize exercises of divine recognition would help resolve the difficulties of multicultural recognition. Still, if we chasten his insistence, I believe Edwards offers a theological contribution to the difficulties of multicultural recognition. The key to this chastening is what I suggested earlier: the truth about us that God recognizes – God’s idea of us – is our potential divine subjectivity; this is the beauty that we ought to recognize in each other. Recall Edwards’s distinction between general and particular beauty. The distinction between loving God and loving particular creatures coincides with this: to love God is to recognize the divine beauty of Being in general; to love particular creatures is to recognize the beauty of the limited spheres in which we relate to them according to particular finite ideas – families, political alliances, cultural groups. As I suggested in the prior section, if God can be understood as the very structure of recognition, creating and redeeming us by the ongoing recognition that constitutes his triune deity, then we can think of human life as composed of spheres of recognition, forms of social binding in which we recognize, praise, and blame each other according to the standards of the identities these spheres provide. Edwards would insist that such human spheres of recognition, if undisciplined by our participation in divine recognition, would necessarily militate against divine recognition, just as private affections undisciplined by benevolence to Being in general prop up something creaturely in place of God.46 However, if love for creatures can arise from proper love of God, then our finite practices of recognition may arise from divine recognition and become truly virtuous. Edwards suggests two indicators of this: practices of human recognition should coincide with God’s manner of recognizing humans, and their aim should be agreeable to God’s end in creation.47 As we have seen, God’s end is his own glory, which he promotes by his manner of recognizing us – empowering us to behold his glory. Thus, truly virtuous human practices of recognition turn out to be practices that empower those recognized to become subjects of divine recognition. This is the second clue about how God’s structuring of recognition shapes human practices of recognition, and it is in tension with the first. The first clue suggests that what we ought to recognize in others is the true virtue they exercise, the divine beauty of their actual recognition of divine beauty. This second clue suggests that how we ought to recognize others is by empowering them to become truly virtuous. The first presupposes actual true virtue; the second presupposes its possibility. If we let this second clue chasten the first, then what we ought to recognize in each other becomes our potential to become subjects of divine recognition, which potentiality constitutes God’s idea of humanity. This perspective on the object of recognition has advantages. It coincides precisely with God’s constitutive recognition of us, not simply in its end (true virtue), but more significantly, in its

108  Joshua Daniel manner (empowerment). To recognize others’ potential to become truly virtuous rather than their actual achievement is to recognize a fact about them that demands recognition, not an accomplishment that merits recognition. Moreover, recognizing the fact of this potential in others should motivate us to help them capitalize on it – it evokes our empowering agency. Human practices of recognition that attend to the potentiality of true virtue do not rely on a spiritual hierarchy that marks some as deserving of recognition and others as not; rather, they rely on a vision of spiritual equality meant to evoke our mutual empowerment. In this way, we recognize each other as God recognizes us, which means acknowledging our finitude and sin, while anticipating our full participation in the divine recognition that joins Father and Son in the Spirit. Of course, our mutual empowerment is limited and cannot accomplish what God’s empowering recognition does. This provokes the question of what mutual empowerment toward true virtue involves within our limited spheres of recognition: what do we empower each other to do, and what must we perceive and value about each other in order to do this? I submit that human practices of recognition arising from divine recognition require loosening the bindings that compose our spheres of recognition. Undisciplined by divine recognition, human practices of recognition bind us to each other falsely because they turn on false ideas of humanity. In this dynamic, what we come to perceive and value about each other is not our potential for true virtue, but rather something far less and warped – namely, our capacity to participate in a particular sphere of recognition and sustain its existence promoted as universal. Such bindings of recognition necessarily constrict us since they involve us recognizing each other as reduced versions of ourselves, rendering ourselves carriers of finite identities seeking to fix themselves in God’s place. In Markell’s terms, this is the practice of sovereignty. We attempt to ‘get each other right’ by recognizing each other according to a particular standard of perception and value, so as to treat each other rightly; however, treating each other rightly reduces to conforming to the sphere of recognition that provides the standard of right recognition in the first case. Markell’s alternative is the practice of non-sovereignty, whereby we acknowledge the vulnerability of our identities by becoming open to the unpredictable possibilities of shared agency. I think Edwards suggests something similar. Human practices of recognition arising from divine recognition acknowledge the vulnerability of the identities provided by our spheres of recognition – to become participants in the divine recognition by the indwelling of the Spirit is to become capable of a form of recognition that lies beyond the imaginative resources of our spheres of recognition, and so cannot be delimited by our finite identities. To be open to this recognitive potential is to become open to the possibility that our finite identities require unsettling – which means loosening the bindings of human recognition so that we have the room to engage in such unsettling. This is the sense in which we practice mutual empowerment toward true virtue: we

An Edwardsian theoethical aesthetics  109 empower each other to constitute our spheres of recognition as vulnerable to the unsettling of its aesthetic standards. Against Markell, I insist that acknowledgment of mutual vulnerability and the unsettling of recognitive identities it entails are not an alternative to recognition, but rather grounded in our aesthetic recognition of each other as potential subjects of divine recognition. This form of aesthetic recognition does not endanger the vulnerability of identities that non-sovereign acknowledgment requires, because the potentiality for true virtue is not the sort of identity that can constrict our practices of recognition; it simply affirms that there is an unimaginable form of recognition – divine – that we are nevertheless ultimately capable of practicing. When we recognize each other as potential subjects of divine recognition, we are not ‘getting each other right’ in the sense of fully comprehending what this potentiality entails. Rather, we perceive truly and value accordingly the fact that we are meant to become bearers of divine recognition. This form of recognition grounds our encouragement of each other to be open to the unimaginable recognition of God, by which openness we empower each other to loosen the bindings of our spheres of recognition and so unsettle our shared i­ dentities – and thereby treat each other right. This is our true beauty, this side of the eschaton, and it must be aesthetically recognized to become empowering. What does all of this involve between spheres of recognition, more specifically, under conditions of multicultural difference? Encouraging my fellow white Americans to loosen the bindings of recognition that white America imposes so that we don’t confuse the success of American endeavors with God’s intentions might be salutary, but what does it suggest for how I should relate to African-Americans or recent immigrants, particularly when these groups demand recognition according to their own standards of recognition? If my relation to my own group entails loosening its recognitive bindings and unsettling its identity, and it is based on a recognition of my fellows as potentially divine and so truly excessive to any such bindings and identities, then it would seem that I should encourage those in other groups to loosen their recognitive bindings and unsettle their identities, to convince them that they are truly excessive to the bindings and identities they are demanding I recognize. But isn’t this simply to refuse their demand for recognition? And insofar as my exhortations involve convincing them of their divine potential, which conception of divinity is of Western origin, doesn’t this add the insult of misrecognition to the initial injury of non-recognition? In a multicultural context, a good way to practice loosening the bindings of recognition within one’s own sphere and unsettling its identity, might be to accede to another groups’ demands for recognition, on their own terms. Learning to perceive and value as another historical or cultural group does can help counter any perceived self-evidence of one’s own native standards of recognition. Simply put, affirming another in all of her historical-cultural particularity is good for unsettling one’s own. Moreover, while accepting the Edwardsian account of recognition I have offered commits one to view finite

110  Joshua Daniel spheres of recognition as vulnerable and their proffered identities as more unsettled than fixed, it cannot necessitate that multicultural encounters take the form of exhorting others to unsettle themselves. Such a practice risks retightening the bindings of recognition within one’s own sphere, constraining one to value others only insofar as they unsettle themselves – which means, only insofar as they affirm one’s own now critical standards of recognition. That is, it risks imposing an idea of humanity as ‘identity-unsettlers,’ and so fails to value properly our finite identities. While the truth about us that God recognizes, because it is his own idea of us as potential subjects of divine recognition, cannot be grasped by our finite ideas of humanity, it may nevertheless involve these ideas, particularly if they come to interact in ways that please God. Recall that human practices of recognition arising from divine recognition involve loosening our finite bindings of recognition, not dissolving them. The point is to create enough room to empower each other to unsettle ourselves, but only for the purpose of creating new, unpredictable forms of recognition. That is, the point of loosening our recognitive bindings is to empower each other, and others, to create new bindings, new ways to enjoy each other. What this should promote is a form of social experimentalism that refuses to claim in advance how standards of recognition particular to specific historical-cultural groups ought to be approached and assessed. Edwards claims, “It pleases God to observe analogy in his works.”48 Perhaps multicultural encounters are meant to be occasions in which forms of recognition are accomplished between human groups that are richer than those who constitute the groups by themselves. Such forms of recognition would serve as analogies to the divine recognition accomplished in the triune life and thereby become sites for empowering each other to become truly virtuous.

Notes 1 Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). I single out Markell because of the tension he helpfully discusses between identity and agency and how it relates to issues of truth and sovereignty. 2 On the issue of recognition, see Charles Taylor, et al., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. by Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), and The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition, trans. Joseph Ganahl (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012). For criticisms of the concept, see Markell, Bound by Recognition; Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 3 Cf. Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper, 1993); Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993); John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993). On my reading, what makes Edwards’s psychological account of the Trinity so rich is that it has ramifications for how we ought to treat each other as persons and utilizing the

An Edwardsian theoethical aesthetics  111 notion of recognition brings this out. Whether or not this account coheres with his social account, a question that vexes some Edwards scholars is a topic for another essay or book. 4 Jonathan Edwards, “An Essay on the Trinity,” in Treatise on Grace and Other Posthumously Published Writings, ed. by Paul Helm (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. Ltd., 1971), 108. 5 Edwards, “Essay,” 99. 6 Markell, 39–40. 7 Ibid., 41. 8 Ibid., 59–60. 9 Ibid., 34–8, 178–88 10 Edwards, “Essay,” 119. 11 Ibid., “Essay,” 99. 12 Jonathan Edwards, The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards from His Private Notebooks, ed. by Harvey G. Townsend (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009), 6–7. 13 Edwards, Philosophy, 74. 14 Robert W. Jenson claims that Edwards’s “brazenly speculative proposition” that ‘space is God’ should be understood as the position that God contains all reality “as a consciousness contains that of which it is conscious.” The space that is God is the space of an eternal, omnipresent consciousness. See Jenson, America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 21. 15 Edwards, “Essay,” 118. 16 Ibid., 100. 17 For a discussion of this epistemology of repetition and how it differs from an epistemology of representation, see William J. Danaher, The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 19–26. 18 Edwards, “Essay,” 100–2. 19 Ibid., 118. Danaher contends that Edwards’s notion of a person is that of “a dynamic state of relationality in the self-consciousness,” (Trinitarian Ethics, 7; addition mine). Hence, as God’s idea of himself, the Son is a moment in God’s self-conscious whereby God relates to himself, and thereby a person. The same structure characterizes the Spirit as God’s love. 20 Edwards, “Essay,” 105. 21 Ibid., 108. 22 Edwards makes this explicit in “Charity and Its Fruits,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards Volume 8: Ethical Writings, ed. by Paul Ramsey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 373: The Son “is not only the infinite object of the Father’s love, but he also infinitely loves the Father.” Amy Plantinga Pauw draws the connection between this claim and Edwards’s notion of the Holy Spirit as the mutual, reciprocal love between Father and Son, in her The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 49. 23 Edwards, “Essay,” 118 24 Edwards, “Treatise on Grace,” in Treatise, 63–5. 25 It is this communicative dynamic that Pauw is referring to when she claims that the psychological analogy, despite its immanent rather than economic character, has “strong implications for God’s redemptive presence in the world” (Supreme Harmony, 12–3). Sang Hyun Lee articulates this as Edwards’s dispositional ontology, whereby divine being simply is God’s disposition to communicate himself. See his “Jonathan Edwards’s Dispositional Conception of the Trinity: A Resource for Contemporary Reformed Theology,” in Toward the Future of Reformed Theology: Tasks, Topics, Traditions, ed. by David Willis and Michael Welker, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. Pauw herself articulates this as

112  Joshua Daniel Edwards’s relational ontology (Supreme Harmony, 80–9). Similarly, Jenson claims, “According to Edwards, to be is to be harmoniously related” (America’s Theologian, 24). On my reading, Jenson strikes a different note than Lee and Pauw insofar as he stresses the connection between consciousness and ontology: God’s power to create is the power of thought and the being that upholds particular beings is the envelopment of God’s consciousness; hence, “to be is to pertain to the community of consciousness” (America’s Theologian, 29–31; 141). 26 Edwards, “Essay,” 105. 27 Edwards, “Dissertation I: Concerning the End for which God Created the World,” in Ethical Writings, 431. Pauw, in conversation with other Edwards scholars, notes that his idealism, whereby to be is to be the object of some consciousness, follows from his conviction that the very point of God’s glory is to be known (Supreme Harmony, 87). On a related note, Jenson contends that Edwards’s claim that humanity is the end of creation concerns humanity’s eventual and eternal consciousness of creation, which consciousness is not a “superior present endowment” (America’s Theologian, 36). 28 Edwards, “Treatise,” 64. 29 Danaher notes that divine unity in Edwards is not a matter of simplicity, but rather of identity (29), or in my terms, of recognitive self-relation. Sticking closer to Edwards’s own language, Pauw notes that Edwards’s alternative to the simplicity tradition of divine unity “revolved around the notions of excellency, harmony, and consent.” (69). My account of Edwards’s trinitarian theology, as well as next section’s discussion of how this analogizes to the human, should make clear that I disagree with Danaher’s assessment that Edwards’s psychological analogy concerns how we know ourselves while his social analogy concerns how we love ourselves (95). On my reading, his psychological analogy also concerns love, though admittedly it does not thematize that love through covenantal relations, as his social analogy does. 30 Danaher helpfully notes how this notion of the goal of human life as theosis or divinization, connects to Edwards’s idealism: our participation in divine selflove, which I have articulated as divine self-recognition, is “the actual repetition in the soul of God’s knowledge and love through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit,” 210. 31 Edwards, “Treatise,” 72–5. 32 Edwards, “Essay,” 99, interpolation mine. 33 See Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 3: Original Sin, ed. by Clyde Holbrook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 34 Edwards, Philosophy, 242–3; Elizabeth Agnew Cochran notes that Edwards’s notion of natural law is based on self-love as a natural human instinct. See Cochran, Receptive Human Virtues: A New Reading of Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). 35 Pauw characterizes Edwards’s notion of sin as “creaturely resistance to the aims of God’s great work of redemption” (Supreme Harmony, 137). On Jenson’s characterization, “If a finite consciousness does not love God, it will love only itself and hate all others,” and so become counterfeit religion (America’s Theologian, 82). 36 Edwards, “Treatise,” 75. 37 According to Jenson, this particular work is a piece of political theory. It addresses “the problem of the stranger” in the course of articulating human relations as “the bonding of hearts in community,” rather than “the mutual balancing of egocentric ‘interests.’ ” (America’s Theologian, 169–71). The claim that underlies my argument is more modest: what Edwards accomplishes in The Nature of True Virtue has ramifications for issues of multicultural recognition. 38 Jonathan Edwards, “Dissertation II: The Nature of True Virtue,” in Ethical Writings, 539.

An Edwardsian theoethical aesthetics  113 9 Edwards, “True Virtue,” 540–2. 3 40 Ibid., 550–1 41 Ibid., 552 42 And to become subjects of divine recognition is to participate in God’s self-­enjoyment, which is to say, in divine happiness. As Cochran notes, Edwards aligns virtue and happiness because, on his account, happiness (both human and divine) involves “objective moral recognition of divine virtue” (Receptive Human Virtues, 53). And divine virtue is nothing other than divine recognition. 43 Edwards, “True Virtue,” 542. 44 Ibid. 45 See Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards Volume 2: Religious Affections, ed. by John E. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); See Pauw’s account of how Edwards’s trinitarian vision of human community led to “narrow moralism” and “sacramental exclusivism” (Supreme Harmony, 170–4). 46 Edwards, “True Virtue,” 554–7. 47 Ibid., 558–9. 48 Ibid., 564.

7 Trinity, virtue, and violence Aristotle Papanikolaou

My chapter will begin with a tradition-specific theological construal of God – the Christian doctrine of the Trinity – that all who profess to be Christian do not necessarily accept, and that has been debated endlessly by those Christians who do accept such an understanding of God. I will selectively trace the history of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity to indicate that this particular understanding of God is simultaneously an understanding of the God-world relation. In this sense, the implication of my brief selective history will be that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is not simply a narrative description of the threefold way in which God relates to the world, but a reasoned argument about how humans must imagine God to exist in order to make sense of a God-world relation in terms of divine-human communion. I will then try to show how such an understanding of God made a difference for the understanding of virtue in the seventhcentury Christian thinker, Maximus the Confessor, in terms of learning how to love. I will then attempt to show how such an understanding of virtue opens up ethical possibilities in relation to war ethics and violence.

Trinity An important moment in the Christological debates that is relevant to the development of the doctrine of the Trinity was that between Athanasius and the so-called Arians or non-Nicenes.1 Lewis Ayres has recently framed this debate in terms of what he calls the grammar of divine simplicity. The following passage I think provides a helpful summary of his position: “The language of simplicity is inseparable from the language of divine incomprehensibility and gives rise to ‘formal features’ of divine being that should govern all our speech about God.”2 Ayres is claiming that the fourth-century debate was essentially about scriptural attributions of Jesus as the Word of God or Son of God. The genius of the pro-Nicenes was the forging of a grammar of divine simplicity that “enabled the achievement of a clear distinction between God and creation (such that ‘true God’ is synonymous with God).”3 Ayres seems to be arguing that if the debate is primarily one over the scriptural attribution of Jesus as the Word or Son of God, the

116  Aristotle Papanikolaou so-called Arians simply did not get it that such an attribution would not work unless there is a clear uncreated and created divide, which demands an understanding of divine simplicity that does not allow for degrees of divinity. I want to argue that the grammar that renders intelligible the pro-Nicene position is not simply that of divine simplicity; the more fundamental grammar, indeed, the very logic of Christian thought on the Trinity, is that of the grammar of theosis. Maurice Wiles’s review of Nicaea and Its Legacy helps illustrate this point. Wiles argues, The issue of whether a pro-Nicene theology can justly claim to be superior on the ground that it does a justice to the divine mystery that a non-Nicene theology wholly fails to do, seems to me an open question that requires a lot more study before even tentative answers are forthcoming.4 Wiles is correct that simply on the basis of the grammar of divine simplicity and incomprehensibility, there are no theological grounds to argue for the superiority of the pro-Nicene position. The importance of the emerging pro-Nicene response was not simply the categories that would demonstrate that divine simplicity is not threatened with a particular understanding of the eternal relation of the Father and the Son; the implications of the proNicene position are much stronger: the non-Nicene account of simplicity is inadequate because it does not allow for divine-human communion in the incarnate Word as revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The grammar of the pro-Nicene position is not simply that of divine simplicity, but a divine simplicity that allows for theosis – i.e., communion with the ‘true’ God – a kind of communion that non-Nicenes could not bring themselves to accept. This grammar of divine-human communion is evident especially in Athanasius. I will limit myself to two examples, though more could be given. One of Athanasius’s most perplexing arguments against those he labels as Arians in his Orations against the Arians is the one where he attempts to argue for the divinity of the Son by stating that if the Son were not divine, the Father would not be eternally Father.5 Notwithstanding the fact that Pannenberg thinks it is Athanasius’s most crucial insight,6 it requires attention to realize that the force of the argument only makes sense if one takes into account the shared presuppositions between Athanasius and the so-called Arians. Among other things, both would agree that the Son is a mediator between God and creation. In order to preserve a particular notion of divine simplicity, the Arians do not identify the Son as the true God, but as something distinct from creation so as to affirm some kind of mediation between God and creation. Otherwise put, the Arians want to affirm a particular notion of divine simplicity and some sort of communion. Athanasius, however, calls them on this incoherency; the attempt to preserve a certain kind of understanding of divine simplicity that does not allow

Trinity, virtue, and violence  117 for communion with the true God is forcing the Arians to deny an identification of the Son with the true God, the consequence of which is the conclusion that the Father is not eternally Father, which, in the end, destroys the very notion of divine simplicity the Arians are trying to preserve. In order to allow for a notion of divine simplicity that would allow for communion with the divine, they must allow for an understanding of divine simplicity in which the Father eternally generates the Son. By identifying the Son with the true God, Athanasius is not simply following any notion of divine simplicity, but one that allows for divine-human communion. Athanasius is essentially radicalizing divine simplicity; he is, in Karl Rahner’s words, radicalizing monotheism and doing so in a way that invokes Anselm’s dictum that the idea of God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. For Athanasius, what is greater than God’s existence is a God who exists so as to be in communion with the not-God. It could also be argued that Anselm had something similar in mind.7 This grammar of divine communion is clearly evident in the Orations, most especially in the Athanasius’s discussion of Proverbs 8.22, “The Lord created me as a beginning of his ways for his works,” in the second Oration. What is suggestive is that Athanasius spends many pages arguing why the Son cannot be considered a creature before offering an interpretation of the passage itself. As he says, We have taken up these points at such length and have countered the irrational fabrications which they have devised in their hearts before dealing with the passage of the Proverbs, so that they may recognize that it is not fitting to call the Son of God a creature and may thus learn to read correctly the passage in Proverbs, according to its right sense. Prior to this, Athanasius argues, If the nature of originated beings needs a mediator because it is not capable of partaking in the direct activity of God, then it is altogether necessary that the Word, as a creature whose being is also originated, also needs a mediator for his creation, for he too is one of those whose nature is originated and cannot partake of God’s activity but has need of a mediator. And if a mediator is found for him, then there will again be need for another mediator.8 The buck must stop somewhere: either give up the idea that mediation is possible or admit that mediation is in and through the Son as true God. Not understanding this important hermeneutical key is why the so-called Arians misunderstand Proverb 8.22. It would indeed not be difficult to find similar passages in Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory the Theologian, Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor. These passages indicate that what Athanasius saw more clearly than anyone prior to him is that if one is to think God as love grounded in a

118  Aristotle Papanikolaou hermeneutical focus on the person of Jesus, and if to think God as love means imagining a communion across an ontological abyss – a divinehuman communion – one must think the divine simplicity in terms, to again draw on Rahner, of “permanent” and “factual” distinctions.9 Only in thinking the one God in terms of permanent and factual distinctions can one think mediation across the ontological abyss as God and, more importantly, can one then think the not-God as not competitive or alien to God,10 but as inhabitable and permeated, always and already shot through with God. The trinitarian grammar of divine-human communion carved out by Athanasius is continued in the so-called revival of trinitarian theology. I doubt if the Trinity was ever forgotten, but what was revived was an understanding of the Trinity as the Christian conceptualization of the Godworld relation in terms of theosis. This is especially clear in Rahner who in his important but not-often-referred-to article, “Oneness and Threefoldness of God in Discussion with Islam,” defends the Trinity as an expression of monotheistic faith, but he does refer to it as the “radicalization” of monotheism. As he argues, Our basic thesis, put forward here, is meant to show that the doctrine of the Trinity can and must be understood not as a supplement or an attenuation of Christian monotheism, but as its radicalization, assuming only that this monotheism is itself taken really seriously as concrete monotheism based on the experience of salvation which does not banish God in his oneness out of Christianity’s experience of salvation history and into a metaphysically abstract solitude.11 “Radicalization” for Rahner means that the affirmation of the one God is not a theoretical or abstract monotheism, but the God who is concretely manifested in history and is thus immanent in creation itself. This becomes clear toward the end of the article when Rahner presents to the “religious monotheist” inescapable alternatives: [He] will hesitate uncertainly between an abstract monotheism, which simply cannot take entirely seriously what is proper to religious monotheism, and a concealed polytheism, which in practice makes absolute those created realities which are supposed to convey God to him, although they are finite.12 In order for monotheism to be radical and avoid being abstract and theoretical it must affirm that the one God is mediated concretely in history. But anything less than an ‘uncreated’ mediation leads back to a remote God and, thus, to an abstract and theoretical monotheism. Thus the final alternative is that God must mediate to himself through himself; otherwise he remains remote in the last resort and in this remoteness is present only by the

Trinity, virtue, and violence  119 divisive multiplicity of created realities which point to God’s remoteness . . . Since these two modes of factuality of the one God in and despite their diversity are themselves God and not something created and different from him, they must belong always and eternally to God himself as such.13 Put another way, a radical monotheism that affirms the one God acting concretely in history needs the concept of mediation in order to avoid nominalism and pantheism. But such a mediation, if it is truly to be radical, must be Godself; but, in order to think of such a mediation as Godself, one must think of a self-mediation of God to himself through himself as the condition for the possibility of the mediation of Godself in history. As Rahner states, Hence we may say that if revelation a) testifies to a real self-communication, and b) explains this self-communication as containing distinctions “for us,” that is considers it as mediated, of a mediation that is not merely created (which would do away with the character of a real self-­ communication), then it affirms ipso facto distinction and mediation in God as he is in himself.14 This does not mean that God is triune only in relation to history, or that God needs history for self-expression. God can become history without ceasing to be the immutable, triune God and that this very possibility is God’s very being as the self-differentiated triune God. Rahner then says, “This we can and must affirm, without being Hegelians. And it would be a pity if Hegel had to teach Christians such things.”15 Their obvious differences notwithstanding, there is a point of agreement between Rahner and Pannenberg here, as Pannenberg argues that a real relation of God to time “is possible only if the reality of God is not understood as undifferentiated identity but as intrinsically differentiated unity. But this demands the doctrine of the Trinity.”16 Rahner’s reference to Hegel brings to mind the last theologian I will reference in my select history of the Christian thinking on the Trinity – Sergius Bulgakov. As I said previously, the so-called revival of trinitarian theology is misleading if one does not qualify that to mean the revival of a trinitarian understanding of God in terms of the Christian answer to the question of the God-world relation, with the answer being that of theosis. And even though someone like Schleiermacher could be interpreted as attempting to give expression to something like a communion between God and creation, it was Hegel who rediscovered that the Trinity was always about the relation between the infinite and the finite, in which the true infinite is the condition for the possibility of the finite, where the finite is distinct from the infinite even if grounded in the infinite, and where the infinite overcomes the distinction without annihilating the finite. Bulgakov has too often and easily been dismissed as simply being influenced by Hegel, as well as Fichte and Schelling, but such an accusation would not give enough credit to the

120  Aristotle Papanikolaou profundity of a thinker who prefigured many theological currents that were soon to follow, such as Balthasar’s kenotic God, Moltmann’s suffering God, Johnson’s Sophia God, and even the bold use of Marxist thought for analyzing and unmasking economic equalities toward a theology that would liberate the poor and oppressed.17 And though a broad outline of the German idealist phenomenology of absolute spirit is discernible in Bulgakov (Gallaher 2017), rather than uncritically appropriating German idealist thought, Bulgakov was intent on correcting it.18 More strongly, Bulgakov saw in the German idealist thinking of the antinomy between freedom and necessity, spirit and nature a natural development of the hypostasis/physis distinction forged by Christians’ debates on the Trinity – a welcomed development, but one that he thought had gone wrong especially in its inability to maintain the integrity of that which is finite. Bulgakov did argue that the only way to understand God as Trinity was to understand God as the self-revelation of absolute spirit.19 The categories of essence or nature and person or hypostasis were indeed important achievements of making sense of the self-revealing God, but Bulgakov would argue that a third category or distinction is needed – and that category is Sophia. For Bulgakov, the category of Sophia is the only way to make sense of the God-world relation in terms of communion, of the infinite ground for the finite that overcomes the distinction without annihilating the finite. The problem for trinitarian thought, according to Bulgakov, has always been the question, why the Holy Spirit? Understanding God as absolute Spirit as a self-revelation of God to God’s Self is to understand that God knows God’s Self in an Other who is all that God is by necessity, but this all that God is is not actualized until it is returned in freedom and love. This self-reflexive movement of the trinitarian being of God is neither just Father, Son, and Spirit, but it is the actualization of the self-revelation of God to God’s Self and, as such, is God’s very being. As such, it is not the empty absolute, but is the actualization in love and freedom (the Spirit) of the content of all God revealed in the Other (the Son). As self-revelation it is then the essence of God hypostatized. As self-revelation, it includes all that God is to creation from eternity without positing a creation in time and space. This trinitarian being of God is Sophia, and Sophia then becomes the connecting link to finite creation, since all that God is to God’s Self includes God’s relation to creation. The mediation to the not-God cannot simply be the Logos, since whatever the Logos and the Spirit are to creation it must be through Sophia. Echoing Pannenberg, creation according to Bulgakov is the self-repetition of the trinitarian being in time and space – the created Sophia realizing all that is possible for creation in the self-revelation of God to God’s Self, or God-as-Trinity-as-Sophia.20 Given this understanding of the grammar of the language of the Trinity in terms of theosis or divine-human communion, Roger Haight is simply not correct when he says, “The doctrine is not intended to provide information about the internal life of God, but is about how God relates to human beings.” The point of the doctrine is, in fact, to conceptualize the life of God

Trinity, virtue, and violence  121 that is free to be in relation to what is other than God for the sake of communion. I would also not agree with his claim, If God were conceived as single, simple, spiritual, conscious, intelligent, and a sovereignly free subject, this characterization of God could of itself account for God’s real self-communication to Jesus and each human being. In other words, a “modalist” position can be understood in a way that accounts for the point of the doctrine of the trinity, and there is no really convincing argument against it. With this observation, however, I do not defend or endorse modalism.21 A modalist position, as Athanasius, Rahner, and Bulgakov saw very clearly, would not allow for a real self-communication of God to what is other than God, which is what the Trinity is attempting to express. This is because modalism by definition is God becoming trinitarian as God relates to creation. If these modes of operation are permanent, then they are dependent on creation and God’s being depends on something finite. If they are not permanent, then they are simply created effects. The modes of operations must exist eternally within God’s very life if there is to be a real self-communication with God in history. In order to discern the difference such a tradition of thinking on God has for theological ethics, we must again go back in time to the seventh-century Christian thinker – Maximus the Confessor. Indeed, Maximus and Bulgakov are the only two thinkers in the Eastern Christian tradition to present a speculative, cosmic vision of the whole that is trinitarian and has as its center theosis.

Virtue and violence That the doctrine of the Trinity hinged on debates about the degree of divinity presenced in the person of Jesus of Nazareth is to tell only half of the story. Sarah Coakley convincingly argues that arguments for the divinity of the Spirit were not derivative of what was said about the Logos. Coakley states, “Prayer (and especially prayer of a non-discursive sort, whether contemplative or charismatic) is the chief context in which the irreducible threeness of god becomes humanly apparent to the Christian.”22 She amplifies, There is something, admittedly obscure, about the sustained activity of prayer that makes one want to claim that it is personally and divinely activated from within, and yet that activation (the “Spirit”) is not quite reducible to that from which it flows (the “Father”).23 Elsewhere she adds that it is also not reducible to that to which it responds, which is the Logos. In summary, the prayer’s total perception of God is here found to be ineluctably trifaceted. The “Father” is both “source” and ultimate object of divine desire; the

122  Aristotle Papanikolaou “Spirit” is that (irreducibly distinct) enabler and incorporator of that desire in creation – that which makes the creation divine; the “Son” is that divine and perfected creation.24 A similar argument about the grounding of the doctrine of the Trinity in the experience of the Spirit is also given by John Zizioulas, who focuses, however, more on the corporate prayer of the Eucharist rather than contemplative prayer.25 Coakley helps explain the link between the doctrine of the Trinity and the tradition of thinking on the virtues that emerge within the ascetical tradition of such Christian thinkers as Maximus the Confessor and Evagrius of Pontus. Virtue becomes the primary language through which the human embodiment of the divine is expressed; it is embodied theosis. Maximus is heavily reliant on Evagrius, who, of course, together with other Christian thinkers, were appropriating Greek philosophical thinking on the virtues. Maximus, however, was attempting to correct Evagrius. As Andrew Louth so nicely articulates, “Whereas Evagrius’ doctrine of prayer and the spiritual life is about how the soul is to regain the state of being pure mind from which it has fallen, for Maximus the spiritual life is about how we love.”26 For Maximus, the road to knowledge of God as union with God is inseparable from a love and desire for God. In essence, to learn God is to learn how to love. The ascetical life is such a training in love that involves the virtues.27 If virtue is embodied theosis, Maximus, in his Four-Hundred Chapters on Love, helps us to understand that the virtue of love is something that must be learned; it requires humans to engage in ascetical practices that allow us to acquire the virtues, which then form the building blocks for acquiring the virtue of virtues, which is love. Maximus offers a relational understanding of the virtues in which virtues build relationships, while vices destroy relationships. He says, “All the virtues assist the mind in the pursuit of divine love.”28 In the end, this asceticism of divine-human communion is the realization of the greatest commandment – to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Mt. 23:37). Maximus, however, understood the paradoxical nature of this commandment; he knew that one could not simply will oneself to love as one wills oneself not to steal or to lie. What he also understood is that love is a learning that requires a training that shapes our emotions and desires, and by so doing, increases the capacity of the will to love. For Maximus, in particular, “progress in the love of God,” is measured ultimately by how one relates to others, especially those to whom one feels hatred or anger.29 As Maximus explains, The one who sees a trace of hatred in his own heart through any fault at all toward any person whoever he may be makes himself completely foreign to the love for God, because love for God in no way admits of hatred.30

Trinity, virtue, and violence  123 There are, however, other conditions in life that make love difficult, and one such condition is violence. Violence that happens to us or that we commit makes love difficult. I will illustrate how violence has this effect by looking at three particular cases of violence, two of which are related to war and one of which is related to conditions of poverty. It is very common in the United States now to hear of stories of combat soldiers from the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is very disturbing to hear the stories of combat veterans, which include not sleeping with their spouses for fear that a nightmare may lead them to physically harm their spouse; not being able to sleep in the middle of the night because of hyper-vigilance; not wanting to be outdoors for fear that a sound, such as a bird chirping or water running, may trigger combat mode; not being able to enter public spaces, such as grocery stores or elevators; having dreams of mutilating one’s children; alienating friends and families; and not being able to hold a job, or even get a job for fear of public spaces. Many of them end up homeless on the American streets with 13% of the homeless population in the United States being veterans, and 20% of the male homeless population being veterans. They are plagued by demonic images and memories of the war. The high rate of the experience of PTSD symptoms among Vietnam veterans demonstrates that the effects of war linger in the body long after a soldier’s tour of duty. According to Jonathan Shay, one of the pioneers in the United States in treating combat veterans suffering from PTSD, this lingering is in the form of “(a) hostile or mistrustful attitude toward the world; (b) social withdrawal; (c) feelings of emptiness or hopelessness; (d) a chronic feeling of being ‘on the edge,’ as if constantly threatened; (e) estrangement.”31 There are many stories and statistics that reveal that there is an asceticism to war: either through the training received in the military or through the practices that one performs in the midst of war to train the body for survival against constant threat of violence, war is the undoing of a theosis-based understanding of virtue in the sense that impacts negatively a combat veteran’s capacity for relationship with family, friends and strangers.32 In addition to PTSD, a new category is emerging in order to distinguish a certain state of being that is effected by the combat veteran’s participation in war and that is no longer thought to be identical with PTSD, even if many of the symptoms are similar. This state of being is being called ‘moral injury,’ which is distinguished from PTSD in the sense of not being induced through a fear response.33 Moral injury refers to a state of being in which the combat veteran experiences a deep sense of having violated their own core moral beliefs. It may occur as a result of killing either combatants or non-combatants, torturing prisoners, abusing dead bodies or failing to prevent such acts; it may also ensue even if there was no way for the combat veteran to avoid doing such acts. In the experience of moral injury, combat veterans may judge themselves to be worthless, unable to live with an act he or she committed that is a never erasable act. Symptoms are similar to

124  Aristotle Papanikolaou those as PTSD, such as isolation, mistrust of others, depression, addiction, emotional detachment, and negative self-judgments. In a recent New Yorker article entitled “The Return,” one of the veterans from the Iraq War is quoted as saying: I don’t want to tell her stuff [the her being his wife] . . . I don’t want her to know that her husband, the person she married, has nightmares about killing people. It just makes me feel like a monster . . . That she’ll hate me . . . What kind of person has dreams like that?34 Maximus often speaks of how self-love is the biggest obstacle to progressing in leaning how to love. In the case of moral injury, it is not self-love as much as self-loathing that is, ironically, the obstacle. The effects of violence on the human is also clearly visible in the poor neighborhoods in the big cities of the United States where the threat of violence is constant. One teenager who lived in a poor neighborhood of Chicago, which is infested with violent gangs, described his neighborhood as a daily war zone.35 He went on to wonder why so much attention was being given to combat veterans and not to people in the United States who lively daily surrounded by the threat of violence. Related to this, one of the most difficult questions confronting educators in the United States is how to educate children in poorer neighborhoods, who are consistently underperforming in comparison with children in more middle-class or affluent neighborhoods. As an example, Paul Tough has recently authored the book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character in which he reports on approaches to this problem that focus on character, such as the recent work and studies of the Nobel Prize economist from the University of Chicago, James Heckman.36 Tough describes how educators for decades were focusing on improving what are called “cognitive skills,” which have to do with such things as reading and mathematics. Studies have shown that the skills correlated with success in such things as college graduation or well-paying job are what are called “non-cognitive skills.”37 It is the development of non-cognitive skills that allow for the development of cognitive skills. According to Heckman, the types of cognitive and character skills that are crucial to success in economic and social life . . . include perseverance (‘grit’) . . . trust, attentiveness, self-esteem and self-efficacy, resilience to adversity, openness to experience, empathy, humility, tolerance of diverse opinions, and the ability to engage productively in society.38 Heckman also lists self-control, which would include impulse control, anger management, delayed gratification, or thinking before making a bad decision – what Robert Merrihew Adams calls the structural virtues.39

Trinity, virtue, and violence  125 What they have also discovered is that the stress from adverse experiences in childhood, such as the experience of violence or the threat of violence, can prevent non-cognitive skills from developing properly. Tough reports on findings that indicate that 51% of children who have experienced four or more adverse effects are identified as having learning or behavioral problems.40 Trauma, in particular, can interfere with healthy brain development, decision making, memory, and the type of sequential thinking needed to work through problems.41 If a child is experiencing the constant threat of violence in the home, the stress that such a threat generates can prevent the development of the part of the brain responsible for non-cognitive skills. Another way it was explained is as follows: if one is in the forest and is confronted by a bear, then the part of the brain responsible for aggression will activate, and that part of the brain responsible for non-cognitive skills will deactivate in order for the person to prepare for an emergency response. Such an emergency response, however, is meant to be infrequent. For some children living in a family home situation in which the threat of violence is constant, the brain responds as if facing a bear every single day. If the emergency response of the brain is activated repeatedly, the brain forms pathways that get increasingly ingrained. In day-to-day situations, this means that it is difficult for such children to learn reading and mathematics in class when the brain is constantly on emergency response mode. It is not uncommon for such children to have behavioral problems in school that often manifests itself in rage.42 Being surrounded by or experiencing violence can actually form the brain in such a way as to form such vices of fear and anger (again, not necessarily selflove as much as self-loathing), two of the vices that Maximus says impair the ability to be in the kind of relationships that would not simply allow for love but also for learning to occur. This description of the effects of violence on the human person leads me back to my discussion of virtue as embodied deification in Maximus the Confessor, and the question that immediately should be anticipated is, what can virtue ethics possibly have to do with the effects of violence? When it comes to violence, ethics has often engaged the question of when it is permissible to do violence? When is the act of violence morally right or wrong? These are the very questions usually addressed in ethics of war in the tradition of just-war theory. The inadequacy of just-war theory, however, to deal with the effects of violence in war I believe reveals its blind spot. Combat soldiers are trained to kill in order to defend, to treat all others as threats in order to protect. This training becomes intensified when in the combat situation, where the body is training itself to protect itself. In addition to the constant fear of violence, which can potentially provoke the feeling of anger, combat soldiers are put in situations where they must inflict violence, often on innocent non-combatants. What emphasis on justwar theory does in the ethics of war is to fail to account for the effects of violence on the combat veteran’s capacity to love: to love self in the proper

126  Aristotle Papanikolaou way and to love the other, even the enemy or the stranger. This effect occurs on the combat veteran even if it is clear that they are fighting on the supposedly ‘just’ side of the war, as in World War II. The mistake that just-war theory makes is not so much trying to establish criteria for thinking about justified uses of violence but implying that simply because one is on the socalled just side of a war that his relationship with God is unaffected. And if theological ethics is about one’s relationship with God, then how war affects those caught in its path must be part of the discussions of the ethics of war. Whether one is on the just or unjust side, the combat veterans’ experience of violence will affect his relationship with God insofar as it affects his capacity to love. If one is impaired in the ability to love, one is impaired in one’s ability to be gifted theosis. Shay describes the effects of the violence of war on the combat solider in terms of the “ruin of good character.” If we follow Maximus, this “ruin of good character” must be understood in terms of the diminished capacity to love. While seemingly a problem for pastoral theology, the effects of violence in war both in the form of PTSD and moral injury – two of the many horrors43 possible for the human experience – highlights starkly the kinds of ethical possibilities opened up by a theological account of God and, in particular, the God-world relation in terms of divine-human communion. Furthermore, if in fact ‘moral injury’ has emerged as a way of making sense of the existential dimensions of violence, and whose status as a diagnostic category is currently being debated within the field of psychology, then such a categorization as ‘moral injury’ cries out for a moral framework within which to understand what exactly is being injured. Deontological, utilitarian, and divine command theories clearly fail in understanding the situation that is moral injury. Only the language of virtue as a moral language can illuminate what is meant by moral injury. I actually see a mutually validating relationship between the experience of moral injury and virtue ethics in the sense that the language of virtue ethics validates the experience of moral injury, and the experience of moral injury validates the understanding of ethics in terms of virtue over deontological, utilitarian, and divine command understandings. Furthermore, the experience of PTSD and moral injury reveal a blurring of the lines between the psychological, the spiritual, and the ethical; in other words, such experiences make it difficult to claim that they have nothing to do with the ethics of war but are more related to psychological, pastoral, or spiritual challenges. Again, it is the language of virtue ethics that has the potential to integrate the various dimensions of these particular experiences. Let me flesh this out a little more. Since the revival of virtue ethics over the last few decades, there have been and will continue to be endless debates about what is meant by virtue ethics. I’m inclined to agree with Robert Merrihew Adams’s distinction between virtue ethics and the ethics of virtue, where virtue ethics is concerned with virtue for the sake of right action, while ethics of virtue is about being for the good for the sake of the good. As Adams claims, and I agree, one can be virtuous and still commit a wrong

Trinity, virtue, and violence  127 action. For Adams, being virtuous entails being for the good in a way that is persistently excellent. He further defines “being for the good” as loving it, liking it, respecting it, wanting it, wishing for it, appreciating it, thinking highly of it, speaking in favor of it, and otherwise standing for it symbolically, acting to promote it or protect it and being disposed to do such things. He elaborates, Excellence in being for the good involves having feelings and desires that respond appropriately to the good, as well as acting well and thinking well about the good. Virtue’s integration needs to involve all these types of response. In pursuit of such holistic integration it is reasonable, I think, to seek resources in practices that are not purely intellectual; various forms of psychotherapy and of religious meditation come to mind.44 One could see Adams’s understanding of virtue at work in the training of soldiers for combat situations. Although the training involves an increased effectiveness in killing, the being for the good is not killing per se, but defense – of country, but more concretely of fellow comrades and of innocent non-combatants within the vicinity of combat soldiers, who are also threatened by those seen as the enemy. Toward this end, the military is one of the most effective institutions at training in the virtues. Beyond forming habits that would incline the solider to act in reaction to a particular sound or image, the military trains soldiers to relate to fellow soldiers in terms of loyalty, integrity and camaraderie; there is also training in discipline and trust to higher ranking officers; this training in particular virtues and habits is to enable a being for the good that manifests itself in courage in life-threatening situations both for protection of self, but especially for protection of fellow soldiers and innocent non-combatants. I want to be clear here – I am not presenting a defense of war grounded in the ethics of virtue. Whether the good for which the military trains soldiers to be is actually good or not is debatable, but it would be unfair to see this training in virtue as simply for killing, even if it involves killing. Real problems begin to occur when combat veterans return home, because what has not been recognized is that the combat solider has indeed been formed in habits, inclinations, tendencies, dispositions, and character, and that the kind of momentum generated by such a training cannot simply be reversed by switching geography. The problem is that while the military understands the importance of virtue in training for combat, it falls back on deontological ethics for the return home. It treats soldiers as if they simply need to will the good when they return home, even though it took the military months to train these soldiers for a particular kind of being for the good. It fails to recognize that there is a different kind of being for the good

128  Aristotle Papanikolaou that requires the solider to engage in a different kind of training with a different set of practices. The kind of military training the soldier experienced may, in fact, get in the way of the being for the good at home. This is especially evident when soldiers cannot sleep, react to sounds of birds chirping as if they are in combat mode, and have difficulty being in crowds for fear of threat. These particular habits cannot simply be turned off. What the military especially failed to consider is the lingering effects of images of violence that induces states of fear, anger, depression, guilt, and shame. So while the military is very good at understanding the training involved in being for the good that involves combat, it expects the soldier to simply will the good that is now required for civilian life. All this begs the question of for what good should we exactly be in an excellent way? This will endlessly be debated, but let me offer an answer that I think most would find agreeable, and that is to define the good in terms of love. The Christian tradition as a resource for understanding the good as love contributes to the discussion of virtue and violence. Even more concretely, the good as love through the lens of the Eastern Christian tradition, specifically the concept of theosis, offers a paradigm for understanding the human person that is able to illuminate the existential dimensions of the effects of violence, and also offer insights for living in the midst of the damage that violence does. My position here resonates with that of Warren Kinghorn’s, who argues that “Faith communities, unlike the clinical disciplines, are able to embrace thick and particular conceptions of human flourishing and human failing and are, thereby, equipped much more robustly than the clinical disciplines to facilitate the healing of morally injured persons.”45 Such a thick and particular conception, according to Maximus, is one of divine-human communion that entails a learning to love, that must include the possibility of proper self-love through self-forgiveness, which is conceivable in light of God’s being as communion.

The askesis of learning how to love There is hope amidst the suffering of violence. Neuroscientists have discovered that the plasticity of the brain lasts throughout our lifetime. This means that the brain can, indeed, be rewired, that new pathways can be formed that one might describe in the language of virtues. They are discovering that spiritual practices, such as yoga and certain forms of prayer, can rewire the brain, because, as explained by one of the leading specialists in treating trauma, Bessel van der Kolk, such practices allow “the body to have experiences that deeply and viscerally contradict the helplessness, rage, or collapse that result from trauma.”46 According to van der Kolk, Twenty weeks of yoga practice increased activation of the basic selfsystem, the insula and the medial prefrontal cortex. This research needs much more work, but it opens up new perspectives on how actions that involve noticing and befriending the sensations in our bodies can

Trinity, virtue, and violence  129 produce profound changes in both mind and brain that can lead to healing from trauma.47 In response to this problem of the effects of violence on learning, the Head Start Trauma Smart program has students engage in such practices as breathing exercises to help regulate anger and enable learning, even issuing breathing stars as rewards, realizing that traditional disciplinary methods based on fear, such as time outs, are ineffective.48 The fact that yoga and breathing practices are proving to be so helpful to those who have suffered trauma – child abuse, rape, combat violence – should motivate more studies on the effects of various spiritual practices, such as the Jesus Prayer, on the body for healing the effects of violence. There is clearly potential in these spiritual practices to wire the body toward openness to loving and being loved. The language of virtue most adequately captures the dynamics of this wiring, but diligence is required so as not to overlay this formation with deontological categories of right or wrong, and correlative notions of penance, atonement or guilt. The virtues are not primarily about right or wrong but about forming the body so as to receive the presence of God. As Maximus states, “The essence in every virtue is the one Logos of God . . . Which is to say that anyone who through fixed habit participates in virtue, unquestionably participates in God, who is the substance of virtues.”49 Virtues, in other words, move us into the life of the trinitarian God, whose being is the difference with creation that makes possible communion with God.

Theosis and theodicy I have attempted to suggest a link between the development of the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of God’s inner life as a being as communion and Maximus’s understanding of virtue as learning how to love. Theosis is the unifying thread that binds Trinity and virtue. Moreover, Maximus’s account of virtue that can both illuminate the effects of violence and poverty on being human, specifically on the human capacity to love and to form relationships, and can contribute to the interdisciplinary effort of understanding how the cultivations of virtues leads to human flourishing in areas such as education, or how the cultivations of virtues mitigates the effects of violence and poverty. John Chrysostom once said that even the poor need virtue. Maximus helps us to understand this comment in the sense that in addition to helping the poor in time of need and advocating for systemic change to inherently biased structures, by never wavering in its understanding of the human being as being created to learn how to love, a Christian social ethics should offer the very wisdom of the practices needed to form the human being in the virtues that would allow the human to mitigate the effects of poverty and violence, and enable the person to learn how to love, which is nothing less, according to Maximus, than the experience of God. I say “Christian”

130  Aristotle Papanikolaou social ethics intentionally because it has gone largely unnoticed that one of the most important theological debates in the past century has had a clear winner. In the debate over nature and grace, what has emerged is an identifiable theological consensus across diverse forms of theology that nature is indeed graced and created to be graced. The real debate in both systematic theology and theological ethics is less about method and more about the implications of this shared consensus across denominations and across methodological commitments. This debate, however, can be productive in the sense of moving forward the discussion on how the Christian affirmation that humans were created for communion with God is relevant to the human experience of violence and poverty. It can allow us to see affinities in seemingly disparate theological thinkers, such as Maximus and the womanist theologian, Karen Baker-Fletcher, who in her Dancing with God, says, “Hatred leads to division and unnecessary violence. It is a destructive, nihilistic privation of goodness, healing, and right relationship. Hatred is the negative power of evil,” and then speaks of the Trinitarian God who is “the source of all virtuous attributes [and who] calls the world to overcome evil and shares power with the world to realize such overcoming.”50 My own attempt at a contribution is that it can be relevant through the language of theosis and virtue. I want to end with a caution. This chapter is absolutely not saying “all you need is love”; it is unequivocally not an ode to the Beatles. In fact, what the ascetical tradition probably knew a little better than the Beatles is that it is quite not as simple as “all you need is love.” Love is, in fact, not willed, but learned and formed in and through particular practices. At its best, the Christian tradition is a tradition of thinking on the practices that realize love in relation to those near and far from us. As such, I’m not convinced that imagining no religion ultimately leads us to realizing that all we need is love. There can be no such thing as a traditionless learning how to love, even given all the anti-love baggage that accompanies a tradition of thinking of learning how to love. The experience of violence also reveals something else that is important about understanding the human learning to love. Whatever love becomes after the experience of violence, it does not leave that experience behind. In the redoing of the undoing of virtue caused by violence, the human learning to love is not a forgetting or erasure of the violence experienced; it is not even a moving beyond the experience of violence; it is always a moving in, through, and with that experience of violence, especially since whatever shape love takes, whatever it looks like, will have something do to with the violence experienced. As Marilyn McCord Adams has so eloquently stated, “To defeat horror-participation within the individual created person’s life, God must weave it into the fabric of that individual’s intimae and (overall and in the end) beatific personal relationship with God.”51 I am not saying that loves needs violence to be realized. The Christian hope that I am pointing to affirms that violence does not make love impossible, but whatever love is, it cannot cancel what has been done. The violence

Trinity, virtue, and violence  131 affirmed as part of one’s own narrative is eternally constitutive of that narrative, even if one’s narrative is not reduced to that experience of violence. The word that comes to mind here is forgiveness, but, like love, I believe that we have become too familiar with this word, especially in seeing it as something that can be willed or is obligated. One does not will forgiveness; one becomes forgiveness, and this becoming forgiveness is a relationality that does not forget, negate, or even move beyond the wrong done, but exists in the midst of and as a result of such a wrong. Love-as-forgiveness moves in, through, and with such contrary experiences as it does not allow our individual stories and the story of creation to be reduced to such experiences; it does not point to a border ‘beyond’ contrary experiences, such as violence, but to a ‘more than’ in some sense constituted by but not reducible to such experiences. This point is important in the face of those who might claim that in light of the fact that loss and, hence, mourning are constitutive of the self, of our identity, that there is and can be no such thing as love; it is also a necessary caution to Christians and rock stars alike who might too easily proclaim that “all you need is love.” Love is hard work; love is learned, but, for Christians, it should be a learning driven by the hope that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38–9)

Notes 1 Recent literature has pointed to the fact that the ‘Arians’ were neither followers of Arius, nor were they necessarily a homogeneous group. See, especially, Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and John Behr, The Nicene Faith, vol. 2, Formation of Christian Theology (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004). Although not a homogeneous group, the unifying thread of the so-called Arians is resistance to attributing full divinity to the person of Jesus. 2 Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 287. 3 Ibid., 4. 4 Maurice Wiles, “Review of Nicaea and its Legacy,” Journal of Theological Studies 56, no. 2 (2005): 337–38. 5 See Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians I, in The Trinitarian Controversy, ed. and trans. by William G. Rusch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1980), 91–7 [1.29–36]. 6 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1991), 273. 7 Nathan R. Kerr, “St. Anselm: Theoria and the Doctrinal Logic of Perfection,” in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, ed. by M. J. Christensen and J. A. Wittung (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 175–88. 8 Athanasius, intro. and trans. Khaled Anatolios, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2004), 138 [2.44]. Emphasis mine.

132  Aristotle Papanikolaou 9 Karl Rahner, “Oneness and Threefoldness of God in Discussion with Islam,” (OTG) in Theological Investigations, vol. 18 (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 115. 10 For an understanding of the God-world relation in terms of non-competition, see Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 11 “Our basic thesis, put forward here, is meant to show that the doctrine of the Trinity can and must be understood not as a supplement or an attenuation of Christian monotheism, but as its radicalization, assuming only that this monotheism is itself taken really seriously as concrete monotheism based on the experience of salvation which does not banish God in his oneness out of Christianity’s experience of salvation history and into a metaphysically abstract solitude” (Rahner, OTG, 109). 12 Ibid., 117. 13 Ibid., 117–18. 14 “Hence we may say that if revelation a) testifies to a real self-communication, and b) explains this self-communication as containing distinctions ‘for us,’ that is considers it as mediated, of a mediation that is not merely created (which would do away with the character of a real self-communication), then it affirms ipso facto distinction and mediation in God as he is in himself” (Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 36, n. 34). Again, “It follows that this real mediation of a divine kind in the dimension of salvation history must also be a real mediation of God’s inner life. The ‘threefoldness’ of God’s relation to us in Christ’s order of grace is already the reality of God as it is in itself: a three-personal one” (38). 15 Karl Rahner, “On the Theology of the Incarnation,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 4 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966): 113–14, note 3. 16 Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 405. 17 Aristotle Papanikolaou, The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 36–43. 18 Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company): 87–117. 19 For what follows on Sergei Bulgakov, see, especially, The Comforter, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 53–73 and 177–218; see also, Aristotle Papanikolaou, “The Necessity for Theologia: Thinking the Immanent Trinity in Anglo-Translated Orthodox Theology,” in Recent Developments in Trinitarian Theology: An International Symposium, ed. by Christophe Chalamet and Marc Vial (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014). 20 On the self-repetition of God in creation, one sees a similar understanding in Pannenberg. See Systematic Theology I, 389. 21 Roger Haight, The Symbol of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 488. 22 Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 55. 23 Ibid., 112. 24 Ibid., 114. 25 See John Zizioulas, The Eucharistic Communion and the World, ed. by Luke Ben Tallon (London: T&T Clark, 2011). For Zizioulas’s theology, see Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 26 Maximus the Confessor, intro. and trans. Andrew Louth, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 1996), 38. For Evagrius on the virtues with references to Maximus, see Julia Konstantinovsky, “Evagrius Ponticus on Being Good in God and Christ,” in Modes of Godly Being: Reflections on the Virtues from the Christian East, ed. by Perry T. Hamalis and Aristotle Papanikolaou, Studies in Christian Ethics 26, no. 3 (August 2013): 317–32.

Trinity, virtue, and violence  133 27 For Maximus on the virtues, see the special issue Modes of Godly Being: Reflections on the Virtues from the Christian East, ed. by Perry T. Hamalis and Aristotle Papanikolaou, in Studies in Christian Ethics 26, no. 3 (August 2013): 351–63. 28 Four-Hundred Chapters on Love, in Maximus the Confessor: Selected Writings, trans. George C. Berthold (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), 36. 29 Ibid., 42–8. 30 Ibid., 37. 31 Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1994), 169. See also, Shay, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (New York: Scribner, 2002). On trauma, see also, Judith Herman’s classic, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic, 1992). 32 For the ascetics of war, see Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009); Rachel M. MacNair, Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). 33 On moral injury, see Brent T. Litz, et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” Clinical Psychology Review 29 (2009): 695–706;   Shira Maguen, et al., “The Impact of Killing on Mental Health Symptoms in Gulf War Veterans,” Pychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy 3 (2011): 23–6; Shira Maguen, et al., “The Impact of Reported Direct and Indirect Killing on Mental Health Symptoms in Iraq War Veterans,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 23 (2010): 86–90; Shira Maguen, et al., “Killing in Combat, Mental Health Symptoms, and Suicidal Ideation in Iraq War Veterans,” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 25 (2009): 563–67; Kent Drescher, et al., “An Exploration of the Viability and Usefulness of the Construct of Moral Injury in War Veterans,” Traumatology 17, no. 1 (2011): 8–13; For theological accounts, see Warren Kinghorn, “Combat Trauma and Moral Fragmentation: A Theological Account of Moral Injury,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 32, no. 2 (2012): 57–74; Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini, Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After War (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2012). 34 David Finkel, “The Return: The traumatized veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan,” The New Yorker, 9 September 2013, 36. 35 Leland Jones and Lloyd Newman, Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago (New York: Scribner, 1998), 170. 36 James J. Heckman, John Eric Humphries and Tim Kautz, eds., The Myth of Achievement Tests: The GED and the Role of Character in American Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014). 37 Ibid., 341. Also, Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), xix, 148–75. 38 Ibid., 342. 39 Robert Merrihew Adams, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 37. 40 Tough, How Children Succeed, 1–48, esp. 17. See also, Nadine J. Burke, et al., “The Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences on an Urban Pediatric Population,” Child Abuse and Neglect 35:6 (June 2011): 408–13. Also, “The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study,” www.acestudy.org, last accessed 15 May 2014. 41 David Bornstein, “Teaching Children to Calm Themselves,” The New York Times, 20 March 2014, accessed 11 July 2016, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes. com/2014/03/19/first-learn-how-to-calm-down/?_r=0. 42 Ibid. See also Susan P. Walker, et al., “Inequality in Early Childhood: Risk and Protective Factors for Early Child Development,” The Lancet 378, no. 9799

134  Aristotle Papanikolaou (2011): 1325–38, esp. 1331; Susan P. Walker, et al., “Child Development: Risk Factors for Adverse Outcomes in Developing Countries,” The Lancet 369, no. 9556 (2007): 145–57, esp. 152. 43 On horrors, see Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and the Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 44 Adams, A Theory of Virtue, 222. 45 Kinghorn, “Combat Trauma and Moral Fragmentation,” 71. 46 Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2014): 3, 217, 267–69. 47 Ibid., 275. 48 For full results, see the 2013 “Head Start Trauma Start Report,” accessed 7 April 2014, www.saintlukeshealthsystem.org/head-start-trauma-smart. See also, Bornstein, “Teaching Children to Calm Themselves,” and Tough, How Children Succeed. 49 Maximos the Confessor, On the Difficulties in the Church, The Ambigua, trans. N. Constas, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 103. 50 Karen Baker-Fletcher, Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective (St. Louis, MI: Chalice Press, 2006), 9. 51 Adams, Christ and the Horrors, 47.

8 God as infinite Ethical implications David Tracy

Introduction The infinite is not a univocal concept. Among the many different meanings of the concept, the most basic division is that between the quantitative infinite in mathematics, physics and cosmology and the ontological infinite as first principle, ultimate reality, source of all reality in philosophy and theology.1 In its diverse, sometimes conflictual meanings, the concept of the infinite has been an indispensable category, first, as a quantitative category for space-time extensions in cosmology and physics, and second, for the multiple mathematical infinities of contemporary post-Cantor mathematics. Third, and the focus of this chapter, the infinite is a vital ontological category as the ultimate actual infinite in philosophy (Plotinus, Descartes, Cusa, Bruno, Spinoza, Hegel, Whitehead et al.) and in theology (Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius Areopagite, John Scotus Eriugena, Hadewych of Antwerp, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Duns Scotus, Nicolas of Cusa, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Rahner, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Robert John Russell and others). Indeed, in my judgment, the infinite is the first, though not the last (that is Infinite Love), to affirm about the Christian God. The ontological infinite names the first principle, the ultimate reality as source of all reality. Unlike the alternative category, the absolute for the ultimate, the category infinite does not close into a totality2 but is always infinitely open as well as internally related to all other reality – which the absolute by definition is not. This chapter is an attempt to encourage philosophical and theological ethicists to incorporate the category of infinity into their ethical reflections on the Good philosophically and on God theologically. It is a puzzle that, in the history of ethics, unlike in the histories of mathematics, physics and cosmology, as well as in the histories of philosophy and theology, the infinite has played only an occasional role, with certain important exceptions like Scotus Eriugena, Baruch Spinoza and, of course in contemporary thought, the deeply influential ethics of the infinite of Emmanuel Levinas – to whose groundbreaking work I will return later in this chapter. The chapter has the following structure: first, for clarification of the concept infinite, a return to the origin of the positive ultimate actual infinite in

136  David Tracy philosophy in Plotinus in the third century CE and a century later in theology in Gregory of Nyssa; after that historical interpretation, the chapter will conclude with an analysis of the ethical implications of the infinite as the Good (Plotinus) or as God (Gregory of Nyssa) in critical conversation with the contemporary ethics of the infinite of Emmanuel Levinas.

The classical Greek belief on the infinite as imperfection The classical Greek commitment to the form principle as necessary for all intelligibility prevented Plato from developing his profoundly original articulation of ultimate reality as the necessarily perfect reality (in the Republic, VI) as the Good beyond Being into a notion of the Infinite Good.3 For Plato, the ultimate as perfect must be a definite, bounded form – and thereby intelligible, finite. The Infinite, for Plato and for almost all classical understandings of perfection was form-centered. Any reality that was formless was chaotic, unintelligible and, therefore, imperfect. Despite his radical critique of Plato’s theory of the Forms, even Aristotle upheld the form principle as the key to intelligibility and, at the limit, perfection. He united form to potentially limitless matter in order to formulate the basic Aristotelian principle of finite form/matter. In either Platonic, Aristotelian or Stoic versions, the form principle (as the necessary ontological key to all intelligibility) was central in most Western thought from Plato to Hegel.4 Only in contemporary philosophy in major thinkers, like Heidegger and Whitehead in their distinct ways, did the category event replace substance (and therefore form) as the central metaphysical category. Event had, of course, earlier become the principal category for discussions of the quantitative infinite for the discussions in physics and cosmology. On the ethical side of the discussion, Plato, in his major dialogue on ethics the Philebus, unlike Aristotle had formulated a surprisingly Kant-like set of rational criteria for ethics. Unfortunately, Plato left unfinished the obvious further question of the logical relationship between Plato’s ontological Good beyond Being in the Republic and the formative rational criteria for discerning ethical goods in the Philebus. Meanwhile, Aristotle made so many major ethical contributions – for example, on teleology and on virtue as mean – that neo-Aristotelians can still seem intellectually untroubled that Aristotle provided solely an empirical ground for ethics, in effect a Greek aristocratic basis for his teleological ethics. In contrast to Aristotle, not only Kant but also Plato demanded a rational criterion for ethics. Not until seven centuries after Plato and Aristotle will an active positive infinity be implicitly, but clearly worked out by Plotinus, the most original ancient thinker since Plato and Aristotle.

Plotinus on the infinite as perfect Plotinus considered himself simply a faithful interpreter of Plato. He certainly did not consider himself as later scholarly ages accurately named

God as infinite: ethical implications  137 him, the first and most original neo-Platonist philosopher.5 On the topic of infinity, Plotinus implicitly held what Plato and Aristotle explicitly denied: ultimate reality is actually Infinite.6 Plotinus explicated what Plato had left unconceptualized – namely, the fuller ontological meaning of ‘The Good beyond Being’ of the Republic as bearing an intrinsic metphysical relationship to the ‘One’ of the Parmenides. Plotinian metaphysics of the One-Good as ultimate reality and first principle was indeed ontological but a henology not an ontology: the One as the dynamic living Real is also the Good, which as ultimate source radiates both being (ontology) and intelligence (epistemology) to ever lower levels in the famous Plotinian hierarchy of reality. The One as the Good is our ultimate source and end but neither consciously chooses nor cares for us. Rather, the One precisely as the impersonal Good, unconsciously and generously overflows to emanate all reality: from Nous (Pure Intelligence) to Psyche (soul) to cosmos to matter. For Plotinus, matter7 is at the very bottom of the Plotinian hierarchy of the real and is, therefore, interpreted as the negative infinity constituting the exact opposite to the One as Good, the positive infinity at the top of the hierarchy. In summary, Plotinus insisted that the fundamental reality – or, perhaps more accurately, the fundamental, ineffable principle and source of all reality – is beyond being (and, therefore, beyond ontology) in an exact metaphysical sense. The impersonal ultimate reality (on a few metaphorical occasions, the personal divine ‘He’) is One. But even the One is finally only a name for Plotinus, a necessary but still inadequate name for the ineffable but dynamic, the living first principle, the ultimate source and telos of all reality. For Plotinus, the Infinite One-Good is indeed not an adequate name,8 but it is the least inadequate name; rather, it is like the name, non-name tao in taoism. The One-Good names what cannot ultimately be named (it is both ineffable and apophatic). The Infinite One precisely as multiple, is the infinite source of the finite many (now arranged hierarchically from psyche, to cosmos, to matter) thus finally resolving, in Plotinus’s judgment, the most ancient of all Greek philosophical questions: the metaphysical relationship of the one and the many. The One, therefore, is the least inadequate name for the ultimately unnameable first principle: the One that radiates the many.9 For Plotinus, all being is constituted as many finite beings by the power of the Infinite One. The One as infinite is, therefore, formless, beingless, intelligence-less, boundless, infinite. The One is positively unlimited and indeterminate. It cannot, therefore, be defined save apophatically—i.e., as infinite, indeterminate. But the One is also the Good who radiates all reality impersonally but generously, unconsciously and uncaringly, completely unlike the caring, intelligent, merciful and just, the biblical One God who is love. The living One as Good overflows, radiates, emanates the whole of all reality. All reality save infinitely negative matter at the bottom of the hierarchy is good. Paradoxically, even matter in the beautiful form of the finite cosmos is good. Indeed, for Plotinus – here explicitly against contemporary Gnostics10 and implicitly with the Bible’s affirmation of the goodness of all

138  David Tracy finite reality – all emanated reality from Nous to soul to the beauty of the formed material cosmos is good. It is noteworthy that the usually serene Plotinus was fiercely and uncharacteristically polemical towards the Gnostic disparagement of cosmic reality as not good. Not only does the One as the Good emanate (not create) all reality in the grand hierarchical descent from the One-Good to Pure Intelligence to psyche to the beauty of the cosmos to the lowest level, formless matter. At the same time, the One-Good, like the ultimate magnet lures the intellectually and morally self-disciplined soul back home first in its ascent to contemplative Nous followed, at rare times, by the power of the Good itself to a vision of a transient but deeply affecting union with the One-Good. According to Plotinus, we can help produce this active receptivity in several ways:11 first, by a disciplined ascent from matter to the soul; second, through the soul’s powers of discursive reason united to purificatory intellectual and moral exercises (i.e., the cathartic virtues); and third, through the aesthetic attraction of the beauty of the cosmos to the soul. In a fourth step, the now intellectually and morally purified soul reaches Nous where it may contemplatively (i.e., not discursively) serenely rest, wait and hope. The infinite longing of the soul for the Good finds its penultimate home in the contemplative Nous. No further intellectual or moral disciplines can any longer help the soul reach its ultimate source and telos, the One-Good. Then Plotinus states in a fine metaphor that the now contemplative soul waits on the shore to see if the now Nous-inflected soul may be carried away to its true home.12 In Plotinus’s life, according to Porphyry,13 he himself experienced this mystical union with the One three times during the several years of Porphyry’s study with him. The following is one of Plotinus’ss descriptions of the experience of the Good (in Enneads VI, 7, 32): But if there is something desirable of which we cannot grasp the shape or form, it thereupon becomes especially desirable and lovable until the love we experience is measureless. Yes, love here is infinite because the Beloved is infinite. Love for her is infinite and, consequently, her beauty is of another sort – beauty beyond beauty. For Plotinus the supreme principle of the One as the Good is Infinite, for it is beyond form, beyond being, beyond intelligence, beyond care. For Plotinus, actual positive infinity, therefore, is no longer an imperfection as it was for Plato and Aristotle, but perfection itself. Plotinus’s purely spiritual One is not the fated material Logos in the eternally recurring fiery cosmos of the Stoics and later of Nietzsche with his ‘amor fati,’ nor is it the finite Unmoved Mover of Pure Intelligence (Nous) of Aristotle, nor even the finite (because formed) highest Good, the Good beyond Being of Plato. Plotinus’s intellectual revolution is clear: he is the first philosopher to develop an actual infinite (not merely as in Aristotle, a potential infinite of infinite effects of the first principle). The effects of this

God as infinite: ethical implications  139 Plotinian revolution have reverberated through centuries of a good deal of Western thought: pagan, Islamic and Christian, and rejected or ignored by many later philosophers (e.g., Anselm). Plotinus has also influenced a good deal of early modern and classically modern thought,14 especially Romantic thought as well as German and Anglo-American idealist philosophy (for example, the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson with his notion of the Vast).

Gregory of Nyssa: the infinite loving god and infinite human desire (epektasis) Gregory’s work of his later, more mystical years, The Life of Moses, written more than ten years after his earlier major dialectical-argumentative and often surprisingly fiercely polemical Contra Eunomius I and II, is a classic spiritual-theological text. In The Life of Moses and other texts, especially his last text, Commentary on the Song of Songs, Gregory turns his attention away from the earlier dialectical debates with Eunomius on neoArianism to work out the fuller implications for the Christian way of life and thought of a God who, as Infinite, is necessarily Incomprehensible (not the reverse).15 Gregory’s philosophical and theological oeuvre demonstrates well the error of yet another Western bi-polar opposition: philosophically, an opposition between philosophy as theory and as a way of life (as argued in Pierre Hadot);16 second, an even more false binary opposition in some ethics between contemplation and action (which, for Gregory, can never be separated); and third, a related modern theological unnecessary binary opposition between theology and spirituality. In his early work, Against Eunomius,17 Gregory forged rigorous dialectical and rhetorical arguments defending the doctrines of Nicaea and anticipating First Constantinople. Nevertheless, these early works are different in genre and tone but not in content from his contemplative and at times mystical later texts, Life of Moses and Commentary on the Song of Songs.18 Few thinkers have been as at home as Gregory of Nyssa in the full range of classical reason – from discursive dialectical argument and rhetorical persuasion, to constructive speculation and finally to the pure contemplation in his later works. Gregory intrinsically correlated a predication of God as Infinite, a proposition forged in his debates with Eunomius, with a novel understanding of our infinite, loving desire as never ending – i.e., as infinite desire stretching out (epektasis) to God.19 This ethical-intellectual spiritual trans-form-ation of all our desires and virtues by our infinite desire (epektasis) happens, for Gregory, when the finite self or soul experiences infinite desire and loving contemplation of the Infinite God united to infinite loving action toward others as other, i.e. any other, the neigh-bor. The truly free and graced self, for Gregory, experiences infinite stretching out (epektasis) toward the Infinite God. As Infinite, God for Gregory, like the Good for Plotinus, is necessarily Incomprehensible. For Gregory, God is the Infinitely Intelligent and

140  David Tracy Loving God (not the Plotinian impersonal One-Good) now become a Trinitarian monotheism of the One constituted by real relations. Gregory’s innovation on desire was based on his interpretation of a metaphor rather casually used by St. Paul in Philippians 3:14–15: epektasis – or stretching out. Epektasis became, for Gregory, the exactly correct word for our infinite, never ending, intellectual and erotic and ‘stretching out’ (epektasis) to God in this life and, against most of Christian traditions, even after this life. Epektasis, for the etymologically fascinated Gregory, points both to epi (‘at’ or ‘towards’ the Infinite Incomprehensible God) while at the same time pointing to ek – i.e., the self outside itself in the epektasis-ecstasis of the infinitely, desiring, loving self. Moreover, Gregory’s arguments with Eunomius were (for anyone interested in the central theological issue of naming God) a crucial moment in theological history both for the continuing complex debate of how to name God if there be a God and, in Christian theology, for understanding what was at stake for a Christian Trinitarian understanding of God in the intense fourth-century Trinitarian debates for naming God in Christian terms. The fourth-century, inner-Christian debate on naming God was many-sided.20 Eunomius’s fundamental doctrine was that through discursive dialectical reason reflecting on divine revelation we can know the essence of God if we name God as agennotos, or ungenerated.21 If that definition holds, it follows logically, Eunomius argued, that any authentic Christian understanding of God would name only the ungenerated Father, God; the Son and Spirit are, after all, described even by anti-Arian orthodox Christians as generated by the ungenerated Godhead of the Father. For Eunomius and his many neo-Arian followers, therefore, neither Son nor Spirit is divine. Son and Spirit are, as Arius earlier insisted, the highest most divine-like creatures but they are not ungenerated like the Father alone and therefore, are not God. In a way, the Eunomian controversy proved for Gregory a felix culpa for clarifying the name of God in his own emerging philosophical theology. In Gregory’s judgment, Eunomius’s principal error was his assumption that our finite minds can ever know the infinite essence of God. For Gregory, God is positively, actually infinite and, as such, Incomprehensible. Like so much of the Christian tradition so often influenced by the great Jewish thinker Philo of first century CE. Alexandria three centuries before him, Gregory insisted that philosophically our finite minds can, in Philo’s words, know that God is but not what God is.22 Contrary to many contemporary discussions of apophatic theology, Gregory did not hold that God was Infinite because Incomprehensible but Incomprehensible because Infinite. Along with Gregory’s own dialectical arguments with Eunomius of Cyzicus, Gregory held that if God is infinite, God, by definition, must be incomprehensible to our finite minds as well as, like Plotinus’s One-Good, positively Infinite in Godself. Eunomius’s problem for Gregory was not just his particular definition of God (ungenerated) but Eunomius’s belief that the essence of God can be defined at all.

God as infinite: ethical implications  141 Moreover, for Gregory as a biblical theologian, the all-wise, all-mighty, all-loving God of the Bible (see Gregory’s last work, Commentary on the Song of Songs)23 freed and purified through pure gift (i.e., grace), the infinite desire (eros, love) of humankind for God, the infinite Beloved who is Love. In Gregory’s theology, by the gift and the power of Divine Infinity, God shattered the limits, measures and boundaries of created finite humankind. Henceforward, for Gregory, Christians can live a new Christian ethical and spiritual life of authentic freedom (the chief attribute of the human as imago dei for Gregory): as a contemplative and ever-active life of epektasis: moving out of oneself (ecstasis) toward (epi) ever greater loving desire for God and love of neighbor. After an excursus on the contemporary ethics of the infinite in Emmanuel Levinas, I shall compare Gregory’s theological ethics of the infinite – i.e., his ethics of epektasis to Levinas’s ethics of the infinite other.

An ethics of the infinite: Emmanuel Levinas No contemporary philosopher has so emphasized an ethics of infinity more than Emmanuel Levinas. One need not agree with Levinas’s hyperbolic language for the radical ethical exclusivity of the other person. At the same time, Levinas’s ethics of the Infinite Good shattered Hegel’s ethics of totality24 just as Franz Rosenzweig had earlier shattered Hegel’s totalistic concept of the state. In my judgment, Levinas provided a new ethics of the Infinite Good, which can also serve as a worthy companion to two other contemporary Platonically inflected philosophical ethics – Iris Murdoch’s on the Good and Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics rendered into a full-fledged teleological ethic of the Good and of God by Franklin Gamwell in his groundbreaking works, The Divine Good and Existence and the Good.25 Levinas’s ethics of Infinity is hermeneutically related to his readings of two major predecessors: Plato’s insistence in Republic VI of the Good beyond Being. As it happens, in his public defense of Totality and Infinity, Levinas provocatively called for a Platonic restoration in ethics and metaphysics alike.26 In fact, Plato combined an Aristotle-like general teleology of the Good with a Kant-like rational ground for ethics – especially in the dialogues The Republic and Philebus. Levinas’s position on the Good beyond Being of Plato (he also mentions but does not expound upon Plotinus on the One)27 was joined to his second major hermeneutical retrieval: an original reading of Descartes’s concept of the infinite in Meditation III.28 Through his reflections on alterity Levinas has maintained that Western philosophy has tended to reduce all alterity, i.e. all otherness and difference into the Same (such as Hegel’s dialectically inclusive totality). On Levinas’s reading, Descartes in the third meditation reversed this Western philosophical logic of total appropriation of the other and the different into the Same because, so Levinas argues, Descartes’s concept of infinity means an ideation that surpasses its idea (concept) – i.e., for Descartes, in thinking the category the Infinite, I think more than what

142  David Tracy I think. Through thinking infinity, I am finally outside the control of any concept of totality. In that case, the other and the different are not reduced to the same. The Levinasian insight on the radicality of the Cartesian infinite29 is, in my judgment, exactly right. To repeat: in thinking the concept the infinite, I think more than I think. In my own language, through understanding the proposition ‘the Infinite,’ I am uniquely transferred into a non-propositional contemplative realm beyond conceptual propositions: in thinking infinity, I think more than what I think. For Levinas, the logical structure of the Cartesian analysis of the infinite is retained but the referent is changed from Descartes’s Infinite God to Levinas’s other person. In other words, Levinas does not use the notion of the Infinite, as Descartes did, as a philosophical (i.e. metaphysical) way to think God. For Descartes, God as final principle is alone Infinite. All other quantitative extensional space and time is, for Descartes – contra Giordano Bruno’s vision of an infinite universe30 – properly described as indefinite but not indeterminate – a category that applies to God alone. Levinas’s shift of Descartes’s infinite from God as the metaphysically Infinite God to an ethically infinite other human being allows Levinas once again to hold against Heidegger that ethics not ontology is first philosophy. It follows that the ethical other is the singular infinite, not any ontological-metaphysical concept of the Infinite God. For Levinas, the human other is manifested as Infinitely other in its ethical height and its implicit command by simply being there before me through its non-phenomenal face with the most fundamental ethical command, ‘Do not kill me,’ denies my natural ego-ism. Unlike Martin Buber’s focus on an I-thou encounter,31 Levinas’s ethics of the infinite has the other as an other confront, not encounter, me by means of its ethical demand for ethical responsibility. Every Levinasian other is a unique, irreplaceable, infinite Other who – as an infinite and finally incomprehensible alterity – resists and ultimately stops what Levinas sees as the ego’s insatiable desire to appropriate every other into its own sameness.32 On the contrary, every other person is infinitely other to me and demands from me an infinite ethical responsibility: this is the double givenness (infinite other; infinite responsibility) of Levinas’s ethics of the infinite. Furthermore, as a philosopher who is also an observant Jew, Levinas not only reads Torah but also writes philosophically inflected Torah commentaries,33 many of which emphasize the traditional Jewish prophetic ethical responsibility to the neighbor as the Torah command. Philosophically, however, unlike in his Torah commentaries, Levinas does not write directly of God but rather of what he calls ‘the God who comes to mind’ – i.e., comes to mind as the Ultimate Other only by means of my infinite ethical responsibility for the other person. Indeed, Levinas, in his interpretation of the classical prophets of the Hebrew Bible, has worked out his philosophical ethics of the infinite as well as in his Torah commentaries, which in his judgment likewise calls for a radical prophetic ethic for all others, especially any oppressed as marginal others (the widows, orphans, and strangers of the prophets and Leviticus).

God as infinite: ethical implications  143 So committed is Levinas to an ethics of the infinite constituted by the alterity of the other that, unlike in his two major mentors, Descartes on the Infinite God or Plato on the Good beyond Being, Levinas argues that the human other, not God nor the Good beyond Being, is the true referent of all ethics and therefore of first philosophy.34 For Levinas as for Kant, religion is mainly though not exclusively identical to morality. It clearly follows that for all authentic religion, especially modern Judaism which he interprets (here following Hermann Cohen) as the religion par excellence of ethical monotheism, is a prophetic ethics of the other. In my own judgment, religion must, as religion, of course contain a morality, but as Schleiermacher saw so clearly, is not confined to morality. Fortunately, Levinas can here be corrected by his sometime mentor Franz Rosenzweig.35 Rosenzweig’s openness to the full range of Jewish traditions, not only its ethical monotheism, is notable as in Rosenzweig’s crucial attention to liturgy, his openness to Kabballah and his strong focus more on the biblical love song, the Song of Songs than on the prophets (whom of course he both honors and interprets as central to Judaism). In his magnum opus, The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig articulated a modern philosophical Judaism which is not only an ethical monotheism but, as Rosenzweig argued through his philosophical and theological reading of the Song of Songs, Judaism also brilliantly explicates an anti-totality ontology as well as a Jewish theology with a biblical ethics, aesthetics and erotics grounded in both love of God and the ethical love of neighbor. Rosenzweig was able to honor not only the ethical monotheism of such classical modern Jewish philosophical thinkers as Moses Mendelsohn and Hemann Cohen as well the Talmud, but he was also able to retrieve, as Levinas was not, selected aspects of mystical kabbalistic Jewish traditions. On the contrary, Levinas – in direct difference from Rosenzweig, to whom to whom he always referred as his major Jewish modern philosophical mentor – always remained faithful to his Lithuanian and classical rabbinic and anti-Hasidic background which treated mystical kabbalah and Hasidim with at best mild indifference and sometimes straightforward hostility. In my judgment, Franz Rosenzweig had the more inclusive and more love-centered theocentric position, which included a theological ethics without loss of Jewish ethical monotheism and its prophetic focus. But it was Emmanuel Levinas who first articulated the first major contemporary ethics of the infinite – an ethics that has by now influenced both a great deal of philosophical thought (e.g., Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Marion) as well as a great deal of important contemporary Jewish and Christian thought. Rosenzweig’s position, in today’s now familiar theological language can been named a mysticalpolitical position, whereas Levinas’s position is austere, admirable, radical, but the exclusive ethics of the infinite other. During the same period in Christian theology, several political and liberation theologians as well as several feminist theologians – including but not limited to Gustavo Gutierrez, Johann Baptist Metz, James Cone, Maria Clara Bingemer, Sarah Coakley, Dwight Hopkins and Aristotle ­Papanikolaou – have argued on biblical grounds that it is a serious misreading

144  David Tracy of Christianity to read it as either almost solely a morality (Kant) or almost solely a mystical religion (Lossky). Christian theology for all these thinkers as for me is more accurately named a mystical-political theology or, as I propose as perhaps a more accurate description, an ethical-political and contemplative theology.36 Levinas’s profound ethics of infinity for the other, with additional reflection along the lines of Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, could without loss of its ethical center of gravity in an ethics of the infinite other also be developed into a mystical-political ethics of the other, the neighbor – or as I prefer to name this option (an admittedly less pointed more cumbersome name) – an ethical-political-prophetic theology united to an aesthetic contemplative and at times mystical theology: more briefly a propheticcontemplative theology. With Levinas’s contemporary ethics of the infinite in mind, it is time to return to the two major ancient thinkers of the infinite rather cryptically analyzed earlier – Plotinus and Gregory of Nyssa. By that comparison we may be able to see more clearly how the ancient ontologies of the infinite Good and Infinite God of love may provide what is too seldom noticed in the history of ethics: a distinctive ethics of the infinite – the Infinite Other, the Infinite Good or the Infinite God aligned (in Gregory at least) with an ethics of the infinite other, the near one, the neighbor.

Plotinus’s infinite desire for the good as the ethical virtue Plotinus did not develop a full-fledged ethics beyond the rather scattered reflections on the ethical virtues that he treats in the six treatises of Enneads I.37 What those treatises make clear, however, is that Plotinus was so focused on the soul’s ever-increasing, purificatory cathartic personal virtues that aid the soul’s ascent to union with the One as the Good38 that the only ethical virtues that interested Plotinus philosophically were those same cathartic virtues. Ethically, Plotinus enunciated what Pierre Hadot provocatively named ‘spiritual exercises’ designed to describe virtues that could purify the loving, desiring soul both morally and intellectually to prepare it gradually and rigorously to move ever forward in its ethical-metaphysical journey back to the One as the Good. The Plotinian soul must deliberately and constantly practice the intellectual and purificatory moral virtues to discipline itself to rise to contemplative serenity even as it heightens its attention to the pervasive lure of the One-Good magnetically attracting the soul home to union. For Plotinus, therefore, even the classical civic virtues of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Stoics and Cicero were never explicitly rejected but were surely down-played in favor of cathartic or purificatory virtues all driven by the primordial Plotinian virtue – an infinite desire for the Good39 that, for Plotinus, could transform all individual and civic virtues into a single drive of the individual, not of the polis, for the good – i.e., contemplative, life. Plotinus, like the Stoics and unlike the Cynics and the Epicureans, was honored for his dutifulness in fulfilling all the appropriate civic virtues in the imperial Rome

God as infinite: ethical implications  145 of his day but unlike the Stoics he did not theoretically relate Logic – Physics – Ethics. Indeed, Plotinus faithfully practiced the civic virtues of a good citizen (or, more accurately, subject) of his world of third-century imperial Rome.40 Plotinus’s only ethical-political act was his proposal (initially supported by the emperor, several senators and his many loyal students and former students) to found a new city for philosophers to be named (inevitably) Platonopolis somewhere south of Rome in Capania. Unfortunately, this fascinating Plotinian experiment in building a philosophical polis that would inevitably demand the development of civic virtue in the manner of Plato was not to be; the emperor, for mysterious reasons, suddenly withdrew his support and Plotinus himself contracted a fatal disease (possibly leprosy). Once the disease was diagnosed, Plotinus exiled himself to die in the house of his doctor in Capania – a doctor who was also one of Plotinus’s best students.41 Since Plotinus never had the opportunity to develop his polis, and unlike Plato, Aristotle, or Cicero left no political text, we do not know what explicit civic virtues for his polis Platonopolis might have been. It is not, however, just to charge Plotinus (as some ethicists have done) with ignoring in his life, as distinct from his philosophical thought which was both highly argumentative (i.e., dialectical and propositional) and contemplative, the traditional civic virtues. In fact, in his personal life, as reported in the moving Life of Plotinus by Porphyry, Plotinus conscientiously practiced his civic duties in the turbulent circumstances of third-century imperial Rome. As an individual, Plotinus was famously serene, gentle and generous to the point where he willingly accepted such all-encompassing ethical responsibilities as in his agreeing to be the personal and legal guardian of many children in his own home. Still, it is not unfair to observe that Plotinus did not establish anything like Levinas’s ethics of the infinite other nor any civic, political ethic as his mentor Plato had. Plotinus’s ethics is rather an ethic for the individual philosopher as sage and for a community of like-minded philosophers: it is an ethic of an ever-more purified infinite desire for the Infinite Good. So much is this the case that Plotinus’s ethics for the Infinite Good in one way is the exact opposite of Levinas’s ethics of infinite other human being. For Levinas, as noted earlier, the ethics of the infinite is grounded in the other person; God, therefore, as the ultimate Other at times ‘comes to mind’ as a result of attending to one’s ethical responsibility on the other. By contrast, Plotinus’s ethics of the Infinite Good is an ethics constituted by individual virtues that help the philosopher to give in to the lure of the Infinite Good. This loving, contemplative sense of the Infinite Good allows, one can say, one’s ethical duties to the human other (the neighbor) to come to mind. In other words, one can be allowed, I hope, to suggest that in Levinas’s ethics of the infinite, God may ‘come to mind’ may also be translated into its opposite in Plotinus. The other – the neighbor – does occasionally ‘come to mind’ and is then to be ethically attended to, but the central ethical virtues are cathartic not civic, individual, not communal – more intellectualist than

146  David Tracy passionate although not without great passion in his desire for the Good. Plotinus’s ethics is the ethics of a Greek sage; Levinas’s ethics is the ethics of a Jewish prophet. Gregory of Nyssa, like Franz Rosenzweig, tried to unite both ethics into a singular prophetic-contemplative ethic of love of God and love of neighbor. In Gregory of Nyssa’s ethic, like that of Franz Rosenzweig, one finds a theological ethics where both the infinite love of Infinite God and the kind of infinite love of the neighbor could be ethically unified into a complex single ethics of the infinite. Neither the Infinite God nor the infinitely commanding neighbor need merely come to mind; both are there from the very beginning to the infinite end.

Gregory of Nyssa: the ethics of epektasis The most original move in Gregory of Nyssa’s ethical-spiritual world, as we noted earlier, was his highly original interpretation of St. Paul’s word in Philippians for stretching out (epektasis). Paul seemed to like athletic metaphors42 (the good race, weights, etc.) – hence, the stretching out, epektasis, was a natural Pauline choice for our spiritual striving as a stretching, a straining forward. For Gregory’s rich etymological and theological imagination, epektasis, stretching out, became a metaphorically descriptive term for unending infinite ethical and spiritual stretching out whereby our infinite desire – for God and for the neighbor – never ends. For Gregory, each desire once fulfilled becomes an occasion for further desire. Desire will never end for we shall never be fully sated, much less bored (as Origen feared souls became in the beginning by exhausting their attention to a perfect but finite not Infinite God: the fall). For Gregory as a Christian, God is an Infinite Unity constituted by the three Trinitarian infinite relations43 – or more philosophically stated by Gregory – the Trinitarian God of Infinite Being, Intelligence and Love – causing our infinite loving desire for God and neighbor. Gregory’s too seldom discussed ethical innovation deserves notice: First, unlike in classical Greek ethics (Plato in Republic and Philebus; Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics; Zeno, Epictatus and Seneca in Stoic ethics), Gregory’s ethics of epektasis is not a classical Greek ethics of measure, limit, form; rather, as an ethics of finite fulfillment driven by infinite desires and pulled forward by the Infinie Good. Gregory’s ethics is, in fact, an ethics of excess. Above all, Gregory’s ethics of epectasis is not the measured virtue of the mean between extremes of Aristotle. His ethics is far more like the ethical portrait of the daemonic excess of Sophoclean heroes (above all, Antigone and Oedipus)44 as well as like several ethics of excess, not measure, in many post-modern thinkers. Precisely as epektasis – never-ending desire where each satisfaction stirs up ever-more desire – Gregory’s ethics is more like the ethics of excess in tragedy (especially Sophocles) than like the more familiar classical Greek ethics of limit and measure in Socrates and Aristotle. It is also more like Plato who possessed his own love of excess in the Symposium, the Phraedrus and even

God as infinite: ethical implications  147 the more measured Philebus. Gregory’s ethics of epektasis as more an ethics of excess than an ethics of limit and measure does not, of course, make his ethics like that of such a post-modern ethics of excess as Georges Bataille’s. After all, Gregory’s ethics is, in fact, an ethics of the infinite – i.e., the Infinite God evoking our infinite and therefore not measured but excessive desire. Levinas’s ethic, as we saw earlier, is an ethic of the infinity of the other as other. For Gregory, as for Plato in the Symposium, desire (eros) is not just lack or need (limit) but overflow of excess. Gregory’s ethics of the infinite is one where the self’s non-ending, joyful but never satiated desire for the Infinite Loving God is the excessive desire of epektasis that quite naturally overflows in love for the neighbor, any other. The neighbor does not merely ‘come to mind’ but, for Gregory, is a necessary object of the infinite joyful loving desire of the loving Christian self for the Loving God. Love of God and love of neighbor cannot be sundered; the love of neighbor naturally flows (indeed overflows) from the love of God. A second innovation of Gregory’s ethics and spirituality of epektasis has been accurately described by its major modern proponent, Jean Danielou, as a revolutionary innovation for an ancient thinker: if epektasis is the ethicalspiritual ideal, it follows that change – usually assessed negatively by the ancients – is now affirmed as a positive characteristic of a Christian ethicalspiritual life45 – i.e., an ever-changing infinite loving desire for the Beloved God and the beloved neighbor. In Gregory’s Christian ethic, we are, of course, finite (as well as deeply affected by evil and suffering) but as images of God – through our freedom, for Gregory, even more than through our intelligence – we are constituted to experience epektasis, that infinite, excessive desire transforming our embodied and social ethical finitude into the radical freedom of an ethically active and spiritually contemplative self. John Henry Newman in his Essay on the Development of Doctrine once famously wrote, “It may be different in another world but here below to live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.”46 That is a familiar thought for any modern person for whom, unlike the ancients, change is our one stable reality. For almost any ancient, however, change was negatively assessed, but not for Gregory of Nyssa. For Gregory, change in this life is perfection not imperfection. Even more radically, Gregory of Nyssa affirmed (unlike the majority of the Christian tradition) that epektasis, this constant change driven by infinite desire is not limited to this life but continues infinitely in the afterlife.47 Probably influenced by Plotinus either directly or indirectly, Gregory grounded all purifying, cathartic, individual as well as civic virtues (unlike in Plotinus) in the increasingly infinite, transformative desire for communion with the biblical Infinite God of Love that for Gregory, of course, meant the Trinitarian God who is Love. Unlike Plotinus, Gregory’s infinite desire demanded not only a contemplative desire for God but also actions of love working through justice driven by an infinite love of neighbor. As with Levinas, for Gregory, neighbor means any other human being, the stranger, even the enemy.

148  David Tracy On the demands of infinite love working through justice, Gregory followed his elder brother and mentor, Basil. Basil, one of the principal founders of communal monastic life, insisted that, contiguous to his monastery, there must be many hospices, hospitals and refuges for the poor and ill including otherwise homeless lepers in Caesarea.48 For Basil, like Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day in our own day and culture, a contemplative life (individual or communal) also demanded an active work for justice especially for all those marginalized by society. Another of Gregory’s siblings, his famous sister, the abbess Macrina (the ‘fourth Cappadocian’ as Jaroslav Pelikan rightly names her) made sure that her monastery always provided food for any who came seeking it during the frequent famines in Cappadocia. Macrina also provided refuge for all orphaned young girls.49 For all four Cappadocians, therefore, a contemplative life, whether in the world or in a monastery, demanded ethical work for the neighbor, especially the poor, marginal and oppressed, those most privileged by many classical prophets and Jesus of Nazareth alike. Unlike his monastic siblings, Basil and Macrina, Gregory of Nyssa, according to most scholars, was never a monk.50 Gregory was a married man, a priest and a bishop, an ecclesiastical diplomat and a theologian of note. Even if not a monk himself, he defended his siblings’ choice of a contemplative monastic life51 as the most free life because free from the usual busy distractions of life in the world, including the necessary worldly distractions inevitably attendant upon marriage. For Gregory, all Christians, not only monks and nuns, should unite the ethical and spiritual virtues of contemplation of God and prophetic actions for the neighbor, especially the poor, marginalized and oppressed. Inspired by his older sister and intellectual mentor, Macrina, Gregory fashioned a life in the world that united contemplation and ethical action into an unbreakable bond. In the light of God’s active love through justice for every finite creature, Gregory held firmly to a radical equality of persons: there is no other unworthy of our ethical concern. In any genuine ethics of the infinite (Levinas’s or Gregory’s) all persons are necessarily equal and each person is unique. Every other person (the neighbor as other) commands our attention and demands our responsible action. Gregory insisted on the importance not just of traditional individual formative (cathartic) virtues but unlike Plotinus, also the civic virtues of social justice. Furthermore, as some feminist theologians have argued, Gregory possessed a strong theological ethical affirmation of the equality of men and women as differentiated but equal free images of God.52 Gregory’s here was possibly influenced by his reflections on his remarkable theologian-sister, Macrina.53 In fact, Gretory’s almost proto-feminist stance was a very rare position among male theologians in the very patriarchal fourth century – patriarchal in both society and church. Furthermore, Gregory’s understanding of the kind of social justice implied by any ethics of infinite epektasis toward the Infinite God led to his well-known and, at the time, rare theological ethical denunciation of slavery as an intrinsic evil.54

God as infinite: ethical implications  149 In sum, for Gregory of Nyssa both the actuality of the Infinite God of Love and the actuality of the infinite biblical prophetic call to ethical responsibility to the other the neighbor are secured by his ethics of infinite epektasis. Neither the ethical reference to the Infinite God nor the ethical reference to an infinite love of neighbor merely ‘come to mind.’ Both are operative from the beginning to the end of Gregory’s unique Christian ethics of the infinite: in a never-ceasing epektasis of attention, intelligence and love, contemplation and action in this life, and in the afterlife as well. This Gregorian ethic of infinite loving desire for the infinite God and the finite neighbor is grounded in Gregory’s most important theological, ethical and spiritual innovation – viz., epektasis: ceaseless stretching out. Gregory of Nyssa insisted on the need that every Christian, whether monk withdrawn from the world or a lay person ever active in the world, emperor or citizen, free or slave, man or woman, should, as a Christian, be ethically committed to a contemplative and active life of epektasis, in short to a position in theology that today many liberation and political theologians name mystical-political.

Conclusion: the infinite task of a theological ethics I hope these reflections on the possibility of the category of the ontological infinite may prove useful to both any philosophical ethic of the Good as necessarily an infinite Good and to any theological ethics of the Infinite Good – i.e., God as Love. Indeed, philosophical and theological reflections on the infinite can be ethically fruitful for, first, any ethical philosophers of the teleological Good grounded in reason, and, second, for any modern Christian ethics of the Infinite God as Love.55 Moreover, if these reflections are at all persuasive, they should encourage both constructive ethicists and historians of ethics to pay closer attention than historically they have to other ethics of the infinite in our Western history – i.e., other than the ones discussed here – for example, the implications of their different concepts of the infinite for their distinctive ethics in Scotus, Descartes, Spinoza and Schleiermacher and Hegel. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that one day the history of the category the infinite in ethics will be as taken for granted in histories of ethics just as the different concepts of the infinite are already in the histories of post-Cantor modern mathematics and in the histories of physics and cosmology from Aristotle to post-scientific revolution modern physics and cosmology. Above all, the histories of philosophy and theology include, in several key thinkers, notions of the ontological actual Infinite. Such a move would open, not resolve, many further questions on infinity, on God and on an ethics of the infinite.56 There are indeed many further questions, but sufficient to the day is the question thereof: the ethical implications of the concept of the infinite allows one to rethink what Descartes saw so clearly – that emancipating concept of the infinite frees us to think more than we think not only in mathematics, cosmology, physics, philosophy and theology, but also in ethics.

150  David Tracy

Notes 1 For histories and definitions of the ‘infinite’ in different disciplines, see A. W. Moore, The Infinite (London: Routledge, 1990) (philosophy, mathematics, mysticism); Brian Clegg, Infinity: The Quest to Think the Unthinkable (New York: Running Press, 2003) (mathematics); Elie Major, Infinity and Beyond: A Cultural History of the Infinite (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) (mathematics and art, especially Escher); John D. Barrow, The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless (New York: Random House, 2005) (mathematics, physics, cosmology); Leo Sweeney, Divine Infinity in Greek and Medieval Thought (New York: Peter Lang, 1992) (philosophy and theology); David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003) (theology, aesthetics); Karstin Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Boston: The MIT Press, 2002) (art and philosophy); Michael Heller and W. Hugh Woodin, eds., Infinity: New Research Frontiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) (mathematics, theology, philosophy). 2 The comment on the ‘Absolute’ is my own; on the correlative category, ‘Totality’ (and Hegel’s ‘Absolute’), see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Books VI–X, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 3 Plato, Republic II, Books 6–10, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1930), 509b. The Good (to agathon) is given, not achieved. 4 On the importance of the form principle in Western philosophy, see Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), esp. 15–42. 5 As noted earlier in note 3, Plato, despite his insistence on the Good beyond Being as the Highest Reality, does not hold the Good as actually infinite. Aristotle developed his influential notion of the qualitative infinite (apeiron, sometimes aoriston) in Phys., 202b30–208a27; the First Unmoved Mover, the Separate Intelligence (Nous) is not actually Infinite in se but only through the power of its effects (Met., 1073a6–10). For Aristotle, see the translation edited by Jonathan Barnes, Physics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) I, 315–447; Metaphysics, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) II, 1552–729. 6 The word ‘implicit’ is an accurate reading of Plotinus’s clear but non-explicit understanding of the One-Good as actually Infinite. Throughout I shall be employing the Loeb translation of Enneads by A.H. Armstrong. See especially Enneads V.5.6.5 and VI.7.32.9. The One is the arche of all form and hence is ontologically different from all that of which it is the arche (V.5.6.1–5, 8–10). At other times (II.4.15.17–20), Plotinus locates the One’s positive Infinity in the One’s eternity, its eternal power and activity. On the other hand, the entailment of Infinity by the One’s formlessness and self-sufficiency (VI.7.32.9–10) and by the One’s simplicity (I.8.2.4–5; II.9.1.9; V.4.1.12–13). 7 Sensible matter is apeiron because it lacks form. As formless, therefore, matter can be called infinite. Matter, at the bottom of the hierarchy emanating from the positively formless (i.e., Infinite) One-Good is the exact opposite (i.e., negatively infinite) of the positively Infinite One-Good. 8 Technically, the Infinite One is ineffable. 9 ‘Radiates’ seems to me a preferable metaphor here rather than the ambiguously ontological ‘emanates.’ 10 Enneads, II.9 which Porphyry titled either Against the Gnostics or, more exactly, Against those who say that the maker of the world is evil or that the world is evil. 11 Plotinus in I.2.1.4 and I.4.16.10–13 quotes Plato’s famous notion (in Theatatus, 176b) that the goal of the good life is ‘assimilation to god,’ i.e., radical divinization. This reality and the philosophical-ethical, even mystical journey to

God as infinite: ethical implications  151 union with the One is, first, a human intellectual and moral achievement in both discursive-dialectical reasoning and moral and intellectual purification up to contemplative reason in the Nous. Ultimately, the return journey is empowered by the gifted lure of the Good itself, as Plotinus states clearly in VI.7.22.15: “And as long as there is anything higher than that which is present to it, it naturally goes on upward, lifted by the giver of its love.” 12 Enneads VI.36.15. 13 See Porphyry’s “Life of Plotinus,” in Enneads I, 71. 14 See Dominic J. O’Meara, Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 111–19; The Cambridge History of Late Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. by A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 264–68. 15 An influential and contested work on God as Infinite in Gregory is Ekkehard Mühlenberg, Die Unendlichkeit Gottes bei Gregor von Nyssa: Gregors Kritik am Gottesbegriff der klassischen Metaphysik (Göttingen, 1966). Two critiques of aspects of Mühlenberg’s interpretation are Charles Kannengiesser, ‘L’Infinité divine chez Grégorie de Nysse,” Recherches de Science Religieuse 55 (1967): 55–64 and David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, op cit., 190–204. 16 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. and introduction by Arnold I. Davidson (London: WileyBlackwell, 1995). 17 See Contra Eunomius Libri I et II, GNO Series, ed. by Werner Jaeger (Leiden: Brill, 1960). For one example of God as Infinite in Contra Eunomius, see 1.156– 83 including the lucid statement: “For limitlessness (to aoriston) means the same as infinity (to apeiron).” For a defense of Eunomius, see Maurice Frank Wiles, “Eunomius: Hairsplitting Dialectician or Defender of the Accessibility of Revelation,” in The Making of Othodoxy: Essays in Honor of Henry Chadwick, ed. by Rowan Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 18 Understanding God as Infinite in The Life of Moses (in his reading of Exodus 33:23: “My back parts you will see, but my face you will not see,”) leads Gregory to hold that the divine nature itself is Infinite not simply as Incomprehensible to our finite intellects (section 236) but also as the object of an infinite desire that as such is unending (section 233). See Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans., intro. and notes by Abraham I. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 2.219–35. One should also note the classic French version which includes the Greek text translated by Jean Daniélou, Grégoire de Nysse La Vie de Moise (Paris: Éditions de Cerf, 2007). For the possible influence of Plotinus and Porphyry in Gregory, see Jean Daniélou, Platonisme et théologie mystique: Essai sur la doctrine spirituelle de saint Grégoire de Nysse (Paris: Aubier, 1944); idem. ‘Grégoire de Nysse et Plotin,’ Actes du Congres de Tours et Poitiers (Paris: Association Guillaume Budé, 1954), 259–62. For some important qualifications on the thematic analyses of resourcement interpreters of Gregory (especially Daniélou’s and von Balthasar’s as lacking sufficient analysis of the historical context of Gregorian themes), see Michel René Barnes, The Power of God: Dynamis in Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology (Washington: Catholic University of America, 2001), esp. 220–24. Barnes provides a persuasive interpretation of one aspect of the Eunomius-Gregory debate, viz, dynamis. Barnes shows how Gregory, against Eunomius, argues that God’s productive capacity is internal to the divine essence: for one example, see Barnes, 61. See also Morwenna Ludlow’s analyses of the interpretations of Thomas Torrance, Ekkehard Mühlenberg and Michel René Barnes in Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa: Ancient and (Post) modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 19 Rowan Williams justly attributes this Gregorian ‘revolution’ in thought to Jean Daniélou. Epectasis is a nominal form of Paul’s verbal ‘to stretch out’ in Philippians 3:13. See Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (London: Darton,

152  David Tracy Longman & Todd, 1990), 61. Epektasis, for Williams, may be defined as constant, never ending straining forward to what lies ahead. For Daniélou himself see, inter alia, From Glory to Glory: Gregory of Nyssa, 56–71. In Gregory himself, see Life of Moses, op. cit., 111–20, for example. Thus, no limit would interrupt growth in the ascent to God, since no limit to the Good can be found nor is the “increasing of desire for the Good brought to an end because it is satisfied” (116). 20 See Henry Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society: From Galilee to Gregory the Great (London: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11–415. 21 See Contra Eunomium II, Proceedings of the 10th International Colloquium on Gregory (Vigiliae Christianae, Supplements) ed. by Lenka Karfikova, Scot Douglass and Johannes Zachhuber (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 12–66, esp. 12–44. 22 For the importance of Philo for Christian theology on these issues, see Henry Chadwick, ‘Philo and the Beginnings of Christian Thought,’ in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, op. cit., 135–57 and Harry Austryn Wolfson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I and II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947). In fact, Philo, three centuries before Gregory, held that God is Infinite in Legum Allegoriae, but unlike Gregory, did not much develop the category metaphysically or theologically. Hence it is not finally inaccurate to describe Plotinus as the first philosopher to develop the notion of the Infinite for the ultimate reality (the One-Good) and Gregory of Nyssa as the first theologian to explicate the notion of divine infinity both dialectically (in Contra Eunomium) and in spiritual-­mystical theology (Life of Moses). Gregory’s Moses text was also clearly influenced by Philo. Harry Wolfson may have exaggerated Philo’s influence on all subsequent Christian theology – but not by much. It is also possible, although not proved, that Plotinus may have read some of Philo. 23 On Gregory as a biblical theologian see the introductory essay by Richard A. Norris Jr. – i.e., his introduction to his last work – a splendid translation of Gregory and notes (including the Greek text) in Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), xiii–xliv. See also the valuable study on the centrality of faith (and therefore the Bible) in Gregory’s theology in Martin Laird, Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith: Union, Knowledge and Divine Presence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 24 Indeed, the major philosophical target of Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, op. cit., is clearly Hegel. Levinas here is probably influenced by Franz Rosenzweig’s critique of Hegel on the State as a totality in Hegel und der Staat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1920). See the exceptional essay by Adriaan Peperzak, “Unendlichkeit zuwischen Hegel und Levinas,” in Das Endliche und das Unendliche in Hegels Denken, Herausgegehen Francesca Menegoni und Illetterati: Hegel-Kongress in Padua und Montegrotto (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Verlag, 2004), 186–208. 25 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Viking, 19943); Franklin I. Gamwell, Existence and the Good: Metaphysical Necessity in Morals and Politics (New York: SUNY Press, 2012) and The Divine Good: Modern Moral Theory and the Necessity of God (New York: Harper Collins, 1990). It was Alfred North Whitehead who famously stated that all Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. See also the two studies in Jean-Marc Narbonne and Wayne Hankey, Lévinas et l’héritage Grec Cent Ans de néoplatonisme en France: Une brève histoire philosophique (Québec/Paris: Presses de l’Université Laval/Vrin, 2004). 26 Levinas’s public defense of Totalité et Infini took place on June 8, 1961 at the University of Paris. The last line of the statement, “To show that the first signification emerges in morality – in the quasi-abstract epiphany of the destitute image bared of all qualities – an absolute that absolves itself from all cultures –is

God as infinite: ethical implications  153 to restrict the understanding in the reality of the basis of history; it is a return to Platonism,” is quoted in Adriaan Theodor Peperzak, “The Platonism of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Platonic Transformations (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), 121. 27 En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Librairie Philosophique Vrin, 1974), 189. 28 See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, op. cit., 48–52; in Descartes, the main text is the third meditation in René Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes par C. Adam et P. Tannery, nouvelle presentation (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1973-), Vols. 9, 36, 38 and 48. Levinas’ interpretation of Descartes is well formulated by Adriaan Peperzak with his characteristic lucidity in To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2005), 59: “Here the ideation surpasses the idea. The idea of the infinite thinks more than it thinks. In this manner, the infinite shows its exteriority, its transcendence, and its radical highness.” This is Peperzak’s commentary on Totalité et Infini, 11–12, 40–2, 170–71 and 196–97. 29 Levinas’s own way to think God can be found in Of God Who Comes To Mind (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), especially in the essay, “God and Philosophy,” 51–79. 30 See Sidney Greenburg, The Infinite in Giordano Bruno (New York: 1950) and the now classic text of Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). Since relativity theory and quantum physics, the majority of contemporary physicists and cosmologists do not name the expanding universe infinite. In that sense, Descartes, almost two centuries earlier, and Nicolas of Cusa, were correct to insist that only God can properly be named infinite. 31 See Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 55–68 (on Buber) and 68–100 (on Levinas). 32 Totality and Infinity, Section I, “The Same and the Other,” 33–109, esp. 31–53, and Levinas’ more radical (on some issues) and more language-oriented position in his later work. See his second magisterial work, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Springer, 1981), esp. 131–73. 33 See, inter alia, Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). On the Jewish character of Levinas’ thought, see Catherine Chalier, “The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the Hebraic Tradition,” in Adrian Peperzak, Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3–12, and Hilary Putnam, “Levinas and Judaism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 33–63. 34 For some further valuable studies, see Jeffrey Bloechl, Liturgy of the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas and the Religion of Responsibility (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2000); R. Burggraeve, From Self-Development to Solidarity: An Ethical Reading of Human Desire on Its Socio-Political Relevance According to Emmanuel Levinas (Leuven: Peeters Bvba, 1985); F. Ciglia, Un Passo Fuori dall’uomo: La genese del pansiero de Levinas (Padova: CEDAM, 1988); John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics (London: Routledge, 1995); Michael Purcell, Levinas and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jeffrey Bloechl, ed. The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 35 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (South Bend: University of Notre Dame, 1985). On Rosenzweig, see Paul Mendes-Flohr,

154  David Tracy ed. The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig (Hanover: Brandeis, 1988) and Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), especially the “Foreword” by Emmanuel Levinas, 13–23; Robert Gibb, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Richard A. Cohen, The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 36 The more expanded phrase is preferable since (1) the ‘political’ in all these political and liberationist theologies is more accurately described as ethical-politicalprophetic to clarify its difference from so many secular understandings of ‘the political’ since Machiavelli and Hobbes; (2) the same theological positions are more accurately described as generically active-contemplative which, on rare occasions, is also mystical (e.g., Simone Weil). In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the ethical political is, to be sure, grounded in the prophetic traditions. 37 See, especially Ennead I.2 “On Virtues” and I.4 “On Well-Being.” See also Pierre Hadot, “Virtues,” 64–73, and “Gentleness,” 73–96, in his Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision, trans. Michael Chase, intro. by Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago, 2993); Lloyd P. Gerson, Plotinus: The Arguments of the Philosophers, ed. by Ted Honderich (London: Routledge, 1994), 185–203; John M. Dillon, “An Ethic for the Late Antique Sage,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, ed. by Lloyd P. Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 315–16. 38 Plotinus’s ethical focus is on the cathartic personal virtues transformed by the desire for the Good – that Good lures the soul’s loving desire (eros) forward for its return to eventual union with the Good. This is the reason why Plotinus is less prominent in most histories of ethics as distinct from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics: Plotinus’s ethical focus is both more individual and more aptly named ‘spiritual’ than solely ethical. Hence Plotinus’s prominence in histories of spirituality – e.g., Pierre Hadot, “Plotinus and Porphyry,” in Classical Mediterranean Spirituality: Egyptian, Greek, Roman, ed. by Arthur Hilary Armstrong (New York: Herder & Herder, 1986), 230–50; Andrew Louth, “Plotinus,” The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition (Oxford, 1981), 36–52; Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, I (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 44–55; Michael S. Sells, “Awakening Without an Awakener: Apophasis in Plotinus,” in his Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 14–33; Réne Arnou, Le désir de Dieu dans la philosophie de Plotin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library Press, 1921); Jean Trouillard, La procession plotinienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955); Werner Beierwaltes, “Plotins philosophische Mystik und ihre Bedeutung für das Christentum,” in Philosophische Christlicher Mystik, ed. by Margot Schmidt und Dieter Bauer (Stuttgart: Bad Cannstadt, 1987), 39–49. The separation of ‘the ethical’ and ‘the spiritual’ in Western modernity has narrowed the range and the depth of both. 39 For some properly restrained reflection on the possible influence of Indian Hindu and especially Buddhist thought on Plotinus, see Emile Bréhier, The Philosophy of Plotinus, trans. Joseph Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 106–32. There is, to date, no hard historical evidence that Plotinus knew of Indian texts. However, the cosmopolitan character of Alexandria itself as well as his interrupted travels to East with the Roman army do suggest some influence. 40 It is hardly surprising that Plotinus longed for a quiet Platonic monastery-like polis with his fellow philosophers. Plotinus was characterized by his disciple, the more dramatic, much less serene Porphyry, in these striking images and words: “Then, too, when you [Plotinus] are struggling to escape from the bitter wave of this blood-drinking life, from its sickening whirlpools, in the midst of its billows and sudden surges, often the Blessed Ones showed you the goal ever near.” “Life of Plotinus,” in Enneads I, 6–7. Plotinus’ last words were characteristically

God as infinite: ethical implications  155 detached. As he was dying, Plotinus told his doctor and disciple Euctochius that he was trying to make what was divine within him rise up to what was divine in the Universe. 41 Porphyry, “Life of Plotinus,” in Enneads I, 4–31. 42 I am thankful to Hans-Dieter Betz who observed (private e-mail communication, May 1, 2014): Paul’s sports metaphor, in Philippians 3:12–15, of a runner in a race includes both epekteinomenos, the image of a runner straining ahead, stretching himself forward as well as being pulled forward by Christ (katelemphthen). Paul, who seemed to have enjoyed being a spectator (perhaps even a fan!) at races at local sport-stadiums was clearly intrigued (as Gregory would later be) by the image of a stretching, straining-forward, god-oriented runner in a race. Like Gregory, Paul never claimed to have finished the race – i.e., reached the goal of perfection (teleios). Nevertheless, Paul kept running, again like Gregory, with joyful satisfaction at what was already attained and equally joyful anticipation of more gain. Betz also helpfully observes that the Stoics used the same runner image whereby both the Stoic runner’s intense activity (of running – i.e., of Stoic virtue) was aided by the deity who lifted the runner ever upward. 43 On Gregory’s Trinitarian theology, see inter alia Sarah Coakley, ed. Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa (London: Blackwell, 2003), especially the essays by Sarah Coakley, 1–15; Lewis Ayres, 15–45; and David Bentley Hart (111–33). 44 I have developed the Sophoclean notion of the daimonic hero in “On Naming Saints,” in Saints: Faith Without Borders, ed. by Françoise Meltzer and Jas’ Elsner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 97–126. 45 Jean Daniélou, “Introduction,” in From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings, trans. Herbert Musurillo (Crestwood: St. Vladimirs Press, 1961), 56–74. 46 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 40. 47 I am thankful to Bernard McGinn who observed in response to this essay-lecture that the notion of infinite growth in perfection in the afterlife was affirmed by many later Christian mystics in the West as well as in the East. 48 See Morwenna Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa: Ancient and (Post) Modern, op. cit., 136–39; Brian Daley, 1998 NAPS Presidential Address, “Building a New City: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Philanthropy,” Journal of Ancient Christian Studies 7, no. 3 (1999): 337–63; see especially the study by Susan Holman, The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia (New York: Oxford, 2001) and her translation of two of Gregory’s sermons in the appendix, 193–206. 49 Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Saint Macrina, trans. with introduction and notes by Kevin Corrigan (Eugene OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 38–9. 50 See Anthony Meredith, Gregory of Nyssa (London: 1999), 3–4. 51 Gregory of Nyssa, “On Virginity,” in St. Gregory of Nyssa Ascetical Works (Fathers of the Church), trans. Virginia Woods Callahan (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1967). 52 See the Socratic role of Macrina in Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, trans. and introduction, Catherine P. Roth (Crestwood: St. Vladimirs Press, 1993), 28, starting with her direct, Socratic question to Gregory, who was overcome with grief at the death of their brother Basil: ‘What aspect of death seems to you most grievous in itself?’ For the argument that Gregory’s position has feminist implications, see Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa, ed. by Sarah Coakley: “Gender, Trininitarian Analogies and the Pedagogy of The Song”; see also Verna Harrison, “Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology,” Journal of Theological Studies 41 (October 1990), 441–71; Verna Harrison, “A Gender Reversal in Gregory of Nyssa’s First Homily on the Song of Songs,” Studia Patristica 27 (1993), 34–8. For a valuable analysis of the debate on Gregory’s

156  David Tracy feminism or lack thereof, see Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa: Ancient and (Post) Modern, op. cit., 163–231. See, for example, the conflict of interpretations on Gregory’s statement in On the Making of Humanity: “Human nature as a whole, extending from first to last, is the single image of the one who is; but the distinction of kind into male and female was added last to what was made” (PG, XVI, 18). 53 The remarkable dialogue between the Socrates-like Macrina and Gregory is modeled on Plato’s Phaedo. Gregory’s Plato-like dramatic note is especially well executed: Macrina, like Socrates in the Phaedo, is herself facing death (although, unlike Socrates, from natural causes). Socrates rationally defends the immortality of the soul; Macrina rationally and biblically defends the resurrection of the body. 54 Grégoire de Nysse, Homélies sur l’Ecclésiaste, ed. by P. Alexander, trans. by F. Vinel, Sources Chrétienne (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1996). Gregory’s On Beneficence (GNO Series, IX, ed. by Werner Jaeger (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 193– 99. Interestingly, Gregory’s oratio X, De benefitia, was sometimes labelled, in the Latin tradition, De Pauperibus amandis oratio, I. See David Bentley Hart, “ ‘The Whole Humanity’: Gregory of Nyssa’s Critique of Slavery in the Light of His Eschatology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54, no. 1 (2001): 51–69. 55 See Franklin I. Gamwell, The Divine Good, op. cit. A good example of a theological analysis of the divine Good centered on an explication of the divinehuman communion may be found in Aristotle Papanikolaou, The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy (South Bend: Notre Dame Press, 2012), esp. 131–63. 56 Such further questions would include (1) the relationship in Christian theology of God as Infinite to God as One and (2) the use of the notion of the Infinite both for the Infinite One God and the Infinite Trinitarian God – the latter, for example, in Martin Luther’s Trinitarian use of the category ‘infinite’ in his explication of Trinitarian infinite inner relations (see here Christine Helmes, The Trinity and Martin Luther (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 1999), 41–119; (3) the distinct understanding of the Infinite God especially in Nicolas of Cusa, Spinoza, Schleiermacher and Hegel.

9 Plumblines in the vastness Measures without measure Michael Fishbane

The invitation to write this chapter included an inherent demand: absolute theological honesty. I was asked to consider the following issues: the relationship between God and the good, the possibility of a theological ethic, and the horror of evil with God in mind. Each topic calls for serious consideration; taken together, they require a bracing reconsideration of our intellectual and religious heritage. An additional request forces the point, since it asks us to rethink these matters in the light of Scripture and ­Tradition – surely a tough task in our dark and muddled times. So how might one respond? I for one hear these challenges as a contemporary person and as a Jew. As a person and a Jew, I hear the primordial question: “Where are you?” with renewed force. It asks: Where do you stand or hide before these grave issues? What can you say in a century of mustard gas and cyclone B; with death camps in Europe and Siberia; genocidal butchery in Bosnia and Rwanda; and brutalities that rage as we speak in Central Africa and Syria? For most perpetrators, biblical scripture and tradition are meaningless scraps; or their teachings are mocked by perverse and self-serving exegesis. One can only gasp: all the theological air seems sucked from our lives, with no solution in sight. Was Nietzsche right? Does an insane laughter rattle down to Hell? These are difficult matters; so let me reformulate the questions again, for you and myself. Is there a conception or sense of God that is credible – for thought and life and worship – in our time of inexhaustible evil and technological hubris after Auschwitz and Hiroshima (as if this ‘after’ were not still present, day in and day out)? Further, can such a sense of Divinity – within Being or Beyond it, take your pick – limit this evil or hubris in any way, with even a ‘still, small voice’ in the human heart? And, finally, can the Bible (or its Traditions) offer any resource for us in this process – without entangling us in hermeneutic knots or leave us hanging by some verbal thread? All told, the challenge is God, because of evil and technology; and ethics, because the ground seems so groundless; and also scripture itself, because its voice is muffled by a mute and unwritten vastness – which seemingly mocks the spoken, written text of the Bible. Time and life press upon us. So what I offer is a personal statement, brief but forthright, in the hope that it will

158  Michael Fishbane fall favorably on your hearts, similarly heartbroken, and still groping for Sinai. We must start once again from our all-too-human ground.

A first reflection I must speak to you in the first-person, to demonstrate the task of the thinking self, as I understand it – to present to you the voice of a person who, like yourselves, begins and remains ontologically smothered by the swirl of existence; and one who repeatedly seeks some breathing room for values and moral action. How does it go for such a person, who is embedded in this swirl even in moments of spiritual transcendence? How may it go for us, who perceive evil in ourselves and in others, and seek ways to resist this force – both to bolster our moral will and to confirm the significance of moral acts? In formulating my thoughts, I shall take up a threefold meditation, whose distinct domains reflect our multifaceted life in this world, and desire to live meaningfully within it. I believe these domains to be both intertwined and structurally related, but I shall take them up separately. I do so both for analytic clarity and because they engage the self independently, according to our separate life concerns and levels of consciousness. The first domain is that of the world, and it involves our perceptive engagements with things and persons; the second domain is that of texts, and it involves our reflective encounters with formulations of words and values; the third domain is that of God, and it includes our various apperceptions of divine transcendence – such as they are. These three registers thus engage our natural being, our cultural selves, and our theological aspirations. They mark off three spheres for perceiving and enhancing the good in reality, for disregarding its potential through neglect or destroying it through evil, and for living with scriptures and a transcendent horizon – each of which may inspire a heightened awareness of our moral choices, latent in the forms of existence. Neither the world, nor texts, nor God are impassive by-standers in this process. Each is affected by the human spirit in ways estimable and otherwise. Our moral will and cultural traditions may foster the good or crumble without strength, and then the world and texts and divine dimensions are reciprocally impacted. So we must do the best we can. Nothing is simply given, but rather involves a seeing and receiving, for better or worse. We must recognize our many entwinements – and not take them for granted. This said, let me turn to Level One: The Natural Self. I (we) begin in the swirl of the world, entwined in relation to things or persons, as they are perceived or conceived. These things and persons make claims upon me, and direct my body and mind in their direction. But this is not a relationship between two separate spheres: self and world. Rather, from the outset, what I perceive (visually and tangibly) is already infixed within me. My personal self is relationally impacted by some ‘otherness,’ which simultaneously constitutes my selfhood from within, prior to all reflection. I am, therefore,

Plumblines in the vastness  159 not somehow ‘thrown’ into world-reality, as a being who must only then assess his ontological condition, but I actually ‘find’ myself within a myriad of pulsing sensations with which I vitally engaged from the outset. I shall call this primary vibrancy our onto-vitality. For our life-serving energies are fundamentally entwined with living realities of many sorts: for food, for stability, for companionship, and so on. We thus adjust our existence to many other factors whenever these matters impact our physical or mental awareness. Internal and external realities intersect: I am within the world even as it is within me. Hence, we begin within a primordial swirl, with flashes of ‘value’ (features of worth, whether positive or negative) in our perceptual field; and then make certain ‘evaluations’ on the basis of personal need, experience, or memory (deposits of lived of tradition, both individual and collective). These choices have their own phenomenological character. They constitute what I would call our onto-hermeneutical condition. This term – an extension of our onto-vitality – denotes all the estimations, judgments, and correlations we make in the midst of our life situations. These determinations are alternatively deliberative or spontaneous in nature, as we coordinate our ‘self’ with some perceived ‘other.’ The very capacity to do so – to calibrate or concoct solutions – is encoded into our genetic condition or physical nature long before the revelation of things to our consciousness. Seemingly from the beginning, this tradition is inherent and present, such that my onto-hermeneutic engagements are fundamentally entwined with my onto-vitality – helping me discern the pangs of hunger and where I may go for help (be it initially the smell and feel of a breast, or subsequently the smell and feel of objects I may recognize or recall), helping me discern the difference between a stick and a snake (for my protection), or also helping me discern when an object is a tree with branches or a person with outstretched arms (with diverse benefits in each case). And because of the entwinement of these two ontological forms (the vital and the hermeneutic), I am located within an ontological circle immediately – even pre-reflectively. My life is thus affected by primary engagements long before I have any awareness of the phenomena pressing upon me and eliciting my responses through the impressions they effect within me. Focused on matters of worth – primary and secondary issues of value – I claim them and I am claimed by them simultaneously. How I deal with these claims determines my being and my personality; for the mode of acquisition may be aggressive because of inherent needs, deceptive because of perceived scarcity, or mindless or thoughtful depending on my spiritual capacity at the moment. Hence, I am tested at every turn. Every act is charged with onto-vitality and onto-hermeneutics significance, and all matters of physical worth and ethical value are interrelated, oscillating for privilege or priority, and making claims on my character. The Good and goods, and evil and evaluations, are thus not simple matters for people like us, embedded in the world, with needs and desires and memories.

160  Michael Fishbane But there is more – one more decisive factor that affects my ongoing evaluations; I refer to the crises or ruptures in the flow of routine and happenstance. I call these ruptures ‘caesuras’ (or breaks) because they may also open our minds to our primary, human condition, and allow us to perceive something of our fundamental onto-hermeneutic nature – beings who turn the swirl of experience into components that mask the fragility and indeterminateness of life, transforming raw revelations into tame traditions about the nature of things.1 So the question is: Can we allow the very tremendum of this disruption to be taken to mind and heart? Can I allow myself, for the briefest moment, to stand silently within this awesome caesura (which sunders our hermeneutic presuppositions) and sense the reality of my ‘hermeneutic will’ – as itself a disruption of Being, and allow that awareness to make a claim upon me? And if so, I may understand (through some leap of intuition) that there is a most primordial ‘claim’ (of World-Being as such) that may affect me even prior to all the particular claims of my life, and even become a moral imperative – one that addresses me and commands concern for how I act in the world? If this may miraculously happen, such radical caesuras may open our hearts towards the whole world order, and cultivate an ethical disposition – attuned to a heavenly ‘no’ resounding through the vitalities of existence, intoning restraint and humility before the great manifold of which we are a part. But not all caesuras are alike. Some are relatively easy to fix – by finding the right piece to reconfigure the shattered jigsaw puzzle of our lives. Human ingenuity invents many ways to close these gaps; though it may also happen that our mind’s eye may skim over these lacunae and disregard them like some cognitive blind spot. After all, we have our precious networks of meaning to maintain. However, there are other ruptures that cut to the bone and open wounds so devastating and inexplicable that they weaken our resilience and energy, or render the lexicon of all reasons dyslexic. And then our words turn into a primal shriek, echoing everywhere, as we wander the world with shriveled hearts. Insurance agents call natural disasters ‘acts of God’ – how theologically considerate of them. But even these providers of ‘all-state’ guarantees bite their tongue before human evil and raw brutality. So what is there to do when all our hermeneutic dexterity seems a mockery and without meaning? Then things may rattle everywhere, and we are thrown asunder upon minimal acts – small gestures – which offer consolation or the sense that life has significance when shared in love and consideration. On such occasions, might some hint be heard that these minimal deeds are not vacuous and vain, but real truths intuited from the inscrutable depths, and may offer moral measures to guide our lives? If and when we perceive this, faced with faceless horrors, we have been claimed once again – perhaps when least expected. And then, in the silence, something says ‘Do’ or ‘Do Not’ – like a transcendent call to conscience or moral strength, and we are saved from the abyss. Who speaks? Let Nietzsche answer this too; for he said, “Don’t ask, just receive.”

Plumblines in the vastness  161 With this moral possibility, we have completed our first series of reflections. In the process, we have broached topics in the natural domain of our lives that will recur in other forms as we proceed in our next meditations.

A second reflection So now Level Two: The Cultural Self. We never escape the world; it is our primary ontological condition. But we are also not limited by its sights and sounds; other readings of experience are embodied in texts, which offer diverse expressions of our subjective and spiritual existence and stylized articulations of the tasks and forms of culture. Overtime, these features interpenetrate: and then the textual objectifications become directives for one’s life in the world, and the statements may formulate new shapes of subjective possibility. Onto-vitality and onto-hermeneutics thus conjoin here in productive ways, variously energizing or enforcing one another. Such are the dialectics of cultural hermeneutics. Now primary speech becomes secondorder locutions, and second-order language becomes primary, through new interpretations. We read as we live, with multiple loops of entwinement: the words of texts inscribe our soul, and we envision experience through diverse literary filters. Slowly, we may even become embodiments of these inscriptions, as we internalize the interpreted traces of our verbal traditions. In such ways, we rise above the swirl with a reflective consciousness that deals with the caesuras of reading and life in one way or another. Considered formally, textual caesuras primarily instantiate gaps between one word and the next, as readers try to make sense of a sentence – given its rendition of experience and our literary competence or life experience. Beyond this formal level, other caesuras occur when a reader confronts gaps between the values of a text and those in one’s heart, particularly when one’s moral sensibility has been shaped by this very text. Suddenly, disjunctions mark off older virtues from new sentiments and values. We work at these matters all the time – sometimes to keep the text in historical perspective and thus at moral bay; at other times, we engage in radical interpretation or harmonization, hoping these moves will conceal the contradictions. But textual and personal horizons don’t always converge, and then we try to live with bi-focal perspectives, or just move on. But not all texts are the same. Some even proclaim special privileges of voice and value. Heaven or transcendent truth is their homeland, so they say, and their guardians use every means to shape earthlings in their image. There are many reasons why people accept this proclamation. One of them is surely that people doubt what they see, when doubts harass them. So they gladly prefer exegetical lens polished by their priestly opticians, who claim that their glasses can correct the apparent caesuras that distort the nexus between life and texts. And then, lo and behold, all the moral gaps are shown to be mere misprisions in the eye of the beholder, and the text is saved – along with faith. Given these results, is it any wonder that these exegetical practitioners use strong institutional claims to protect their

162  Michael Fishbane hermeneutic product? A lot is at stake; so much so that many religions argue loud and long over the truth of their exegesis, even unto death? Just look at the evil that has been wrought by the presumptions of such interpreters, who turn minimal textual possibilities into maximal assertions of truth. In the process, the texts become mute, and all that remains is the chatter of pompous ventriloquists. However, corrupt textual exegesis is one thing and misguided reasons for the caesuras of life quite another. Suffering can induce all kinds of solutions. Some therefore conclude that it is best to keep such speculations under lock and key, stuffed into a Pandora’s box. Why ask for trouble? Why risk theological anomie? But the need for meaning pushes against the lock, and we ask: Do evil and suffering come from a misbegotten human will, or are they rather God-born in some sorry sense or other? Only Heaven knows, or so the Book of Job suggests, but on earth, assumptions run wild. Every possibility is tendered, but no argument holds firm. Sprung from our empty hearts, the contentions turn into vacuous platitudes. It is, therefore, of greatest merit that guardians of the ancient Israelite heritage kept this book in the canon. But they were not alone. Keepers of other great cultures also took the risk of holding their values to the harshest light, and allowed their unsettling formulations remain as sources of instruction for later readers. Think for a moment of the Iliad and how it presents the complex relationship between family life and heroic ideals, between death and fame, or between personal pride and collective glory, and considers these matters without any conclusion and with no consolation greater than the balm of beautiful language depicting brutality and carnage. If this book’s pedagogical goal was to teach ancients about the tragic relationship between destructive vainglory and the constructions of culture, so be it. But it is certainly a puzzling piece of Bildung to suckle the young, as has been our wont since its study was revived two centuries ago. I’ll say no more. Let me rather consider Job and the book in his name. What does it dare do? It dares let the snakes of the cultural unconscious – or not entirely unconscious – come to the fore and pour venom into our bewildered hearts. Job lamented after his tragedy, “What I feared,” what was of the deepest and most suppressed anxiety, va-’asher yagorti, has surfaced and “come upon me,” yavo’ li (Job 3:25). Surely, Job had some inkling, and surely the author of Job had more than this inkling. As mentioned, the text is replete with all kinds of arguments and solutions, which echo centuries of covenantal theology – as recorded in the Pentateuch, in Psalms and Proverbs, and in the Prophets, from Amos to Ezekiel. All ask: Why suffering; and what sense does it make? Is it some kind of warning or just tough love – a kind of justice beyond our ken? Take your pick; it’s all there, and with little resolve. Our chinks of pain widen with the icy silence of heaven. Bold reasons wither; nothing remains but a spate of endless speculations. The Book of Job brings all this to the fore, through a cacophony of rhetoric that hardly knows what it is talking about – as we know from overhearing the opening scenes in heaven. Who could have invented such a plot, if

Plumblines in the vastness  163 not a writer sunk in theological perplexity? Is not his voice the voice of Job himself? And has he not used Job (like an alter ego) to proclaim his own anguish? For Job is portrayed from the outset as one who lived on the brink of religious anxiety, filled with the suspicion that the dots do not connect, and so he filled his life with rituals and moral deeds, and intervened in the rites of his children, lest they did not perform their duties with a perfect heart. Surely, Job could not suspect these possible troubles if a psychological tear had not already rent his mind. This is initially expressed by the thought that “perhaps” (’ulay) his children needed his help, and again later when we learn that despite the horrors Job “did not sin with his lips.” The innerworld of Job’s concerns was not a secret to the author; and soon he lets the cat out of the bag. With a growing crescendo, the cry of Job’s anguish fills our ears; and the author brings him to the same fissure that rips his own thoughts. But this takes (narrative) time – a time that the protagonist and we readers need, in order to grasp the limits of language in times of sorrow. We thus have to enter (along with Job and his interlocutors) into the remarkable onto-vitality of the human spirit, which projects solutions and meanings with unending pathos and desperation, which refuses to give up or slide into silence, and which shores up the caesuras of sorrow with endless interpretations – to our onto-hermeneutic glory and our inevitable despair as well. What does Job, or anyone, learn from suffering? Three things at least: there is radical diminishment, fragility of the body, and the role of tradition during disaster. Let us consider each in turn. Why diminishment? Because in the course of suffering there is loss of ability and control, including all those things or persons that comprise our sense of self. The horizon of the world contracts; and there is a draining of fulfillments. In the case of Job, he lost his family and possessions and the health of his body. He felt like a living death, deprived of the givens, trying to buck up bravely, and he was virtually unrecognizable to himself, within and without – his wife told him to curse and be done with it; his friends just put their hands over their mouth. In such a state, one may wish never to have been born; for to be alive is to feel the diminishments of loss. And then there is bodily fragility. Why? Because the blows of loss are all wounds: in the heart and mind, most and first of all; but also in the sudden and inescapable sense of being encased in a violated part of oneself. No buffer protects against the onslaught. Mental anguish permeates the body and, reciprocally, physical fracture cripples the mind. In the case of Job, his heart beat bravely while everything else collapsed. His loss was physical pain and mental anguish, and for him to sit “in the dust” (be-tokh ha-’epher) was to become like the ashes themselves. Job’s only recourse was to maintain his integrity, since this was the only reality that might counter the hurt of his body and mind. One who suffers in the flesh is acutely aware how easily horror can ruin one’s spiritual self, and a great struggle ensues to preserve one’s self-image and sense of virtue. And, finally, there is the topic of tradition. Why? Because just this offers an external source of meaning and coherence, a framework of stability and justification. In Job’s

164  Michael Fishbane case, his sense of values, learned from the tradition was and remained the minimal point, so it was from this point that he expressed defiance and whatever mental clarity he could muster. But the point repeatedly narrowed, as the tradition closed off roundabout him, when all his contentions were dismissed by his friends. I think this was Job’s greatest horror. Tradition was turning into rhetoric; and its terms were becoming desperate and devious: used to foil and parry – in attempts to be more right than wrong, or shore up caesuras with sandbags with self-righteousness. This is most evident in the vituperations of Job’s interlocutors; but it shows its face with Job as well. We may imagine that his self- vindications echoed in mocking irony while still in his mouth. Take the following three examples from chapter seven. Suddenly, while bemoaning his mortal condition, which swings like a shuttle-cock between the nothingness of today and tomorrow, Job asks God: “Am I the Sea or the Dragon that you muzzle me” with physical sorrows and terrors (7:12–14)? With this query, he alludes to God’s vaunted might in catching and killing the primordial sea monsters, but now pushes the point that God’s power seems beyond all bounds, without proportion or sense. Do his deeds really threaten the creation? The battle is absurd, and God most of all, for turning his case into a theomachy! Then Job adds another joust, asking, “What is man that you raise him up, and put your mind upon him; that you seek him every morning and examine him by the minute (v. 17)!?” Surely, you hear in this protest an ironic reuse of Psalm 8, where this language was used to exalt humankind through exclamations of rhetorical wonderment – not dire sarcasm – as in this case. And, finally, Job asks, “If I have sinned, what have I done to You, O watcher of man . . .? Why will you not bear my transgression and forgive my sin . . . (v. 20)?” All the terms of this outburst invert the language of Exodus 34: 6–7, which articulates the divine attributes of mercy and forgiveness. By so baldly traducing tradition in these instances, Job has trashed the only language that might give theological comfort and meaning. So what is left? When you perceive the hollowness of your religious proclamations, and turn them inside out, what words are left to build a life? What traditions remain when one’s arguments mock God and every sense of providential proportion? Not much. But some shreds remain, and they are held tight. For insight takes time; and so the author keeps up the din of desperate arguments, and even adds some new speeches to boot, to make sure that the caesural rift that wracks his own heart bursts Job’s as well. And then, suddenly, a new discourse occurs. It is a speech that comes from God Almighty, and with it, our author reveals the insight that inspired his own heart and offered consolation from the depths. The words are addressed to Job, and to all his heirs. By saying this, I don’t wish to suggest that these speeches address our modern situation or justify its great horrors – only that they may provide something to consider at an unsayable edge, where a new spiritual anthropology is birthed for one who can hear this Voice hidden in the Whirlwind. What might that be? Perhaps this: that Job’s heart is imploded by unanswerable questions; by

Plumblines in the vastness  165 questions which unman him and all the pretentions of language, but which also offer him a new beginning in an incomprehensible vastness without measure. True religious language addresses the soul directly and makes a claim – whether this is precisely specified or not. In the present situation, Job is suddenly induced to see the world and divine providence from a totally non-human perspective – even though the divine speeches are addressed to him personally and in terms taken from the human sphere. A barrage of questions is put to Job – all bearing on the divine creation and its sustenance through the strong pulse of life. Granted, Job cannot be brought to an originary consciousness – who could be? But he can be called to trial for his presumptions about the nature of things. And so he is urged to consider the wild ass in the wilderness, the ostrich that abandons its eggs, and the eagles that eye carcasses from on high, and descend to pluck their bones bare. There are also awesome creatures from legendary times to consider – gross mega-monsters who swallowed the seas and snorted trees long before humans walked the earth and deigned themselves the pinnacle of creation. All told, one thing is clear: standing upright and having insight, or being perplexed about the meaning of life, is hardly the heritage of all creatures – all beings are creatures of God. One can say nothing about the hot-blooded horse or the cold-blooded reptile except that they are, and persist, with their own onto-vitality. Sensing this, Job fall to his knees, his mind unloosed by these matters – and proclaims that hearing of God is not enough; for now he sees clearly, and must assert nihamti ‘al ’aphar va-’epher ˙ (Job 42:6). What does this mean? For one thing, the verb nihamti is bivalent, and ˙ so I believe that it was chosen to express two fundamental insights. Taken in one sense, the phrase has Job say that he “relents” or divests himself of his prior presumptions, (both “regretting” or “abhorring” them) since they were expressed by a creature of “dust and ashes” – a mere mortal. This meaning thus refers to the new consciousness that Job acquires, and his awareness of the limited human capacities for explaining suffering. The mortal mind is born of dust and ashes, and Job expresses an existential awareness of the limits of human cognition. I would call this realization epistemological and characterize it as ‘epistemological humility.’ A second meaning of the phrase highlights an entirely different valence of the verb nihamti and suggests that Job now expresses “compassion” for all creatures of˙ “dust and ashes.”2 How can we understand this? What was the impact of the divine speeches upon Job that elicits such a response? One possibility is that Job perceived the great fragility of human life within the flood of existence enunciated by God, and such an insight evoked a new ‘ontological sensibility,’ which transformed his attitude towards suffering and induced a disposition of compassion for all human creatures, similarly fragile. Both interpretations ring true. But I would like to suggest two other possibilities for the term nihamti. In the first case, Job “relents” of his presumptions concerning how God relates to creation, or the nature of divine providence. Hearing God present the vast surge of His creation, Job realizes

166  Michael Fishbane that life is vitalized in innumerable forms, and that each and all express God-given providential gifts (call this their creaturely verve or means of survival). And so Job “relents” of his presumptions of how God cares for his creatures. He realizes that God gives all creatures the capacity to endure in unique ways. The second explanation may be revised accordingly. Instead of suggesting that it was Job’s realization of human fragility that elicited his new compassion for other human beings, I would suggest that Job draws moral consequences from the display of life presented by God. For if crows have their distinctive ways, as do ostriches and horses, what then is distinctive about the human creature? This question hangs in the intervals of the cosmic vision granted to Job. One possible answer is that, in contrast to most other creatures, whose élan vital is bent on their drive for survival, humans are often vitalized by the values of creature care – as is evident in their frequent readiness to endanger personal survival for the sake of values, and to put themselves at risk on behalf of their fellow humans. The realization that values constitute a core feature of humanity (along with the capacity to interrupt primary drives) is, I suggest, the insight that grounds Job’s words of compassion – and conditions his newborn moral minimalism. We can see this through Job’s subsequent actions; for immediately after asserting compassion for all creatures of dust and ashes, Job prays for the friends with whom he had contended and acts on their behalf. Significantly, his ritual deeds are not induced by either anxiety or compulsion, as were his earlier works on behalf of his children, but are now totally grounded in forgiveness and creaturely care. I would add that Job’s new orientation and God’s forgiveness of him are simultaneous. Life is now founded upon a new moral minimalism: ‘compassion.’ It is the one thing needful. Job derives this insight from God’s display of the vastness of life; hence, no natural theology is expressed here, but a theology derived from the depths of God’s created order, as a divine truth. Beyond cultural forms of good and evil – but fundamentally in their ­service – the Book of Job rejects theologies of retributory justice and reveals a new spiritual center-point. It is a heroic point, whose center is everywhere and nowhere. For those with an eye and heart of humility, it will be found in all the life forms in the great divine vastness – whose rights derive from their status as entities in their own right. This is a truth that recognizes ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ in the depths of God’s creation, and submits to these imperatives with a worldly wisdom. But let us not forget that this insight derives from the Book of Job. It is thus an assertion of scripture for the sake of a renewed theological and cultural life. Perhaps we may build upon it. In this hope, I offer some final reflections.

A third reflection And so, Level Three: The Theological Self. The challenge is now to speak of God – not just of a God-Beyond-Being, without attributes, beyond mind or mindfulness; but of God whose attributes conceivably thread the fabric of

Plumblines in the vastness  167 existence, with potentials for justice and mercy in the human world. This is a God who may somehow be brought to mind and thought. Granted, these thoughts are formulated in human language, and spawned by our mortal limitations. They thus bespeak a divine ontology in human terms; and this realization makes me ask: Is it possible to consider such formulations in a way that comports with our contemporary philosophical sensibility? And if so, how might this particular sense of God command or constrain human action? For an answer, let me return to the Book of Job and the climactic moment, which depicts the rebirth of Job’s soul through a divine maieutic. I begin here because ‘Job’ is such a pivotal text – not solely because it explodes the pretentions of self-centered theodicies, but because Job himself is a paradigm for a reborn subjectivity. Job’s disposition changed because he heeded a call that challenged his consciousness to the core. Brought to the brink by aporias posed by God, these ‘impossible’ and heart-boring questions reconstituted him as a person. And how did this new subjectivity find first expression? By an act of confession: not the lamentation which fills his outburst in chapter three, when he contracted in pain and wished never to have been born; but by the expression of a radical humility, followed by an act of human care. Job is reformed by a new disposition and the acts derived from it. He received the world into his soul in one ecstatic perception, and this vision transformed him. True, the images are parceled out in serial facets, but his response attests to an immediate grasp of this great diversity – filled with pulsing life forms and sustained by God’s gifts. Job succumbed to a new consciousness and a new ethic. But with this act of confessional self-emptying, it appears that Job has transcended words. How then can language help us, beyond what these divine speeches may inspire or evoke in our modern minds? Can we go further? Can we build upon this literary model and ourselves attain a new theological consciousness – one that may sponsor a moral disposition capable of perceiving forms of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ latent in Divine reality? Job is an exemplar from antiquity. How might it be for us? Here is a possibility. It is my own pivot point – the sacred center where my modern (philosophical) sensibilities and the truth of tradition (transmitted by Jewish sources) converge. This is my narrative, in the briefest terms. Words and language rise to consciousness from ineffable depths, shaping our world and ourselves simultaneously. These human locutions and their phonemic potential all derive (as it were) from the infinite intonations of God’s Name – parsed in scripture as “I Shall Be as I Shall Be.” What might this formulation suggest? Perhaps that all such intonations are the creative ground of all world being. Utterly inconceivable as such, they generate the myriad possibilities of existence, which we try to conceptualize, for better or worse. Thus God’s “Shall Be” includes the hidden paths of light and thunderstorms, the harsh frost and tender dew, and the veins of life and earthly ore – not to mention the words that name them or call them to mind. Listening to the wordless word “Shall Be” vibrating throughout existence,

168  Michael Fishbane people of the Joban type shudder in silence; for they perceive in this great God-saying traces of a most sacred semiology, infinitely encoded in the swirl of things. This new theological consciousness may also induce a sudden awareness of our primary onto-hermeneutic condition; namely, that there is no meaningful existence for humans which is totally unshaped by the resources of language (however we conceive it), and that this language conjoins with our eyes and ears to formulate the many shapes of our world. And just as there is no human existence unmarked by modes of language, there are no shapes which prescribe how reality must be seen, or in what form. Our terminology changes the morphology of experience, as does our perspective. Overwhelmed by this realization, we sense with a new knowing that we co-constitute our world through the very (God-sprung) language which constitutes us; and that all our hermeneutic acts derive from divine depths and inscribe human forms in the infinite ether. And then, possibly, the human truth of the tremendum may somehow claim our hearts – and our soul is reborn. Insight now guides our vision, and a new awareness accrues. Of what does it consist? Perhaps that ever and always the hidden but omnipresent God ‘informs’ Being at the very borders of human experience and thought. At such moments, graced by insight, a hint of God’s Godhood pierces our being and the holy vastness has a Name: “Shall Be.” But we must still ask: How may this transforming consciousness inform our moral will? My answer begins with a passage from the Jerusalem Talmud – which undoubtedly arose from profoundest meditations. According to it, some sages pondered the nature of the primordial Torah and wondered how it was written in its preternatural state, before material elements. Most wondrously, they suggested that it could be likened to shapes of black fire chiseled on white fire.3 This image inspired millennia of Jewish mystics to speculate how this Torah might be read. For if the Torah is from God, an expression of God’s Godhood, what are the semiotics of that inscription? Should we read the black configurations against their white background, or rather the white configurations against the black ones? And if this spiritual hologram is somehow true for the primordial Torah, perhaps its earthly manifestation might inspire a related contemplation – namely, that the black letters provide a foreground sense of human meanings, necessary for our personal and collective lives, and requiring the white background for them to be perceived and make sense, whereas the inverse perspective reveals a greater plentitude of possibilities – the infinite and unsayable divine Revelation that is intoned by God’s saying of His Name, “I Shall Be as I Shall Be.” This other inscription – unreadable as such – is the creative effulgence of Divinity, radiating through world Being, while also concealing an infinite ‘more,’ Beyond Being. Perceiving this oscillation of forms (black and white in profound simultaneity), the human being becomes conscious of all the idolatrous possibilities that may result when words are perverted or conceal God’s unimaginable truth.

Plumblines in the vastness  169 Another teaching (variously formulated in the Midrash) takes us further and suggests what is at stake when people do just this. The legend states that when Moses descended the mountain, he beheld a travesty below because the people could not endure the period of his absence and filled the gap with the image of a bull – called their god and redeemer! Utterly overcome, Moses dropped the heavy tablets with the divine words written upon them. Why? Because the holy letters could not witness this great perversion, and so flew upwards to heaven, leaving the Moses with big chunks of matter, which he could hardly hold, and so they fell from his hands and broke apart.4 This scenario (as parable) suggests that it is precisely our spiritual values that make the physical world bearable and transcendent, and give it a transformed character. The shattered stones are thus the earthly remains of a deadened spiritual life, whose potential was squandered.5 To what may these texts be compared for those who seek orientation in the vastness? Perhaps to the ability to live with integrity in the silent depths, aware of the white spaces and the primordial configurations at the heart of all possibility. This is the spiritual challenge, which also precedes the transformation of that awareness into moral action and sensibility. So how might this moral disposition be cultivated? One way is through a meditation on the very conjunction of the black and white configurations of Scripture (or other texts), so that the spiritual seeker might perceive the ‘white reality’ through the lattice of human language – and thus elicit a God-consciousness as an infinite and holy “Shall Be.” This awareness, practiced as a spiritual exercise, may then give birth to a soul humbled by the fragility of language and to a sense of restraint in the way we use words. Taken further, this realization will also affect how we respond to the pulse of existence – enhancing or protecting the surge of life that surrounds us. And then the oscillating ground of black and white, symbolizing human and divine expressions, may also bend our heart to hear the words of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at the foundation of things and the need for utmost care when assessing how our evaluations of worldly claims upon us should be translated into interpersonal norms and values. The God-given – all the a priori conditions – thus depends upon human beings for many modes of its realization and flourishing, or for preventing the bounties of this God-given life from corruption and decay. Thus, if the word ‘yes’ signals our affirmation of God’s creative “Shall Be,” so ever given, even without our merit, a primordial ‘no’ is also inscribed within it for the human heart to hear. This is the great rabbinic warning: bal tašhit, “Do Not Destroy” the fragile life forms of the world, for God’s sake! ˙ Is there more? Does God’s will prefer one earthly thing to another? Are there even some unassailable absolutes? Certain religious traditions (and many political schemers) seem to know for sure, and say so – in their own terms. Their contrary presumptions sometimes leave us with dueling dialectics, competing for exegetical truth about whose life can be tampered with or even deserves death, for ‘righteousness sake.’ May Heaven protect us! Demented and deluded, these claimants to God’s truth even proclaim perverse and triumphalist readings of the most exalted formulations of our

170  Michael Fishbane scriptural heritage, as when Leviticus 19:18, a truly ‘great commandment,’ is read to say, “You shall love your neighbor who is like yourself!” With this semantic twist, the teaching is transformed from a high-minded imperative into a mirror of low-minded narcissism, proclaiming to all the wicked queens who ask that only they are the fairest in all the land! Is this not the self-consuming cell of moral cancer? So let us take a breath. What we can surely know from our own experience and human examples is that, within the divine mystery, some souls are reborn and perceive deeply into God’s Good and wrest (with a hard wrestling) claims for serving life in all its multiplicity. Some of these persons chisel the whirlwind into tablets of Torah, which proclaim these truths. And this is a lot. Founders like Moses formulate primary instructions, for themselves and their heirs. But white fire ever burns at the edges of the letters of life. And thus new souls arise who offer revised formulations of the old instructions, based on creative interpretations for the sake of the Good. And still others come forth in the same spirit, and introduce words and forms hitherto unknown. Their lives and works are also precious. We have to align ourselves with the goals of this righteous remnant – persons whose dispositions of sympathetic care respond to the latent resources of God’s Good (however and whatever it is), and cultivate it as a heavenly law of goodness for the sake of our mortal souls. And where might expressions of this ‘Good’ be found, expressions which may command our attentive regard? Where may we perceive its latent forms? First and foremost, I believe, in a discerning heart – in one that bends heedfully and with attunement to the world in its many life forms. There is no better way, I think, and so to underscore my point in a poignant way, let me conclude with the following narrative (reported by the linguist Roman Jakobson). It transcends its telling, like a parable, and goes like this. Once a missionary went into dark places, believing its people in need of his light, and so armed with his Bible and a bag of tricks, he went forth. Suddenly, he saw many people before him without clothes, stark naked. Horrified, he recoiled and gestured at their exposed bodies. How can you do this, he exclaimed? At which point they pointed to the skin on his face, bare flesh without cover or concealment. But that’s my face, the man proclaimed. Ah, yes, said the others, but for us everything is face!

Notes 1 See my discussion in Sacred Attunement. A Jewish Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 18–22, and passim. 2 Of the two interpretations, the first is more common and already expressed by R. Moses Kimhi; the second has a precedent in R. Isaiah di Trani. For both, see Tiqvat ’Enosh, ˙ed. by I. Schwarz (Berlin: L. Gerschel Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1868), I, ad loc. 3 Cf. Jerusalem Talmud, Sheqalim 6.1 (end). 4 See Babylonian Talmud, Sabbath 87b; Tanhuma, Ki Tissa’ 17; also Pirqe de Rabbi ˙ Eliezer, ch. 45. 5 In the parables appended to the teachings of R. Meir in Midrash Ha-Gadol, Exodus (on Exod. 32:19), the stones without the divine letters are deemed worthless.

10 Mascot or judge God and the mores of church and society Marilyn McCord Adams

Priorities, confusing, and confused The picture of God enthroned, norming church and society, is a Christian commonplace. The theories that underwrite it, however, are many and various – at least, several and contrasting. In practice, they lurk below the surface, with public ideology often misrepresenting implicit presumptions. How easily the normative and norming priorities get confusing and confused. Let me begin by distinguishing three models. 1 The real God as judge Metaphysical realists such as I am, find it natural to begin with the reality of God whose being and excellence are ontologically prior and utterly independent. The real God is the ultimate explainer, the source of the being and the well-being of everything else. The supreme excellence of the Divine nature makes what God is some sort of norm of excellence in creatures. Created natural kinds can be recognized as more or less excellent depending how much or how little they imitate the Divine. God’s attributes of wisdom and knowledge imply that God is an authority on human nature, on what is good for human beings individually and collectively. Surely, the All-Wise God would know what forms of social organization would promote human flourishing in which circumstances; which character traits would help focus human functioning to make it fluent, worthy, and delightful; which sorts of actions would be appropriate when, where, and how. The All-Wise God would know all of the mix-match combinations and so be able to anticipate which sort of conditions would damage or obstruct human capacities or make for individual and collective dysfunction. The All-Wise God would also know what sort of remedies might cut losses and set things right. This by itself would make the real God a good source of normative information. But many Christians believe there is more. Already Torah forwards a theology of life: God is life, for all else, the source of life and its only reliable sustainer. Torah insists that because all life belongs to God, God is entitled that God’s personal creatures should “go along with” God’s “program.” Even some natural lawyers insist that it is God who institutes natural norms by promulgating and enforcing them. Moreover, as Scotus insists,

172  Marilyn McCord Adams abstract consideration of human nature and various types of circumstances, under-determine wholesome social arrangements. Which of many possible norms are actually in force will depend on free and contingent Divine institution and/or delegation. Thus, ontological and normative priorities rest with the real God. God is both norm-giver and judge of human society. Because human beings are the dimmest wits in the cosmos, because human imagination is perverse from our youth up, the human race is politically challenged. Knowing this, the bible’s God issues the ten commandments as minimal social guidelines. Because human beings in this world are both too stupid and too scared to organize utopia, Divine commands build-in corrective measures. Fully aware of human limitations, the bible’s God does not require Israelis to hold all goods in common. The bible’s God does not even demand equality. Divine injunctions aim snake-belly low at a decent standard of living for everyone. Employers must not withhold wages that would prevent day laborers from buying supper. Creditors are not allowed to take the poor man’s cloak in pledge, lest he have no cover against the cold at night. Sabbaticals honor creation by giving the land a rest. Even if the Jubilee year was never observed, the Divine injunction to set the clock back, and to return to square one with economic distribution, stood as a judgment on Israeli society and still stands as a judgment against ours: the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer are not what the real God has in mind. Repeatedly, in the bible story, the real God not only judges Israeli society for its twin sins of idolatry and injustice. Stubborn failure to institute mid-course corrections brings down Divine condemnation. More than once, the real God proves willing to destroy Israeli society, to enforce a time out on nation-statehood, for a period of years to cut Israeli culture off from its embodiment in lands and institutions, before allowing a fresh start. 2 “Durkheimian” gods as mascots Durkheim taught us how human societies are essentially self-deifying. They make an idol of their own survival, and they forward a rival creed. Society is the source of life and its only reliable sustainer. As a sine qua non of individual existence, the survival and flourishing of society are what is sacred. Because individuals owe their existence to society, they owe it to society to be and to do their part to maintain society and to enable it to flourish, not least by living out their assigned social roles. According to Durkheim’s reductive program, gods are not ontologically independent or fundamental, but “socially constructed” all the way down, the projected personifications of society. In relation to society, Durkheimian gods do not have normative priority. On the contrary, society has ontological and normative priority, and gods become the personal face of social mores. Presented as the authors and enforcers of society’s norms and values, gods are in fact reduced to the status of mascots, whose job it is to represent and press society’s aims. Because human societies are not really secure, gods

Mascot or judge  173 also take on the status of extra-powerful social servants. Watch the oscillation in the bible from the real God to genie-in-the-bottle God for whom Israel’s wish becomes God’s command. God is a means to their ends. God exists to go out with their armies and win their battles. God favors, indeed, in the narrative insists on the genocidal pogroms that Israel finds convenient, not to mention the ethnic cleansing post-exilic religious powers-that-be demand. God’s job description also includes guaranteeing good weather and agricultural success. Armies and natural disasters threaten human societies from the outside. Taboos are erected against danger on the inside, to wall out behaviors and life-styles that seem to threaten the very fabric of society itself. Taboos are irrational and inarticulate. To ask why something is forbidden is already to flirt with transgression. Durkheimian gods are the authors and enforcers of taboos. The bible proscribes such behaviors and activities by marking them out as “abominations to the LORD.” Society-unraveling deeds are also said to call down curses that definitively cut off the transgressor from God and the people of God. 3 God as real, but co-opted As between the earlier two models, theocracies and ecclesial bodies typically refuse to choose. Instead, they insist on having it both ways. They forward God as real, fundamental, and fontal, the rightful organizer of and norm-giver for everything else. And they give it out that the real God has chosen this society, social group, or institution to be “a light to the nations,” to embody Divine ideals and purposes. If you want to know what the real God has in mind for church and society, look no further. It is manifested in the social mores and modus operandi and canonical texts of this concrete and visible society, social group, or institution. Their bold boast is “the real God stands behind our ideas and mores.” “God gave the law to Israel and not to any other nation!” “We have the mind of Christ.” “We are God’s vicars on earth.” “We have been chosen by God to convey Divine messages and benefits to you!” Put otherwise, God is not socially constructed, but God is institutionally co-opted. My thesis is that – as much as Durkheimian reduction – such straddling confusion is pernicious, because it takes God captive, surreptitiously turns God into a mascot, a symbol and servant of human social aims. My suggestion is that these considerations furnish a moral argument, however provisional and defeasible, in favor of metaphysical realism about God and God’s role in underwriting norms.

Taking Emmanuel seriously God-with-Us: Anthropocentric as the bible mostly is, it tells us that God creates the cosmos to house Divine traffic with us. God calls and forms himself a people, and purposes life together with us in this world, which is

174  Marilyn McCord Adams our natural home. The real God could, the bible story God does choose to work through specific individuals (e.g., through Noah, through the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) and a particular nation Israel. The bible’s God is represented as adapting human institutions and cultural products, even decorative styles (cf. Divine instructions on temple decor that modify the latest in Canaanite fashion) to facilitate life together. Even if (as universalists such as I am suppose) the real God does not choose some and neglect or reject others, the point readily generalizes: God pursues the Divine goal of life together with human beings by meeting us where we are, by communicating and making relationship moves in ways that are recognizable in terms of human world views and social arrangements. Willingness to begin with human beings conceiving who God is and interpreting Divine actions in terms of human social analogies, is a price that the bible’s God pays for life together with us. It would be a gross understatement to say that life together of God with human beings has proved a challenge for both parties. In the bible, episode after episode shows how fraught with communication difficulties relations between God and the people of God can be expected to be. The bible records the “size-gap” between human being and who and what God is, is intimidating for us. “God’s ways are higher than our ways.” Experiencing the real God as demanding, human partners readily believe that it is urgently important to the real God that we read Divine intentions aright. Desperation for certainty and control begets insistence that there must be a way for the real God to get around or cut through our cognitive fog and affective confusion. Conviction that not getting it right would be dangerous to human health, individually and collectively, drives the theoretical posit that the real God has established proper channels through which the unadulterated Truth of God’s Word can be transmitted and grasped. Reformation Protestants and today’s conservative evangelicals identify this channel with the bible, with “God’s Word written,” which they take to be infallible on its plain-sense reading. Catholics have pointed instead to “the visible church” (which, after all, fixed the canon of scripture). Infallible deliverances are to be found in the pronouncements of ecumenical councils, the Magisterium, and/or ex cathedra papal decrees on matters of doctrine and morals. Twentieth-century critical theory exposed such devout hopes and the “Pure Proper Channel” theories to which they give rise as conceptually confused. Once again, if God wants to communicate with us, God will have to speak our language. Grant that what God thinks is pure and unadulterated Truth. Grant that God is clear about what God means. The moment we take it in, it gets translated into the language and housed in the conceptual schemes by which we organize and understand the world. Even if God transmits pure and unadulterated Truth, our receiving it “contaminates” it with human ways of seeing and knowing. So long as God is content with inter-Trinitarian conversation, God can preserve Truth pure and unadulterated. But God-with-us wants to communicate with us, and – God knows – Truth cannot be received by us and stay pure. Divine-human traffic is, by

Mascot or judge  175 definition, two-sided, human as well as Divine. Whatever God is and does – however excellent that is, and however holy – God-with-us will still have a human aspect. And we don’t need twentieth-century critical theory to tell us what pessimistic liberalism already knew: human being, collectively as well as individually, morally even more than cognitively, is essentially fallible. Some Morals of Fallibility: We don’t have to get technical to remind ourselves how human being is destined for partiality. We know in part. We do not have what it takes to comprehend the material universe. Impressive as they are, the physical sciences proceed by successive approximations, developing competing models to manage unruly data, not only to enable us to cope but to satisfy our Aristotelian desire to know. A fortiori, God is incomprehensible. “God’s ways are higher than our ways,” even if the Emmanuel project means that God is working overtime not to be utterly inaccessible. St. Paul declares, “We see through a glass darkly,” which implies that we do see something, but dimly as in a tarnished mirror. Then there is the fact that human being in the world has evolved a variety of ways of being in the world, cultures with contrasting “takes” on human being and our place in nature, with a variety of non-congruent social structures for housing human interactions. Worse yet, because we have evolved as personal animals in an environment of real and apparent scarcity, our motivation is subject to Darwinian distortions. Animal instinct builds in a drive for individual and species-­ preservation into an organism destined for death. Desperation to survive fuels a sense of entitlement to the necessities of life. Fear that it all depends on us breeds a willingness to do whatever it takes to grab more than we need. Roughly speaking, in-group altruism is bought by amplifying outgroup hostility, all resulting in the proverbial struggle for existence in which the so-called fittest survive. Darwinian motivation combined with limited imagination is what leaves human beings politically challenged. Our social structures oversimplify: we can’t seem to envision workable categories complex enough to fit everybody in. Our understanding of system dynamics is too poor to enable us to anticipate systemic by-products. The result is that every human society spawns systemic evils that privilege some while degrading others. Intricate networking means that social roles and institutions are all at least complicit in and so “contaminated” by systemic evils. So are the language and conceptual frameworks, which are shaped by that social and cultural context. One moral of this story is that the human side of Divine-human interactions can’t help being normatively twisted by the fact that human beings are neither smart enough nor good enough to organize utopia. It is old news – biblical criticism has long since made us aware – that the bible stories and teachings are shaped by cultural context. Nor is there a single set of social arrangements that lies behind them. Bedouin ways of being in the world contrast with that of Canaanite towns and villages, with Hellenistic cities and the Roman empire. We should not be surprised to find different texts at odds with one another with respect both to normative insights and to normative

176  Marilyn McCord Adams distortions. Put bluntly, the bible is human as well as Divine. It represents 1,800 years’ worth of distilled human attempts to articulate what was going on in Divine-human interactions. But from the human side, its texts are human cultural products, whose normative perspectives are contaminated by the systemic evils of the many societies that shaped them. Their very status as canonical is likewise a human cultural product. For these reasons, the bible is not a credible candidate for the role of Pure Proper Channel. Taking the Emmanuel-project seriously, means admitting that “the bible says so, and that settles it!” argument won’t fly. So also for any and every ecclesial institution. However much God is willing to work with and through all of them, human-side fallibility means the arguments “tradition says so, the pope ex cathedra pronounced it so, the ecumenical councils agree that it is so, and that settles it!” shouldn’t achieve escape velocity either. To pretend that because they are Divinely sponsored, human societies, institutions, or cultural products are above reproach is a form of idolatry that co-opts God as a mascot. “For God, country, and Yale” the inscription reads. It makes the real God the author and enforcer of social and institutional norms and taboos, and holds the real God “eyes-open” directly and deliberately responsible for the systemic evils of university, church, and state! To be sure, the bible’s God is kenotic. A second moral to my story recognizes a good sense in which – in choosing to be God-with-us – God abandons the status of being above reproach. For in meeting us where we are, God allows Godself to be cast in various social roles, or at least to be conceived of and related to as if God were playing something analogous to those social roles (e.g., suzereign in relation to vassals, army general to home-tribes and enemies, jilted Bedouin husband to unfaithful wife). But social roles are themselves implicated in the systemic evils, which arise from the social system in which they are enmeshed. Any role occupant, even one who disapproves of those evils and would seek to uproot them when made aware of them, remains – so long as s/he occupies that role – complicit in such evils. By agreeing to be cast in such roles or role-analogues, God is consenting to be thought of as de facto complicit in such social ills. If this is true of the God of the Hebrew bible, so also and all the more so of Jesus and the Godman of two-natures Christology, who was – in his human nature – born and reared in a particular culture with its distinctive biases and prejudices (e.g., against Samaritans and Gentiles). Nevertheless, in mixing it up with human society, God does not aim to lend unqualified normative legitimacy to any part of it. God is more to be compared with the anti-war protestors or the civil rights activists who do not wash their hands of American society and flee to Canada, but stay to work from the inside to tweak and transform, reform, and/or revolutionize our ways of being in the world.

Scandalous co-option So far, I haven’t said anything new or original. Mutatis mutandis, pessimistic liberals, and neo-orthodox theologians have made such points many times.

Mascot or judge  177 They might not bear repeating, if it weren’t for the fact that idolatry is a perennial temptation. Sex-and-gender crises in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Anglican-Communion showcase just how pernicious Pure Proper Channel models really are in practice. The Perils of Pre-Vatican II Ecclesiology: The Roman Catholic Clergy Sex Abuse disclosures were doubly scandalous. First and foremost, there was the horrendous harm to the children. Second, and shocking, was the pattern of institutional cover-up that simply reassigned repeat offenders and put still more children in harm’s way. While many factors contributed to the climate that gave rise to the crisis, pre-Vatican II “institutional-model” ecclesiology played a role by fostering default attitudes that put priests on a pedestal and placed the Church above reproach. Lumen Gentium still reflects this picture according to which Church is the Body of Christ, which is in turn identified with the visible institution. If the Holy Spirit is the ésprit de corps, the Spirit’s relation to the visible institution is ontological, even likened (albeit without philosophical precision) to that between the Divine Word and the human nature of Christ. Thus taught by the Spirit, the Church is infallible (or at least ex cathedra papal pronouncements are held to be infallible). The Church is over all and in the end indefectible. The Holy Spirit works through proper channels to teach the Church all things necessary for salvation, and the Holy Spirit cannot be wrong. Moreover, Christ Himself intended to found a church and meant for the apostles to establish a top-down pyramidal hierarchy: with the successor of Peter, the plenipotentiary pope at the top; then the bishops; then the priests subordinate to and instruments of their bishops; and then deacons, sub-­ deacons, laity, religious, and unvowed forming the broad base. The rite of Holy Orders makes an ontological change in the ordinand, confers on the priest a sacramental character that conforms him to Christ as head and shepherd so that the priest is empowered to act “in the person of Christ” and even (within his assigned territory) as a vicar of Christ. In subordination to pope and bishop, the priest “heads” by “ruling” and “sanctifying” his parish. Stretches of some documents seem to construe the priest’s shepherding or pastoral function in terms of sacramental delivery. The sacrifice of the mass must be daily repeated to make the saving work of Christ present, alive, and accessible to the faithful who are prepared (by baptism) and screened (by confession). From the pre-Vatican II perspective still reflected in many documents, outside the Church – specifically, the Roman Catholic Church – there is no salvation. Sacramental participation is necessary for salvation. Therefore, priesthood pertains to the essence of the Church (its esse and not merely its bene esse). Like Christ the Good Shepherd, priests are gate and gatekeepers to the fold of eternal life. Evidence of predator priests engaged in pederasty put Church officials in a quandary. Identifying the Body of Christ with concrete and visible Roman Catholic institutions, places the institutions above reproach. Any evidence to the contrary must be denied or covered up to “keep up appearances.”

178  Marilyn McCord Adams Likewise, whatever goes wrong cannot be the fault of an infallible and indefectible institution. Already, the Donatist controversy acknowledges, priesthood has a divine and human side. Considered as human individuals, bad-apple priests could be scapegoated, denounced as exceptions who “defile” their sacred office by betraying their vows. Considered from the divine side, they are priests forever. The sacramental character conferred at ordination is indelible and marks them as brother priests entitled to fraternal support and institutional protection. Both sides were acted out, but for years, the institution tilted more towards honoring the sacred office of priesthood by giving predator priests another chance in a different parish. When unwelcome data fail to fit favored theories, it is only human to deny or marginalize them as long as possible. Christ Himself was thought to have placed bishops at least two layers higher on the institutional pyramid than the laity, with the result that higher-ups didn’t have to engage concretely how bad it was for victims. Ignorance was bliss, allowing the bishops to subordinate the gravity of the sin (which – for the priests – could be shriven in confession) and the harm to the victims in the interests of institutional damage control. Yet, even at the level of theory, it is a moral fiction to suppose that the Church can remain untarnished by what its clerics do. Both pre- and postVatican II ecclesiology stress how there is no such thing as priesthood outside the institution. What it means to be a priest is institutional through and through. If the priest gets his identity from his institutional role, he is thereby complicit in the systemic evils to which the institution gives rise. Conversely, institutions are expected to take responsibility for the (mis) deeds of employees who act on their behalf, all the more so for the behavior of individuals whom it trains and forms for institutional functioning. Church officials were misled by their “Pure Proper Channel” theology into the conviction that the institution could train, keep, protect, and reassign predator priests, while keeping institutional hands clean. Pre-Vatican II ecclesiology forwards the Church as the Pure Proper Channel chosen by Christ to guarantee secure delivery of spiritual benefits to the faithful. But institutional idolatry led the Roman Catholic hierarchy to betray its high calling and very reason for being by handing over the sheep to shepherds who devoured them. To be sure, Vatican II documents hint that because the Church is human as well as Divine, the Church is always in need of reform, that perfection in holiness is an eschatological goal, not a presently entrenched reality. Some responses to the crisis (e.g., Chinnici and the Franciscan order in California) acknowledge that the Church as an institution, religious orders themselves sin and for that reason – and not simply because individual members go wrong – need to repent and reform. Mid- and post-crisis documents on priestly formation tend to assign greater responsibility for selection and training to institutional authorities (especially bishops and superiors of religious orders). We can hope for more and better from Pope Francis.

Mascot or judge  179 What is needed at the theoretical level is a sharper and more radical distinction between the Body of Christ (the way Divine Providence is organizing the Church) and any and all human institutional structures that are fallible and defectible, ecclesia reformata et semper reformanda, and deserving of our loyalty only insofar as they remain skillful means of Gospel proclamation. The Holy Spirit (the real God) is infallible and indefectible, but flesh and blood cannot inherit these features. The Vatican is wrong to think that it is an exception, because in organizing the Vatican and its worldwide branches, not only Christ and the Holy Spirit but also multitudes of merely human beings are involved. The bible stories already warned us: attempts to co-opt the real God are medium- to long-run disastrous. Pure Proper Channels, Anglican Style: From the mid-nineteenth century, the Anglican Communion has been a loose federation of nationally independent churches around the world, whose globally scattered members owe their origins to British commerce and colonization, on the one hand, and to British missionary movements (notably, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Church Missionary Society), on the other. Since 1867, the Archbishop of Canterbury has invited Anglican bishops worldwide to the once-a-decade Lambeth conference. Since 1978, there have been more than annual meetings of the Primates, and since 1968, triennial gatherings of the Anglican Consultative Council, which includes lay as well as clergy representatives from the different provinces. These bodies (or, as they came to be called in recent controversies, “instruments of union”) evolved to foster collegiality, to discuss issues of common interest, and to coordinate, the better not to duplicate activities. Despite their episcopal forms of government and liturgical roots in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the national churches (not only in the British Isles but also in Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas) are now indigenous and represent a wide variety of cultural perspectives. In any society, sex-and-gender taboos powerfully shape institutions and gender role expectations. They are strongly felt by individuals because they root deeply in the human heart. Little wonder, then, if the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, and LGBT pride movements in Europe and North America got Anglican leaders worried about whether the Anglican Communion could hold together if Western national churches started to change sex-and-gender regulations. Changes did happen: the US church (alias “The Episcopal Church” or “TEC”) ordained women to the transitional diaconate (1974), the priesthood (1977), and the episcopate (1988). New Zealand (1989) and Canada (1994) followed suit. In 2003 and 2010, TEC consecrated partnered homosexuals (Gene Robinson in New Hampshire and Mary Glasspool in Los Angeles) as bishops. In April 2003, the Canadian diocese of New Westminster authorized and immediately proceeded to use liturgical rites for blessing same-sex partnerships. Anglican leaders attempted first to avert and then to contain the crisis caused by such “localchurch” institutional policy changes, by inventing a new polity for the

180  Marilyn McCord Adams global Anglican Communion. Unsurprisingly, their arguments appealed to the concept of consensus fidelium to develop a Pure Proper Channel ecclesiology of a distinctive kind. The project required some subtlety. Global Anglican primates (notably from Africa and Asia, but also in South America), not only judged but also condemned TEC and New Westminster. Many wanted to excommunicate them from the Anglican Communion, to “discipline” them by excluding them from full participation in the “instruments of union,” at the very least to force them to retract their actions, to cease and desist from implementing such institutional policy changes on pain of excommunication. Ecclesiologies that identified each national church, or some aspect of its decisionmaking procedures, as a Pure Proper Channel would not meet the crisis! Instead, the Kuala Lumpur Report and many other documents forward the thesis that while local churches can be mistaken, the Church as a whole cannot be mistaken. “Local” has wide scope to include national churches (such as the Church of England, TEC, or the Anglican Church of Nigeria), dioceses (such as the Canadian Diocese of New Westminster or the US dioceses that attempted to secede from TEC: Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, Quincy, South Carolina, and San Joaquin), and parish congregations. These taken by themselves, acting and teaching alone, are not infallible. “The Church as a whole” ranges over time as well as space. The Church as a whole includes Christians from the beginning at Pentecost down through the ages. The Church as a whole encompasses not only Anglican provinces worldwide but also favored ecumenical partners, for the authors of the documents and the erstwhile Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams that meant Rome and the Eastern orthodox churches. A necessary condition of certainty about essentials is trans-temporal and global consent. From this, AnglicanCommunion officials drew the corollary: no local church should proceed to give institutional expression to changes in essentials of doctrine or praxis, unless and until the change has been received by the Church as a whole. However much Archbishop Williams and Anglican-Communion covenant drafters were thinking on their feet, they sincerely believed in Pure Proper Channel theories in this neighborhood. Such ecclesiologies wear their conservative bias on their face, and would – if adopted – give sex-andgender conservatives the results they wanted. The Church as a whole has not everywhere and always ordained women, ordained or blessed partnered homosexuals. The Church as a whole has not and still does not receive such institutional changes as acceptable. And, for that very reason, national churches in more liberal societies have not warmed to the dictates of these Pure Proper Channel ecclesiologies. For one thing, trans-temporal consensus fidelium slippery slopes into a Strong Argument from Tradition. For trans-temporal consensus fidelium requires unanimity or always-or-for-the-most part agreement among the faithful. Perhaps, more realistically, it demands that official institutional decision-making procedures down through the ages yield the same results. Since the past cannot be changed, this amounts to a privileging of what

Mascot or judge  181 has gone before. Founding documents and the decisions of past ecumenical councils become the norms to which later generations must conform. Likewise, past institutional practice as follows: both Cardinal Kasper and Metropolitan Zizioulas warned the Church of England’s General Synod; down through the ages, the church has not recognized the ordination of women to the priesthood, much less the episcopate, and that settles it. Ecclesial bodies in the present are “not free” to deviate from this piece of positive Divine law. Everyone knows that churches down through the ages have not agreed about all matters of doctrine and praxis. Pure Proper Channel theories take the consensus fidelium test to apply only to essentials. In AnglicanCommunion disputes, what fueled the promotion of sex-and-gender policies from adiaphora to essentials was the righteous indignation of some Anglican provinces when TEC and New Westminster violated their sexand-gender taboos. Sex and gender become essentials over which churches cannot agree to differ, because the human side of ecclesial institutions has always been shaped by social taboos. Conservatives charged that TEC and New Westminster had been taken captive by the spirit of this present age. My retort has regularly been the following: consensus fidelium sliding into the Strong Argument from Tradition co-opts the real God to author and enforce past taboos and so make the whole Church captive to the spirits of past ages. In Anglican-Communion disputes, consensus fidelium is also given geographically wide scope, the better to establish global harmony. But clearly, this is a vexed strategy. Everybody knows there are vast cultural differences among – say – African, Asian, and Middle Eastern societies, on the one hand, and European, North American, and Australasian countries, on the other. Durkheim was happy with henotheism or polytheism: each society will have its own god or gods to promulgate its own mores and ideals, and societies are free to engage in “my god is bigger than your god” rivalries. But where the real God has been co-opted to underwrite cultural biases, a global God is going to authorize a plurality of conflicting social practices and taboos. But those who sponsor global consensus fidelium as a Pure Proper Channel do not want to endorse a to-each-its-own religious or cultural pluralism. On the contrary, where essentials of doctrine and praxis are concerned, conservatives are insisting on cross-cultural agreement. They want the result that “local” churches are “not free” to give sex-and-gender changes institutional expression, unless and until the change is agreed on worldwide. Sex-and-gender liberals might be tempted to an uncharitable paraphrase: not until God the mascot repents of misogyny and homophobia, not until there is a Divine change of heart.

The real God as subversive Pure Proper Channel models as much as Durkheimian reductions make God the author and enforcer of social norms that spin off systemic evils. Both approaches are idolatrous. This consideration constitutes a moral argument

182  Marilyn McCord Adams against them and speaks in favor of a return to the metaphysical realism with which I began. Pace Durkheim, the real God is too big and too real to be socially constructed. The real God is not really co-opted nor co-optable, whatever human societies and institutions like to pretend. The real God is both ontologically and normatively prior. The real God is not restricted to the options of (1) being an aloof norm (like a Platonic form) or (2) being reductively absorbed (à la Durkheim) or (3) being real but institutionally co-opted (as in Pure Proper Channel theories). The bible tells us that the real God is God-with-us, God meeting us where we are. Universalists imagine the real God meeting all sorts and conditions of human being where they are. So the real God does work in and through a wide variety of humanly devised institutions and social systems. In so doing, God allows Godself to be cast in analogues of their social roles and so relates to members of that society through them. To that extent, the real God is complicit in the systemic evils that those social systems and institution spawn. Nevertheless, the real God does not work in and through humanly devised societies and institutions in order to lend normative legitimacy to them. The real God infiltrates humanly devised societies and institutions to subvert them, allows Godself to be cast in role-analogues first subtly and then blatantly to caricature them. The real God first gets to know and then co-opts prophets to point out the symptoms and trace back to the causes of systemic evils, to warn and persuade, to co-opt others to join the real God in working to dig them out. Because systemic evils are so systemic, so intertwined with everything else, they cannot all be yanked out at once without leaving the society in shambles. The real God shares Divine Wisdom with co-opted devotees about which evils are ripe for the uprooting at any given place and time. Because Divine aims are global, God moves in with people in very different cultures at the same time. Because societies are organized so differently, and because each and all of them are in flux, what is ripe for uprooting in one culture may not be on today’s prophetic agenda in another. The real God has the wisdom and subtlety to design distinctive syllabi to suit each situation. The real God has the insight and sensitivity to recognize which individuals are here-and-now co-optable and for what cause. Societies can stay creative for a long run if they are willing to be subverted into mid-course corrections. But all human-side societies and institutions eventually wear out and collapse of their own weight. In any event, the Gospels compare Kingdom-coming to leaven in the lump that infiltrates and expands secretly. Unless it is punched down and reformed, the whole mass will explode. The Gospels imply that Kingdom-coming will be utopia and that the real God aims at societies in which there are no systemic evils in which the common good is achieved by seeing to the well-being of each and all. Only the real God is smart enough and good enough to organize utopia. God-with-us is two-sided. For us to be with God in utopia, God will have to bring the human side, mutatis mutandis, into harmony with the Divine side. Among

Mascot or judge  183 other things, God will have to overcome our Darwinian motivations and win our unreserved trust. Only the real God knows how to do this. Utopia is an eschatological goal. What we do know is that God’s interim strategy is to co-opt us, through working together to acquaint us with Divine tastes and values, more and more to win us over to the Divine side.

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184  Marilyn McCord Adams Jones, Robert Alun. “Practices and presuppositions: some questions about Durkheim and Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse.” In The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith, 80–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Kelly, J.N.D. Early Christian Doctrines. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1958. Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1932. Paul VI. Lumen Gentium. November 21, 1964. Chapter 1, Sections 1–6. Accessed August, 2011. www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/ vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html. Pius XII. Mystici Corporis Christi. June 29, 1943. Accessed March, 2014. http:// w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_2906 1943_mystici-corporis-christi.html. Sacred Congregation for Religious, Religiosorum Institutio. February 2, 1961. Accessed August 2011. www.ewtn.com/library/CURIA/CCL1961R.HTM. The Virginia Report, Section III.8 (1998). Accessed January 27, 2007. www.ang licancommunion.org/resources/document-library/lambeth-conference/1998/sec tion-iii-called-to-be-faithful-in-a-plural-world/section-iii8-the-virginia-report.aspx. Williams, Rowan. “The Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today: A Reflection for the Bishops, Clergy and Faithful of the Anglican Communion.” June 27, 2006. Accessed June 2006. http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/ articles.php/1478/the-challenge-and-hope-of-being-an-anglican-today-a-reflec tion-forpbishops-clergy-anc. Wolter, Allan B., OFM. “Duns Scotus on will and morality.” In The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus, edited by Marilyn McCord Adams, 181–206. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1990. Wolter, Allan B., OFM. “The unshredded Scotus.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 77:3 (Summer 2003), 315–56. Women in the Episcopate? An Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue. Vol. 885 of Church of England: General Synod Series. London: General Synod of the Church of England, 2008.

Index

agency 95, 97, 108 Anderson, Pamela Sue 82, 87 Anscombe, Elizabeth 74 Aquinas, Thomas 48 Aristotle 16 – 18 Athanasius 115 – 18 atheism 47, 50 – 2, 59 – 60, 65 – 9 Augustine 15, 57, 84 Ayres, Lewis 115 Barth, Karl 17 Bataille, George 66 Beatitudes 56 beauty 105 – 7, 109; divine 99 – 100, 107; moral 105 – 6 benevolence 105 – 7 Bulgakov, Sergius 119 – 21 Camus, Albert 15 Christ 85 Christianity 19; attached to detached knowledge 87; certain conceptions of 60; ethical failures 83; ethical possibilities 60; patriarchy 65 Chu Hsi 16 climate change 81 – 2, 92 Commers, M. S. Ronald 37 – 9 communion 99 – 100, 115 – 20, 122, 126, 128 – 30 comprehensive doctrine 48; see also John Rawls consensus fidelium 180 – 1 Declaration Towards a Global Ethic 33; see also Global Ethic deism 65 Descartes, René 15 divine command theory 17 – 19 divine simplicity 115 – 18 Don Scotus 17, 22 Dower, Nigel 33

dualism: soul/body 82; spirit/matter 82 duty: as God’s command 14, 18, 22, 58, 60; for its own sake 14; see also Kant, Immanuel Edwards, Jonathan 96 – 101, 103 – 8 Elshtain, Jean Bethke 48 embodiment 82 Epicureans 13 ethics: of liberation 82; must become globalized 33; of shift toward materiality 89; of virtue 126 – 7; see also virtue ethics Euro-American-centrism 33 Evagrius of Pontus 122 evil: moral 52; source of 15 faith: incarnate 91; as love of earth 90 feminism 76, 82 flesh: as an element 86; as glorious 90; the name for what the divine became 90; as part of the world 86 – 90; the promise of 89 – 90; as relationship 86 – 90; as vulnerable 89; what words may become 91; see also MerleauPonty, Maurice fons bonorum 49 forgiveness 15 gender bias 28, 67, 69 – 71, 75 Genesis 21 Global Ethic 34 – 6, 40 globalization 27 – 31, 33 God: as aesthetic 98 – 9; all-knowing 57; all-powerful 57, 64; as being in general 105 – 7; without a body 64, 68; command by 17, 19; commands only good things 18; critiques of 71; is dead 65 – 6; as enabling and empowering a good and righteous life 49, 55; as the

186 Index guarantor of the human good 49, 52, 58 – 9; human dependence upon 15; as a humanizing concept 36; in human society 85; as imaginative construction 29; incarnate 84 – 92; ineffable 71; lawgiver 74; located in the inner self 83 – 90; as love 117 – 18; male-gendered 65 – 7, 76; name of 83, 90 – 2; normative guide 27, 35, 63 – 7, 72; obligation to obey 17; omnibenevolent 63 – 4; as profound cultural symbol 27; reign of 82; rejection of concept 71; as the source of the good and of the right 21, 49, 55; sovereign 14; as structure of recognition 98, 101; as the supreme end of the moral life 49, 55; thick ethical concept 63; as trinitarian 120 – 1, 146 – 7; real 171 – 4, 176, 179, 181 – 3; as the ultimate point of reference 27, 29 – 30, 32, 41; validly moral 27 – 8; worthy to be loved 17 gods, Durkheimian 172 – 3 the good 17 – 19 Gould, Carol 31 happiness 13 – 16, 49, 51 – 2, 54 – 60; divine 96, 100, 103, 115 – 16 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 84, 119 highest good 13 – 15, 48 – 54, 56 – 60 Hobbes, John 53 holiness 55, 57 – 60; see also Wesley, John holocaust 50, 83 human development 29, 36 – 9, 42; see also Human Development Index Human Development Index (HDI) 29, 36 – 7; see also human development human dignity: grounded in God’s attachment 21 – 2; grounded in image of God 17, 20; located in God’s call to us 19; in relation to God 18; residing in our responsiveness to the moral law 23; tied to individual distinctiveness 22; see also Kant, Immanuel; Kelsey, David; Weithman, Paul; Wolterstorff, Nicholas human flourishing 35 – 7, 39, 42 humanism 65; see also theological humanism humanization 31, 33, 35 – 7, 41 identity 95, 97, 102 – 3, 109 – 10 imago dei 59, 84 incarnation: as requiring Christians to give themselves to the world 86, 92

integrity of life 51, 53, 60 International Development Ethics Association 33 Islam 19 Jesus 16, 54 – 5, 82 Joas, Hans 27 Job 162 – 7 Judaism 19 justification by faith 83 just-war theory 125 – 6 Kant, Immanuel: anthropology 35; antinomy 56 – 7; autonomy 55; categorical imperative 16, 55, 57; children 19; Critique of Practical Reason 54, 55, 57; dignity as tied to our potential responsiveness to the moral law 23; duties as commands from God 15, 58; effect of grace 15 –  16, 16; God 60; Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 19, 55, 58; happiness 54 – 5; highest good 54, 57; human dignity 17, 18, 19, 23, 55; human moral status 19; kingdom of ends 55; love 56; is to be loved 17; maxims 15, 16, 55 – 6, 58; Metaphysics of Morals 17; moral law 54; moral standpoint 35; moral theology 13; naturalsocial standpoint 35; perfection 54; postulate of immortality 60; procreation 19 – 20; Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason 15, 22; religious immaturity 68; a response: creating new thick religious concepts 69; revelation 15; Second Critique 17; Trinity 18, 22; use of reason 16 Kaufman, Gordon 27 – 8 Kearney, Richard 91 Kelsey, David 21 Kierkegaard 22 King Jr., Martin Luther 50 Korsgaard, Christine 17, 73 Küng, Hans 34, 40 – 1 Kymlicka, Will 28, 33 Levinas, Emmanuel 83, 86, 90 LGBTQ 28, 36 liberation theology 82 love 17 – 19, 21 – 2, 56, 58 – 9, 97 – 103, 105 – 7, 122 – 6, 128 – 31, 138, 141, 143, 146 – 9; divine 99 – 100, 103, 106

Index  187 Luhmann, Niklas 49 Luther, Martin 15, 16, 84 Markell, Patchen 95 – 8, 109 materiality 81, 82 Maximus the Confessor 121 – 2, 124 – 6, 129 – 30 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 83 – 5, 87 – 9, 91 Mill, J. S. 14 Moore, A. W. 63 – 4, 67 – 9, 71 – 2, 75 – 6 moral: law 13, 17; particularism 40 – 1; relativism 31 – 2, 40; universalism 31, 40 – 1 moral gap 15, 16, 18, 22 moral injury 123 – 4, 126 morality: argument from grace 15; argument from justification 16; argument from providence 13; dependence on religion 13, 90; as a system of obligations 74; see also ethics natural law 17; see also Don Scotus Nietzsche, Friedrich 53, 65 – 9, 75 – 6 Norenzayan, Ara 28 obligation: emerges from material relations 90; to obey God 17; produced by divine command 17; religious 86; role in contemporary ethics 74 onto-hermeneutic 159 – 60, 163, 168 ontology: of flesh 83, 92; relational 86 onto-vitality 159, 161, 163, 165 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 119 – 20 Parliament of the World’s Religions 28 – 9, 33 – 4, 41 Paul (St.) 60 perfection, human 47 – 9, 51 – 2, 54, 58 – 60 Peters, Rebecca Todd 33 philosophy: feminist 65, 70; of language 86; of religion 70; see also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Plato 18, 48, 50, 53 poverty 129 – 30 Pre-Vatican II Ecclesiology 177 – 8 PTSD 123 – 4, 126 Rahner, Karl 117 – 19 Rawls, John 48 recognition 95 – 8, 100 – 10; as aesthetic 100, 105 – 6, 109; as empowering 100, 106, 108; multicultural 101, 107; spheres of 107 – 10

Ricoeur, Paul 60 Rieger, Joerg 32 the right 17, 58 Sartre, Jean-Paul 66 secularization 50 Sen, Amartya 36 Shariff, Zaim 28 Shay, Jonathan 123, 126 Sidgwick, Henry 14 sin 102 – 4 Smith, Zadie 81, 92 social justice 36, 87 Socrates 18 – 19 Sophia 120 Stackhouse, Max 28, 32 Stoics 13 Sugirtharajah, R. S. 32 Taylor, Charles 48 ten commandments 17, 83 Tertullian 90 theistic metaphysics 63 theological humanism 60 theological method 30 – 1 theology: analytic 63 – 4, 70; Biblical 22; constructive 27; and ethics as supportive of each other 32; helps us understand ourselves 92; incarnational 83 – 90; as an interpretation of an interpretation 48; Latin American liberation 82 – 3; negative 87; offers visions of the world 91; unique role 90 theosis 48, 116, 122, 129 – 30 tradition 163 – 4 Trinity 22, 49, 115 – 16, 118 – 22 ul Haq, Mahbub 36 United Nations Development Program (UNDP) 36 – 7, 39, 42 violence 123 – 6, 128 – 31 virtue 13 – 14, 50 – 1, 54 – 7, 103 – 9, 121 – 3, 125 – 30; true 104 – 9 virtue ethics 125 – 6 vulnerability 89 war 123 – 7 Weithman, Paul 21 Wesley, John 47, 49 – 50, 52, 54 – 6, 58 – 60 Williams, Bernard 63 – 4, 67 – 9, 71 – 6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 27 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 20 – 1 Wood, Allen 35