God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology: Volume 2: Virtue and Intellect 9780567664099, 9780567664112, 9780567664082

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Introduction: Agere sequitur Esse
Chapter 2. ‘Where Christ is’: Christology and Ethics
Chapter 3. The Dignity of Creatures
Chapter 4. Mercy
Chapter 5. Dolent Gaudentque. Sorrow in the Christian Life
Chapter 6. Courage
Chapter 7. Mortification and Vivification
Chapter 8. Sins of Speech
Chapter 9. On the Theology of the Intellectual Life
Chapter 10. God, Theology, Universities
Chapter 11. Intellectual Patience
Index of Names
Subject Index

Citation preview

GOD WITHOUT MEASURE

Working Papers in Christian Theology

GOD WITHOUT MEASURE

Working Papers in Christian Theology Volume II: Virtue and Intellect

John Webster

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © John Webster, 2016 John Webster has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-56766-409-9 PB: 978-0-56768-604-6 ePDF: 978-0-56766-408-2 ePub: 978-0-56766-410-5 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Chapter 1 Introduction: agere sequitur esse

1

Chapter 2 ‘Where Christ is’: Christology and Ethics

5

Chapter 3 The Dignity of Creatures

29

Chapter 4 Mercy

49

Chapter 5 Dolent gaudentque. Sorrow in the Christian Life

67

Chapter 6 Courage

87

Chapter 7 Mortification and Vivification

103

Chapter 8 Sins of Speech

123

Chapter 9 On the Theology of the Intellectual Life

141

Chapter 10 God, Theology, Universities

157

Chapter 11 Intellectual Patience

173

Index of Names Subject Index

189 191

Acknowledgements A debt of gratitude is owed once again to Tyler Wittman for his diligent preparation of this volume for publication. The author and publishers acknowledge with gratitude permission to reproduce previously published material as follows: Chapter 2, ‘ “Where Christ is”: Christology and Ethics’ = ‘ “Where Christ Is”: Christology and Ethics’, in F. L. Shults, B. Waters, ed., Christology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), pp. 32–55. Chapter  3, ‘The Dignity of Creatures’ = ‘The Dignity of Creatures’, in P. Middleton, ed., The Love of God and Humanity Dignity. Essays in Honour of George M. Newlands (London: T&T Clark, 2007), pp. 19–33. Chapter  5, ‘Dolent gaudentque. Sorrow in the Christian Life’ = ‘Dolent gaudentque: Sorrow in the Christian Life’, in R. Song, B. Waters, ed., The Authority of the Gospel: Explorations in Moral and Political Theology in Honour of Oliver O’Donovan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), pp. 250–67. Chapter 6, ‘Courage’ = ‘Courage’, in M. Barnes, ed., A Man of the Church: Honoring the Theology, Life, and Witness of Ralph Del Colle (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2012), pp. 40–55. Chapter  7, ‘Mortification and Vivification’ = ‘Communion with Christ: Mortification and Vivification’, in K. Eilers, K. Strobel, ed., Sanctified By Grace. A Theology of the Christian Life (London: T&T Clark, 2014), pp. 121–38. Chapter 8, ‘Sins of Speech’ = ‘Sins of Speech’, Studies in Christian Ethics 28 (2015), pp. 35–48. Chapter 9, ‘On the Theology of the Intellectual Life’ = ‘On the theology of the intellectual life’, in R. Lundin, ed., Christ Across the Disciplines. Past, Present and Future (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), pp. 100–16.

Acknowledgements

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Chapter 10, ‘God, Theology, Universities’ = ‘Sub ratione Dei. Zum Verhältnis von Theologie und Universität’, Communio. Internationale Katholische Zeitschrift 42 (2013), pp. 151–69; ‘God, Theology, Universities’, in D. Nelson, ed., Indicative of Grace – Imperative of Freedom. Essays in Honour of Eberhard Jüngel in his Eightieth Year (London: T&T Clark, 2014), pp. 241–54.

Chapter 1 I n t r o du ctio n : ag e r e s e qu i t u r e s s e

The essays assembled in the first volume of this collection treated questions concerning the divine nature and persons, and God’s immanent and transitive works in creation, providence and the history of grace. The present volume considers the moral and intellectual acts of God’s human creatures. Though they were prepared for diverse occasions, the essays work from a common set of judgements about the necessity of treating questions of creaturely life and activity in the full circle of theological science, about the places in a systematic account of the Christian faith at which these questions may be expected to display themselves with especial prominence, and about the movements of theological thought through which answers are to be sought. Alongside the exegetical and historical duties of theological reason, in which it is required to attend to its res as mediated through texts and through the temporally unfolding practices of the Christian religion, it also has dogmatic and practical-­ethical responsibilities towards its object. As dogmatics, theological reason fixes its gaze on God, and then on all things sub ratione Dei; as practical-­ethical theology, it is an exercise of deliberative intelligence, directed to the task of discerning what in particular circumstances the human creatures of God are to do. But consideration of human action does not first arise in practical-­ethical theology; it arises also – indeed, it arises first – in dogmatics, precisely because the matter to which dogmatics gives attention includes creaturely life. Dogmatics investigates the first principles of moral science; yet it has no monopoly in treating human action, and theology’s responsibility to this element of its res is only completed in practical-­ethical work. As it inquires into God and all things relative to God, dogmatics assembles a description of creaturely mortal nature: the moral being, powers and condition of human agents considered under the aspect of their origin and end in God, and their historical course between first and final cause. This is the moral theological task of dogmatics. In going about

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this task, dogmatics seeks to acquire understanding of what it is to be a human agent, not by asking about particular acts and sets of circumstances, but by coming to a view of what kind of being the human agent is, anterior to and in and after its acts. To accomplish this, dogmatics gives an account of the first principles of human moral history: the origin and preservation of creaturely being, the nature, powers and limits of human agents, their relations to God and other created agents and things, the goods in which they may legitimately find fulfilment, the situations in which those goods are to be pursued – and all this in relation to God. As moral theology, dogmatics does not deliberate on how to be patient with noisy neighbours, or courageous in face of deprivation of dignity; rather, it asks about who the patient or courageous person is, about the historical and social domain in which that person is located, about how and why it is that patience and courage are fitting enactments of our moral nature and condition. It is in this sense that action follows being. Moral theology is distributed across the corpus of dogmatics, not restricted to, for example, theological anthropology or sanctification. In treating any of its components, dogmatics will also give attention to moral matters, and not simply for the purposes of displaying the use or application of doctrine, but as an intrinsic part of coming to know its object. There is a moral-­theological derivate of all Christian doctrines: Trinity, creation, providence, sin, reconciliation, regeneration, perfection, and the rest. Moral theology is a necessary element of dogmatics by virtue of the object of dogmatic intelligence. There is one principal Christian doctrine, the doctrine of God the Holy Trinity, immanently and transitively considered, of which all other doctrines are extensions. Because dogmatics inquires into God, it inquires also into God’s outer works, considering not only their grounds in the divine will and processions but also their temporal forms and effects. Accordingly, dogmatics is required to give its attention not only to God the creator and his act of creation, but also to creatures, their natures and properties, and especially to the human creature. In so doing, dogmatics has not only to inquire into the origin of created human nature but also into the history of its actualization by the animating power of the Holy Spirit. In moral theology, that is, dogmatics is always both retrospective, concerned to build up a picture of created nature and action by reduction to principia, and prospective, looking to the temporal enactment of that nature. Each moment of dogmatic reflection on God and the works of God is enlarged (though not superseded) by moral theological reflection. And so, by way of example, in speaking of God’s works of grace, the reach or force of such topics as justification, regeneration and gospel will be exhibited more fully when dogmatics enfolds within its account of

Introduction

3

these works consideration of sanctification, vocation and law. Moral theology is an exponent of dogmatics, yet not in such a way that there occurs a shift away from its matter, but only an amplification prompted by that matter’s full scope. The essays which follow are exercises in moral theology so understood, largely devoted to reflection on the first principles of created moral nature, its condition and history with God. Though they do not venture into the deliberative field of practical-­ethical theology, they indicate something of the grounds and orientation of that necessary next step. Why necessary? Because of the kind of creature which the human agent is. Created moral nature is to be grasped first in its origin and setting in relation to God. But that nature is not a sheerly contingent state of affairs; it is a potency pressing for realization, a divine gift which is also a vocation. Dogmatics and moral theology may be drawn to make much of the first principles of moral action in order to resist any suggestion that we can go no deeper than human self-­ realization, to ensure that talk of what creatures do is, indeed, talk of what creatures do. But there is risk in this of mischaracterizing the object of moral theology and of curtailing its scope. Created moral nature bears history within itself. Derived from God the Father’s purpose, preserved and renewed by God the Son, it is also quickened by God the Holy Spirit. Created moral history, moreover, does not simply follow a fixed course by natural propensity. It is not instinctive but animate, and so intelligent, intentional and deliberate. It knows its given nature and ends, it makes those ends into elect purposes. Dogmatic knowledge of our created moral nature includes knowledge of the fact that we are practical reasoners, summoned by our nature to its appropriation and enactment. There is a sequitur to esse; created moral being includes moral time. There is a material order to dogmatic-­moral and practical-­ethical theology, in which inquiry into nature precedes attention to circumstances. Practical-­moral theology has a retrospective moment, because answers to the question ‘what shall we do?’ draw upon an understanding of who ‘we’ are, and therefore upon what is said about God and God’s works. The order of causality, the order of uncreated and created being, is to find its counterpart in the order of thought. This is especially necessary in our fallen state, which engenders ignorance of our moral nature, condition, powers and ends. After the fall, moral excellence, including excellence in moral deliberation, necessitates learning by attention to divine instruction. Dogmatic science is an instance of such learning. But as deliberative reason combs through circumstances, it acquires further knowledge of our nature. Deliberation, the task of practical-­ethical science, is not simply the application of already-­achieved knowledge. Certainly, it draws on what

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renewed intelligence knows, but it is also a further act of discernment, a fresh coming-­to-know of our moral nature, confirming and enriching our store of moral knowledge. In short: well-­ordered and spiritually acute Christian moral thought does well to pause long and lovingly over God and created moral being, returning time and again to the principia actionis. It will not terminate there, in the false expectation that dogmatic moral ontology furnishes complete moral knowledge. But its deliberative arguments will demonstrate a habitual attentiveness to dogmatics, and so a genuinely theological attitude. In the note ‘To the Reader’ which prefaces his Practical Exposition Upon Psalm CXXX, John Owen writes: ‘Sin and grace in their original causes, various respects, consequents, and ends, are the principal subjects of the whole Scripture, of the whole revelation of the will of God to mankind. In these do our present and eternal concernments lie, and from and by them hath God designed the great and everlasting exaltation of his own glory. Upon these do turn all the transactions that are between God and the souls of men. That it should be an endeavour needless or superfluous, to inquire into the will of God about, and our own interest in, these things, who can imagine? Two ways there are whereby this may be done – first, speculatively, by a due investigation of the nature of these things, according as their doctrine is declared in the Scripture. An endeavour according to the mind of God herein is just and commendable, and comprehensive of most of the chief heads of divinity. But this is not to be engaged in for its own sake. The knowledge of God and spiritual things has this proportion unto practical sciences, that the ends of all its notions and doctrines consists in practice. Wherefore, secondly, these things are to be considered practically . . .’1 Undertaken ‘according to the mind of God’, speculative investigation of the nature of sin and grace, of their causes, respects, consequents and ends, is ‘just and commendable’. Without it, how could we pursue our interest in them with intelligence, how could we know these matters in which we are concerned? It is this which is the business of moral theology. But, however indispensable, such investigation does not complete the moral task of Christian theology. It has an end beyond itself: ‘The knowledge of God and spiritual things has this proportion unto practical sciences, that the ends of all its notions and doctrines consists in practice’. If the essays which follow have any value, it is that of a set of preparatory exercises whose end is evangelical clarity of mind in the pursuit of moral and intellectual tasks. 1.  J. Owen, A Practical Exposition Upon Psalm CXXX [1668], in The Works of John Owen, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), p. 325.

Chapter 2 ‘ W h e r e C h r i s t i s ’ : C h r i s t o l o g y a n d E t h ic s

I Moral reasoning is biblical reasoning (for the moral life is within the domain of the Word of God), and biblical reasoning does well not to stray too far from exegesis, because exegesis is a hearing of the Word, and ‘the unfolding of [God’s] words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple’ (Ps. 119.130). Part of the discipline of dogmatic and moral theology is coming to terms – often after some struggle against our own sophistication – with the fact that this is so: that we will not get very far unless moral reason is disciplined by the divine teaching which is ministered by the prophets and apostles, and that, as we do so govern moral reason, we are granted illumination. Exegesis – indeed, the theological enterprise in its entirety, including moral theology – is calling upon God: ‘I cry to thee, save me, that I may observe thy testimonies. I rise before dawn and cry for help; I hope in thy words’ (Ps. 119.146f.). Patiently pursued, as a work of theological intelligence quickened and borne along by the Spirit, exegesis is an act of hope in God’s words. As it engages in exegesis, churchly intelligence is entitled to expect divine instruction and so – in the case of moral theology – may with good cause count upon being directed to a conclusive word about its perplexities, and not simply to further dilemmas. Moral knowledge, and therefore intelligent moral action, is possible because the divine Word in Holy Scripture is law, that is, a truthful command in which God extends his rational government of the church by instructing it about his purposes and about the ways in which he guides ruined creatures into moral fellowship with himself. Scriptural instruction is, of course, no exception to the rule that creaturely moral knowledge is acquired over time, learned. But such knowledge is not simply the by-­product of improvisation in moral practice; it is taken to, as well as taken from, the moral situation. It is ‘heavenly’ doctrine, because both its substance and its source is the church’s heavenly master (Col. 4.1), and it generates both

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‘spiritual wisdom and understanding’ (Col. 1.9) and fruitfulness in good works (Col. 1.10). Accordingly, the gospel dispenses a double knowledge: first, of God and God’s acts, and, second, of the will of God for creatures. ‘What may be known of God’, remarks John Owen, ‘is his nature and existence, with the holy counsels of his will.’1 The matter of Christian theology encompasses dogmatics and morals, because the gospel which theology contemplates concerns God’s ‘beloved Son’ (Col 1.13), in whose ‘person and mediation . . . there is made unto us a representation of the glorious properties of the divine nature, and of the holy counsels of the will of God.’2 Theological apprehension of Christ and his dominion is at once metaphysical and moral – only moral because metaphysical, and because metaphysical necessarily moral. For a compelling canonical instance of this, we may turn to Colossians. What Colossians has to say about the moral life of believers cannot be restricted to the so-­called Haustafel (Col. 3.18-4.1), but is an integral element of its entire presentation of Christ. A long tradition of scrupulous (and largely inconclusive) form-­critical inquiry into the Gattung and Vorlage of the household code has heightened its isolation by analysing it diachronically as traditional material originating elsewhere and subsequently implanted into the letter with little relation to the letter’s theological impulses.3 Whatever conclusions may be reached concerning the literary and historical questions surrounding the Haustafel, there is surely an exegetical (and theological) misstep here, an inadequate conception of the scope and integrity of Colossians, whose paraenesis is not lightly Christianized Stoic commonplaces, but instruction which flows from a Christologically derived and shaped understanding of the redemption of moral nature and moral situation, and of its integral imperatives: ‘As therefore you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so live in him . . .’ (Col. 2.6). With this in place, what may be said of the relation of Christology and ethics in Colossians?

1.  J. Owen, Christologia, or, A Declaration of the Glorious Mystery of the Person of Christ [1679], in The Works of John Owen, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), p. 65. 2. Owen, Christologia, p. 65. 3. For a thorough critical account of the history of interpretation, see J. Hering, The Colossian and Ephesian Haustafeln in Theological Context. An Analysis of their Origins, Relationship, and Message (New York: Lang, 2007).

‘Where Christ is’

7

II Jesus Christ ‘is before all things, and in him all things hold together’ (Col. 1.17). Jesus Christ is the absolutely existent one and, by virtue of that absolute existence, the one in whom creaturely reality in its entirety coheres. Together, this αὐτός and its correlative ἐν αὐτῷ are the principle of creaturely existence, as well as of its intelligible unity and its movement towards perfection. And so to invoke the name of Jesus Christ in a moral context is to indicate the one by whom τὰ πάντα are moved, the one in whom creaturely action has its ground and telos. Creaturely moral action is action in the economy of grace, the ordered disposition of reality in which in Jesus Christ God’s goodness is limitlessly potent. What more may be said of this one? First, he is ‘pre-­eminent in everything’ (1.18); he is ‘the head of all rule and authority’ (2.10). He is determinative of created reality in a comprehensive way; his rule knows no restriction or competition; he has authority over all other authority because he is the author of all things – ‘whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities – all things were created through him and for him’ (1.16). In another image, he is ‘the substance’ (τὸ σῶμα, 2.17), the true ultimate reality by which all other realities are rendered provisional, non-­final, to be left behind on the way to what is to come.4 All created dominion is relativized by the stunningly simple Christological confession: ὅς ἐστιν ἀρχή (1.18). Second, all this is attributed to Jesus Christ by virtue of his antecedent deity. In order truthfully to grasp his history and the identity which it enacts, he has to be confessed as ‘the image of the invisible God’ (1.15), the coming into visibility of the one who entirely eludes creaturely imagining. He is the dwelling place of the utter plenitude of God, the one ‘in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell’ (1.19), God’s perfect life present in matter and time. ‘In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily’ (2.9): the divine πλήρωμα is now also – astoundingly – ‘somatic’. And, once again, to grasp this ‘somatic’ reality, we must talk of a divine movement and presence, the movement of the divine good pleasure, the presence, not simply of divine virtues but, as Bengel puts it, the very divine nature: ‘Deitas plenissima: non modo divinae virtutes, sed ipsa divina natura.’5 What takes place in Jesus Christ’s history is not contingent but an eternal correlate of 4.  All citations of the Greek are from E. Nestle, E. Nestle, B. Aland, et al., The Greek New Testament, 27th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1993). 5.  J. A. Bengel, Gnomon Novi Testamenti (Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1862), p. 739.

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the Father’s will to be manifest to creatures. ‘God’s mystery’ and ‘Christ’ are identical (2.2): Jesus Christ is not simply the occasion in which that mystery is revealed, but its very content, both mode and matter. Third, in and as this one God has effected the decisive alteration of the condition of creatures. This one, αὐτός, is within the plenitude of the divine being, and as such the reconciler.6 That is, his eternal being in the godhead is directed towards creatures; in him there takes place a divine mission. ‘In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell’; and therefore through him God ‘reconciled to himself all things’ (1.19f.). Jesus Christ’s being is thus doubly defined: by ἐν αὐτῷ, in which his relation to God’s inner plenitude of life is stated, and by δι’ αὐτοῦ, through which attention is drawn to his ‘external’ acts as reconciler. This external work, God’s goodness in the economy, is not a closed but an open act, whose term is the remaking of creatures and of creaturely relation to God. There is a real καὶ ὑμᾶς, ‘and you’, which follows inexorably from the indwelling and the objective reconciliation: ‘And you, who once were estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death’ (1.21f.). What is described as reconciliation can otherwise be indicated: as deliverance from dominion (1.13); as redemption or forgiveness (1.14); as making alive (2.13); as the cancelling of a bond (2.14) or the disarming of hostile forces (2.15). Its result is existence in a sphere of rule which establishes creatures after they have been overtaken by enmity with God; that sphere is ‘the kingdom of [God’s] beloved Son’ (1.13). Christian life and activity take place in the domain of God’s charity to lost creatures, which has its ground in the perfect inner repose and delight of Father, Son and Spirit. This domain is the kingdom of the eternal Son of the Father’s love, and therefore divinely good and secure. Fourth, in this kingdom of the Son, reality is illuminated and true knowledge made possible. Christ’s rule is intelligible and renders intelligible that over which he rules. In view of this kingdom, it makes sense for the apostle to pray that his readers should ‘increase in the knowledge of God’ (1.10; see also 3.10), precisely because the divine office of the apostle in the

6. Hering’s concern to underline the ‘benevolent’ character of Christ’s dominion (The Colossian and Ephesian Haustafeln in Theological Context, p.  65) and to disavow any idea of that dominion as pure power, imaged in hierarchical human relations, lends a distinct ‘economic’ cast to his reading of the Christology and soteriology of Colossians; this in turn leads to some neglect of the rooting of redemption in the eternal being of the exalted Son.

‘Where Christ is’

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church is ‘to make the word of God fully known’ (1.25) on the basis of the fact that in Jesus Christ a revelation has taken place in which the hidden mystery is ‘now made manifest to his saints’ (1.26). In Christ are ‘hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (2.3): ‘hidden’, because he is the agent of their manifestation and ‘in him’ because he is their content. Fifth, Christ’s kingdom is a moral commonwealth.7 To exist within the domain of the Father’s beloved Son, to know ‘the riches of the glory of the mystery’ of ‘Christ in you’ (1.27) is at the very same time to be drawn into transformation of life-­activity. ‘Spiritual wisdom and understanding’ is thus confirmed as ‘knowledge of his will’ (1.9); or again, ‘increasing in the knowledge of God’ entails a ‘leading a life worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work’ (1.10). To grow in knowledge of this mystery is also to learn how to act in the wake of its manifestation. Reconciliation in Christ is, similarly, purposeful: the Son’s work of reconciliation is ‘in order to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him’ (1.22), an end which carries the moral entailments of ‘continuing in the faith, stable and steadfast . . .’ (1.23). This coinherence of acknowledgement of Christ and manner of life is, of course, basic, both to the overall argument of Colossians, and to its most characteristic pattern of moral appeal, which might be called Christological deduction, a pressing of the moral logic of is: ‘as . . . so’ (2.6); ‘if . . . why?’ (2.20); ‘if . . . then’ (3.1); ‘seeing that . . .’ (3.9) and, most of all, the ubiquitous ‘therefore’, οὖν (2.16; 3.5; 3.12).8 All this serves to indicate in an initial way that Jesus Christ presides over a moral economy; knowledge of him is in this sense practical. To apprehend his being is to feel the forward pressure of the ‘therefore’ towards modes of action which are impressed by his own: ‘as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive’ (3.13); ‘Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts’

7.  In this connection, Hering’s presentation of the coordination of the vertical (divine-­human) axis and the horizontal (intra-­human) axis of what Colossians has to say of Christ’s rule is substantially correct: The Colossian and Ephesian Haustafeln in Theological Context, pp. 61–105. He argues that the key redemptive ‘movements’ of Christ’s dominion in his death and resurrection ‘become a part of the new and unfolding context of life for the hearers, who now partake in them as their identity is increasingly defined in terms of, and therefore intrinsically tied to, Christ’ (p. 69). 8. On this, see W. Nauck, ‘Das οὖν-paräneticum’, Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 49 (1958), pp. 134–5.

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(3.15); ‘you are serving the Lord Christ’ (3.24). The Christology is moral Christology. Yet, there is no ethical nominalism here, in which invocation of Jesus Christ is simple ornamentation. To be summoned to life in this moral economy is to feel the backward pressure of the ‘therefore’, its reference back to Christ as God’s fullness. It is ethically crucial that Jesus Christ is an ontological perfectum, a complete reality, a se and in se, not one somehow produced or extended in Christian moral history. If he were so produced, he would not be Lord of the moral life, and Christian action would not be undertaken in reference to a given order. One rule, therefore, for Christian moral determinacy is: ‘Him we proclaim’ (1.28). Yet, again, proclamation includes ‘warning’ and ‘teaching’ (1.28) and has as its end the creature’s perfection in Christ. The moral life thus revolves around two affirmations in their necessary connection and their proper sequence: ‘in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily’ (2.9), and ‘you have come to fullness of life in him’ (2.10).

III So far, the apostolic gospel in Colossians. We may now stand back a pace and restate the matter in a rather more formal idiom. Jesus Christ establishes and governs the order of moral being and the order of moral knowing; he is the ontological and noetic foundation of good human conduct; ethical reflection is accordingly an expansion of his name as that name exalts itself in the field of creaturely activity. To explicate that name requires us to trace two movements from the central point of Jesus’s history as the embodied fullness of God. The first is a movement backwards, into the infinite depth of the eternal Son and his relations to the Father by whom he is generated and the Spirit whom with the Father he breathes. In tracing this movement, we come to see that Jesus Christ’s name is spoken out of the unrestricted fullness of the triune life. In the more abstract idiom of trinitarian dogmatics: his history is a divine mission, a turning outwards of the abundance of the divine processions, a divine act ad extra resting upon the triune life ad intra. The second movement is a movement forwards, the movement in which the eternal Word speaks of himself now, making himself present to creaturely knowledge, love and obedience. The eternal Word, made flesh to redeem creatures, is also the Word spoken through the apostles as the consolation and direction of the gospel. To speak of Jesus Christ is to speak of this one: the Father’s eternal Son in whom the Father’s reconciling will has been accomplished and who through the Holy Spirit is now drawing creatures

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back into fellowship with the Father. Such expansions of the name of Jesus can only be assumed here, however; we press on to reflect upon the ontological and noetic corollaries. 1.  Jesus Christ determines the order of moral being. In Christian moral theology, Christological statements function as reality-­indications. From them we may build up a picture of the moral field, that is, a portrait of the identities of the divine and human agents in their encounter in the economy of God, and of the ways in which human beings ought to conduct themselves in that economy. This is who God and his creatures are, this is where they meet, this is the character of their meeting. In an ethics which is Christologically determined, we are not dealing with an ‘indefinite’ sphere of human action, but with one which is ‘fixed and limited’, having a particular character.9 Put slightly differently: from the church’s confession of Jesus Christ as the one in whom God has redemptive dealings with creatures, theology generates a metaphysics of morals – an account of moral natures, a moral ontology. As we have already seen from Colossians, the interpenetration of the moral and the ontological is basic to a Christian theological account of the conduct of creatures. To be a creature is to have and enact a particular given nature. The principle here is enunciated by Turretin: ‘As the creature has itself in being with respect to God, so also it ought to have itself in working, for the mode of working follows the mode of being’.10 The kind of esse which is proper to creatures takes place as agere; the kind of agere which is proper to creatures is action in accordance with being. The separation of esse and agere – in a modern context, by retraction

9. K. Barth, The Christian Life (Church Dogmatics IV/4) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), p. 7; paragraph 74 of the Church Dogmatics in its entirety is an important example of the kind of moral ontology which I am recommending; on the issues here, see further my Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). I remain agnostic about whether the task of theological identity description of moral agents is helped by a ‘theodramatic’ conception of the Christian faith, as proposed in, for example, K. J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine. A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Doctrine (Louisville: WJKP, 2005), B. Quash, Theology and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and (more lightly) M. Horton, Lord and Servant. A Covenant Christology (Louisville: WJKP, 2005). 10. F. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 3 vols. (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1992), VI.iv.ix (vol. 1, p. 503).

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of esse and expansion of agere as self-­realization – makes it hard for us to understand what it means to act as a creature, one to whom a determinate nature is given to complete in fellowship with God who creates, redeems and perfects that nature. To act well is to act in accordance with my nature and so to move towards perfection, that is, the entire realization of my nature. Christian moral ontology attempts to listen to the gospel’s instruction concerning that nature and its history, and in so doing tries both to assist in the formation of moral reason and its acts of judgement, and also to display before the intellect, the affections and the will those objects towards which God desires and enables creatures to move. This being so, Christian ethics is a contemplative as much as a practical science, an orientation of redeemed reason to being as much as to action. We may explicate this by meeting an objection which the claim invites. The objection is that to speak thus is radically to misperceive the object of Christian ethics, which is the unfolding moral history between God and creatures. Moral ontology resolves moral history into abstract moral nature. The objection is already articulated with some force in Barth’s Münster ethics lectures from the late 1920s, where, eager to dispose of a conception of ‘the ethical question’ as serene observation of possible conduct, he told his hearers: ‘We no longer have the time to wander in distant metaphysical regions in search of the good. We no longer have the time to try to contemplate it as being. This being somewhere above the “ought” is the infallible mark of an ethics that does not quite take the “what?” of the ethical question seriously, that gets its knowledge elsewhere from the actual ethos of the ethicist and his time and background, and that is really making no more than an appearance of asking.’11 Something similar – albeit a good deal more sophisticated – can be found in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics as he broods on the relation of reality and the good: ‘The subject matter of a Christian ethic is God’s reality revealed in Jesus Christ becoming real among God’s creatures, just as the subject matter of doctrinal theology is the truth of God’s reality revealed in Christ. The place that in all other ethics is marked by the antithesis between ought and is, idea and realization, motive and work, is occupied in Christian ethics by the relation between reality and becoming real, between past and present, between history and even (faith) or, to replace the many concepts with the simple name of the thing itself, the relation between Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. The question of the good becomes the question of participating in God’s reality revealed in Christ. God is no longer an examination of what exists, for instance my 11. K. Barth, Ethics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), p. 68.

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essence, my moral orientation, my actions, or of a state of affairs in the world . . . Good is the real itself, that is, not the abstractly real that is separated from the reality of God, but the real that has its reality only in God.’12 Perhaps the most probing recent reflection on this theme can be found in Hans Ulrich’s Wie Geschöpfe Leben.13 The book is, at heart, an appeal to take moral history seriously, and so to resist the reduction of the new creation to some ‘moral Ur-Situation’.14 The object of ethical reflection is the eschatological reality of life with God in the new creation, creaturely existence in the movement of God in Jesus Christ. As such, Christian ethics is not concerned with ‘the course of things’15 or with some general humanum, but with ‘the praxis of historical life’;16 its matter is not a given state of affairs, a principium, but an initium concretum,17 which is the conversion of life brought about by God’s turn to creatures in Christ. In their different ways, these are all appeals to reintegrate the ethical and the temporal, after the bifurcation of history and the good in ‘metaphysical’ ethics, and to do so precisely on Christological grounds: naming Jesus Christ in an ethical context precludes flight into moral essentialism or extrinsicism. There are some dogmatic dimensions to the matter: Bonhoeffer and Ulrich (and sometimes even Barth in the Ethics lectures) give only a slender role to the perfection of Christ, that is, to his fully realized identity anterior to creaturely moral history, and are much more interested in the ways in which ‘Jesus Christ’ names God’s temporal presence with creatures. These dogmatic matters are of some import, but here must be laid to one side. What can be said, however, is that the antithesis between moral ontology and moral history is specious. In Christian ethics to contemplate being is not simply to note a state of affairs, for that ‘state of affairs’ is the living, commanding Christ who out of the depths of eternal deity makes history by making himself present, drawing our scattered and incoherent moral histories before him in order to judge and heal and 12. D. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 6 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), pp. 49f. 13. H. Ulrich, Wie Geschöpfe leben. Konturen evangelischer Ethik (Münster: LIT, 2005); see my article ‘Wie Geschöpfe leben: some dogmatic reflections’, Studies in Christian Ethics 20 (2007), pp. 275–87. 14.  Wie Geschöpfe leben, p. 19. 15.  Wie Geschöpfe leben, p. 42. 16.  Wie Geschöpfe leben, p. 48. 17.  Wie Geschöpfe leben, p. 88.

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integrate them. This presence of his is a determination – the determination – of our situation: not an offer of a set of possibilities but a decision about what creatures are, and the execution of that decision in time. To contemplate this determination – to consider, for example, the reality that we have been transferred into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son (1.13) – is not merely to observe something anterior to our moral histories so much as to grasp what our historical identity is by virtue of the active presence of Christ. Put formally: moral ontology is concerned not only with moral space but also with moral time; or perhaps we might say that moral space is not a bounded sphere populated by a set of inert objects possessed of a certain nature, but a setting for discursive agency. Moral ontology concerns the creature’s appointment to be a certain kind of being, the creature’s being moved in order to engage in a certain movement. Yet that moral movement is imperfectly undertaken without apprehension of moral nature, without intelligence of who and where we are, and of by whom we are met. Against this, it might still be objected that appeal to knowledge of moral nature may fail to acknowledge (may, indeed, inhibit) the necessity of continuing moral learning. If knowledge of the good is not something which is more or less complete prior to action but rather occurs in active obedience, then it is more appropriate to speak of practices of moral learning, of coming-­to-know over the course of dealing with the particularities of moral history – in the case of Colossians, over the course of believers figuring out conduct within the Christian assembly and the household (Col. 3.12–4.1). Thus ‘doing everything in the name of the Lord Jesus’ (3.17) is the place at which knowledge of Christ is acquired, not simply the occasion for its application. A corollary is that appeal to moral nature is limited in its power to illuminate particular ethical situations or to generate particular moral claims, since it can furnish only statements of a high level of generality. By way of response, one might begin by noting that the theological and rhetorical structure of Colossians reflects the pattern: agere sequitur esse.18 But the relation of esse and agere is not one of temporal succession: sequitur does not mean that being is first at rest and subsequently in act, for the order of esse and agere is not chronological but logical. Esse as much as

18.  This point is made explicit in J. Ernst’s comment on Col. 3.1-4, Die Briefe an die Philipper, an Philemon, an die Kolosser, an die Epheser (Regensburg: Pustet, 1974), p. 220.

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agere refers to moral history.19 However, the moral history performed in agere is to be understood as emerging and taking place within the economy of God’s saving works in which the agent’s being as creature, and therefore his or her creaturely acts, are subject to transformation. In Christian moral metaphysics, ‘being’ means: creaturely moral reality, brought into being ex nihilo, moved by God’s providential and reconciling works and summoned to redeemed and perfected creatureliness. Further, moral learning occurs as the result of the disclosure over time of the antecedent reality described in Colossians 1 and 2. It is deepening apprehension of and obedience to the gospel imperatives by constant reiteration of the indicatives known and confessed in Christian baptism: ‘he has delivered us’; ‘you . . . he has now reconciled’; ‘you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead’. Why must Christian ethics contemplate being? In order that our moral lives can be conducted away from idols towards reality. The metaphysical impulse in Christian theology is not a flight from history – far from it: it is an element in the ascesis imposed upon sinners by the gospel, part of the needful dispossession and re-­engagement with the truth in which the baptismal form of Christian existence is impressed upon the subjects of God’s redemptive goodness. I cannot act well if I do not know who I am; I must learn who I am by having my gaze drawn to a set of realities which I must come to love even though I fear and hate them; my will must make friends with those realities, at the heart of which is Christ himself and Christ in himself. The role of theological metaphysics in ethics and elsewhere is thus to ensure that we do not for a moment let our attention slip from the αὐτός ἐστιν and the ἐν αὐτῷ by which creaturely being and action are constituted. Only reality obliges us, only truth can chasten and redirect the will. 19.  Chrysostom’s perception of this is one of the strengths of his homilies on Colossians (despite their incipient moralism). On Col. 1.10, for example, he comments: ‘he that hath understood God’s love to man (and he doth understand it if he have seen the Son delivered up) will have greater forwardness. And besides, we pray not for this alone that ye may know, but that ye may show forth your knowledge in works; for he that knows without doing, is even in the way to punishment’: Homilies on Colossians II, in P. Schaff and H. Wace, ed., A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church [NPNF], 28 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1886–1900; reprint, Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), First series, vol. 13 [1.13].

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What kind of reality-­indications may be derived from the confession of Christ as he expounds himself to us in his apostolic witnesses? (a)  They are counter-­indications. They indicate a decisive alteration in reality brought about through a new act of divine goodness, by which creatures are secured for their intended perfection. Created reality has become the subject of deliverance from one dominion to another (1.13); more comprehensively, it has been set in a reconciled relation to God. The counter-­reality thus established is grounded in Jesus Christ’s resurrection: he is ‘the first-­born from the dead’ (1.18), we have been raised ‘with him’ (2.12, 3.1) and ‘made alive together with him’ (2.13). This new disposition of creation calls the ‘old’ reality into question in a drastic way; Christian conduct is a point at which God’s ‘setting aside’ or ‘disarming’ disordered reality (2.14, 15) is to be visible, precisely because it is given to believers to know themselves drawn into the abolition and regeneration of reality in Christ: ‘If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe, why do you still live as if you belonged to the world?’ (2.20). To continue to be oriented to that which God in Christ has set aside is untruthful, living ‘as if ’, failing to see the abolition of the ‘old nature’ (selfhood and practices) and its replacement by a new reality of permanent regeneration (3.9f.). From here, we may formulate an answer to what Bonhoeffer thought was ‘the ultimate and decisive question: With what reality will we reckon in our life?’20 We are to reckon (proximately) with the history of regeneration into whose movement we and our acts are caught up, and (ultimately) with what Colossians 3.1 calls τὰ ἄνω, the things that are above, where Christ is. Bonhoeffer perceived the first, but – held back, perhaps, by some emphases in Lutheran Christology, as well as by worries about spatial conceptions of God’s relation to creatures – he had a less secure grasp of the second. ‘[T]he reality of God has revealed itself and witnessed to itself in the middle of the real world. In Jesus Christ the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world. The place where the questions about the reality of God and about the reality of the world are answered at the same time is characterized solely by the name: Jesus Christ. God and the world are enclosed in this name’.21 And so: ‘there is no real Christian existence outside the reality of the world and no real worldliness outside the reality of Jesus Christ. For the Christian there is nowhere to retreat from the world, neither externally nor

20.  Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 49. 21.  Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 54.

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into the inner life.’22 But: Christ is above; only because that is so do we have moral history in the world. (b)  The gospel’s counter-­indications of reality are not transparent, for the alteration of reality which is indicated by the confession of Christ is actual in an indirect way, and, because it is thus in some measure hidden, it is subject to contest and misperception. The believer, too, may fail to see or fully to see its constitutive character, and may continue in allegiances and modes of action stemming from uncertain grasp of the believer’s true condition. Thus the basic pattern of exhortation in Colossians: believers must live their lives in accordance with the divinely accomplished alteration of their condition, and refuse other perceptions of reality which present themselves with self-­evident force. ‘See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the element spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ’ (2.8). ‘Philosophy’ and ‘deceit’ offer an account of the creaturely condition which carries weight; the worldly asceticism which they recommend is a matter of what is by general repute ‘wisdom’ (2.23). Believers must therefore venture their acts with a measure of defiance, on the basis of the fact that, though they ‘have all the riches of assured understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, of Christ’ (2.2, cf. 1.26f.), they can expect no public consent. The natural corollary of this situation is exposure to deceit, delusion by the self-­evidences of ‘human precepts and doctrines’ (2.22). In this situation, the apostle exhorts his hearers to nonconformity, to be unafraid of the prestige of false conceptions of reality, and to allow the authority of the reality manifest in Christ to free them from harassing illusion: ‘Let no one pass judgement on you’ (2.14); ‘Let no one disqualify you’ (2.16); ‘Why do you submit to regulations . . .?’ (2.20). In short: the Christian moral life, arising within a perception of the primacy of God’s regenerative grace in Christ which the gospel announces, entails learning how to steady oneself by its reality, how to act in its wake, how to refuse the charms and threats of other reality-­indications. (c)  The gospel’s counter-­indications of reality are the law of Christian conduct, in two senses. First, they orient the believer in moral space and time.23 22.  Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 61. 23. See the treatment of Orientierung in I. U. Dalferth, Die Wirklichkeit des Möglichen. Hermeneutische Religionsphilosophie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), pp. 34–46, 149–64.

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One of the functions of moral reason is the discernment of the order of reality and of our place in that order. Reality-­indications – in this case, the instruction which redeemed reason receives from the gospel about Christ’s kingdom as the moral situation of believers – uncover the intelligibility of our moral lives, displaying their form and so promoting intentional occupation of moral space and movement through moral time. Reality-­indications enable us to read the patterns and teleology of human life, to discern that moral identity and movement are more than random accumulations. Reality is law in the sense of determinate and intelligible shape. Second, the gospel’s reality-­indications function imperatively: they serve to quicken action. Hence, for example, in the apostolic injunction: ‘Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old nature’ (3.9), the present imperative (‘Do not lie’) draws its authority to command from the aorist (‘you have put off the old nature’).24 To say ‘is’ is to say ‘ought’, to be obligated by reality. 2.  Jesus Christ determines the order of moral knowing. Jesus Christ is communicatively present to those who have ‘heard and understood the grace of God in truth’ (1.6). His exaltation and session do not entail his removal from relation to creatures, nor his withdrawal into some divine darkness; rather, as the exalted one he explicates himself, addressing himself to his community, and so constituting the world as the place of revelation. Christian moral existence and conduct take place within a sphere in which a decisive noetic alteration has taken place: within the domain of the Word of God. Because this Word has been and continues to be spoken and heard, believers are summoned to a course of life shaped by ‘the grace of God in truth’. How can this ethical domain of the Word of God be more closely characterized? (a)  Most generally, Christian existence and conduct arise from hearing a truthful Word, a communicative act which is penetratingly direct, untainted by deception, which does not seek to delude or manipulate, 24.  ἀπεκδυσάμενοι is not to be read synchronously as part of the command, but as the reason for the command; Aletti notes that ‘putting off ’ (and ‘putting on’ in verse 10) ‘sont plus que de simples modalités d’exécution de ces imperatives, ils en determinent l’effectivité, et ont une function causale: c’est parce que les croyants se sont dépouillés du vieil homme et ont revêtu l’homme nouveau, qu’ils peuvent rejeter les vices qui constituaient leur mode d’existence antérieur’ (J.-N. Aletti, Saint Paul Épître aux Colossiens [Paris: Gabalda, 1993], p. 229).

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which is cold, clear truth.25 Because this Word is true, it is trustworthy, it does not belong to the economy of ‘empty deceit’ (2.8), it is not ‘beguiling speech’ (2.4) – marketplace rhetoric, the speech of ‘the mind of flesh’ (2.18). To hear the gospel is to hear the truth, and this hearing is something which has taken place. The apostle tells his addressees that they ‘have heard’, and speaks of ‘the day you heard and understood’ (2.5, 6), and of ‘the gospel which you heard’ (1.23) – the past tenses here indicate both the decisive interruption of a disordered economy of communication by the Word concerning Christ, and the fact that the church’s present continues to be determined by that Word. The Word of Christ having been spoken, nothing remains unaltered. (b)  What has been heard in the economy of the divine Word can, therefore, be variously described. It is ‘the word of the truth’ which is ‘the gospel’ (1.5): the divine announcement of the hopeful truth that in Christ God is blessing creatures and directing them to their destiny in the kingdom of God. Or again, it is audible and intelligible grace, grace which ‘you heard and understood’ (1.6). In the gospel and its proclamation grace occurs as a communicative act in which hearing and reason are drawn to attend to that which benefits creatures in a wholly unexpected and undeserved way. Grace speaks its blessing, and so establishes the saving rule of the Word. (c)  The domain of the Word is the place to which the Word has come (1.6). The Word is a gift from beyond human communicative practices; the Word is both original and eschatological. It is present not naturally but by virtue of a movement from within the perfect life of God, which is the manifestation to the saints of the divine mystery (1.26f.). As mystery, the Word entirely exceeds the capacities of human speech, being beyond articulation or interpretative appropriation. If it is known, therefore, it has to be by a divine act of manifestation, an act which, moreover, elects and separates its recipients as ‘saints’, taking them out of their customary course. In this way, the domain of the Word is a location of the divine glory, that is, the overwhelmingly rich majesty of God setting itself before creatures (1.27). (d) Yet this manifestation of glory is audible, it takes contingent form as human address. That is, in the domain of the divine Word there are 25. See here B. Wannenwetsch, Political Worship. Ethics for Christian Citizens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 281–97.

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creaturely speech-­activities of which we may say: in them there is a ‘making known’ of the Word in which both God and creatures act. This co-­action takes place, first, in apostolic speech. The gospel is God’s audible grace learned from a fellow creature – in the case of the Colossian believers, from ‘Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant’ (1.7). Apostolic speech is ministerial (1.7; cf. 1.23, 25), serving the primary divine self-­manifestation as an accompanying creaturely indication. Of itself, apostolic speech can say nothing; but it is not of itself, since it is the exercise of a ‘divine office’ (1.25), a work of commissioned administration in which the apostle is given responsibility for seeing the Word through its full course. Such apostolic speech is therefore fitting when it is an enactment of ‘faithful ministry’ (1.7), unswervingly steadfast in its allegiance to the Word by which it is preceded and which it is summoned to speak again. Second, the divine Word is made known as it becomes a settled presence in the Christian assembly. ‘Let the Word of Christ dwell among you . . .’ (3.16). The Word, that is, engenders practices in the community of saints which form their moral agency: teaching, admonishment, singing, prayer. In this sense, the Word does not take place without that which the community does with the Word. But this ‘indwelling’ does not mean that the Word is as it were folded into the formative practices to which it gives rise. Even as it is administered by the apostles and active in the community’s public gatherings, the Word remains ‘the Word of Christ’ – not simply the Word about Christ (though that sense is also there) but the Word whose speaker is Christ himself, inalienably his to utter, and only on that basis the Word of his ministers. His Word, spoken by him, vivifies the enterprise of moral community. (e)  The Word of Jesus Christ, active in the common life of the church, is fruitful (1.6). It is a productive Word, which has its term not simply in being uttered but in making moral history. Thus in its form as apostolic proclamation, the Word’s end is human perfection: by it, creatures are moved to the fulfilment of their nature, namely, maturity in Christ. This movement embraces moral knowledge – ‘knowledge of [God’s] will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding’ (1.9) – and moral conduct – ‘leading a life worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work’ and just so ‘increasing in the knowledge of God’ (1.10). The Word of Christ instructs, forms and claims. It is a sanctifying Word. By this Word, Barth remarked, we are ‘caught at work’.26 26.  Barth, Ethics, p. 15.

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So far, then: Jesus Christ is the exalted one who constitutes all things, the communicative one who is present in his Word. How do these realities shape Christian conduct? By way of answer we look in more detail at the moral hinge of Colossians, 3.1-4.

IV If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

The opening four verses of Colossians 3 serve as a bridge from argumentation to explicit exhortation. This rhetorical function expresses the theological significance of the passage, which sums up the moral situation of believers before the letter turns more fully to instruction.27 ‘Situation’, we should note, not simply ‘perspective’:28 the Christological statements concern not just a way of looking at reality but a new reality itself. We may shy from saying that these verses communicate an ontology, perhaps on the grounds that this would suggest an over-­realized eschatology in which moral exhortation had lost its point. But what Lightfoot calls a ‘new sphere 27.  ‘More fully’, because 3.5 does not mark a move to a new concern for ethics, but an intensification of what has been present in the preceding chapters. Hering notes that the conventional division of Colossians into 1.1–3.4 and then 3.5–4.6 ‘reflects the relative density of sheer theological or paraenetic material contained in each respective “half ” of the letter’ but does not indicate a clear division of ‘dogmatic’ and ‘ethical’ passages (The Colossian and Ephesian Haustafeln in Theological Context, pp.  61f.). What unites the two ‘halves’ of the letter is the theology of Christ’s dominion. ‘Just as there is the unfolding of the universal scope of the dominion of Christ in the first two chapters of the letter, the third and fourth chapters give an exposition of the ways in which the lordship of Christ includes all areas of our life. Teaching and exhortation are thus closely bound to one another. As Christ is Lord over all (1.15-20), so his own people should do all in the name of the Lord Jesus (3.17)’: E. Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), pp. 3f. 28.  ‘Perspective’ is J. D. G. Dunn’s term in The Epistles to the Colossians and Philemon, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 202.

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of being’29 is spoken of, and only on this basis does the subsequent paraenesis makes sense: ‘the believer’s being-­raised-with-Christ defines the believer’s horizon and modalities of action’.30 In what history does the Christian exist and act? Most simply and directly: ‘You have been raised with Christ’ (3.1). The Christian’s moral history is shaped by reference to two past events: the resurrection of the Son of God, and the co-­resurrection of the believer. Moral time now is therefore doubly defined: by Easter Day, and by the unleashing and actualizing of its transfiguring power in creaturely history at baptism. These two events are sheerly creative; in them, the redeemed moral life comes to be. This counter-­indicative ontological force of the language of co-­resurrection cannot be tempered into metaphor31: God has indeed made the believer alive (1.13; see Eph. 2.4-6). Moreover, location precedes action. Christ’s significance for the moral history of the believer is condensed into the prefix ‘with’ (συν-). Christ is not model or instructor or commander of some antecedent moral history which in some respect he modifies; rather, he constitutes creaturely reality by binding it into his own. ‘Christology has invaded all the dimensions of Christian existence. Above all it shows that for the author of Colossians the dimension of ethics is one in which the received fullness manifests itself, made to be shared’; ‘the believer’s ethical activity comes from her situation, which is that of being alive with the same life as Christ’.32 Yet there is no simple identity of believer and Lord; any such identity would, of course, render moral history superfluous. Believers are, as it were, in the moral interval between their resurrection-­exaltation and their coming final glorification. This interval is shaped both by the aorist of 29.  J. B. Lightfoot, St. Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 275. 30.  Aletti, Saint Paul Épître aux Colossiens, pp. 215f.; Grässer’s comment that the author ‘does not write a dogmatics but an ethics’ seriously misconstrues not only the ethics of Colossians but the letter as a whole: E. Grässer, ‘Kolosser 3, 1-4 als Beispiel einer Interpretation secundum hominem recipientis’, in Text und Situation. Gesammelte Aufsätze zum Neuen Testament (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1973), p. 130. By contrast, Pokorný rightly emphasises that ‘the more the completion of salvation is emphasised, the more paraenesis is extended’: P. Pokorný, Der Brief des Paulus an die Kolosser, Theologischer Handkommentar zum Neuen Testament, vol. 10/1 (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1987), p. 136. 31.  As it is by Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and Philemon, p. 203. 32.  Aletti, Saint Paul Épître aux Colossiens, pp. 216, 217.

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having-­being-raised, and the imperative: ‘Seek!’ It is not that the aorist indicates something potential, a promise which ‘can only come to life in the process of “seeking” ’.33 ‘Seeking’ is required because resurrection with Christ has already taken place. The ‘seeking’ is thus not a matter of struggling to obtain but of keeping a searching eye upon the things that are above. To envisage one’s moral history as ‘seeking’ is to enact roles and responsibilities (such as those set out in 3.5–4.6) in such a way as to reduplicate the entire alteration which has taken place in Christ and into which the Christian has been drawn. It is to pursue his reality and our end in him. In this way, it is the moral movement corresponding to nos extra nos: we really are, and we really are outside ourselves. What are the objects of this ‘seeking’ which constitutes a basic act of moral existence in the domain of Christ and his Word? ‘The things that are above’ (3.1, 3.2). To seek these realities is not to escape from creaturely relations. ‘Above’ and ‘below’ are not equivalent to ‘transcendent’ and ‘temporal’ – indeed, whatever else may be said of the so-­called Colossian heresy, it appears to have fallen into precisely this all-­too-worldly notion of the ‘above’ which inflamed fascination with the flesh rather than checking it (2.23). To seek what is above, therefore, is to be directed in one’s moral history by the reality which grounds that history and towards which that history moves, namely ‘Christ is’. This seeking is not apart from the mundane realities of holy action – dealing with desire, governing speech, forbearing others, handling church, domestic and economic relations. These realities are not of themselves ‘things that are on earth’ (2.1) any more than rigorous devotion and bodily self-­abasement are ‘things that are above’ (2.23). Truly to seek what is above is not to flee embodied social existence but to see it as caught up in the entire reorientation of created life in the kingdom of Christ. Because of this, once again, the instruction on common life in the church (3.5-17) and the Haustafel by which it is followed ought not to be read as relatively detachable conventional material awkwardly inserted after the Christological metaphysics. The paraenesis is rather the natural amplification of the Christology, a summons to practical compliance with the moral logic of ἐν κυρίῳ (the point is reinforced by the repeated references to Christ as κύριος in 3.12–4.1). As ‘Lord in heaven’ (4.1), Christ is ‘before all’ – ante omnes . . . ante omnia . . . primogenitus;34 and his 33. E. Schweitzer, The Letter to the Colossians (London: SPCK, 1982), p. 173. 34.  Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem V.xix, in Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani Opera. Pars I. Opera Catholica. Adversus Marcionem, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina [CCSL], vol. 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1964).

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primacy is also a moral reality, that on the basis of which and towards which believers act. The distinctiveness of what the gospel has to say περί οἰκονομίας is not simply at the level of motivation, but lies in its understanding of the nature of created reality and of moral action as falling within the dominium Christi. ‘Seeking’ is therefore an active, willed orientation to Christ and all things in him, which the apostle calls a ‘setting of the mind’ (3.2) – a sustained effort of attention, a fixing upon a specific object in order to perpetuate truthful perception and proper use of temporalities. This fixing of the mind also entails a kind of asceticism: ‘not on things that are on earth’. To act in such a false way would be to neglect the proper finality of created reality, and so fall into intemperance, crazy attachments which inhibit moral growth towards Christ in whom all things have their end. But why should believers enact their moral histories in this way? Why should they reduplicate this order of being? Because this order of reality (‘where Christ is’, 3.1) is not only external to them; it is also their own most proper reality: proper first to Christ, and so by derivation – that is, by Christ’s self-­communicative goodness – proper to them also. This is already stated in 3.1, in the astounding, unqualified claim: ‘You have been raised with Christ’, and it is expanded in 3.3 by the no less astounding or unqualified claim: ‘You have died’. The believer is no longer a participant in the unregenerate life-­realm; that history is now closed. If it lives on – and the exhortation of the letter assumes that it does so – it can only be as a half-­life, an absurdity, a lack of conformity to what has been made of us. And what has been made of us is that we ‘have’ our lives in a way which is at once an unsettling of our desire to possess ourselves and also a restoration of creaturely nature and vocation. ‘Your life is hidden with Christ in God’ (3.3). The prepositions here, σύν and ἐν, indicate the ontological condition of the regenerate: their life is in one important sense extrinsic to them, not in se but ab extra. Here creatureliness is restored as the old nature has been killed and a new nature put in its place. But the restoration awaits its final end. The all-­important backward reference in the paraenesis ought not to be mistaken for an over-­realized eschatology. There is still moral time, stretching forward to the consummation of all things. ‘God’s eschatological act has already taken place; he has called man from death to life’ comments Lohse; but ‘this life is not conveyed to man as the divine fullness and power of immortality. Rather, it is the summons to obedient appropriation which results from having acquired salvation.’35 The new nature remains in some 35. Lohse, Colossians and Philemon, p. 132.

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measure hidden; it does not share in the self-­evidence of the things that are on earth. The believer’s moral life is thereby burdened by a certain dishonour, for it is action within a non-­evident situation, stretching out towards a blessing which goes largely unrecognized. Yet this pathos is a necessary corollary of the fact that with Christ, in God, the believer does indeed have life. ‘It is worth noticing’, remarks Calvin, ‘that our life is said to be hid, so that we may not murmur or complain if our life, buried under the ignominy of the cross and various distresses, differs nothing from death, but may patiently wait for the day of revelation.’36 In distress we retain our location ‘with Christ’ – and ‘what is more to be desired than that our life dwell with the very fountain of life?’37 Further, this limitation is not final: ‘When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory’ (3.4). The occlusion of life in Christ and its attendant ignominy is an episode in the wider history of the manifestation of the reality which is established in him and which is moving towards its climactic moment, the appearing of Christ which will also be the appearing and glorification of those who share his life. ‘A beautiful consolation, that the coming of Christ will be the manifestation of our life’.38 Christian moral history is qualified not only by the world’s negation of its true basis and direction, but also and above all by a promise. The substance of the promise is (most objectively) ‘Christ . . . is our life’ and (as a determination of our own existence) ‘with him’. To sum up: ‘The human existence of all of us is not really enacted at an undefined point in empty space, but in proximity, fellowship, even brotherhood with the human existence of Jesus Christ, and therefore with God’s own human existence. In Jesus Christ we can see our human existence wide open to heaven, irradiated, purified, held and sustained from above, not rejected by God, but in a love that interpenetrates all things affirmed by him in the way in which he affirms himself. And this view is not a mere theory, or vision, or moral ideal, but the unlimited and unconditional truth of our human existence, irrespective of what we deserve or achieve in our behaviour or attitude to this love.’39 36.  J. Calvin, The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1965), p. 346. 37.  Calvin, The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians, pp. 346f. 38.  Calvin, The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians, p. 347. 39. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), p. 558.

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V What does the foregoing suggest about the bearing of Christology upon creaturely moral history? Three things might be noted. First, theology does well not to segregate what it has to say about Jesus Christ from what it has to say about Christian conduct. This, not in the hope that an ethically-­ oriented Christology will somehow make Christ a cultural force to be reckoned with (that way lies misery), but because of the reality which Jesus Christ is. He is the one in whom redeemed creatures have come to be set on the way to fullness of life. The moral lives of the redeemed do not take place in a sphere apart from but in and with him. His being as Lord, his pre-­ eminence in all things, is also to be seen in the moral mystery of ‘Christ in you’. Christology is a moral undertaking, but not in such a way that Jesus Christ’s identity is first realized or filled out in human moral activity, as if he were amorphous until given moral definition by our conduct. His identity is antecedently and infinitely full, and therefore limitlessly potent. Moral Christology begins from apprehension of ‘the riches of the glory of this mystery’, namely, ‘Christ in you the hope of glory’ (1.27). His inherent glory glorifies, and part of the glorification of creatures is their sanctification. Second, the gospel of Christ’s resplendent glory relieves creatures of the task of making their own moral histories. It does so by setting before them the fact that in Christ’s death and resurrection they are made and moved – that Jesus Christ is the actuality of the ἐνεργεία τοῦ θεοῦ (2.12). Faith in this divine energy, not self-­realization, is fundamental to the esse of the believer, and therefore to his or her agere. Christ’s death and resurrection certainly make believers to be makers – there is no termination of moral history – yet not makers ex nihilo but creatures who live with Christ in God. This is why the apostle can present the shape of redeemed moral existence as a repeating of the given baptismal pattern of death and resurrection, rather than as the fashioning of a wholly new reality. The moral history which stretches out before the redeemed is not indefinite; it has a distinct form. This form is one which they must, indeed, disclose to themselves by apprehending and actively inhabiting it; but it is not one of which they are in a final way the creators. Creaturely moral history is a function of the gift of life which in Christ flows to us from the inexhaustible fountain of God’s own life. Third, in Christian moral theology, the metaphysical task has material precedence over the paraenetic. The order of moral (not only dogmatic) theology is, first: ‘Him we proclaim’, and then by (necessary) derivation ‘warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man mature in Christ’ (1.28). Admonition and instruction

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derive from the continuing public annunciation of him, this one. It is certainly the case that proclamation, admonition and instruction constitute a sequence which must be followed through to its end if the mystery of the divine Word is to be fully apprehended, for the creaturely term of that mystery includes a moral element: ἵνα παραστήσωμεν πάντα ἄνθρωπον τέλειον ἐν Χριστῷ. And, further, the derivative elements of admonition and instruction may often be first in the order of discovery, and on occasions may legitimately assume priority in the order of exposition. But they cannot be first theology; they must be undertaken in conjunction with Christian moral metaphysics. And Christian moral metaphysics is a joyful science, for it contemplates the loveliest reality, which is Jesus Christ who is all and in all.

Chapter 3 T h e D ig n it y o f C r e at u r e s

I Dogmatic and moral theological teaching about the dignity of creatures is an extension of teaching about God and the works of God; only as such is it teaching about creatures; and only as teaching about creatures is dogmatic and moral theology a humane science. A primary task for a theological account of human dignity, therefore, is the integration (in present circumstances, the reintegration) of the concept of dignity into an orderly presentation of the ways and works of God, arising from contemplation of the intrinsic and unsurpassable worth of God in se: ‘Worthy art thou, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for thou didst create all things, and by thy will they existed and were created’ (Rev. 4.11). If it is to speak well, theology is thus obliged to undertake a dogmatics of human dignity as part of a moral anthropology which is governed by the church’s confession that its Lord and God is indeed worthy and has created all things. A dogmatic moral anthropology tries to indicate that, according to the church’s confession of the gospel, creaturely life and history have being, duration and purpose by virtue of (and only by virtue of) the creative, preserving and glorifying work of the triune God. He is the ground of creatures; without him, all is surface, and apart from him appeals to dignity can scarcely be more than cries of alarm, or prohibitions, or commands which lack final authority to compel action. Apart from God, dignity is precarious, hovering in an order of obligation untethered to an order of being. Obligation can only quicken action if it presents the imperatival force of being, which is the imperatival force of divine love. One of the functions of dogmatics in moral theology is to inquire into the grounds of moral policy in the order of being and love which the gospel announces. In the matter of human dignity, dogmatics deploys its conceptual abbreviations to unfold the ways in which, sub specie Dei, dignity may properly be attributed to human creatures and is not finally contingent upon social

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affirmation. Dignity is encountered, not simply ascribed, and encountered in such a way as to be beyond manipulation. And so, attention to creaturely dignity leads us to consider a requirement which is transcendent, ‘sacral’,1 one grounded in the purpose and operations of God’s goodness. Giving a theological description of this requirement entails two related moves. First, theological talk of human dignity has to be properly located. Its setting is not a fundamental or pre-­theological anthropology, but the divine economy in which creatures enact their nature by participating in God’s history with them. This history, which stretches from creation to perfection, and which has its decisive episode in God’s saving intervention in the mission of the Son, is the history of fellowship between the Lord and his creatures. It is in – not prior to or apart from – this history of fellowship that creatures come to have and exercise the dignity which is proper to them. Accordingly, second, in a theological account of human dignity creatureliness will be presented as anthropologically fundamental. To speak of human beings as creatures is to indicate their absolute contingency of origin and their specificity of nature. Made by God out of nothing, creaturely being is particular being, and creaturely dignity is the particular dignity of those destined to be the children of God through Jesus Christ (Eph. 1.5). Claims such as these are counter-­intuitive, even in some moral theology, their ready acceptance inhibited by a pervasive sense that human dignity is a self-­evident, basic concept requiring little further elucidation, one to whose availability we may therefore confidently appeal. To make this appeal is to align ourselves with a particular complex of philosophical, legal and political traditions, as well as with the understandings of human nature to which they are in turn bound. These traditions are commonly considered more comprehensive than the positive tradition of the Christian confession, whose teaching about human dignity can largely be folded into that generated by natural religion or natural morality (for the natural precedes the confessional). Further, these traditions are marked by minimal

1.  ‘Der Begriff “Würde” meint etwas sakrales: er ist ein im Grunde religiös-­ metaphysischer’: R. Spaemann, ‘Über den Begriff der Menschenwürde’, in Grenzen. Zur ethischen Dimension des Handelns (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001), p. 113. See also the gentle and perceptive presentation of the matter by G. Tinder in his classic essay, ‘Against Fate: An Essay on Personal Dignity’, in R. P. Kraynak, G. Tinder, ed., In Defense of Human Dignity. Essays for our Times (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), pp. 11–52.

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deployment of language about God in establishing and depicting human dignity: in the matter of human dignity, God is only remotely operative, and is characterized in ways derived from somewhere other than the church’s confession of the gospel. Even a sketch of the history of how the notion of human dignity has been annexed to the larger project of free subjectivity cannot be attempted here;2 but the durability of that tradition (as well as its distance from the gospel) can readily be seen in an early and paradigmatic episode, Pico della Mirandola’s ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’, written in 1486 for a public disputation which was suppressed by Innocent VIII, and never published in his lifetime:3 At last the best of artisans ordained that the creature to whom he had been able to give nothing proper to himself should have joint possession 2.  Amongst the handbook and encyclopaedia materials, there are useful accounts in H. Cancik, E. Helms, ‘Würde des Menschen’, in H. D. Betz, D. S. Browning, B. Janowski, E. Jüngel, ed., Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft, 4th edition, 8 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998–2007), vol. 8, pp. 1735–9; E. Starke, ‘Menschenwürde’, in E. Fahlbusch, J. M. Lochman, J. Mbiti, J. Pelikan, L. Vischer, ed., Evangelisches Kirchenlexikon. Internationale theologische Enzyklopädie, 3rd edition, 5 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986–1997), vol. 3, pp.  367–72; A. Grossmann,‘Würde’, in J. Ritter, K. Gründer, G. Gabriel, ed., Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 13 vols. (Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1971–2007), vol. 12, col. 1088– 93; W. Dürig, ‘Dignitas’, in T. Klauser, et  al., ed., Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum. Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des Christentums mit der antiken Welt, 24 vols. (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1950–2012), vol. 3, col. 1024–35; W. Huber, ‘Menschenrechte/Menschenwürde’, in H. Balz, et  al., ed., Theologisches Realenzyklopädie, 34 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977–2002), vol. 22, pp. 577–602. See also the historical articles by E. Dassmann (‘Menschenrecht und Menschenwürde in frühchristlicher Zeit’) and W. Sparn (‘ “Aufrechter Gang” versus “krummes Holz”?’) in I. Baldermann, E. Dassmann, O. Fuchs, ed., Menschenwürde. Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie 15 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2001), pp. 151–79, 223–46. 3. G. Pico della Mirandola, ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’, in E. Cassirer, P. Kristeller, ed., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 223–54. For the Latin, see ‘De hominis dignitate’, in De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, e Scritti vari, ed. E. Garin (Florence: Vallecchi, 1942), pp. 101–64.

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God Without Measure II of whatever had been peculiar to each of the different kinds of being. He therefore took man as a creature of indeterminate nature and, assigning him a place in the middle of the world, addressed him thus: ‘Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgement thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions that thyself shalt desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand we have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the world’s centre that thou mayest from thence more ably observe what is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honour, as though the maker and moulder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul’s judgement, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.’4

Notice, first, how radically Pico has reconceived the god who addresses himself to Adam. He is Pater architectus Deus, artifex, optimus opifex – the idiom is that of the producer of a free-­standing reality which bears no continuing relation to its maker, and is neither moved nor governed by the maker’s presence and care: creation and providence are reduced to manufacture. Notice, further, how formless is the product of this god’s activity. Adam has ‘nothing proper to himself ’ and is ‘a creature of an indeterminate nature’; what gives shape to his being is not nature but ‘longing’ and ‘judgement’ – only from this do ‘abode’, ‘form’ and ‘functions’ emerge. Adam is a being without law, that is, without quickening order or shape (for Pico, natural order is ‘limit’ and ‘constraint’). Instead, Adam is characterized by arbitria through which he gives himself shape as ‘the maker and moulder of thyself ’. And it is in all this – in Adam’s existence as ‘Proteus’, as ‘our chameleon’ with a ‘self-­transforming nature’5 – that human dignity consists. But in this explication of dignity in terms of self-­culture, there is little which from the gospel’s perspective can be considered a contribution to human flourishing, and much which serves to draw 4.  Pico della Mirandola, ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’, pp. 224f. 5.  Pico della Mirandola, ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’, p. 225.

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creatures from their well-­being.6 What is required is a different account of the natures of God and God’s creatures, and a different teleology. These the gospel furnishes.

II Human dignity is the dignity proper to creatures; creatures have their being within the situation and history for which they have been made by God and in which they are to discover and enact their lives. Dignity is not a correlate of human indeterminacy but precisely of our limitation, of the special, life-­bestowing form with which we are blessed by God and to whose performance we are summoned. What Christian theology has to say about human dignity is thus governed by a fundamental rule in theological anthropology: creaturely being is and is available to be known and lived out only within the grace of God’s relation to us. Like their freedom, the dignity of creatures is not a property or power anterior to the creature’s history with God; it is an element of that history, and in that history God is always antecedent. The epistemological corollary of this rule is that, because there is no standpoint which creatures may adopt outside their history with God, knowledge of human dignity does not arise within the self-­enclosed circle of human reflection, but in the course of the attention to divine instruction. In the matter of human dignity, there is no absolutely original self-­knowledge; creaturely self-­knowledge is a creaturely act, and therefore an act whose description requires talk of God the creator. We are hidden to ourselves until God the creator shows us who we are; and our dignity, too, is not transparent, but must be taught and learned. We are instructed concerning our dignity by participating in the history of God’s fellowship with us. The cognitive force of this history is what is known as ‘revelation’. Revelation instructs us concerning our dignity. On the creaturely side, this means that dignity is known in faith, spoken of in the language of confession, and celebrated in praise, since faith, confession and praise are among the acts in which creatures are intelligent participants in the history of fellowship and revelation. This material rule and its noetic extension govern theological procedure. A theology of human dignity is well-­ordered when organized by reflection 6. See here L. Dupré, Passage to Modernity. An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 124–6.

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on the magnalia Dei, spaciously conceived as the entire scope of the triune God’s dealings with creatures which is founded upon his antecedent completeness. This can be accomplished to best effect by a scheme which combines the historical-­dramatic and the conceptual, as in the long-­ familiar ‘three-­moment’ pattern of creation-­reconciliation-perfection. Though not without its limitations (especially when elaborated by appropriating each moment too firmly to a particular trinitarian person) this arrangement can provide space for conceptual analysis without abandoning the historical character of the divine economy. What might be said of human dignity within such an arrangement? 1.  Human dignity has its basis in the loving act of God the creator who brings creatures into being ex nihilo, bestowing life upon them, ordering their nature and determining their destiny by calling them to enact their being in fellowship with himself. Human dignity is the dignity of creatures. To be a creature is to be wholly originated, owing one’s being to the loving and purposive divine fiat. Unlike the life of the creator, the life of creatures is not a se or in se. Creatures have being and life by virtue of the freedom and goodness of God whose will it is that there should be life other than his own perfect life. Because this is so, the manner in which creatures ‘have’ being and life can only be explained by extensive description of the will and work of God. Creatureliness means absolute dependence upon that will and work across the entire span of creaturely being. To be a creature, therefore, is not simply to be a self-­ standing product of an initial cause; it is to be and to live – without restriction – ex nihilo and therefore ab extra. Further, to be a creature is to have a particular shape, to exist as a particular configuration. Formed by God, creaturely being has a given nature. Nature is not, of course, to be construed in crudely necessitarian terms as ineluctable fate; it is the bestowal of and summons to life in a particular direction, with a particular bearing. In this nature, the creature lives, that is, the creature is characterized – precisely as creature – by derivative but no less real spontaneity and agency, by moved movement. This is above all because in its nature the creature is ordered to fellowship with God. It is of the nature of creatures both to be given and to act out what they are, to be determined for life not only from and under but also for and with the creator. This means that to be a creature is to be appointed by God the creator to a specific destiny or end. As the creature receives its being at the loving hands of God, and is formed to be a particular being, so also the creature is pointed to a particular perfection, namely full realization of creaturely

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nature in fellowship with God. Brought into being ex nihilo, creatures are moved and summoned to fulfil their nature over time, to realize themselves according to the form bestowed upon them. This is why to the creative work of God in bestowing being there necessarily corresponds his preserving work, in which God upholds creatures and directs them to attain their end. What are the implications of this sketch of creatureliness for how we understand creaturely dignity? (a)  The dignity of creatures is, once again, the dignity of creatures. God is ‘the principle and cause of being to other things’7, and so the principle and cause of their worth. To be a principiatum and not a principium, to be caused and not the cause of one’s being, is not to be nothing: it is to be something out of nothing. God the creator gives life, and the gift of life includes the bestowal of inalienable and inviolable dignity. The fact that we have our being ex nihilo does not signify absence of value but the exact opposite: the irrevocable establishment of the worth of created being. This worth has its foundation in the fact that God creates out of benevolence: not from need, not in order to furnish himself with inferior subjects, but from limitless generosity as one who, being in himself entirely happy and having no need, communicates being and worth by causing other beings to be. Infinitely established in his own worth, God establishes the worth of the works of his hands. Human dignity is not ‘independent’ but ‘creaturely’,8 and in this respect is an element of creaturely need. But creaturely need and creaturely dignity are not in conflict; indeed, they are inseparable, for need is simply the creature’s reference back to God’s original bestowal of life, and reference forward to the end to which creatures have been ordained. Creaturely worth is not imperilled by this reference – on the contrary, origination ab extra is of the essence of the kind of being which it is given to the human creature to be, and so an ingredient in its glory. ‘[I]t not only belongs to the nature of the creature, but constitutes its true honour, not merely occasionally but continuously to need and receive the assistance of God in its existence.’9 If, then, Christian theology stands at some distance from the paradigmatically modern assertion that ‘autonomy is . . . the ground of the 7.  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), II.6.1. 8. S. Heuser, Menschenwürde. Eine theologische Erkundung (Münster: LIT, 2004), p. 243. 9. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), p. 12.

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dignity of human nature and of every rational nature’,10 it is because according to the instruction of the gospel human nature is most primordially not a matter of being ‘a lawgiving member in the kingdom of ends’,11 but rather of being God’s creature moved to life and active fellowship. What Christian theology has to say about human dignity is undergirded by the metaphysical substance of the church’s confession. According to a Christian metaphysic of created nature, human dignity is ‘alien’12 – the idiom is that of imputed righteousness, but can serve to indicate the way in which creatures have worth. ‘Alien’ does not, of course, mean ‘unreal’ or ‘alienated’, any more than ‘to be a creature’ means ‘not to have life’. ‘Alien’ simply means ‘not a se, not in se, but only and truly in the divine gift.’ Alien dignity is dignity which is proper to creatures in whom need is ontologically constitutive; in Christian anthropology, ‘alien’ and ‘proper’ are not adversative. There is an anthropological extrinsicism here, but it is not such that it compromises the stability of creaturely dignity. Human dignity assuredly involves responsible selfhood and ‘a subsisting identity across time.’13 But creaturely substance and continuity – and therefore creaturely dignity – cannot be had remoto Deo, apart from the creator’s moving presence. They are elements in (not prior to) the creature’s history with God. ‘The spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life’ (Job 33.4; cf. Ps 66.9); and only in reference to this making and giving may theology speak of human worth: ‘Human dignity consists in the task which God grants to humankind, and thereby it consists equally in the callings by which humankind is singled out and which ground human hope. Human dignity (if we are to speak in such terms) consists in the fact that humankind occupies a particular place in God’s history, not just any place . . .’14 10.  I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in M. J. Gregor, ed., Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.  85. On this theme in Kant, see S. M. Shell, ‘Kant on Human Dignity’, in R. P. Kraynak, G. Tinder, ed., In Defense of Human Dignity, pp. 53–80. 11. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 84. 12. H. Thielicke, Theological Ethics, vol. 1 (London: A&C Black, 1969), p. 170. 13.  J. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 272. In this connection, Glenn Tinder is indeed correct to distinguish fate from destiny: ‘The irony of destiny is that even though it is the life of the intimate and sacral self, it is given to us, not as a natural necessity, but as a personal possibility and moral demand. Dignity consists in the possession of a destiny and is affirmed through fidelity to individual destiny’ (‘Against Fate’, p. 13). 14. H. Ulrich, Wie Geschöpfe leben. Konturen evangelischer Ethik (Münster: LIT, 2005), p. 96.

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(b)  The obverse of claiming that creaturely dignity derives from God alone is that in creating, God dignifies creatures by acknowledging and approving creaturely life. God the creator elevates creatures, forming them to be living subjects who are the object of his recognition. God wills to be God with creatures and so honours creatures by electing them to be those with whom he wills to be. ‘What is man,’ asks Job, ‘that thou dost make so much of him, and that thou dost set thy mind upon him, dost visit him every morning and test him every moment?’ (Job 7.17f.) His lament is a perverse repudiation of his dignity as God’s creature, which consists precisely in the fact that he is encountered, affirmed and honoured by the presence of God who is the ‘watcher of men’ (Job 7.20). Calvin comments that here ‘we see . . . how Job turneth God’s providence quite upside down, and that instead of comforting and cheering himself therewith, he would fain that God were far off.’15 ‘Why hast thou made me thy mark?’ (Job 7.20). The answer to Job’s question is: ‘God wants us for himself.’16 God crowns creatures with glory and honour, marking them out as recipients of his approval, and setting them apart for fellowship with himself. Creation is exaltation; creatures have dignity as they are dignified by God. (c)  The verdict of the creator – that is, the creator’s judgement whereby creatures are declared to be the subject of his regard – is his alone. Only God the creator can crown with glory and honour; creatures are not competent to ascribe dignity to themselves or to other creatures. Human judgements about dignity can only be repetitions of the divine judgement, acts in which honour is recognized as an indicative and imperative which rests on the authority of creative divine goodness. The notion of the inalienable character of human dignity reaches towards this, though often stopping short of articulating the divine basis of the assertion, and instead assimilating human dignity into a fundamental anthropology. Yet it is precisely at this point that the basis of human dignity in the creator’s beneficence has to be brought to the fore, because only that theological-­ metaphysical affirmation has sufficient strength to resist the corrosive effects making dignity a matter of the creature’s own ascription and so, in the end, a function of the creature’s will. Against this hypertrophy of creaturely competence, the counsel of the gospel is: quidquid in nobis honorificum cernimus, ad gratuitum Dei favorem celebrandum sensus

15.  J. Calvin, Sermons on Job (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1993), p. 133. 16. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), p. 657.

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nostros excitet.17 And because it is thus rooted in God’s free favour alone, creaturely dignity is secure. In sum: God the creator bestows upon creatures their particular dignity. Whatever else may be said of human dignity, its metaphysical and moral structure, and the basis on which it may be predicated, is: ‘from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory for ever’ (Rom. 11.36). 2.  God the reconciler defeats creatures’ trespass upon their own dignity, restoring them to fellowship with himself and re-­establishing their destiny. In attending to the work of God the reconciler, we attend to a matter of especial density and import in a positive dogmatic and moral theology of human dignity: that sequence of actions in which God undertakes to restore dignity to lost creatures. The adequacy of what theology has to say will, accordingly, be especially measured by how it approaches and describes this work. This restorative and regenerative work does not stand alone; in contemplating it, theology must at the same time look back (to creation) and forward (to the eschaton). The divine work of reconciliation poses an ineluctable question about human dignity: ‘will creatures rediscover their lost dignity?’18 A theology bound by the gospel is required not only to identify the properties in which human dignity consists, but also to show how creatures are restored by their creator to the dignity which they have abandoned but which persists at his hands. ‘The true honour of man,’ Augustine writes, ‘is the image and likeness of God, which is not preserved except it be in relation to him by whom it is impressed.’ He continues: ‘The less therefore that one loves what is one’s own, the more one cleaves to God. But through the desire of making trial 17.  J. Calvin, In Librum Psalmorum Commentarius, in G. Baum, E. Cunitz, E. Reuss, ed., Ioannis Calvini Opera [CO], vol. 31 (Brunswick: Schwetsche, 1887), col. 91 (on Psalm 8.5). 18. H. Ulrich, Wie Geschöpfe leben, p. 97; cf. S. Heuser, Menschenwürde, p. 18: ‘a fundamental question for theological perception of human dignity [is] how the new person comes to us in our world and sets our talk of humankind and human dignity newly in motion’. Heuser’s study is a most important attempt at recovery of the ‘heilsgeschichtliche Grammatik’ of human dignity. This soteriological element is commonly lacking in theological accounts of human dignity oriented by a conception of being in the image of God as a stable, pre-­soteriological human condition; see, representatively, R. P. Kraynak, ‘ “Made in the Image of God”: The Christian View of Human Dignity and the Political Order’, in R. P. Kraynak, G. Tinder, ed., In Defense of Human Dignity, pp. 81–118.

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of his own power, man by his own bidding falls down to himself as to a sort of intermediate grade. And so, while he wishes to be as God is, under no one, he is thrust on, even from his own middle grade, by way of punishment, to that which is lowest, that is, to those things in which beasts delight: and thus, while his honour is the likeness of God, but his dishonour is the likeness of the beast, “Man being in honour abideth not: he is compared to the beasts that are foolish, and is made like to them.” ’19 If we follow Augustine’s indication, a theology of human dignity cannot bypass hamartiology and soteriology. The ‘true honour’ of creatures – life in the divine image and likeness – is not so much an unchanging property of humankind but the history of a relation between God the creator and his creatures; and this relation is repudiated by creatures, who thereby fall away from their given dignity. Sin is rejection of the divine gift of life and the divine vocation to fellowship; it is refusal of the absolute origination in which alone creatures have life and by which alone they are exalted. The sinner does not consent to have being in the gift of God, refusing to enact the form of life which is the creator’s blessing. Sin is disobedience, lack of assent to that which has been given to the creature as the shape of being, and so a contradiction of creatureliness (in Augustine’s terms, a descent to the bestial). As such, it is a worthless attack both on God’s honour and on the honour of creatures. In withholding compliance to the being and destiny of creatures, it erodes creaturely dignity. Sin is abasement; abandoning the righteous order in which the dignity of God and creatures concur, sin degrades creaturely life. When fellowship with God is compromised, so too is the dignity which accrues to creatures as they enact their being. The sinful state which eventuates may be characterized by alienation (the objective breach of relations between creator and creatures in which creatures come to discover that they have placed themselves at a mortal distance from the source of life and blessing), and by misery (the subjective degradation which comes from the futile attempt to have life on conditions other than those established by the creator’s love). As sinners we can do to ourselves what other creatures cannot do to us: corrode our own dignity. Others may fail to recognize our dignity, but only we ourselves can sever the fellowship with God in which alone our dignity can flourish. No other person – only I myself – can repudiate my creaturely calling. This is because the creaturely side of my fellowship with God is not in the end constituted by others, but by my obedience to my vocation. Only 19.  Augustine, On the Trinity (NPNF 1.3), XII.11.16.

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I can abase myself by resisting or despising that vocation. I may do so because I do not care for my own dignity, but trample it in the rush to carnal fulfilment (Rom. 1.26: ‘dishonourable passion’). Or – in a supreme irony – I may abase myself precisely by thinking that my dignity is expressed, indeed constituted, only in the act in which I make myself responsible for establishing and protecting it. But carnality and self-­ responsibility are both forms of opposition to God’s gift of life; and the end of both is (as Augustine is instructed by Psalm 49) that creatures threaten to become at their own hands what they are not, and perish like beasts. I can abase myself; I can withhold consent to the God-­given form of life, and so deny or devastate or erect a counterfeit of my creaturely dignity. But I cannot abolish it. Sin is a potent threat to the destiny in which the dignity of creatures is enacted, but it cannot entirely overthrow and bring to nothing the creator’s purpose. I may erode, even ruin, the creaturely side of fellowship with God. But I cannot unmake myself, I cannot not be a creature made and called by God’s love, even though I may have subjected my being to a fearful onslaught. For in the hands of God and his mercy that very onslaught becomes the occasion for the unfolding of his purpose to dignify fallen creatures through his reconciling work. God the reconciler defeats creatures’ deadly trespass upon their own dignity. How does God do this work? What form is taken by this divine protection? The divine reconciling work is identical with the person and mission of God the Son in its entire scope. The dignity of creatures is restored because God is and acts as this one. The eternal Son takes our nature upon him, gathering to himself and bearing the full weight of human abasement, misery and alienation, humbling himself and in just that way exalting the creatures among whom he has set himself. More needs to be said by way of description of this reconciling mission and its grounds in the eternal deity and honour of the Son. But before that, two clarifications are necessary. First, God’s work of protecting the dignity of creatures has the form of a special creaturely history: ‘special’, because its subject and agent is the eternal divine Word; ‘creaturely’, because the Word acts in union with flesh. Creaturely dignity is not protected by the promulgation of a moral ideal (law), but by a divine mission of reconciliation (gospel). And, further, this mission is not simply an alien intrusion, wholly external, for in a crucial sense it is the work in time of a fellow creature. Dignity is restored from within. Certainly that ‘from within’ rests upon a ‘from without’: only in that way can the self-­abasement of creatures be arrested and overthrown. Yet there is a fittingness to the form taken by God’s reconciling work: it takes the form suitable to the end of the work, which is the restoration of creatures to their vocation. The form of God’s

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work, its shape as obedient human life in time, itself indicates how God’s benevolence so acts as to dignify creatures. Second, this special creaturely history by which God protects our dignity is the entire span of the Son’s external operation. Dignity is restored by the full scope of this divine mission: its origin in the eternal procession of the Son; the assumption of flesh; the state of humiliation; the exaltation of Easter; the glorious rule of the Son as the ascended and enthroned reconciler who presents himself in the Spirit’s power. No one moment may be isolated as in itself the ground of human dignity. The assumption of flesh, for example, is not in itself that by which dignity is restored; flesh is not dignified by being the chosen instrument of the Word’s operation, for what the Word assumes is sinful flesh, flesh abased by disobedience to creaturely vocation. Something of the same can be said of justification, which in some Protestant accounts of human dignity has furnished a powerful counter to the Kantian linkage of dignity and autonomy.20 But the motif of justification, even when interpreted as broadly as possible as a way of indicating the priority of divine action, is too restricted to bear all the weight of a theology of reconciliation, and has to be integrated into a larger theology of God’s economy of salvation. With these two qualifications in mind, we return to the description of the Son’s work of restoring creaturely dignity. At his incarnation, God the Son freely appropriates the dishonourable state of sinful humankind, making it his own, and suffering in his own person the breach of fellowship with God to which sinners are condemned. Precisely in this way, he takes away the sinner’s shame, acting out our vocation as creatures, fulfilling our destiny on our behalf, and so securing our dignity. This work of his is a wholly divine work, the work of the eternal Son who even in the depths of his humiliation does not relinquish his antecedent divine glory. Here the concern of classical Reformed Christology – that the exinanitio Christi does not diminish or set aside his status exaltationis – comes into its own. The saving efficacy of the Son’s abasement is wholly dependent upon the freedom with which he gathers our abasement to himself, and upon the unhindered operation of his deity precisely in his humiliation. He empties himself, sharing the indignity of ruined creatures; but he does this without compromise to his eternal Sonship. And so our indignity does not swallow him up; he does not abandon himself to our 20.  Most notably in Heuser, Menschenwürde; justification is also a pervasive theme in C. Schwöbel, ‘Recovering Human Dignity’, in R. K. Soulen, L. Woodhead, ed., God and Human Dignity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), pp. 44–58.

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squalor. He remains the agent of his own movement into the realm of indignity. He himself empties himself. In the formal language of dogmatics: his passive obedience, his non-­resistance to the curse of death in alienation from his Father, is anchored in and empowered by his active obedience, his willing fulfilment of the Father’s call which is itself grounded in the eternal relations of filiation and paternity. His ministry of suffering is that which he takes upon himself. This work of his is, moreover, wholly external to us, in two senses. First, it is external in that his work is the work of one who even – precisely! – as sin-­bearer does not share our depravity. He takes sinful flesh, but he is not himself a sinner. He shares the indignity and shame of those whom he takes as his brothers and sisters, but only because he who is without sin chooses so to do. Only because he is utterly unlike us is he able to make himself like us and occupy our place. Second, we do not act in the matter of the restoration of our own dignity. We are not co-­operators, because we are ruined, beyond any repair which we ourselves might undertake. So distorted is our agency – so set on false ends, so destructively attached to the project of self-­creation and self-­destruction – that it has to be set aside. For dignity to be restored, we have to be humiliated. That is, the law of our creaturely nature, according to which we only have life and dignity as recipients of the grace of God, has to be imposed on us, since we have refused to consent to it of ourselves. The restoration of our dignity thus depends upon Christ in our place, forcing us out of our place. As this one – the eternal Son, wholly unlike us, acting in our stead and without our collaboration – he enters into and makes his own the situation of creatures who have forfeited their own dignity and who suffer at their own hands the ignominy of broken fellowship with God. He does not, however, enter the situation of estrangement and as it were revivify it simply by assuming it to himself. Taken on its own, the incarnational union of Word and sinful flesh is not the entirety of the Son’s saving work, but rather its ontological condition. He enters our situation in order to face its actual contradiction of himself. He is opposed by sinners; we are not passive towards him, even though he comes to effect our exaltation, but are actively hostile. In evoking this opposition, his presence exposes our indignity and is the occasion of its final exercise. The sinful creatures who are encountered by him in his history (which is, of course, the representative enactment of all human history) give full vent to their indignity by seeking to humiliate him. This is the final manifestation of creaturely abasement: we abase him, and so effect the most wicked and destructive abandonment of our vocation. ‘They spat in his face, and struck him . . .’ (Mt. 26.67; cf. Isa. 50.6, 53.3).

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What is there in this history of the Son’s degradation by abased sinners which brings about their restoration to dignity? Simply this: the Son accomplishes the will of the Father, wholly and unflinchingly. The course and effect of the Son’s incarnate work can be summed up as: ‘Lo, I have come to do thy will’ (Heb. 10.7, 9). Having his being in his eternal procession from the Father, the Son of his own nature embraces the Father’s will, obeying the Father’s call and fulfilling that vocation precisely by offering himself to disgrace. He consents to be the one without esteem, and in just this way enacts the dignity of obedience to God. The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I turned not backward. I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I hid not my face from shame and spitting

(Isa. 50.5f.)

And because he is and does this, then ‘I know that I shall not be put to shame’ (Isa. 50.7). He is vindicated, and highly exalted by the Father. What is the saving effect of this filial obedience and exaltation? That which is realized in the Son’s obedience to the Father is not for him alone; it is, rather, the fulfilment of the destiny of all creatures. In him, creaturely fellowship with God, and so creaturely dignity in obedience to the given form of creaturely life, are brought to fruition. His obedience is the obedience of one who unites himself to the children whom God gives him (Heb. 2.13); as such, it annuls our disobedience, establishes our dignity and so exalts us.21 We may sum up from Calvin’s soteriological account of human dignity in his exposition of Psalm 8. To be crowned with glory and honour pertains, Calvin suggests, ‘properly to the first beginning of the creation, when man’s nature was whole and sound’. But in Adam, all fell from this original nature, defacing the divine image so that ‘we were brought from most high excellency, to sorrowful and loathsome neediness’. The reversal of this situation of ruin depends upon Christ’s two-­fold relation to the Father and 21. On the link between the incarnation and work of Christ and the fulfilment of human destiny and dignity, see W. Pannenberg, Grundfragen der Ethik. Philosophisch-­ theologische Perspektiven (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2003), p.  105; idem, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991–4), vol. 2, p. 176.

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to his fellow-­creatures, which furnish an infinite supply of grace to lift us from the wreckage of sin: ‘the heavenly Father has again bestowed the fullness of all gifts upon his Son, that all of us should draw out of this well-­ spring: whatsoever God bestows upon us by him, the same of right belongs in the first degree to him; yea, rather, he is the lively image of God, according to which we must be amended, upon which all other things depend.’ And so: ‘His excellence and heavenly dignity are extended unto us also, for whose sakes he is enriched with them.’22 3.  God the perfecter completes the dignity of creatures, gathering them into the fellowship of the saints and empowering them actively to testify to God’s protection of human dignity. The restoration of the dignity of creatures by the Son’s humiliation and exaltation not only bestows status but also effects the resumption of their vocation, for God’s gift of dignity is the gift of moral history. Creaturely dignity is an ontological and moral relation to God. There is, therefore, a perfecting work of God in relation to the dignity of creatures, through which God acts to fill out human life and activity in ways which correspond to his appointment and summons. In dogmatic terms, this perfecting work is most commonly appropriated to the Holy Spirit as the one through whom the glorified Son directs creaturely realities to their completion. In this ‘directing to completion’, the Spirit is the life-­giver, one who generates, sustains and purifies obedience and active consent on the part of the creatures in whom he is at work. The Spirit moves creatures, and in moving gives them their proper spontaneity and integrity, that is, their dignity as the active children of God. To talk of human dignity as a form of moral life is, accordingly, not to compromise the basic rule that talk of the dignity of creatures is a function of talk of God. Along with a number of other basic moral concepts such as freedom or conscience, dignity is in Christian usage derivatively moral. It acquires its meaning and force from a moral ontology, an account of moral natures and ends, supplied for Christian theology by the gospel’s recital of God’s life in se and God’s works quoad nos. This is why a Christian theology of creaturely dignity cannot be translated without residue into language about human rights. An account of rights is only as cogent as the account of goods to which it gives expression, and in the account of goods to which Christian theology is committed, the gospel is irreducible, and not merely a set of ethical incentives. 22.  J. Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms, vol. 1 (London: James Clarke, 1965), pp. 93f.

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Nevertheless, creaturely dignity is necessarily a task, for it is not simply an inner quality of creatures but a nature which brings with it a commission: the ‘metaphysical’ is also the ‘orientational’.23 God’s gift of creaturely dignity is the principle and moving power of moral culture. This moral culture is a special mode of human fellowship, a gathering with others from, with and for God; in other words, the communion of saints. What distinguishes this fellowship is that it is marked by externality and provisionality. Its externality consists in the fact that it derives its life from the will and act of God, and so it is not in any univocal sense a society, assembly, culture – it is a gathering around a mystery, not a self-­perpetuating social project. Its provisionality consists in the fact that it is not a settled realization of human society, but an anticipation of the kingdom of heaven. Because of this, the church is not the social terminus of the divine economy, but rather the interim common life which awaits the consummation. How can this fellowship be characterized? It is fellowship determined by the sequence of divine acts which ground its history: eternal election, creation, preservation, reconciliation, consummation. It is therefore not fellowship which is about the business of creating its own life, but is the creaturely correlate of God’s will and act. Its dynamic is not immanent to itself; it is creaturely, and therefore eschatological, fellowship. Moreover, it is a form of fellowship directed towards common objects and united in shared access to common goods. Among these objects and goods is the divine gift of dignity: the fellowship knows that – mirabile dictu – God has exalted abased sinners, bestowing upon them a worth which cannot be extinguished by any kind of humiliation, even that of sin itself. The church is therefore a fellowship in which human dignity is rediscovered: ‘But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus’ (Eph. 2.4-7). The fellowship is bound together by common recognition of and assent to the rich mercy by which creatures have been raised up, and by hope in the divine vindication; its life is one long reference to the movement of God.24 23. See Schwöbel, ‘Recovering Human Dignity’, p. 45. 24.  ‘Reference to’ rather than ‘sacrament of ’ or ‘icon of ’ (contra Schwöbel, ‘Recovering Human Dignity’, p.  57), in order to retain the over-­againstness and sheer originality of the life of God in relation to the saints.

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Yet precisely because it is a reference to this movement of God’s mercy, the life of the fellowship has an inescapable horizontal dimension. Creaturely dignity, restored by God, locates believers in ‘the heavenly places’; but it also subsists in time, in the relations of persons in common life. These relations are the social shape of Christ’s saving exaltation of the children whom God has given to him, and to one another. The relations are characterized by acknowledgement, protection and testimony. The dignity given to others by God presents itself to me, not for my review and judgement as a possible value, but for my recognition. In this sense, Kant was right: human dignity is ‘infinitely above all price, with which it cannot be brought into competition or comparison at all without, as it were, assaulting its holiness’.25 What I recognize I must also seek to protect against its erosion or denial by others, and especially by myself. I do not protect in such a way as to take upon myself final responsibility for the dignity of others: how could I exalt my neighbour? How could I be other than a fellow creature? But I may interpose myself between my neighbour and what eats away at his or her dignity; I may do to my neighbour what I did not do to Christ in his passion: defend that Sichzeigen which is basic to dignity as a social value.26 And in so doing, I may bear witness to the divine protection, directing both my neighbour and also the curious world to the true source of dignity.

III [H]enceforth he leads us away from the old to the new polity, both opening to us the gates on high, and sending down his Spirit from thence to call us to our country there; and not merely to call us, but also with the greatest mark of dignity. For he hath not made us angels and archangels, but he hath caused us to become ‘sons of God,’ and ‘beloved,’ and so he draws us on towards that portion of ours. Having then all this in thy mind, do thou show forth a life worthy of the love of him who calls thee, and of thy citizenship in that world, and of the honor that is given thee. Crucified as thou art to the world, and having crucified it to thyself, show thyself with all strictness a citizen of the city of the heavens. And do not, because thy body is not translated unto heaven, suppose that thou hast anything to do with the earth; for 25. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, §435, p. 85. 26. Spaemann, ‘Über den Begriff der Menschenwürde’, p. 111.

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thou hast thy head abiding above. Yea with this very purpose the Lord, having first come here and having brought his angels, did then, taking thee with him, depart thither; that even before thy going up to that place, thou mightest understand that it is possible for thee to inhabit earth as it were heaven. Let us then keep watch over that noble birth, which we received from the beginning; and let us every day seek more and more the palaces there, and account all that is here to be a shadow and a dream.27

So Chrysostom, summarizing the dogmatics and ascetics of creaturely dignity and their grounds in the saving economy of Christ and the Spirit. What he says may strike us as disappointing: there is at first glance rather little in Chrysostom’s homily on dignity as a moral-­political reality. But look further: there is the language of ‘polity’, ‘country’, ‘citizenship’, ‘palaces’ – of life in common, stemming from our exaltation to be the children of God ‘with the greatest mark of dignity’. May it not be that the life of the communion of saints is the place where it is given to creatures to keep watch over the ‘noble birth’ which God has given by his work of regeneration? And may it not be that in keeping watch – in living from and for ‘the city of the heavens’, in inhabiting earth as it were heaven – the saints assist in protecting the dignity in which the destiny of creatures consists?

27.  Chrysostom, Homilies on St Matthew (NPNF 1.10), XII.4.

Chapter 4 Mercy

I 1.  Christian theology speaks about mercy by speaking about Jesus Christ: in order to speak of a virtue, theology is required to speak a name. What it has to say about both the mercies of God and creaturely mercy retains Christian specificity only in the closest proximity to this name and to the sphere of reality which this name indicates, and, further, only in such proximity can theology be genuinely helpful and interesting to its neighbours in the human community. This determinate or positive character is the source of both the joy and the pathos of moral-­theological work. It is a source of joy because in naming this name, Christian theology confesses, aligns itself with and is protected by a reality which is in itself strong, authoritative and true. For the Christian confession and its theology, the name of Jesus Christ is beyond contest, because it is not one name alongside others but the name of the one who is Lord. The bearer of this name is the one whom God has highly exalted and upon whom God has bestowed the name which is above every name (Phil. 2.9); he is the one who has obtained a name of surpassing excellence (Heb. 1.4). To invoke the name of Jesus Christ in the work of theological reason, to ‘call upon’ this name (1 Cor. 1.2) and to attempt to speak ‘in the name of Jesus Christ’ (Acts 2.38, 3.6, 4.10 et passim) is to be granted a measure of boldness and cheerful confidence. The name of Jesus is a field of force; to speak or call upon his name is to appeal to an authority which is antecedently capable and effective. In the matter of mercy, therefore, Christian theology knows no other way of proceeding than to speak of ‘the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (Jude 1.21). But there is also a pathos in Christian theology’s appeal to the name of Jesus Christ, a reminder of the limitation and the measure of humiliation which ordinarily attend its undertakings. The name of Jesus Christ has long since ceased to exercise a governing function in the civil societies of the

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West. It is rarely invoked, and little is expected of such invocation, least of all any illumination of our present condition. Such public honour as the name still bears is commonly ornamental rather than axiomatic, lending gravity to undertakings whose real energy lies elsewhere. Moreover, when the name is invoked, it sometimes invites offence by its sheer particularity: can so much be allowed to hang on so little? And so a theology which appeals to Jesus Christ does not command ready assent, and may provoke opposition. Theology may not count on a hearing or assume it will be offered a place at the table of public wisdom. And even when it is invited to speak its mind, there is so much over which it begs to differ: its genealogy and diagnosis of where we are, and its preferred remedies, often seem to its hearers obtuse, contrary and cross-­grained. Because theology speaks the name of Jesus Christ, it finds itself compelled to envisage the world in a drastically different way – or, perhaps better, to indicate a world which is not publicly visible in a straightforward manner. Theology speaks of a world which becomes publicly visible only in ‘faith in the name of Jesus’ (Acts  3.16); and so theologians commonly appear in the guise of those struggling and often failing to explain themselves. How does theology respond to this pathos? Sometimes by a style of public engagement seeking to commend common principles which transcend and enclose the name of Jesus; sometimes by retreat into a confessional or ecclesial enclave. There are losses to be borne both ways. The cost of searching for common principles is often reducing Jesus to contingency; that of retreating into ecclesial security may be a certain shrillness and defiance, and a narrowing of expectations – instead of facing affliction, theology withdraws into melancholy. But neither stance is necessary. If theology is truly authorized by its object and so truly a joyful exercise, it will face affliction simply by saying what it has to say – whether about mercy or about anything else – without adopting either a concessive or a defensive posture. It will give itself to the task of seeking to attend to the gospel and to speak about what it has heard. Theology’s task is biblical reasoning; public theology is biblical reasoning in public. Theology’s public responsibilities are best discharged by explicating the Christian faith and its understanding of reality out of the canon of texts in which the church receives the gospel. This is what we have heard, the theologian says, this is the good which has been given to us and which we seek to commend. What the church says to itself and what the church says to its neighbours outside the church will be the same thing; in both contexts, theology has to describe the gospel well, and to persuade by description. In terms of its speech before the world, therefore, theology simply speaks the gospel and leaves the gospel to look after itself. Theology shares the condition of all

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Christian speech in time, namely that it cannot expect perfect assent and often generates reproach, because it must so often cut across prevailing discursive norms. Like Wisdom at the opening of Proverbs (1.20f.), theology cries aloud, accosting what seems often to be a rather reluctant audience. Yet, again like Wisdom, its place is not only in the temple precincts but in the streets and markets, at the top of the city walls and in the entrance of the city gates. 2.  Theology speaks about mercy by speaking about Jesus Christ. But how does it speak of him? Two negations are needed. First, Jesus Christ does not function merely symbolically or illustratively in Christian social ethics or public theology. To attend to him is not to open our minds to the central figure in a morally stimulating narrative, reinforcing instruction which might be received from elsewhere. Quite the opposite: Christian ethics is always marked by the contrast ‘You have heard . . . but I say to you’ (Mt. 5.21f. et passim). Jesus Christ exemplifies nothing; he speaks with immediate, intrinsic authority; he himself is both content and speaker. Second, Jesus Christ does not function merely didactically or imperativally. He is neither prophet nor legislator in some kingdom of ends which encompasses him. What then is his function? Why must a Christian theology of mercy rest on what is said of him? According to the Christian confession, the history of Jesus Christ – the historically enacted identity which is indicated by this name – makes manifest the metaphysical and moral order of the entire creation. In him, the eternal Word of God made flesh, is displayed the order of being which establishes, quickens, delimits and directs human action. Through him, all created things are so ordered and reordered that to act well is to act in the light and power of his reality. He makes and remakes creaturely being, bestowing upon creatures a new nature and so requiring and enabling action in accordance with this nature. Jesus Christ does all this because he is the eternal Son in whom God the creator intervenes directly and finally in the history of creatures, gathering them back into fellowship with himself and so setting them again on the path to perfection. He is the one in whom ‘all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell’ (Col. 1.19), and therefore the one ‘through whom’ God was pleased ‘to reconcile to himself all things’ (Col. 1.20). Jesus Christ is the world’s making and remaking, and so the remaking of human action. Put in formal terms, this means: teaching about Jesus Christ the Word made flesh supplies a ‘moral ontology’, a theological metaphysic of the creaturely moral condition. Because of this, talk of Jesus Christ – above all, as it is conducted in Holy Scripture – has heuristic, orientational, directive

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and corrective functions. It displays the topography and teleology of the world and of human existence in the world. It instructs us that there is, indeed, a summum bonum and a finis ultimus, despite our disavowals; it indicates that human life has both shape and direction, and that truthful action is action which conforms to this shape and stretches out to this end. It tells us where creatures must look for their good, where they may seek refuge, how they must govern their lives. And in doing this, talk of Jesus Christ converts creatures out of illusion and self-­absorption into the clarity in which intelligence, the will and the affections can once again serve their good. In all this, therefore, it quickens moral history. More concretely, this means that as the history of Jesus unfolds itself in the scriptural witness, the world and creatures in the world are shown as what they are. Because he was and is, because he enacted and continues to enact the mercy of God, creaturely mercy is natural: truthful, possible and required. It is no longer a wager but a very sober undertaking. 3.  Theology speaks about mercy by speaking about Jesus Christ. But Jesus Christ does not exist in isolation. His history is not a wholly discrete and self-­contained reality, but reaches both backwards and forwards. It reaches backwards into the eternally full and rich life of God the Holy Trinity. What takes place in his history is the enactment in time of the mission of the eternal Son or Word of God, fulfilling the purpose of the Father in the power of the Spirit. There is an infinite depth to the history of Jesus Christ, a reference back to that which was ‘in the beginning’ (Jn 1.1), ‘before the foundation of the world’ (Eph. 1.4). Crucially, therefore, to encounter the mercy of Jesus Christ is to encounter God’s mercy; in him is the answer to the psalmist’s petition: ‘Hear, O Lord, my cry for mercy’ (Ps. 140.6). And more: Jesus Christ fulfils that petition because he is ingredient within God’s self-­proclamation as ‘the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious’ (Exod. 34.6). To talk of the virtue of mercy, therefore, we need to start very far back indeed, ultimately with teaching about the Trinity, proximately with teaching about the incarnation of the Word. Such teaching is not a metaphysical distraction in the practice of Christian ethical reasoning; far from it, it is essential to discovering the moral texture of the world and our own identities as agents in the world. But the history of Jesus Christ also reaches forwards to the life of the children of God. His history is complete in itself, possessed of a fullness, perfection and sufficiency which excludes prolongation or expansion. But as such his history is not self-­enclosed but open and communicative, directed to the renewal and perfection of all other histories; this, indeed, is why we speak of him as merciful. Jesus Christ enacts God’s mercy, bringing

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it to bear upon estranged and damaged and distressed creatures, drawing them together into a new form of common life in which they enjoy fellowship with God and so with one another. As creatures of God’s mercy, they are commissioned and empowered for merciful action. There is, accordingly, a necessary social-­ecclesial element to a theology of mercy; as the apostle puts it in Colossians, because there is the common life of ‘God’s chosen people’, then we must enact this reality: ‘clothe yourselves with compassion’ (Col. 3.12). All this – rightly – appears to make theological ethics difficult of access. But the difficulty does not stem from the refusal of Christian theology to come out of its lair; rather, it is the inevitable result of the fact that what theology has to say is bound up with its realization that the world is not what it is commonly taken to be, but is a new creation. If the theological ethicist is a rather puzzling figure, it may be because his or her work is directed by and towards a converting reality – by and towards Jesus Christ himself – a reality whose apprehension requires the transformation of moral reason. How, then, are we to reorder the ways in which we speak of God and creatures?

II We must begin by speaking of God’s mercy, because God’s mercy is the commanding feature of the world’s moral topography. It is ‘over all that he has made’ (Ps. 145.9). This is simply to follow the rule that moral theology is moral theology – that, like all other Christian teaching, it is an extension of teaching about God, not a fresh venture with independent norms or procedures. But what authorizes and directs our talk of God’s mercy? If our task is biblical reasoning, we talk of God’s mercy as we contemplate the reality that, according to the testimony of the prophets and apostles, God’s mercy happens. To observe the mercy of God, we are to attend to this testimony, follow its indication. ‘Scripture,’ says Augustine, ‘subjects the mind itself to God, that he may rule and aid it’.1 Taken together, his terms for the condition of reason in matters of divinity – ‘subjection’, ‘rule’ and ‘aid’ – suggest that the task of the mind is not to ascribe properties such as mercy to God, but rather to learn the range and application of terms in divinis by giving attention to a movement in which their proper usage is displayed. This movement is the history of the ways and works of God, both in its eternal 1.  Augustine, De civitate Dei (NPNF 1.2), IX.5.

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basis in the perfection of God’s own life as Father, Son and Spirit and in its temporal enactment in God’s turning to creatures in mercy. In short: a moral theology of mercy begins with God’s self-­naming as ‘a God merciful and gracious’ (Exod. 34.6). By way of theological expansion of this name, a number of things might be ventured. 1. God is good. Absolutely or intrinsically understood – understood, that is, as an attribute of God in himself – God’s goodness is his sheer perfection: original, unfading, incomparable. ‘No-­one is good but God alone’ (Mk 10.18): in his goodness, God the creator is wholly unlike all creatures, for the goodness of creatures is had by participation or gift, whereas ‘God alone is good by nature, per suam essentiam’;2 ‘[O]nly God possesses every kind of perfection by nature. He alone therefore is by nature good.’3 But this solus Deus does not exclude divine self-­communication: to God’s absolute, intrinsic goodness there corresponds his relative, extrinsic goodness, that is, the divine benignity whose ground is the inner divine bonitas. This benignity is, in turn, the principle of God’s disposing of himself towards creatures, bestowing, conserving and perfecting creaturely life. God’s benignity may be considered, first, as benevolence, God’s willing of the creature’s good (which may be termed God’s decretive goodness, his unshakeable determination to be and act for the creature), and, second, as beneficence (which may be termed God’s executive goodness, his enactment of the creaturely good which he wills). In short: God’s active benevolence is the effect of his willed goodness, resting upon his benignity; and this benignity is the outer, communicative face of his goodness in himself. 2. God’s benevolence takes the beneficent form of mercy in the situation of creaturely distress. Mercy is the directing of God’s majestic goodness to the relief of the creatures in misery and wretchedness. Creatures always need the creator’s benevolence, simply because they do not hold life in themselves, but have life only in the gift of God. All the more do creatures stand in need of the creator’s benevolence when they commit treachery against God, breaking fellowship and casting themselves adrift from the life which can only be had in fellowship. Sin is unrighteousness and pollution; but it is also misery, rendered more grievous by the fact that 2.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae, T. Gilby et al., ed. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964–81; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Ia.6.3 s.c. and resp. 3.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.6.3 resp.

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creatures are utterly incapable of coming to their own aid: sinners have no power of themselves to help themselves. Seeing our powerlessness, God’s mercy helps us: ‘the Lord is gracious and merciful and will not turn away his face from you’ (2 Chron. 30.9). Divine mercy includes more than compassion, fellow-­feeling; it is active pity which supplies the resources which creatures do not and cannot hope to possess. The movement of divine mercy is one of majestic condescension: God is ‘gracious and merciful’, gracious in his mercy and merciful because gracious. Mercy ‘involves the giving from one’s abundance to others,’ Aquinas notes, ‘and, what is more, relieving their needs, a function especially belonging to a superior. This is why we say that mercy is something proper to God’.4 3.  We must pause a little over this fact that mercy is proper to God. Mercy executes benevolence, and benevolence is benignity in purposed and purposive relation; and so in God’s mercy, God’s essence is implicated. Creaturely need is the occasion of God’s mercy, but not its cause; its cause is simply the incomparable, ceaseless goodness of God. God is merciful because he is good, not because there are needy objects for his mercy. What becomes manifest in the temporal relief of creatures by God is the fact that in himself God is benign and benevolent, that he possesses readiness for mercy. Put slightly differently, mercy is a free divine action. ‘I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy’, God tells Moses (Exod. 33.19) – which does not mean that God’s mercy is arbitrary and capricious but that it is self-­caused (and so inscrutable) and does not have to be extracted from God. Or slightly differently again: mercy is a divine affection (a state and act in which God responds with full integrity and liberty to another); but it is not a divine passion (in which God would act under compulsion, overwhelmed by the creature’s distress). God is not reduced to misery by creaturely wretchedness, so that his mercy is a relief of God’s own trouble as much as that of the creature. Rather, God is gracious and merciful; what God does in the economy of his works has its principle in who he is in himself and so in what he is capable of doing without deprivation. God does not suffer by acting mercifully. Schleiermacher restricted talk of God’s mercy to preaching and poetry, worried lest it lead us to attribute to God ‘sensuous sympathy’, that is, ‘the pain produced in us by hampered conditions in the lives of others’.5 More menacingly, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra 4.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.30.4 resp. 5. F. D. E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928), p. 353.

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is told by the Devil: ‘God is dead; God has died of his pity for man’.6 But God’s mercy is not such; it is grounded in and gives active expression to the plenitude of his life; God does not die of pity but lives as the Father of mercies. His ‘apathy’, his freedom from destructive passion, is not a protection against mercy but the energy with which his mercy is exercised and which makes it truly capable of meeting the creature’s need. God, Barth writes, ‘cannot be moved from outside by an extraneous power. But this does not mean that he is incapable of moving himself. No, God is moved and stirred, yet not like ourselves in powerlessness, but in his own free power, in his inmost being . . . Everything that God is and does is determined and characterized by the fact that there is rooted in him, that he himself is, this original free powerful compassion, that from the outset he is open and ready and inclined to the need and distress and torment of another, that his compassionate words are not grounded in a subsequent change, in a mere approximation to certain conditions in the creature which is distinct from himself, but are rooted in his heart, in his very life and being as God.’7 4. God’s mercy maintains the creature’s good. It does this initially by the eradication of immediate distress, and ultimately by establishing the creature in fellowship with himself. The context of mercy is covenant, that is, God’s dedication of himself to be the Lord and helper of this creature of his. God’s acts of mercy are not therapy, mere occasional relief, but episodes in the enduring history of fellowship. Schleiermacher, again, was troubled that when we speak of God’s mercy we seem to imply ‘a divine causality bent upon a sensuous furtherance of life simply as such’8 – in other words, that God’s mercy might lack teleological or ethical character. But this misses the fact that God’s mercy is inseparable from his steadfast love (Isa. 63.7-9), that is, from the long run of the purpose of God. Jonathan Edwards is a better guide here when, in a reflection on Ps. 136 he uses ‘mercy’ as an encompassing term for God’s relations with creatures: ‘all God’s works’, he writes, ‘are from mercy to his people, not only for the good of his creatures, but from mercy’.9 The history of the covenant concerns ‘the eternity and 6. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 114. 7. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), p. 370. 8. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p. 353. 9.  J. Edwards, ‘Work of Creation, Providence, Redemption’, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 18, The “Miscellanies” 501–832 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 292.

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perpetuity of God’s mercy to his church, or his mercy’s being forever’.10 The course which may be traced in God’s outer works is covenant mercy. The source and energy of those works is God’s goodness, benignity and benevolence; their visible and executive figure is Jesus Christ, in whom ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies’ (2 Cor. 1.3) acts to confront and overcome the evil centre of creaturely misery, which is alienation from God. In and as this one, God’s mercy triumphs over the breach of fellowship with the creator and Lord of the covenant which degrades and oppresses God’s creatures. In Jesus Christ, God’s mercy comes on those who fear him (Lk. 1.50); his coming manifests the ‘great mercy’ of the Lord (Lk. 1.58); above all, in him God ‘performs the mercy promised to the fathers and remembers his holy covenant’ (Lk. 1.72). In Jesus Christ, God’s mercy reigns; by it, the world is made new. In the Gospel narratives, the coming of this new order of created being under the rule of God is especially visible in the healing miracles which are concentrations of the divine mercy. Recall the unelaborated, sheerly intrusive appeal of those who come to Jesus in these healing stories: ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord!’ (Mt. 15.22); ‘Lord have mercy on my son!’ (Mt. 17.15); ‘Have mercy on us, Son of David!’ (Mt. 20.30); ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’ (Lk. 17.13). Jesus’s response is summed up as ‘pity’ or ‘having mercy’ (Mt. 20.34; Mk 5.19). The stories move from a raw appeal for mercy to the triumphant enactment of mercy which deals with apparently absolute and unrelievable distress. Already in these stories, however, mercy aims at the restoration of fellowship with God: to receive mercy is not simply to be given a cure but to be summoned to life with God in the form of thanksgiving, praise or witness (Mk 4.19; Lk. 17.15-19). In line with this, ‘mercy’ can assume a comprehensive meaning as a summary concept for the reconciliation that is accomplished in Christ. The author of 1 Peter sums up Christ’s eschatological transformation of human existence thus: ‘once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy’ (1 Pet. 2.10). ‘Mercy’ characterizes both the precipitating event and the corresponding condition; and, moreover, mercy is only potent and creative in this way because of the fount from which it flows, the ‘great mercy’ of ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Pet. 1.3). Such texts instruct us that human moral culture takes place in the wake of the divine manifestation and action which they attest. Human moral history is the history of God’s creatures; it follows the work of God which has its climax in Jesus Christ; God’s work alone is original and spontaneous in an unqualified way. The questions to be asked at the beginning of a 10. Edwards, ‘Work of Creation, Providence, Redemption’, p. 292.

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consideration of mercy as a creaturely reality include not only: ‘what must we do?’ but: ‘what is?’ and ‘what has been done?’ Biblical reasoning tells us, in answer, that what is is the goodness of God, both intrinsic and transitive; and that what has been done is the fulfilment of God’s merciful purposes in Christ: his coming, his proclamation and his reconciling work illuminate the world as the place where God’s mercy rules, and where creatures may and must look to him for mercy. Only after this may we go on to ask: ‘what must we do?’ This further question must be asked; to fail to do so is to fail to understand the finality of what God has done. God’s mercy rules not only as a condition in which we may rest but also as a direction which quickens creaturely action. But in all this, the divine mercy and the divine goodness on which it rests are primary and causative, the necessary ontological and operative ground of the imperative. Making sense of moral culture – knowing who and where we are, and how we must live if we are not to betray ourselves into chaos and tribulation – means coming to see ourselves as the objects of God’s own mercy. It means trying to grasp that the pre-­eminent factor in the movement of moral culture is what Paul calls ‘the mercies of God’. Those mercies, Barth comments, ‘finally define the world’.11 Moral culture enacts created moral nature, and created moral nature rests upon the completeness and adequacy of God who is good in himself and who wills and works the good of his creatures.

III To pull together the threads so far, we may consider Cyprian at the beginning of his treatise On Works and Alms: Many and great, beloved brethren, are the divine benefits wherewith the large and abundant mercy of God the Father and Christ both has laboured and is always labouring for our salvation: that the Father sent the Son to preserve us and give us life, in order that he might restore us; and that the Son was willing to be sent and become the Son of man, that he might make us sons of God; humbled himself, that he might raise up the people who were prostrate; was wounded that he might heal our wounds; served, that he might draw out to liberty those who were in 11. K. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 427.

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bondage; underwent death, that he might set forth immortality to mortals. These are many and great boons of divine compassion.12

So far, we have spoken of the mercy of God by tracing the movement which Cyprian invites his readers to consider: the movement of the saving divine labour which elevates, frees and gives life. To what creaturely moral economy does this give rise? And how is that economy determined by its origin in the divine labour? God’s active merciful presence and rule establishes a creaturely kingdom of mercy. There is a human social realm which is the creaturely coordinate of divine mercy, for God’s mercy has as its aim the perfection of creatures, and that perfection includes the perfection of human fellowship. ‘Mercy’ and ‘fellowship’ are correlative terms. So, on the one hand, God’s mercy is visible as he summons into being a people who were ‘once no people’ (1 Pet. 2.10); and, on the other hand, one of the essential properties of the fellowship of the ‘chosen ones’ is that they demonstrate ‘compassion’ (Col. 3.12). God’s mercy founds the church as redeemed political fellowship. This fellowship is a necessary coordinate of God’s mercy in Jesus Christ, because what is accomplished by the incarnate Son fulfils in time what God the Father has lovingly purposed from before time, namely that there should be children of God (Eph. 1.15). These children – that is, the community which confesses that God the Son has reconciled us to the Father – belong to the fullness of the one who fills all in all (Eph. 1.23). But this necessary fellowship of God’s children is always wholly derivative, subordinate to the one Son of God. This derivation means that the fellowship is markedly retrospective, in that the dynamic of its life is ‘you have received mercy’ (1 Pet. 2.10). Only in this retrospective derivation is the fellowship a kingdom of mercy. If this seems needlessly insistent, we should remind ourselves that a great deal hangs on achieving a sufficiently fine-­grained description of the relation of the fellowship to its origin: not just the accuracy of a theological account of human mercy, but also – and more importantly – the burden of expectation which we place on human mercy. For human action which emerges in a moral economy of God’s prevenient mercy is much more likely to be self-­forgetful and unafraid than action which must somehow strive to introduce grace into a world from which it is otherwise absent. 12.  Of Works and Alms, in A. Roberts, J. Donaldson, ed., Ante-Nicene Fathers [ANF], vol. 5 (10 vols, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1867–73; reprint, Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), I.

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In short: the basic rule in this matter for the redeemed society is: ‘Be merciful, even as your heavenly Father is merciful’ (Lk. 6.36). The imperative ‘Be merciful!’ has force because and only because of the indicative upon which it rests, and because that indicative is the indicative of the Father, the one who in his Son Jesus Christ calls creatures into society with himself, enacting and, through the perfecting work of the Spirit, enabling mercy. What closer description may be given of human obedience to the command to be merciful? By what sort of action is the fellowship characterized? 1.  Mercy is indeed action, not just attitude. The gospel allows no retreat into a realm of pure sensibility. In a justly famous discourse on ‘Mercifulness’, Kierkegaard agonized lest mercy be confused with mere charity, and the poor man excluded from the possibility of demonstrating mercy. ‘One can be merciful without having the least to give’.13 This is undoubtedly a valuable protest against ‘the worldly presumption of charity and well-­doing’;14 but the exhortation is snared in over-­scrupulous separation of the temporal and the eternal. ‘Temporal existence has a temporal and to that degree an activist conception of need and also has a materialist conception of the greatness of a gift and of the ability to do something to meet need’.15 Kierkegaard can think of no alternative to ‘spectacular externality’ other than ‘significant inwardness’.16 ‘The eternal has understanding only for mercifulness; therefore if you want to learn to understand about mercifulness, you must learn from the eternal. But if you are to have understanding for the eternal there must be stillness around you while you wholly concentrate your attention upon inwardness’.17 But here mercy contracts to attitude, concerned above all to avoid base motivation, and abstracted from the world of goods and bodily needs (food and drink, clothing, shelter, all the things with which the works of temporal mercy busy themselves). Mercy becomes an exquisite state of ‘mercifulness’ rather than a self-­forgetful, active orientation to the needy. But if this is not so – if mercy is active externality, labour – then of what kind of labour must we speak? 13. S. Kierkegaard, ‘Mercifulness, a Work of Love, Even if It Can Give Nothing and is Capable of Doing Nothing’, in Works of Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 293f. 14. Kierkegaard, ‘Mercifulness’, p. 294. 15. Kierkegaard, ‘Mercifulness’, p. 302. 16. Kierkegaard, ‘Mercifulness’, p. 303. 17. Kierkegaard, ‘Mercifulness’, p. 304.

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2.  Mercy is creaturely labour; it is the work of God’s new creatures. It is action which is in accordance with the ‘new nature’ which recipients of God’s mercy have ‘put on’, a nature which is now ‘being renewed’. Merciful action originates in a transformation which has taken place, a moral identity which has been given (principally in the saving mission of God in Christ, instrumentally in Christian baptism). The objective gift of nature and identity not only places its recipients in a certain state, but also generates a process of renewal and alerts them to the requirements which are intrinsic to the history of renewal into which they have been adopted.18 However, because mercy is creaturely, it is limited. It does what it is capable of doing, no more. But it is not harassed by the (merciless) myth that suffering and need are unintelligible threats to moral order which must be expunged from the world by the most strenuous efforts, be they political or technological. Creaturely mercy accepts the restriction of its capacities without resentment or despair. It is not driven by fear of the tragic, because it is confident that its limits are not limits to God, and so it can venture its imperfect work cheerfully and hopefully, looking to God’s own encompassing mercy as its vindication. It is God’s mercy, not that of creatures, which is over all that he has made. 3.  Mercy is spiritual labour. This does not mean that mercy is any less creaturely, or any less active; it simply specifies the kind of action which mercy is. Spiritual action is creaturely action in which the Holy Spirit is at work. In spiritual action there is a coming together of God the Holy Spirit and creatures; not the Spirit without and in opposition to the creature, nor 18.  In this connection, Bernd Wannenwetsch argues that the ethical identity of the merciful person is not antecedent to the acts in which that person identifies with the needy neighbour. ‘According to the rules of Jesus’s narrative art, ethical identity is not “sustained” at all. Rather, it comes into being through identification, in the course of which one person becomes the other’s neighbour. So neighbourliness does not exist at all as an ontological category. It does not even exist as an identifying criterion for a Christian ethic. We may be people who act more or less in solidarity with others, but as “neighbours” we are always still becoming’ (Political Worship, p. 232). Part of what drives this strongly temporal understanding of moral identity is a rejection of ‘role profile’ (p.  233) as morally troubling. But to reject moral calculus which merely applies a fully achieved moral identity is one thing; to weaken the force of ‘moral nature’ is another, and may reflect an assumption that ‘role’ – and perhaps law – is inevitably inauthentic; against which see still D. Emmett, Rules, Roles and Relations (London: Macmillan, 1966).

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the creature without and in opposition to the Spirit. There is no simple synergy between and no simple separation of the respective agencies of Spirit and creature. Mercy is what creatures do; and precisely as this it is the work of the creator Spirit, because the Spirit is the divine agent through whose activity the creaturely counterpart of God’s will is moved and brought to completion. The Spirit gives life, and so enables genuine creaturely action (a point which is only elusive if we consider divine and human action to be inversely proportional or competitive). Empowered and sustained by an agency not their own, spiritual acts are not fully visible. They come from a depth in God which is the lordly reality of the life-­giving Spirit, and so precisely as human acts they are mysterious. The fellowship clothes the naked, comforts the afflicted, these acts are temporal transactions between creatures. But in these acts God’s Spirit is at work, and there comes to be a creaturely counterpart to God’s merciful rule. 4.  The work of mercy flows from affection instructed by reason. Mercy requires an affective relation to the need of others, an affective relation which is unconstrained by other norms of relation. In mercy, misericordia, the heart impels us to act (the opposite of mercy is hardness of heart). ‘[W]hile we follow virtue,’ Augustine notes, the emotions are not ‘part of the infirmity of this life’.19 And so, he asks, ‘[W]hat is compassion but a kind of fellow-­feeling for another’s misery, which prompts us to help him if we can?’20 Life in the fellowship of the saints, we may say, is affective and so moved to action. Mercy is not, however, ungoverned impulse. The emotion of fellow-­ feeling for the one who suffers, Augustine goes on to note, ‘is obedient to reason’.21 This is not meant in the sense that mercy is calculative; it is simply that, under the direction of reason, emotion is instructed and corrected by attending to the truth of what God discloses. Mercy is not a spasm but a truthful affection which sees need as what it is: a place of God’s mercy, an occasion for creaturely love. Merciful action in the fellowship of those who have received mercy is thus creaturely, spiritual, affective labour. What form does it take? Here the tradition may help us with its list of the seven corporal works and the seven 19.  De civitate Dei IX.5. 20.  De civitate Dei IX.5. 21.  De civitate Dei IX.5. Aquinas similarly distinguishes ‘pain over another’s misfortune’ from passion, the former being properly a movement of ‘intellective appetite’, the latter being ‘sense appetite’: Summa theologiae IIaIIae.30.3 resp.

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spiritual works of mercy: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, harbouring the stranger, visiting the sick, ministering to captives, burying the dead as the corporal works; instructing the ignorant, counselling the doubters, admonishing sinners, bearing wrongs with patience, forgiving injuries willingly, comforting the afflicted, and praying for others as the spiritual works. These works (and works like them, for the list is not exhaustive) are particular ways in which the redeemed fellowship shows what human life on the path to perfection is summoned to become. In attending to these works, we come to how the common human good may be sustained. Three things should be noted about these works of mercy. First, they emerge from a particular perception, namely that need and deficiency are intrinsic to the fallen human condition. The fellowship does not protect itself from acknowledging this, since it cannot forget the sheer neediness out of which it has itself been rescued: ‘once you had not received mercy’ (1 Pet. 2.10). ‘All obligation begins with noticing persons.’22 The fellowship notices others; its members have to learn how to ‘consider the poor’ (Ps. 41.1). Often this entails learning how to penetrate the ways in which the world represents itself, to come to see that there are, indeed, feeble and confused and stranded and burdened and destructive persons to whom we must attend. We have to see (1 Jn 3.17) and to hear (Prov. 22.13) those in need, and act in their regard. Such perception is learned – from Scripture as well as from life in common, illuminated by the Spirit who softens the heart to mercy. A fellowship in which such learning happens will also have to learn how to prevent its social centre of gravity – its practices of social visibility, prestige and honour – from making the needy invisible. Such learning is painful; even the redeemed balk at it. ‘Listen, my beloved brethren,’ James tells the community, ‘has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonoured the poor man. . .’ (Jas 2.5f.) Second, works of mercy are directed to the totality of human existence in its oppression and misery. Mercy is corporal and spiritual. To ask whether the corporal or the spiritual is of more account is probably not fruitful; in most cases, it is unclear where the corporal ends and the spiritual begins (think of the depressed and uncooperative hospital patient). Nevertheless, the restriction of mercy to the corporal realm, pushing the spiritual to 22. R. Spaemann, Persons. The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 183.

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the periphery, surely reflects a foreshortened understanding of human flourishing which the fellowship should challenge. Mercy is moved by need in all its manifestations. It takes responsibility for the one in need whose life will continue in defect – hunger, loneliness, folly, destructive anger – until helped by a fellow creature who will not abandon the needy to struggle on their own. Third, works of mercy are directed to all in need, not simply to those with whom we may enjoy special affiliation. Hunger, thirst, imprisonment, doubt are in themselves sufficient to constitute a summons to the fellowship to acts of mercy; no further justification in needed. So in looking to the needs of others, the fellowship is not self-­regarding; mercy does not simply act out or reinforce existing patterns of social relation. The merciful community is open to whatever need presents itself and is claimed by that need irrespective of proximity to or concord with the needy. This is part of what makes the Good Samaritan merciful: unlike the priest or the Levite, he did not deal with the one across whom he stumbled by applying existing norms of obligation; he saw distress and acted for its relief.23 As it encounters need, the fellowship expands its stock of social relations and consequent obligations, and in this way it is itself deepened. And in this way it serves to remind the wider political community that without mercy civil society is badly damaged; there may, for example, be applications of this in immigration policy. In Dependent Rational Animals, which includes one of the best recent treatments of mercy, Alastair MacIntyre suggests that ‘a capacity for misericordia that extends beyond communal obligations is itself crucial for communal life’.24 Why? Because ‘mercy has regard to urgent and extreme need without respect of persons’,25 and each of us needs to know that ‘the attention given to our urgent and extreme needs . . . will be 23.  ‘The Good Samaritan exemplifies a kind of uncluttered common sense about community relations. He reacted to the simple fact of proximity. But such common sense is manifestly uncommon, since it requires a critical ascesis, stripping away the false social representations which constitute unreal but highly believable barriers. That ascesis is part of what is involved in the redemption of social knowledge’: O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love. Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p.  44. See also Wannenwetsch’s extended distinction between solidarity and neighbourliness in Political Worship, pp. 222–34. 24.  A. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals. Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London: Duckworth, 1999), p. 124. 25.  MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, p. 124.

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proportional to the need and not to the relationship . . . But we can rely on this only from those for whom misericordia is one of the virtues. So communal life itself needs the virtue that goes beyond the boundaries of communal life.’26 This is very close to what biblical reasoning wants to say about mercy. Mercy treats those in distress as brothers and sisters, even though they may not be such. It shifts the social coordinates of the fellowship, expanding the range of those to whom the fellowship is bound beyond natural or even baptismal affiliation. Degrees of social connection are opened in this way, because in acts of mercy the fellowship is brought into relation to its Lord. Who are the hungry, the strangers, the sick, the ignorant? They are the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ. ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me’ (Mt. 25.40). This does not identify the sufferer and Christ; still less does it mean that Christ is a proper object of creaturely compassion. But it does mean that the sufferer is bound to Christ because Christ has bound himself to the sufferer. That bond is primary, determining the fellowship’s relation to need, overruling hostility, indifference or caution. Mercy pulls the fellowship into a different pattern of relations, because the needy neighbour whom we come across presents an obligation generated not by human election but by Christ’s adoption of the needy as his own kin.27

IV Three things by way of conclusion. First: there is a loss sustained by placing mercy at the centre of the Christian fellowship. The fellowship can no longer aspire to a sort of stately apathy, because the gospel instructs it to see and be moved to act by human need, as God the Father was moved by the affliction of fallen creatures under the dominion of sin, and as the incarnate Son was moved to pity at the sheer waste laid out before him. Once seeing need and acting mercifully have a place in its life, the fellowship will be a good deal less tidy. And it will be characterized not so much by a determinate and fully composed set of relations as by the expectation that Christ may present us with his brothers and sisters in irregular, often unappealing, ways. Mercy involves 26.  MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, p. 124. 27. See the fine concentrated presentation of this in Spaemann, Persons, pp. 180–96.

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vulnerability, both for its recipient and for the one who acts mercifully. Nietzsche feared this and scorned it as shaming. ‘Truly, I do not like them, the compassionate ones who are happy in their compassion: they are too lacking shame. If I must be compassionate I still do not want to be called compassionate; and if I am compassionate then it is preferably from a distance’.28 Or again: ‘if you have a suffering friend, be a resting-­place for his suffering, but a resting-­place like a hard bed, a camp bed; this will serve him best’.29 But this is evil counsel; for the gospel there is giving and receiving which is beyond the pathology of humiliation, which gives and receives life out of the fullness of God’s own life. Indigent or not, we do not possess ourselves, and so need not fear an economy in which mercy is part of the pace of social relations. Second: once again, need is part of the condition of creatures. We have life from God’s goodness; and when we despise that gift and fall into misery, God’s mercy remakes us. The rule of creaturely life is: ‘What have you that you did not receive?’ (1 Cor. 4.7) We need God to be what we are; and we need others. To require help is not abnormal but the natural state of those created for fellowship. It is, paradoxically, the entirely adequate person who suffers from defect; of this proud, sad self-­sufficiency, only the gospel can heal us. The gospel does so by schooling us in the mercies of God, by setting us in fellowship with others, by calling us to give and receive mercy. But, third, the gospel also tells us that mercy does not come naturally to fallen creatures; it is part of what the Letter of James calls ‘wisdom from above’ (Jas 3.17). We need God’s help if we are to be merciful, and if we are to prompt our neighbours to redeemed social knowledge. And that is why, like everything else in the moral life, mercy is enclosed in the prayer of the community: ‘O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us, as our trust is in thee.’

28. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 122. 29. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 113f.

Chapter 5 D ol e n t g au de n t qu e . S o r r ow i n t h e C h r i s tia n l i f e

I Moral and pastoral theology is a subordinate but not subservient element of theological science. It is subordinate, first, because – like all the various inquiries which make up theology – it must look beyond itself for its principles, ontological and cognitive. Theology is an exercise of sanctified intelligence in relation to an extrinsic object (the high mystery of God in himself and everything in God), an object known as God shares with rational creatures a fitting measure of his perfect knowledge of himself and all things. Moral and pastoral theology is subordinate, second, because its access to these extrinsic principles is generally through other elements of theology. Primarily, it is subordinate to exegesis, that is, to the contemplative construal of God’s instruction of the redeemed through Holy Scripture; secondarily, it is subordinate to dogmatics as the conceptual reconstruction and expansion of this divine instruction. The subordination of moral and pastoral theology to exegesis and dogmatics does not, however, exclude a measure of ordered reciprocity between dogmatic and moral-­pastoral science. Dogmatics possesses a certain priority because of the directness of its engagement with the being of God and creatures which precedes investigation of creaturely practices. But there is instruction about the order of being which can only be acquired or displayed as we consider those practices which form the matter of moral and pastoral theology. No element of theological science can be pursued in isolation, apart from the company of the other elements. Moral and pastoral theology, applying itself to the study of human action as a movement whose cause, setting and end are the presence and works of the triune God, is in especially close company with dogmatics, the theological articulation of first principles. Yet dogmatics would risk missing its object if it did not leave itself open to see its object through the eyes of moral and pastoral

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science; neither is autonomous in respect of the other, but they stand in an ordered and mutually informative and corrective relation of first and second. A double rule obtains, then, for moral and pastoral theology as it investigates creaturely practice. First: operari sequitur esse; second: omne . . . quod est per aliud reducitur ad id quod est per se.1 These movements of following and reduction draw attention to the order of being and causality; coming-­to-know is much less tidy. The order of being need not be replicated in the order of knowing; but the order of knowing must not be projected onto the order of being.2 A theological description of sorrow among the human emotions will exemplify this ordered reciprocity of dogmatic-­metaphysical and moral-­ pastoral intelligence. The need for the first is both acute and easily overlooked. Sorrow is vividly and destructively present in the lives of very many persons; but understanding and alleviating their distress requires the application (under the tutelage of divine revelation and with the assistance of the Holy Spirit) of speculative or theoretical powers in order to reach understanding of sorrow’s nature and causes. For though we customarily expect a formidable array of such powers on the part of psychotherapists, we rarely require them of Christian pastors, and assume that dogmatic-­metaphysical reflection provides scant assistance in the cure of souls and threatens to distract us from practice. Not so: gospel-­ governed dogmatics and metaphysics show us what, in God, the world and creatures are, why their sorrows arise, how they may be eased. Yet moral and pastoral theology is not merely concerned to reduce cases back to their antecedent principles, as if moral ontology constitutes the totality of ethics and the ministry of consolation. Making sense of creaturely sorrow certainly requires intelligent investigation of moral nature as it appears in the light of the church’s confession of the gospel: this is the dogmatic-­ metaphysical element of ethical science. But moral nature is not apart from the enactment of moral history (‘nature’ is causally but not temporally prior to history, and only to be isolated rationaliter); understanding and guiding that enactment, and directing it to that which constitutes its healing, is the chief concern of the practical science of moral and pastoral theology.

1.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.3.6 resp. 2. On the relation of metaphysical and practical concerns in moral theology, see T. Hibbs, Aquinas, Ethics and Philosophy of Religion. Metaphysics and Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

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What follows reflects on sorrow in the lives of human creatures as they are brought into being, sustained, governed and redeemed by God in his outer works of creation, reconciliation and perfection. For guidance I have looked backwards3: to Augustine’s comments on the passions in the ninth and fourteenth books of City of God, but most of all to Aquinas’s consideration of sorrow in the course of the remarkably extensive treatment of the passions of the soul in the Prima Secundae.4 The latter treatment is unequalled in the theological literature. There we find an assumption, untroubled by later curricular tensions, that dogmatic and moral theology constitute a single sequence. And we find other things: clear, penetrating understanding of the biblical and theological inheritance; unsentimental observation of human detail; a profoundly evangelical instinct which places both pleasure and pain within the movement by which ruined creatures are returned to fellowship with God.5 3. Recent philosophical writing on the emotions has found it necessary to undertake a good deal of historical work, retrieving ancient understandings of the passions (examples would include R. Sorabji’s Gifford lectures Emotion and Peace of Mind. From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], or S. Knuuttila’s Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004]), or tracing their eclipse in modern culture (see T. Dixon’s From Passions to Emotions. The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003]). The philosophical histories lack theological nuance, however, and even in reading classical Christian texts they commonly abstract elements of philosophical psychology from their spiritual-­ doctrinal setting in talk of the being and action of God. 4.  The treatise on the passions comprises twenty-­seven questions, divided into one hundred and thirty-­two articles. I prescind from Aquinas’s earlier treatments of the passions in Scriptum super libros Sententiarum III.15 and De veritate X. 5.  In reading Aquinas, I have been guided by, inter alia, M. Jordan, ‘Aquinas’s Construction of a Moral Account of the Passions’, Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 33 (1986), pp.  71–97; E. C. Sweeney, ‘Reconstructing Desire: Aquinas, Hobbes, and Descartes on the Passions’, in S. F. Brown, ed., Meeting of the Minds. The Relations between Medieval and Classical Modern European Philosophy (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 215–33; P. King, ‘Aquinas on the Passions’, in S. MacDonald, E. Stump, ed., Aquinas’s Moral Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 101–32; K. White, ‘The Passions of the Soul (IaIIae qq. 22–48)’, in S. J. Pope, ed., The Ethics of Aquinas (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2002), pp. 103–15; C. Leget, ‘Martha Nussbaum and Thomas Aquinas on the Emotions’, Theological Studies 64 (2003), pp.  558–81; S. Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and

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II How may sorrow become an object of spiritual intelligence? How may we penetrate its keenly-­felt but only half-­understood presence to its deeper reality: its causes and effects, its place in the unfolding history of redemption, the remedies by which it may now be eased, its ultimate banishment by happiness in the holy city which comes down out of heaven from God? Sorrow is opaque. In the realm of the fall, where emotions are commonly disordered and destructive, sorrow can so perturb us as to inhibit understanding, including understanding of itself. There is a kind of blankness which may accompany sorrow, by which intelligence is stultified. In its intemperate manifestations, sorrow may seem to its sufferers an absolute, irreducible reality, requiring and allowing for no explanation. Like acute bodily pain, sorrow ‘can be so intense as to absorb all the soul’s energies’,6 leaving us no desire or willingness or intellectual resources to stand back and think about its nature, causes, effects and remedies. Such knowledge as we have of it is simply knowledge of the sheer fact of our hurt. The healing of distress requires understanding; but understanding is overcome by distress. A condition, therefore, of coming to understand sorrow is the awakening of intelligence (as well as of the will and the desires) by the gospel. Deep, disordered emotion is vivid and wakeful; but in the midst of it, reason may slumber and must be roused. The awakening is at the same time an illumination, shedding abroad light in darkness, dispelling shadows, and a healing, restoring our proper creaturely powers of knowledge. This

Medieval Philosophy, pp. 239–56; S. Pinckaers, ‘Reappropriating Aquinas’s Account of the Passions’, in J. Berkman, C. S. Titus, ed., The Pinckaers Reader. Renewing Thomistic Moral Theology (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), pp. 273–87; D. F. Cates, Aquinas on the Emotions. A Religious-Ethical Inquiry (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2009); R. Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions. A Study of Summa Theologiae IaIIae 22–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); N. E. Lombardo, The Logic of Desire. Aquinas on Emotion (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010); E. Stump, ‘The Non-Aristotelian Character of Aquinas’s Ethics: Aquinas on the Passions’, Faith and Philosophy 28 (2011), pp. 29–43. 6.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae 37.1 ad 3.

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evangelical awakening, illumination and healing is what is meant by ‘revelation’. Revelation is the outer work of divine charity in which, from the Father of lights, there comes down from above to distraught and ignorant creatures every good endowment and every perfect gift, including ‘the word of truth’ (Jas 1.17f.). This ‘word’ is the word of divine instruction, present to us now in the testimonies of the prophets and apostles. If we are to know and govern the passions, Augustine tells us, we need a ‘careful and copious exposition of the doctrine of Scripture, the sum of Christian knowledge, regarding these passions. It subjects the mind itself to God, so that he may rule and aid it, and the passions, again, to the mind, to moderate and bridle them, and turn them to righteous uses’.7 We come to know our sorrow ultimately from divine revelation, proximately from scriptura divina, qua christiana eruditio continentur; attending to revelation and Scripture, moreover, is itself a settling of potentially chaotic emotion by subjecting intelligence to the cure of divine rule.8 Coming to understand sorrow depends upon coming to understand the entire reordering of creaturely life which the gospel announces: in Jesus Christ, supremely in his resurrection from the dead, God has set an end to sorrow, and in the Holy Spirit is now gathering creatures into happiness in fellowship with himself. There is a confidence proper to the Christian understanding of sorrow which flows from the authority, clarity and effectiveness of the gospel announcement. Because Jesus Christ is and is present and eloquent, sorrow is not beyond our understanding. Yet the gospel revelation, perfect in itself, has not yet reached its creaturely term. Certainly, ‘we have the prophetic word made sure’, and the apostle can legitimately exhort believers to ‘pay attention to this, as to a shining lamp’ (2 Pet. 1.19). But the lamp shines ‘in a dark place’; we await the dawning of the day and the rising of the morning star (2 Pet. 1.19). Revelation does not mean the

7.  Augustine, De civitate Dei IX.5. 8.  In the Christian tradition, reflection on sorrow has, of course, involved conversation with sources other than Holy Scripture, Aristotle and the Stoics, chiefly. That conversation is necessary, Christian faith having only a handful of native concepts, and many borrowings; and it is fruitful, for rational creatures cannot but bring to awareness some aspects of their creatureliness. But theology will be alert to elements which fit only awkwardly with the gospel or which do not fit at all; and even what it finds instructive (Stoic teaching about temperance, perhaps) will be placed in an overarching account of things in which what is annexed by the gospel will be extended, adapted and given a different role.

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cessation of learning but rather its engagement by a new and wholly adequate object. We ‘have’ the word; but what we have is not an item of knowledge instantly comprehended and requiring no further appropriation, but something commanding the constant exercise of attention, in prospect of God’s eschatological illumination of us. We come to understand sorrow, accordingly, within the incomplete history of God’s dealings with creatures, a history which is ‘now day and yet night; night in comparison with the future day for which we yearn, day in comparison with the past which we have renounced’.9 In this age, Augustine continues, ‘it is night until there shine forth day in the glorified advent of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . There is therefore to come day after this night, meanwhile in this night a lantern is not lacking’. But ‘even this light by comparison with a sort of ineffable day is called night. For the very life of believers by comparison with the life of unbelievers is day . . . Night and day – day in comparison with unbelievers, night in comparison with the angels. For the angels have a day which we do not yet have.’10 Understanding of sorrow is given, acquired and exercised over time. This time is not random: it is a movement to an end. On the one hand, this counters the way in which great sorrow can make present pain seem an absolute moment, and so render us inert and unteachable (this is despair). On the other hand, it means that the knowledge of sorrow which revelation affords is pilgrim knowledge. It possesses its proper certainties: of our calling and the state into which that calling has introduced us; of the end to which we are being conducted by God; of the gifts which sustain us, including the gift of revelation in the knowledge of Jesus Christ and of the enlightening of our hearts to hope (Eph. 1.17f.). But it remains imperfect knowledge, an element of our movement towards ‘the age which is to come’ (Eph. 1.21). Certainty and imperfection are not dialectically balanced, such that we are poised precariously between stability and chaos. Certainty is our primary and principal state, imperfection simply the result of the fact that the reconciliation of intelligence to divine truth is not yet its full redemption. Even so, theological understanding of sorrow is not to be had in the absence of its exercise; and the gospel does not eliminate sorrow through understanding so much as instruct its hearers on when and how to sorrow, how to resist sorrow’s aggravations, how to wait for our end.

9.  Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos (NPNF 1.8), 77.4 (LXXVI.4). 10.  Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 77.4 (LXXVI.4).

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III Sorrow is one of the emotions or passions of the soul.11 An emotion is not simply a subjective mood: sorrow, for instance, is more than merely ‘feeling miserable’, though it may engender the psychic state of dejection. Emotion has an object. It is a state and activity of a person in relation to circumstances, occurrences and agents other than the self. As such, it is an ‘undergoing’ or ‘suffering’: a movement of the inner self in response to being moved from outside, a reaction. Martha Nussbaum speaks of emotion as an aspect of human vulnerability, that is, of the incompleteness which accompanies the fact that our human well-­being involves our orientation to what escapes our control.12 Call this, rather, an aspect of creatureliness. We do not have our being from ourselves or in ourselves, for we are contingent: absolutely upon God, whose love has given, and sustains us in, being; derivatively upon other creatures from whom we may not detach ourselves without damaging or destroying our well-­being. The current term of preference for this element of creatureliness is ‘being-­in-relation’ or some variant of the same: unobjectionable enough, though often descriptively lush, and likely to be used in ways which solve too many problems too quickly and which threaten to confuse uncreated and created being. Aquinas’s more spare and powerful term is coniunctio.13 Unlike God who is a se and in se, human creatures have their being in conjunction, finding themselves by their very nature set alongside and engaged by other things. To this conjunction, human creatures respond by a movement which Aquinas calls ‘inclination arising from cognition’, 11.  There is no obviously adequate word in English. ‘Passion’ has earlier usage behind it, and may remind the etymologically alert to the element of suffering (passio) in emotion; but in modern usage it tends to connote vehement emotional disturbance. ‘Affection’, similarly, underscores our being acted upon, and has especial resonances in the spiritual tradition of Puritanism, but its usefulness is restricted by the way it is commonly used for one particular emotion, namely fondness, often with a hint of sentimentality; as a consequence, it lacks the range required of a generic term. ‘Feeling’ is too malleable, covering both purely physical states and subjective moods. ‘Emotion’ is, therefore, probably as good as it gets, provided that use of the term does not invoke the nineteenth-­century secular psychologies which made heavy use of the term. 12.  M. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 13.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.35.1 resp.

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inclinatio consequens apprehensionem.14 This is the movement of appetite, whether of attraction or repulsion, consequent upon perception of the state of conjunction in which we exist. The picture here – of being intelligently conjoined to objects which draw or repel – reinforces a conception of human nature as ‘open’: incomplete, not self-­contained or fully resolved or at perfect rest. We are mobile, seeking out other realities in order to find out what may help us towards our good, and, in the course of that, recoiling from the evil which inhibits the fruition of our nature. This creaturely dynamic, in which we respond to our ‘conjoined’ state by cognition and appetite, is the motor of emotion, for the emotions are the various movements of attraction to and recoil from other things. Emotion is intrinsic to human creatureliness, but it acquires a special character in the wake of the depredations of the fall. In our integral state, the ‘conjunctions’ in which human creatures exist invariably promoted our good, and so always generated pleasurable emotion. Eden’s innocence and the happiness enjoyed there were, in part, the absence of evil and of the consequent need to recoil; before the fall, there was no fear that being united to that which is other than ourselves might not lead to our good, and so there was no disinclination. After the fall, the situation and movement of conjunction remains; its absence would spell the end of the creaturely nature in which it is elemental. But intelligent participation in this state and movement makes us aware that our natural vulnerability may cause damage. Evil is present in the world, and so to ‘suffer’ the world – to enact ourselves as the incomplete, needy creatures that we are – is to risk sorrow. There are three elements in sorrow: conjunction with evil; awareness of that conjunction; flight. First, the object of sorrow is some present evil; ‘it is union with an evil that is the cause, in the sense of the object, of pain or sorrow’,15 the evil being judged evil precisely because ‘it denies one some good’.16 This evil object is properly intrinsic – we sorrow over our own 14.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.35.1 resp. In this respect, Aquinas’s account is companionable with recent work on the cognitive character of emotions, such as R. de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987); J. Deigh, ‘Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions’, Ethics 104 (1994), pp.  824–54; R. C. Solomon, The Passions. Emotions and the Meaning of Life (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997); P. Goldie, The Emotions. A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); R. Roberts, Emotions. An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 15.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.36.4 resp. 16.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.35.1 resp.

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misfortune; but it may have an extrinsic object, as in sorrow over the misfortune of another, though even in such a case there must be an element of intrinsic sorrow if we are to be engaged by the other’s situation (in this case, we call the ‘intrinsic’ element ‘sympathy’, in which another’s sorrow is appropriated). Second, sorrow presupposes perception (perceptio17) of the present evil, a perception which is not simply bodily (the pain associated with ill-­health) but interior (awareness of the loss of well-­being). Third, sorrow is flight from the evil which threatens. Aquinas uses the idiom of the movements of approach (accessus) and withdrawal (recessus) of physical bodies to convey this psychic movement. ‘Sorrow is a kind of flight or withdrawal, and pleasure a kind of pursuit or approach.’18 The generic term for the movement of recoil is pain, of which sorrow – ‘internal’ pain, the opposite of joy – is a species; ‘pain’, however, may also be used in a more restricted way to designate an evil which is repugnant to the body, that is, ‘exterior’ pain, the opposite of physical pleasure. Emotion is depicted as a movement of aliveness in which creatures seek to fulfil their natures in relation to other realities. Because only certain sorts of unity or conjunction ‘contribute to a thing’s goodness’,19 withdrawal (sorrow) is as essential to the fulfilment of our nature as approach (pleasure). ‘[A]pproach is, of itself, directed towards something in harmony with nature; withdrawal is, of itself, directed towards something discordant with nature.’20 The distinction (quod est conveniens . . . quod est contrarium) indicates that sorrow is part of the good order of creaturely life after the fall, a way in which human nature is sustained and protected. Sorrow always has ‘some element of good’,21 not, of course, in the sense that sorrow is to be sought out as if it were pleasure, but in the sense that the sheer operation of repugnance for what harms us indicates the vitality of our nature, indeed, our opposition to death. ‘[P]ain,’ Augustine says, ‘which some suppose to be in an especial manner an evil, whether it be in mind or in body, cannot exist except in good natures. For the very fact of resistance in any being leading to pain, involves a refusal not to be what it was, because it was something good.’22

17.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.35.1 resp. 18.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.36.1 resp. 19.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.36.3 ad 1. 20.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.36.1 resp. 21.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.39.4 ad 2. 22.  Augustine, De natura boni contra Manichaeos (NPNF 1.4), XX.

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The principle to which Augustine and Aquinas draw our attention – that sorrow can only exist in good natures – is of immense metaphysical, moral and psychological importance. It indicates the fundamental asymmetry between good and evil. God is wholly good, and has made a good creation. Pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, are therefore not commensurable realities. The creature is not posed between them as between two principles; there is no fundamental ambivalence to creaturely being, for the basic movement of the creature is the movement of life, that is, animate movement towards the good. Reflecting on the question ‘Is sorrow to be shunned more than pleasure is to be sought?’, Aquinas announces the principle: ‘Bonus est fortiori quam malum, good is stronger than evil’, and continues: ‘pleasure is desirable because its object is good; and sorrow is shunned because of its evil object. The desire for pleasure is therefore stronger than the aversion from sorrow’.23 One reason Aquinas advances for this has to do with the supereminence of the good in creaturely being. Aquinas firmly rejects any idea of total evil: ‘the cause of pleasure is something agreeable and good; the cause of pain or sorrow is something disagreeable and evil. Now it is possible to find something agreeable and good without anything at all discordant in it; but it is impossible to find anything totally evil and disagreeable, with nothing good in it at all. It is therefore possible for pleasure to be completely perfect; but sorrow is always partial only.’24 Evil is not a mode of being but declension from being; ‘to be’ is ‘to be good’ (though not necessarily in a moral sense); and so sorrow is not on a plane with pleasure as an object of emotion. It is, rather, a negation which accompanies the affirmation of the good which is the dynamic of creaturely life. Such a description, however, functions at the level of theological metaphysics, not psychology. To speak of sorrow as a negation does not mean that it is illusion, or that it has no object, but that it is a real movement whose object is a privation. Privation can exercise great power. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this for understanding sorrow, on a couple of counts. First, it prohibits the conclusion that sorrow is an indication that evil is a natural element of creaturely existence. Quite the opposite: sorrow, not evil, is natural, its operation being the way in which the good creature opposes evil as something supervenient, an intrusion into the good order of creation. Sorrow is thus bracketed on the one side by the state of integrity in which sorrow was not yet, and on the other by eschatological glorification in which sorrow will be no more 23.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.35.6 sed contra. 24.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.35.6 resp.

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(Rev. 21.3f.). This, in turn, points to something of moral-­pastoral resonance: the prohibition of any tragic understanding of or resignation over sorrow. Both arrest the movement of creaturely life in the realm of reconciliation; both concede too much to present evil; both inhibit the proper operation of sorrow, whose purpose is to direct us to the goodness of God.

IV In the present passage of human life in which we are being gathered back into fellowship with God, our emotions are caught up by the Spirit’s regenerative work, but remain in some measure fragile and unstable. Though they are being educated to serve in the good conduct of our lives, they can still slip the leash, they are not always fitting to circumstances. Noting this feature of the infirmity of human life after the fall, Augustine considers that it signifies, not the natural viciousness of emotion but its imperfection: indeed, ‘so long as we wear the infirmity of this life, we are rather worse than better if we have none of these emotions at all’.25 Augustine does not commend impassibility, which not only deadens emotion but attempts to anticipate in our present life what can only be ours in the next: ‘to be quite free of pain while we are in this place of misery is only purchased . . . at the price of blunted sensibilities both of mind and body. And therefore that which the Greeks call ἀπάθεια, and which the Latins would call, if their language allowed them, “impassibilitas”, if it be taken to mean an impassibility of spirit and not of body, or, in other words, a freedom from those emotions which are contrary to reason and disturb the mind, then it is obviously a good and most desirable quality, but it is not one which is attainable in this life . . . When there shall be no sin in a man, then there shall be this ἀπάθεια.’26 Given that emotions are intrinsic to life in the pilgrim state, what is important is not rooting them out but getting them right, suffering and exercising them as reconciled creatures who are returning to their creator and who are learning how to live well now in anticipation of the future: ‘we must live a good life in order to obtain to a blessed life.’27 Hence the rule: ‘a good life has all these affections right, a bad life has them wrong’.28 To measure ourselves against this rule and deal well 25.  Augustine, De civitate Dei XIV.9. 26.  Augustine, De civitate Dei XIV.9. 27.  Augustine, De civitate Dei XIV.9. 28.  Augustine, De civitate Dei XIV.9.

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with the emotions as we are conducted to God, we need to come to understand two things about ourselves: ‘what manner of persons the citizens of the city of God must be in this their pilgrimage, who live after the spirit, not after the flesh’, and ‘what manner of persons they shall be also in that immortality whither they are journeying’.29 How might this govern our dealing with sorrow? Sorrow is an especially striking instance of how sin disturbs the emotions which are basic to human nature, and so of the need to make the emotions a matter of rational reflection and governance, in order that right and disordered emotion can be distinguished and the emotions can serve rather than inhibit progress towards God. Sorrow is not intrinsically morbid,30 but regenerate persons must sorrow in the right way. There was no sorrow in paradise, because there were no objects of sorrow; but post lapsum sorrow can be a right affection, affectio recta.31 The proper functioning of sorrow, indeed, indicates that by virtue of divine grace human nature has survived the fall and its powers have not been entirely eradicated. Sorrow is flight from present evil which harms or threatens to harm us, and the flight signifies the enduring good order of human life. It is not flight in the sense of ‘rout’ (fearful running away as the only escape from what may overcome us), but in the sense of ‘aversion’, measured, well-­judged turning from what opposes our good. Sorrow arises from a deep sense of and trust in the eminence of the good which is opposed: we are impelled to flight not only by repugnance for evil but by inclination to good.32 Moreover, the aversion of sorrow is

29.  Augustine, De civitate Dei XIV.9. 30.  Augustine criticizes the Stoics for not allowing that sorrow can exist in the mind of the wise person: De civitate Dei XIV.8. Aquinas, similarly, because he considers the emotions a constituent element of human agency and beatitude (on which see Pinckaers, ‘Reappropriating Aquinas’s Account of the Passions’, 276f.), judges that tristitia moderata is a necessary condition for the rational creature’s ascent to God. On this, see Miner’s treatment of Aquinas on sorrow in Thomas Aquinas on the Passions, pp. 188–211. S. Loughlin is incorrect to argue that Aquinas simply wants to eliminate sorrow from the life of pilgrims: ‘Tristitia et dolor: Does Aquinas have a Robust Understanding of Depression?’, Nova et Vetera 3 (2005), pp. 761–83; the opposite view of Sweeney, ‘Reconstructing Desire’ – that Aquinas does not commend rational governance of emotion – is surely exaggerated. 31.  Augustine, De civitate Dei XIV.9. 32. See Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.36.1, 36.2.

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itself an exercise of created power; it is not mere disarray, but action against what is contra naturam, and so a movement which affirms that nature by enacting it. How is sorrow as affectio recta to be distinguished from its disordered counterpart? Sorrow is right affection when it is set in motion by and corresponds to rightly ordered love. ‘Among ourselves.  . . the citizens of the holy city of God, who live according to God in the pilgrimage of this life, both fear and desire, and grieve and rejoice. And because their love is rightly placed, all these affections of theirs are right.’33 Further, when love is attached to proper objects, reason is able intelligently to moderate sorrow. ‘The emotions are not “diseases” [morbi] or “disturbances” of the soul [perturbationes animae], except precisely when they are not under rational control’;34 ‘Emotion leads one towards sin in so far as it is uncontrolled by reason; but in so far as it is rationally controlled, it is part of the virtuous life.’35 This moderatio rationis ought not to be considered mere suppression of emotion to avoid perturbation and retain equanimity; it is, rather, discrimination of occasions and modes of sorrow, and direction of its exercise. Sorrow is right affection when it is ‘sorrow for evil’,36 propelled into motion by objects which are abhorrent and from which we must take flight. Believers groan inwardly as in present circumstances of bondage they wait for the coming fulfilment of their filial relation to God (Rom. 8.23); they suffer the ‘godly grief ’ which ‘produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret’ (2 Cor. 7.10); they weep with those who weep (Rom. 12.15). These various modes of sorrow – distress at the delay of the fulfilment of our nature in perfect fellowship with God, remorse over wrongdoing, pity for another’s misfortune – are indications that created nature is being realized in proper odium towards evil, whether inside us or in some external object. Sorrow goes wrong when in some way it breaks free from well-­ordered love and governance by truthful apprehension of our nature and calling and our regenerate condition. Sorrow gets caught up in the war between the law of the mind and the law of sin; it no longer consents to and delights in the given shape (‘law’) of the inmost self which faithful reason apprehends, but is captive by ‘another law’ (Rom. 7.23). As with all the 33.  Augustine, De civitate Dei XIV.9. 34.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.24.2 resp. 35.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.24.2 ad 3. 36.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.39.1 sed contra.

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emotions, so with sorrow: malum insideat. What forms does this threat take? Consider the ‘godly grief ’ of repentance, being ‘displeased over sinning’ (displicere quod peccavit).37 Penitential sorrow is godly grief when it ‘leads to salvation and brings no regret’ (2 Cor. 7.10) – we might say it is productive, both an aversion from past sin and intention for amendment of life. ‘See what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what zeal, what punishment!’ (2 Cor. 7.10). To undergo such godly grief is to suffer no loss (2 Cor. 7.9). Worldly grief, by contrast, is no such movement of aversion from evil and towards the promised good; all it produces is ‘death’ (2 Cor. 7.10). Unlike the godly sorrow whose underlying principle is our being conducted to perfect life, worldly grief inhibits progress. It is a kind of collapse, ‘the desertion of better things’.38 Worldly grief is a mode of ‘aggravated sorrow’ (tristitia aggravans)39 or acedia;40 the term has been applied to a range of affective phenomena, but is best understood as referring to ‘sorrow over spiritual good’ (tristitia de spirituali bono).41 It is bound up with false judgements: that spiritual goods do not exist, or are not promised, or, for certain persons at least, are impossible to obtain, or even that they are in reality evil. But the root of aggravated sorrow is the unchecked dominion of the flesh, and refusal of or disbelief in the superabundance of regeneration. Sorrow of this order is aversion to God and good, consent to ‘the horror, the loathing of the divine good due to the flesh’s victory over the spirit’.42 Much might be said of the pathology of aggravated sorrow. We are immobilized by it: because it is an aversion to good, it inhibits the flight from evil which is integral to the movement of life.43 One overcome by acedia ‘wants to do nothing’, is ‘dragged away from good work’;44 active concurrence to the propelling energy of divine vocation fails. And this is accompanied by resentment, a sullen frame, listlessness, apathy, shunning of fellowship with God, disgust 37.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIIa.84.8 resp. 38.  Augustine, De natura boni contra Manichaeos XX. 39.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.35.1 resp. 40. See R. K. DeYoung, ‘Resistance to the Demands of Love: Aquinas on the Vice of Acedia’, The Thomist 68 (2004), pp. 173–204. 41.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae 35.2 resp. 42.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.35.3 resp. 43.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.35.8 resp. 44.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.35.1 resp.

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at spiritual things: all symptoms of ‘ceasing to expect a personal share in the divine goodness’.45 In short: sorrow of this kind ‘kills the spiritual life’.46

V Aggravated sorrow is an onslaught on happiness; but Christian faith finds its remedy in the gospel, which quickens the movement of creaturely life. The healing and the proper direction and use of the emotions follow from the gospel’s instruction. Emotional restoration requires cognitive advance, that is, coming to truthful apprehension of our nature and state before God. Disordered sorrow is set right by immersion in the gospel’s pedagogy, through which we come to know what we must be in this pilgrim state, and what we will be in immortality. We have earlier intimated what kind of knowledge this is: knowledge awakened by divine revelation, acquired over time, imperfect yet of sufficient certainty. What is its content? The gospel instructs us about sorrow by turning (sometimes dragging) our attention to the alteration of all things which has been effected by the redemptive work of the Son of God and the regenerative work of the Holy Spirit. Isaiah says of the vir dolorum that dolores nostros ipse portavit (Isa. 53.4). In willing consent to the Father’s determination and appointment, the eternal Son takes upon himself the office and work of the man of sorrows, appropriating the evils which afflict us and with which we afflict ourselves, making them his own and suffering them in the way which is proper to his free majesty. In becoming like us, he acquaints himself with our sorrows and their grief, he bears the pain which they inflict; and all this at the Lord’s pleasure, in fulfilment of the divine resolve to bless creatures and cause them to prosper. Because his bearing of sorrow has this end, it is not to be considered merely the removal of an oppressive weight from us onto him, his relieving us of a burden by shouldering it himself. There is more here than an exchange of suffering subject: he appropriates our sorrows in order to eliminate them; he carries them in order to carry them away. And because this is so, he shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied. By virtue of the saving mission of the Son of God, the faithful have been set in the domain of consolation, their lives taking place in the new created 45.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.20.3 resp. 46.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.35.3 resp.

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reality whose ground is the abundance of God’s charity in its character as solace and comfort. The principle of this reality is the divine nature. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the ‘God of all comfort’ (2 Cor. 1.13), made known in the cross and resurrection of Christ (2 Cor. 1.10), and presently active as God ‘comforts us in all our affliction’ (2 Cor. 1.4). His past deliverance of the saints is the ground for hope that ‘he will deliver us’ (2 Cor. 1.10). Further, the domain of consolation sustains a community of mutual comfort: God comforts us ‘so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God’ (2 Cor. 1.4). The gospel announces the good of our consolation, and instructs us how to repose in that good, there to find pleasure and happiness. Yet we do not delight in that good by instinct; we must come to see that it is, indeed, congenial, conveniens.47 Muddled loves and hatreds, erratic movements of attraction and recoil, must be converted to the good in which our happiness lies. Such conversion, wholly beyond our damaged capacities, is effected by the second saving mission of God, in which the Spirit so moves upon and in us as to bestow the new nature, reintegrate us into the domain of divine consolation and complete the healing of sorrow. The work of the Spirit is physical, the bringing about of a new nature. The Spirit, that is, does not merely propose realities to the minds and wills of creatures as material upon which they are to go to work: that would not be regeneration but merely the provoking of creaturely self-­formation. The Spirit reconstitutes the mind and will from within, so that they become capable of embracing and living gospel consolation. Knowledge of and desire for this consolation generate a life-­movement in which aggravated sorrow is overcome by a combination of tranquillity and resistance: tranquillity, because such is the divine solace that serene confidence in our situation is proper; resistance, because divine solace enables movement against continuing affliction. In the realm of regeneration as in that of nature, the Spirit works graciously and sovereignly, but benevolently, as the extension of divine charity, and therefore not simply extrinsically. As Lord he is life-­giver, communicating the new nature and quickening it into activity. The Spirit does not simply manifest comfort as an external reality of which we are onlookers in the midst of sorrow; we are in the domain of consolation, and that consolation is not only a condition but a form of life. Animating this form of life is contemplation of the God of all comfort. Living well in the domain of consolation and embracing happiness requires 47.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.38.1 resp.

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cogitatio perseverans: ‘the more we think about spiritual goods the more delightful they become to us’.48 Sorrow is assuaged and rightly ordered by contemplating God and his goodness which embraces us and gives us a share in his benefits. Contemplation of this kind is difficult when we are overtaken by sorrow, for ‘contemplation requires complete repose’, and sorrow ‘can be so intense as to absorb all the soul’s energies and make it impossible to learn anything new’.49 Moreover, in the wake of the fall our capacity for contemplation is impaired, and renewing its exercise requires that the Spirit kindle in us love of wisdom.50 But the domain of consolation is also the domain of the awakening and illuminating power of the Spirit. Contemplation of God’s goodness enables reason to govern emotion. This governance is not self-­governance, but perception of the good of divine governance. Reason governs as it defers to and repeats the divine rule. And so, once again, what matters is taking up our place in the realm of the divine pedagogy. Living in that realm, we are to be eager in seeking out the gospel’s teaching which ‘subjects the mind itself to God, that he may rule and aid it, and the passions.  . . to the mind, to moderate and bridle them, and turn them to righteous uses.’51 The creaturely subject of divine consolation, instruction and governance is the person in the church, whose common life is both the setting for and an instrument of the distribution of God’s comfort. Non unus homo est, sed unum corpus est.52 ‘Let all . . . who have “tasted” the sweetness “of the Lord”, and who own in Christ that for which they have a relish, think that they are not the only ones; but that there are such seeds scattered throughout “the field” of the Lord, this whole earth; that there is a certain Christian unity . . .’53 Aggravated sorrow isolates, so compounding grief; the companionship of believers assuages sorrow by love, and moves us to seek out and take pleasure in the divine solace. More especially, the common life of believers can be an instrument of cognitive and emotional advance. Disordered sorrow is exacerbated by existing in hurtful emotional regimes or cultures which 48.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.35.1 ad 4. 49.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.37.1 ad 3. 50.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.38.4 resp. 51.  Augustine, De civitate Dei IX.5. On ‘righteous uses’ of sorrow, see P. J. Griffiths, ‘Tears and Weeping: An Augustinian View’, Faith and Philosophy 28 (2011), pp. 19–28. 52.  Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmum XLI.1, in Enarrationes in Psalmos I-L, CCSL 38 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1990). 53.  Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmum XLI.1

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block apprehension of spiritual goods, and so stimulate or reinforce the misperception and misperformance of our nature. Fitting emotions are learned in part by participation in the community of the saints which has been taught how to rejoice, how to weep; and such participation also enables discernment of fitting occasions for emotions: when to rejoice, when to weep. Further, sorrow may find fitting expression in the common life of the saints. Private, unexpressed sorrow causes secret damage, and may come to destructive expression as inarticulate, uncommunicative rage which further isolates the one who sorrows. Taking part in the common life, one can learn to express sorrow in a way which is not simply an isolating cry of pain but an act of communication, part of life in conjunction with others who have spiritual goods in common, and in conjunction with God who is present and attentive. The expression of sorrow is then no longer a howl of anguish but a lament, directed not to a void but to God and the company gathered around God, and, because so directed, already holding out the prospect of some refreshment and ease. ‘Hurtful things hurt still more if they are pent up within us, for the soul is then more concentrated upon them; but if they are released, the soul’s energies are turned to things outside itself and interior pain is thus lessened. This is why sorrow is assuaged by outwardly expressing it in tears or sobs or even words.’54 Last: the soul which sorrows is embodied, and remedia corporalia are not to be despised. Take a bath, get some sleep, Aquinas counsels, for they afford pleasure, restore the body’s vital motions, and so impede and relieve the smarting of the soul.55

VI The Christian gospel is instruction in human happiness, vouchsafed to us by revelation and reconciliation: by revelation, because it is first spoken to us not by a fellow creature but by God through the mouth of Christ; by reconciliation, because only as wickedness, pride and resentment are pardoned and friendship with God is renewed can we attend to the divine word concerning our restoration to happiness. Included in the restoration is the repair of the emotions, and of sorrow among the emotions. Restored to fellowship with God, we are summoned, not to the eradication of sorrow but to its disciplined, well-­instructed cultivation and enactment in accordance 54.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.38.3 resp. 55.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IaIIae.38.5.

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with our new nature, and within the setting of the history of the redemption of the saints. Even in our restored condition, the penal consequences of the fall linger, one of which is the sheer hard work which an emotion like sorrow requires of us. Yet the one who has borne our sorrows once for all continues to bear them, and will do so until we attain the final happiness for which God destines us, when mourning, crying and pain shall be no more because the former things will have passed away.

Chapter 6 C ou r ag e

I Christian moral theology seeks clear knowledge of the nature and conditions of human action in order to guide its performance. Because moral theology is moral theology, and because the matter of theology is God and all things in relation to God, it inquires into God and creatures, their differing natures, and the history of their fellowship which is created, preserved and brought to completion by divine love. Moral theology is thus an element in faith’s intelligent apprehension of the triune God, his inner perfection and his outer works. In this, faith is instructed by the gospel, the loving address of God of which the prophets and apostles are appointed and authoritative ambassadors. Attending to this instruction – contemplating as it presents itself, and avoiding coveted partial or untruthful representations – moral theology seeks to say: This is the God who is the origin, preserver, governor, judge and end of all human action; these are the creatures summoned to life-­movement by this God; these are the properties of their conjunction in its temporal course; these are modes of action which are necessary and fitting enactments of creaturely nature and which are to be the objects of creaturely exertion; these are modes of action which inhibit, damage or deny creaturely life-­movement in conjunction with God. If this is so, Christian moral theology has both ontological and deontological interests; it treats both the metaphysical and the preceptive. There is, however, an order to these inquiries: deontology follows ontology, because action follows being. The order of discovery may, of course, run in a different direction: consideration of the principles of moral being may be prompted by puzzlement over a precept. But precepts are the imperative force of being, of what is the case in the world because of its conjunction with God. This is why Christian moral theology is not an unreservedly practical science. It concerns itself with the principles of human practice. Access to these principles is often occasioned by practical life-­movement;

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yet what kind of movement is this if not the movement of reconciled creatures, those who move themselves truthfully only when they do so in accordance with their given nature and state, and whose nature can only be grasped in its transparency to the divine charity which is its origin and its preserving power? As metaphysics of morals, Christian moral theology is a contemplative science, which helps to kindle, direct and evaluate moral activity by pausing over moral nature. We are to enact our life-­movement in such a way that we conform to our good. This enactment requires the exercise of moral reason, that element of our intelligent nature by which the good – that which the loving creator purposes for the creatures he has made to be thus – becomes an object of knowledge, desire and will. In our corrupt state, our capacity for contemplative knowledge of our moral nature is damaged: by hatred of God and others, by inordinate self-­love, and by ruinous desire through which we are drawn to or flee from the wrong things, to the wrong degree or in the wrong way. Ignorant, deficient in charity, and with our desires disordered, we need instruction and illumination, the renovation of our loves, and the moderation and ordering of our passions. We need, that is, the work of God which renews the spirit of the mind as part of the creation of the new nature. Renewed moral reason is intrinsic to the exercise of the Christian graces, including the grace of courage. Acting courageously, and avoiding the opposing vices of recklessness and irresolution, requires truthful assessment of our nature and capacities, of what provision we may expect from the hands of God, and of the setting in which courage is required. Courageous persons will be persons of well-­formed moral intelligence who act out of a lively apprehension of their nature and situation as it is configured, upheld and moved by the works of divine justice and benevolence. Such intelligence, steady and attentive to the Spirit’s teaching, will understand that the call to exercise courage reaches creatures at a particular point in the temporal unfolding of their fellowship with God: not that of primal integrity, nor of entire corruption, nor of perfect restoration, but that time in which accomplished reconciliation, effected by the Son at the Father’s behest, is being realized as the Spirit’s renovating work proceeds. For creatures whose lives take place in this penultimate dispensation (in classical theological terms, the third of the four ‘states of humanity’1), courage is possible, fitting and necessary. Courage is possible because the new nature created after the likeness of God (Eph. 4.24) has been given to us, and with it the renewal of 1. See here Augustine, Enchiridion (NPNF 1.3), 118; the classic Reformed account remains the early eighteenth century treatment by T. Boston, Human Nature in Its Four-Fold State (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1964).

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our powers, including that firmitas animi which is the essence of courage. Courage is fitting, because our future good, which is the motive force of our capacity to resist evil and face fear, is secure: courage is the natural action of those whose lives are tethered by divine promises. Courage is necessary, because our future good is not yet possessed. Having knowledge of these things – knowledge acquired by contemplation of God and God’s works, and reinforced by the exercise and application of courage in face of difficulties and disappointments – courageous persons will be able to evaluate threats to their well-­being, to make discriminations about when and how to act in face of evil, to moderate the emotions generated by objects of dread, and to act in obedience to the divine summons. Such discriminating and acting are the stuff of moral exhortation; but moral exhortation is the application and reinforcement of moral science, that by which moral science is brought to term, and that whose imperative force derives from its indicative principles. So much by way of orientation. What, on this basis, is to be said of the nature and acts of courageous persons, of the extensions and deformations of courage, and of the divine gifts by which it is moved? For guidance I have looked to its treatment by Ambrose,2 Augustine,3 and Gregory the Great,4 but most of all to the lengthy treatise de fortitudine which takes up eighteen questions and sixty-­six articles of the Secunda Secundae of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. The authority of the latter presentation derives from its sure grasp of the conjunction of reason, virtue and emotion in courage, as well as from the ease with which it shuttles between moral theory and human detail. It is also bound up with the way in which Aquinas grounds the act of courage in a theology of God, creation and redemption, even though such considerations rarely break the surface of the text. The structure and content of what follows derives in large part from Aquinas’s treatment.5 2.  De officiis (NPNF 2.10), I.35–39. 3.  De moribus ecclesiae catholicae (NPNF 1.4), 15, 22. 4. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1845), XXII.2. 5.  I have profited from J. R. Bowlin, ‘Rorty and Aquinas on Courage and Contingency’, Journal of Religion 77 (1997), pp. 402–20; S. Hauerwas and C. Pinches, Christians Among the Virtues. Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), pp. 149–65; H. McCabe, On Aquinas (London: Continuum, 2008), pp.  165–8; J. Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues. Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), pp. 117–41; J. Porter, The Recovery of Virtue. The Relevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics (Louisville: WJKP, 1990); L. H. Yearley, Mencius and Aquinas. Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).

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II Grasping the nature and function of courage requires an understanding of the task of human virtue, especially of its task in face of the lingering corruption of our nature to which the Spirit’s continuing work of sanctification directs itself. ‘[I]t is the function of human virtue to make both man and his activities at one with reason.’6 This, in turn rests upon a conception of the function of reason as that through which human creatures are able to apprehend the ends of action, most of all that our ‘ultimate end is happiness, in other words God’.7 Virtue, of which courage is an instance, is an element of ‘following right reason’. Two matters immediately call for comment here. First, the exercise of courage follows the intelligence of moral truth: ‘the function of virtue is to preserve a man in the good proposed by reason’; and the object of ‘reason’s good’ is, quite simply, ‘truth’.8 Aquinas assumes the accessibility, singularity and non-­relativity of truth. Moral reason is not correlative to the schematizations of moral cultures or ways of life, but is that through which creatures come to acquire a sufficient (though not, of course, comprehensive or intuitive) knowledge of the nature of things and their course under the direction of God. In moral reason, what matters is not our seeing but that which we see. If we are to act virtuously, we ‘must first know what the good is’9: not merely hold something as good, but see the good.10 Second, the quality of acts of courage is determined by the goods which they pursue and our relation to which they preserve, and not simply by the forcefulness of the exercise of human power. Courage is not mere vitality indifferently directed, but power directed to that which reason perceives. It is an aspect of the sequela rationis11 which characterizes good human action; by courage we are preserved in bono rationis.12

6.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.1 resp. 7.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.7 resp. 8.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.124.1 resp. 9.  Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, p. 122. 10. Yearley’s otherwise perceptive presentation of Aquinas’s conception of courage, in which human flourishing is relative to ways of life and social location, falls into difficulties over this point; Hauerwas and Pinches are unguarded in their reliance on Yearley’s social idealism. 11.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.3 resp. 12.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.124.1 resp.

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Following reason is difficult, sometimes acutely so. This is because the disorder of sin extends to the emotions, those primary movements of attraction and flight which are intrinsic to our created nature, but cast into disarray once our original integrity has been forfeited. Such is the disarray that we are easily defeated in following the good proposed by reason. Some pleasure attracts us inordinately and draws us from hearing reason’s superintendence; or, in a contrary movement, we experience ‘revulsion of will from the end suggested by reason, because of some oppressing difficulty’.13 The first disorder – ‘the pull exercised by some pleasure towards something which right reason rejects’14 – is countered by temperance, the second by courage. To exercise temperance and courage is not to suppress emotion (to do so would frustrate the operation of our nature) but to regulate and moderate attraction and withdrawal so that they serve rather than inhibit active adherence to reason’s good. The obstacle to such adherence is not affectivity tout court but unformed and unruly affectivity. Correction of this deformation cannot be achieved simply by commands. What is needed is our preservation in the pursuit of the good by those virtues which rectify, moderate and steer the affections so that they serve the establishment of the order of reason in human affairs.

III Courage is firmness of mind, firmitas animi; it is a consistent and persistent set of the mind on some known good by which action is directed. Ambrose speaks of ‘the courage of the mind’: ‘rightly is that called fortitude, when a man conquers himself, restrains his anger, yields and gives way to no allurements, is not put out by misfortunes, nor gets elated by good success, and does not get carried away by every varying change as by some chance wind . . . [W]hat is more noble and splendid than to train the mind, keep down the flesh, and redirect it to subjection, so that it may obey commands, listen to reason, and in undergoing labours readily carry out the intention and wishes of the mind?’15 Aquinas picks up the point: most generally described, courage is the steadfastness with which good is pursued, and in this sense it is ‘a condition of each and every virtue’.16 In a more specific 13.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.1 resp. 14.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.1 resp. 15.  Ambrose, De officiis I.36.181. 16.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.2 resp.; see also 123.11 resp.; IaIIae.61.2 resp.

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sense, however, courage may be taken to mean ‘firmness of mind in enduring or repulsing whatever makes steadfastness outstandingly difficult; that is, particularly serious dangers’.17 It is this particular determination of courage – that steadfastness ‘by which a man refuses to yield to hostile forces deterring him from good’18 – with which Aquinas is especially concerned in his treatise. It is important to recognize the external orientation of firmitas animi. The worth of courage does not simply consist in purposive exercise of our powers, and in the sense of integrity and command of self which such exercise engenders. Courage is not simply a matter of ‘laying claim to one’s own character, giving it a shape and thereby making it one’s own’.19 What matters in courage is not so much the expansion of the self as its extension beyond itself towards the good – a matter whose importance can readily be seen in distinguishing courage from mere daredevilry. Courage is firmness of mind exercised in relation to difficulties which engender fear. In his earlier discussion of fear in the Prima Secundae, Aquinas identifies the object of fear as ‘future evil which escapes the control of the fearful person so that he is unable to withstand it’.20 Faced with such evil, fear takes flight. In one sense, fear is natural disinclination from that which is ‘repulsive to one’s natural desire for one’s own existence’.21 But because the impulse to have and maintain oneself is subordinate to our orientation to God as our ultimate good, it cannot be permitted to run its course isolated and unchecked, because it may inhibit pursuit of that ultimate good as presented to us by reason. The task of courage in this matter is to restrain fear and so ‘remove the hindrance which holds back the will from following reason’.22 More specifically, ‘retreat from a difficult situation is characteristic of fear, for fear connotes withdrawal before a formidable evil . . . Accordingly, courage is chiefly concerned with fears of difficulties likely to cause the will to retreat from following the lead of reason’.23 Chief among the fears which courage restrains is fear of death. Aquinas is characteristically concerned with any virtue simpliciter, in its maximal 17.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.2 resp. 18.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.124.2 ad 1. 19.  Bowlin, ‘Rorty and Aquinas on Courage and Contingency’, p. 406. 20.  Summa theologiae IaIIae.41.4 resp (ET altered). 21.  Summa theologiae IaIIae.41.3 resp. 22.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.3 resp. 23.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.3 resp.

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modulation, since a virtue ‘always presses to its own utmost objective’,24 and in that its distinctive properties are most fully manifest. And so ‘courage is properly employed in sustaining all misfortunes. But a man is not unreservedly considered brave because he endures just any sort of trouble, but only because he endures the very greatest evils well.’25 Circa majora major fortitudo consistit.26 Death is ‘the most dreaded of all bodily ills’ because it ‘removes all bodily goods’; and so virtus fortitudinis est circa timores periculorum mortis.27 We may prescind from the question of whether courage is chiefly concerned with death in warfare, with martyrdom or with other mortal dangers, and focus on why it should be that ‘dangers of death’ are the primary object of courage.28 Aquinas picks up a passage from Augustine: ‘Among all things that are possessed in this life, the body is, by God’s most righteous laws, for the sin of old, man’s heaviest bond, which is well-­known as a fact, but most incomprehensible in its mystery. Lest this bond be shaken and disturbed, the soul is shaken with the fear of toil and pain; lest it should be lost and destroyed, the soul is shaken with the fear of death. For the soul loves it from the force of habit, not knowing that by using it well and wisely its resurrection and reformation will, by the divine help and decree, be without any trouble made subject to its authority.’29 Why do we fear death? Because we are both embodied and vulnerable. Our present mode of existence, in which we have life in conjunction with having a body, means that we are not inviolable, that we are susceptible to damage and loss. Moreover, because we are fallen, awareness of our mortality fills us with dread that loss of the body will mean the end of life. This fear is intense, not only because of disordered attachment to our present state of embodiment, but because love of life is supereminent and natural. ‘Fear springs from love’ and ‘it is natural to love one’s own life’.30 Courage does not despise this natural love of life. Its task is not to eliminate fear by eradicating the love of life which produces fear of its injury or loss, but rather to moderate that fear and overcome the withdrawal from reason’s good caused by the bondage to the body which in turn causes us to ignore our ultimate end. 24.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.4 resp. 25.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.4 ad 1. 26.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.5 obj. 2. 27.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.4 resp. 28.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.5 resp. 29.  Augustine, De moribus ecclesiae catholicae 22.40. 30.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.4 ad 2; see also IaIIae 94.2 resp.

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Such, then, is the object of courage: fear of evil which inhibits movement towards good. Courage is chiefly displayed in acts of endurance, though subordinately in attack, that is, in vigorous action against an opposing force. The division of courage into endurance and attack will be important in Aquinas’s detailed anatomy of the parts of courage (QQ 128–38), but the priority of endurance is established in the first question of the treatise. ‘The chief activity of courage is not so much attacking as enduring, or standing one’s ground amidst dangers.’31 The precedence of endurance is instructive for Aquinas’s understanding of courage as a whole. Endurance is a richer, more spacious mode of action, and one less exposed to corruption than the action of aggression. Partly this is because we endure assault from a stronger force, but attack things which are weaker; partly because one who endures faces immediate danger rather than the future dangers which attack may expect; partly, again, because endurance is extended over time, whereas attack is sudden and of short duration. Underlying these distinctions is Aquinas’s sense that – appearances notwithstanding – endurance denotes greater interior power since it involves ‘the action of the soul clinging most bravely to some good’.32 Maintaining one’s position unchanged rather than the élan of spirit in striking out of evil: this is more characteristic of true courage. Seeing this makes Aquinas cautious about audacity and the use of anger,33 and quick to qualify the kind of delight which follows from the exercise of courage,34 and it pushes him to modify the notion of attack into magnanimity and magnificence. And it is one of the factors which leads him to consider martyrdom an act of the highest perfection, since it is linked to endurance (the primary act of courage) rather than to aggression (courage’s secondary act). The endurance of martyrs is an act of the highest courage most of all because its primary impulse is love. In the course of his treatise, Aquinas says relatively little about this (Augustinian) theme beyond such occasional remarks as ‘well-­ordered love is found in any virtue whatsoever’.35 But it grounds the entire treatise, for only love of God can impel us to follow reason’s direction, to endure temporal evil and loss of temporal goods, to face death.

31.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.6 resp. 32.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.6 ad 2. 33.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.10. 34.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.8 resp. 35.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.125.2 resp.; see also 139.2 ad 2, and 23.8.

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IV One of the ways in which moral intelligence enables specification, and therefore more effective performance, of a virtue, is by discriminating it from its opposing vices. Contrast illuminates and clarifies, and thereby directs the energies of the soul: not that, but this, in this way. In Aquinas’s anatomy, there are three opposing vices: fear, fearlessness, and audacity, each instructive about the nature of courage. Not fear, but disordered fear, is sinful. Fear is proper to our constitution as affective creatures who love and preserve their given life, and flee from all that would precipitate its loss. Fear, however, can be disordered. For Aquinas, the ordering of appetites, whether of attraction or repulsion, in accordance with reason, is basic to their operation: ‘the good of a human action lies in due order’, and ‘due order demands that appetite be subject to the rule of reason’36 – subject, that is, to the truth of our nature in relation to God. But again, our affective life is not immune to corruption; it is a domain of sin. Sin muddles the order of the appetites; we pursue what should be shunned, we shun what should be pursued. Fear is an instance of the latter disorder. ‘When appetite avoids particular things which reason commands us to endure, so that we may not abandon other objectives which we should pursue, such fear is disordered and becomes sinful.’37 And so ‘fear is a sin in the sense that it is disordered, that is, in so far as it avoids what reason demands should not be avoided’.38 Fear avoids the good because of the pain involved in its pursuit; courage, by contrast, bears pain for the sake of the good. But this discrimination of courage from fear is insufficient; further specifications are needed, because courage is opposed not only by fear as its defect but by fearlessness and audacity as its excesses (the idiom of defect and excess, and the identification of true virtue as a mean, has remarkable explanatory power). Why is fearlessness (intimiditas) sinful? The root of the vice is not simply a swollen head which believes itself sufficient to deal with all comers, or dim-­wittedness which fails to grasp the dangers which it faces. Most of all, fearlessness is ‘insufficient love’,39 a failure to love life as we ought. ‘[I]f a man falls below the due measure of love of temporal goods, this is against the basic tendency of his nature, and is consequently a sin . . . 36.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.125.1 resp. 37.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.125.1 resp. 38.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.125.3 resp. 39.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.126.1 resp.

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It is possible for someone to fear death and other temporal evils less than he should, because he loves life and its goods less than he should.’40 The fearless person has only a semblance of courage, because courage values life but is prepared to endure its deprivation for the sake of the good of reason. Because this is so, courage involves ‘a calculated and reasonable fear’, whereas fearlessness is a deficiency of this fear, a failure to fear what we ‘ought to fear’.41 Courage does not ignore or underestimate threats to well-­being: it endures. Fearlessness, by contrast, is indiscriminate attack, not directed to the good of reason, but simply a rush of self-­confident vitality. Fearlessness is close cousin to audacity. When governed by reason, audacity can be a kind of godly daring which does not shy from opposing that which opposes life (this positive sense of audacia is set out earlier in IaIIae.45). But the passio of daring ‘sometimes lacks the balance of reason, either through excess or through deficiency, and in this way becomes wicked’.42 Immoderate daring is not courage but recklessness; not clear-­ sighted facing of fear, but ‘an imperfectly-­formed spiritedness’43 which lacks calm, truthful apprehension of the good and its opponents. Courage, by contrast, involves the ‘measure of reason’,44 that is, moderation by which we avoid the deficiencies and excesses which inhibit orderly enactment of our affective nature. Moderation is not bland, cautious ‘balance’; it is truthful exercise of virtue in relation to good, and the distinction of true virtue from its inflated or shrunken versions.

V Courage is a movement of life whose practice involves discriminating and sober assessment of the possibilities and limits of our situation and its threats, and of the capacities which we bring to that situation. Acting courageously requires knowledge and love of God our highest good, and of the subordinate goods of created life. And it also demands moderation of the emotions, so that, fittingly directed they assist in and do not detract from pursuit of these goods. 40.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.126.1 resp. 41.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.126.2 resp. 42.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.127.1 resp. 43. Yearley, Mencius and Aquinas, p. 122. 44.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.126.2 resp.

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Courage is not an isolated element in the moral life. It makes its contribution to human flourishing as it both informs and is informed by other human powers. As one of the cardinal virtues, courage ‘never stands alone’,45 being inseparable from prudence, justice and temperance. Courage is only a human excellence when exerted prudently, justly and temperately; the other virtues require steadfastness of mind for their perfect operation. Gregory, for example, comments (negatively) that ‘each separate virtue is of less worth in proportion as the others are wanting . . . one virtue without another is either none at all or but imperfect’, and (positively) that the ‘first four virtues . . . are severally so far perfect in proportion as they are mutually joined to one another’.46 Detached from justice, courage is mere crushing force; detached from prudence, it is mere daring. Courage is also allied to a range of corollary and subordinate virtues, and its full description must be completed by a presentation of these. Aquinas is especially drawn to this feature of courage; much of the bulk of the treatise is taken up with close analysis of the ‘parts’ of courage (QQ 128–38). His aim is to fill out his anatomy of courage by displaying its association with other constituents of well-­developed moral character.47 Aquinas opens his treatment by recalling the division of courage into attack and endurance already introduced when discussing the principal act of courage in Q123.6, and proceeds to offer further subdivisions, Aristotle and Cicero providing much of the content, though it is substantially reshaped as Aquinas annexes it for his own purposes. Courage as attack – the assertion of our nature and movement of life against that by which it is threatened – is distributed as magnanimity (expansion of the soul in readiness for strenuous action) and magnificence (accomplishment of great deeds). Courage as endurance – sustaining our life-­movement when faced with formidable opposing evils – is divided into patience (by which we resist dejection) and perseverance (by which we overcome the weariness 45.  Ambrose, De officiis I.35.176. 46. Gregory the Great, Moralia XXII.2; see here Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, pp.  123–5; the point is considered by Aquinas at Summa theologiae IIaIIae.123.11, 12. 47. Yearley, Mencius and Aquinas, pp.  33f. finds the account vitiated by false harmonisation of divergent moral cultures, by excessive symmetry and by occlusion of certain virtues as they are subsumed under courage. On the contrary: far from prosecuting ‘a rational coherence that falsifies the actual state of affairs’ (p.  34), Aquinas is trying to preserve the irreducibly compound nature of the moral life.

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which causes us to lose heart). Each of these four parts of courage is analysed along with the several vices to which they are opposed. The essentials can be displayed by considering magnanimity and patience. Courageous action arises from a certain greatness of soul characterized by aspiration, that extensio animi ad magna which furnishes the energy and resolution required by fortitude. ‘A man is called magnanimous chiefly because he has the spirit for some great act.’48 It is this which the courageous person takes to situations in which the virtue is to be exercised; by it, ‘the mind is strengthened for a strenuous task’.49 Of itself, magnanimity does not suffice; only as it is joined to courage does it become strength of mind for a task which is not only strenuous but requires steadfastness in face of mortal peril. Yet without this subordinate virtue we would be immobilized by danger and incapable of courageous sustaining of the movement of life. Not all extensions of the spirit are praiseworthy. As courage is to be distinguished from fearlessness and audacity, so magnanimity is to be differentiated from its excesses: presumption, ambition and vainglory. Presumption takes upon itself what is beyond its powers. At first blush, the soul’s movement in presumption is scarcely distinguishable from that in magnanimity, in that there is an extensio animi; but it is a disorderly extension, against the order of divine reason in which acts are to be proportionate to the given powers of the agent. And so ‘it is . . . perverse and sinful, being as it were against the natural order, for anyone to take upon himself to tackle what is above his powers’.50 ‘The presumptuous man . . . goes too far . . . in respect of his own capacities, which the magnanimous man does not exceed. In this sense presumption is opposed to magnanimity by excess.’51 More deeply, there is in presumption a disturbance of the creature’s relation to God: sometimes a failure to realize that we are to rely upon divine help;52 or perhaps excessive confidence in God’s mercy,53 and lack of fear of God. Ambition is an ‘inordinate appetite for recognition’.54 In this extension of the soul, an incidental product of magnanimity – the ‘respect accorded to someone in witness of his excellence’55 – becomes the end to which the 48.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.129.1 resp. 49.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.129.5 resp. 50.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.130.1 resp. 51.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.130.2 resp. 52.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.130.1 ad 3. 53.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.130.2 ad 1. 54.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.131.1 resp (ET altered). 55.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.131.1 resp.

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agent aspires. All manner of distortions follow: failure to grasp that ‘man is not the source of his own excellence’, or that excellence is ‘a divine gift’;56 failure to use excellence justly, for the benefit of others;57 transgression of the rule of reason in the appetite for what is good.58 Vainglory introduces similar distortions of magnanimity. As ambition has a disturbed relation to the good of honour, vainglory has a disturbed relation to glory – that is, to that human radiance which is ‘the manifestation by someone of a thing which in our eyes seems beautiful, whether it is a physical or spiritual good’.59 The disturbance lies in the vanity of the desired glory: ‘a desire for empty or vain glory does denote a fault, for it is sinful to seek any vain thing’.60 Glory is empty when that for which one seeks glory is unworthy, or when the person from whom one seeks it is unworthy, or when the desire for glory is not applied to honouring God or helping our neighbour. Presumption, ambition and vainglory are distortions of the life-­ movement of magnanimity; courageous persons, knowing that they lie close to hand even in the exercise of steadfastness of mind, will shun them. Yet the distortions should not dissuade us from recognizing that there is, indeed, an orderly, virtuous and necessary extension of the soul. Disorderly extension cannot be overcome by the soul’s retraction, for such retraction is itself a repudiation of our nature. This refusal to extend the soul to great things – pusillanimity – causes a person ‘to fall short of his capability’ and so to fail ‘to achieve an aim commensurate with his powers’.61 The underlying principle here – that human creatures do indeed have capacities – is of great consequence in apprehending courage and acting courageously, as well as in distinguishing courage from associated vices. Courage is possible and necessary because to be a creature is to be empowered to act. ‘It can be said that the pusillanimous man is worthy of great things because of the disposition to virtue which is in him, whether because of good natural qualities, or knowledge, or material endowment. He becomes pusillanimous when he refuses to employ these to attain virtue.’62 The refusal is sinful because it opposes the ‘natural inclination to undertake action commensurate with its 56.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.131.1 resp. 57.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.131.1 resp. 58.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.131.1 ad 1. 59.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.132.1 resp. 60.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.132.1 resp. 61.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.133.1 resp. 62.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.133.1 ad 2.

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capability’, thereby contradicting the ‘law of nature’.63 Law is both indicative and imperative; it indicates both the structure and end of the being with which we have been endowed and the necessity of enacting that being, which is partly constituted by a set of abilities. Without the exercise of these abilities, we exist in self-­contradiction and ‘hold back from the greatness of which [we are] worthy’.64 Courage is empowered by the magnanimous extension of the soul in correspondence with the law of our nature. The deep foundation of this is a theology of createdness – a point of significance if we are to distinguish an account such as that of Aquinas from later conceptions of courage as self-­assertion tout court (Spinoza is exemplary).65 Like all creaturely virtue, courage is a moved human movement: no less a movement for being moved, no less moved for being a movement. The life-­movement of courage involves steadfastness of spirit in face of countervailing forces, and so has patience as one of its corollaries, for patience serves endurance. Courageous persons encounter the need to retain the good of reason against the impetus passionum, the pressure exerted by strong emotion. In particular, they need to resist the sorrow (tristitia) generated by sustained exposure to difficulty in pursuing the good of our nature. It is for this reason that ‘patience . . . is associated with courage as an ally to a main virtue’,66 for ‘the task of patience is to ensure that we do not abandon virtue’s good through dejection . . . however great’.67 Courage requires both refusal of flight from fearful evils and refusal of dejection. Patience is a capacity to suffer, but it entails no abandonment of our proper movement of life and its orientation; indeed, its very task is to prevent the closing down of the soul which sorrow effects. Yet patience takes us beyond our natural capacity to put up with what is burdensome. Its spring is ‘supernatural love’.68 There are certainly approximations to patience in our dealings with temporal, bodily matters (acquisition of health may involve endurance of temporary pain); but properly understood, patience is a caritate causatur. This, because patience 63.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.133.1 resp. (ET altered). 64.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.133.2 resp. 65.  Benedict de Spinoza, Ethica, in Carl Gebhardt, ed., Benedict de Spinoza. Opera, vol. 2 (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1925), III, prop. LIX (pp. 188f.); IV, prop. IV (pp. 212f.). 66.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.136.4 resp. 67.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.136.4 ad 2. 68.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.136.3 ad 3.

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is not mere toleration of difficulty but toleration of difficulty ‘for the sake of future good’69 – that future good being the perfection of our nature in union with God. Disorderly affection inhibits us in this by concupiscence which tugs against the ‘inclination of reason’.70 Only by charity – by the reordering of our love so that it is fixed upon God above all things – can that tug be resisted; and ‘we cannot have charity unless by grace’.71 With this, we reach the penultimate question of the treatise, de dono fortitudinis (Q 139). Its brevity and late placement may suggest that it is an afterthought. Not so. The question is best read as making explicit what has been assumed all through Aquinas’s scrutiny of the phenomena of courage, namely that creatures realize themselves only as they are realized by divine goodness. In both its integral and its corrupted states, our nature needs divine help to will and to do any good whatsoever – this, because we are not self-­moved. After the fall, however, even though creatures are not ‘deprived of the whole good proper to nature’,72 we require healing in order to reach the full scope of virtue. We must be moved in order to move. Certainly, we can exercise a certain steadfastness of mind ‘in a way which is natural and peculiar to [us]’.73 But this is not enough: a further divine work is needed for courage to reach its fullest extension. This is the Spirit’s work. ‘The Holy Spirit moves the human mind further, in order that one may reach the end of any work begun and avoid threatening dangers of any kind. This transcends human nature, for sometimes it does not lie within human power to attain the end of one’s work, or to escape evils and dangers, since sometimes these press in upon us to the point of death.’74 Most of all, attaining the end of the human creature beyond the temporal and out of reach of any possible danger requires a grace we do not possess until given by the Spirit. ‘[H]e leads us to eternal life, which is the end of all good works and the escape from all dangers. And he pours into our minds a certain confidence that this will be, refusing to admit the opposing fear. In this sense courage is defined as a gift of the Holy Spirit.’75 What, then, of precepts? What of the deontology which ensues from the ontology? Here, again, Aquinas’s brevity is striking, a single question with two articles. Why so? Partly because – unlike, say, Ambrose – he is not 69.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.136.3 ad 1. 70.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.136.3 ad 1 (ET altered). 71.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.136.3 resp. 72.  Summa theologiae IaIIae.109.2 resp. 73.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.139.1 resp. 74.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.139.1 resp. 75.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.139.1 resp.

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directly about the work of exhortation; but partly because the moral training which the Summa theologiae undoubtedly offers is undertaken in the indicative mode. ‘Precepts in law are directed towards what the lawmaker intends.’76 The imperative force of law derives from its reference to the lawgiver’s intention, and behind that the lawgiver’s identity and character. All the more reason, then, to pause over the contemplative work of moral theology without which an account of courage may quickly be reduced to the merely statutory.

VI There is a way of loving life which leads to its loss. This is a love of life which identifies life with its temporal, bodily form. Such love of life is a stranger to courage, because when it encounters the gravest of threats to that life – death itself – it is filled with fear and retreats, refusing the extension of the soul which steadfastly maintains that nothing – no tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword – can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. The courageous person can therefore hate ‘his life in this world’ (Jn 12.25) – that is, can endure its temporal dissolution with properly moderated fear, because of the supereminent worth of the good which lies on the far side of death, and which is worthy of all love. ‘He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life’: this is the metaphysical principle of courage. ‘When it is said “he that loveth”, there is to be understood in this world; he it is who shall lose it’, says Augustine. ‘ “But he that hateth”, that is, in this world, is he that shall keep it until eternal life. Surely a profound and strange declaration as to the measure of a man’s love for his own life that leads to its destruction, and of the hatred to it that secures its preservation! If in a sinful way thou lovest it, then thou dost really hate it; if in a way accordant with what is good thou has hated it, then hast thou really loved it. Happy they who have so hated their life while keeping it, that their love shall not cause them to lose it.’77 ‘The Lord is my light and my salvation: whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life: of whom shall I be afraid? . . . Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; yea, wait for the Lord!’ (Ps. 27.1, 14) 76.  Summa theologiae IIaIIae.140.1 resp. 77.  Augustine, In Johannis evangelium tractatus (NPNF 1.7), 51.10.

Chapter 7 M o rti f icatio n a n d V ivi f icatio n

I The Christian gospel is instruction about how, by the goodness of God, creatures may pass from deadly corruption to fullness of life: ‘you he made alive, when you were dead through the trespasses and sin in which you once walked’ (Eph. 2.1f.). The passage from death to life may be explained in this way . . . In his work of creation, God bestows a particular kind of life: life which is not the creature’s product or possession, and which flourishes only as it is exercised in dedicated fellowship with its creator. To this gift and condition, the gospel teaches us, the creature will not consent. Spurning life from and with the creator, the creature pursues a course of self-­origination and self-­ government, whose promises of aliveness prove illusory, leaving the creature ‘dead through trespasses’ (Eph. 2.5). But, the gospel continues, the creator’s determination to love and bless the creature is not overturned by creaturely treachery and repudiation of the divine gift of life. God is ‘rich in mercy’ and ‘out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead . . . made us alive together with Christ’ (Eph. 2.4f.). At the Father’s behest, God the Son takes to himself the creature’s wasted nature and bears (carries and suffers) its mortal corruption. In him, death runs its full course; his death – because it is his death, the death of one appointed by the Father to take away the sins of the world – is the death of death, the termination of death’s regime. Overcoming death, he manifests himself to be limitlessly alive and so the undefeated divine giver of life. Dying for us, he sets aside our old, hopelessly compromised, nature; rising again, he sets in motion our new – regenerate – nature. Like the first created nature before its fall into ruin, this new form of creaturely being and activity is not autonomous or separate from its author. Regenerate life means being ‘alive together with Christ’; it is life ‘in him’. The definitive setting aside of the old nature and the institution of the new are to be confirmed in the lives of regenerate creatures. The Son’s death

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and resurrection are the wholly sufficient, perfect work of divine grace from whose accomplishment creatures are excluded: they are ‘not your own doing’ (Eph. 2.8). Yet they also provide the pattern of regenerate living as, by the moving power of the Holy Spirit, those who are in Christ appropriate the condition in which they have been placed by divine grace. In the course of this appropriation, the regenerate must address themselves to an aspect of their situation which, more than any other, threatens to disrupt the tranquil unfolding of the new nature: though overwhelmed and set aside, the corrupt nature and its habits linger. Regenerate life in Christ is not simply a received and completed condition, but a summons actively to reiterate the death of the old nature and to perform the new, to die and rise again not only once for all but also continually. Evangelical obedience – reverent enactment of the creaturely life which the gospel manifests – entails mortification and vivification. There are, the Heidelberg Catechism tells us, two parts to the renewal of human life, ‘the mortification of the old, and the quickening of the new’ (Q88). Mortification is compunction over and resolute flight from sin – ‘sincere sorrow of heart, that we have provoked God by our sins, and more and more to hate and flee from them’ (Q89). Vivification is joyful and active compliance with God’s commands – ‘with love and delight to live according to the will of God in all good works’ (Q90). In sum, because we are incorporated into Christ, we may and must obey the summons: ‘put off your old nature . . . put on the new nature’ (Eph. 4.22, 24). Mortification and vivification are commonly treated in the course of moral and ascetical theology, those exercises of Christian intelligence which consider the conduct and discipline required and made possible by the gospel. As with any topic in the theology of the Christian life, a treatment of mortification and vivification talks about these human undertakings by talking about God and God’s work. This is necessary for two reasons. First, more formally expressed, moral and ascetical theology treat the actions of creatures, and so trace those actions back to their causes or first principles. All creaturely acts are to be understood by first considering the divine works which cause creatures to live and move. It is of the essence of creaturely activity that it is derivative, action which is set in motion and continues by virtue of antecedent principles. Because of this, the theology of the Christian life is an extension and application of the doctrine of the triune God. ‘The nature and being of God,’ says John Owen, ‘is the foundation of all true religion and wholly religious worship in the world.’1 Second, in more material terms, Christian theology does not talk of 1.  J. Owen, Pneumatologia, or a Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit [1674], in The Works of John Owen, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1967), p. 64.

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mortification and vivification by turning directly to depiction of those human works. It must first portray the regenerate nature and condition to which mortification and vivification give active expression. Regenerate works follow the regenerate condition, and to consider that condition we must consider God its author and source.2 Moreover, Christian practice is often marred by self-­absorption, whether in the form of excessive confidence in human powers of self-­realization, or in the form of restless anxiety about performance. Both threaten the flourishing of the Christian life, because both manifest mistrust in the condition in which God’s grace has placed the believer, and are accompanied by the temptation to detach mortification and vivification from the original grace of regeneration. One of the instruments for correcting these disorders in Christian living is attention to Christian teaching about God’s being and works, for such teaching draws the mind away from preoccupation with Christian practice and invites contemplation of God. It is, says Basil of Caesarea, ‘appropriate and necessary to set forth first the sound faith and sacred doctrine respecting the Father and Son and Holy Ghost, and then to add the morals.’3

II ‘It is now our only wisdom to understand our new state aright, to let its goods and ends take possession of our hearts, and conduct ourselves by the principles of our redemption’: so William Law in his Practical Treatise Upon Christian Perfection.4 Christian conduct is directed by right understanding of the Christian condition. As we come to know God in the gospel, we also come to know ourselves, our nature and vocation as regenerate creatures. ‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew’ (1 Pet. 1.3). God’s regenerating work effects the renovation of all the elements of the believer’s nature, situation and course of life. It is, accordingly, a divine work of such 2. On God as auctor and fons of the Christian life, see J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, J. T. McNeill, ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), III.vi.3. 3.  Basil, Preface on the Judgement of God in Saint Basil: Ascetical Works, Fathers of the Church [FC], vol. 9 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1962), p. 55. 4.  W. Law, A Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection in The Works of the Revd. William Law, vol. 3 (London: J. Richardson, 1762), p. 20.

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scope and originating force that its only analogy is God’s first creative act: ‘if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation’ (2 Cor. 5.17). In its newness, the Christian condition opposes, excludes and replaces an old condition. ‘The old has passed away, behold the new has come’ (2 Cor. 5.17). The old condition consists in corruption of nature and depravity of action brought about by the creature’s defiance of God and of the right order and ends of creaturely nature. Sin does not destroy that nature: after the fall, creatures remain creatures. But sin corrupts our nature, breaks it down, disintegrates it and spoils its proper operation. The mind is darkened and loses its capacity to know God, to direct the creature’s course with constancy, and to reason and judge well. The will is impotent in relation to God, but ungovernably eager in driving the creature to sin. The creature’s appetites and affections are thrown into chaos, grossly over-­ extended towards temporal things and incapable of sustained desire for God or good. The old nature is ineffectual, carnal and averse to God, and it is this nature which corrupt creatures enact in their course of life or ‘walk’ (Eph. 2.1-3). Corruption of nature and course are deadly: ‘we were dead through our trespasses’ (Eph. 2.5). This death is not non-­existence but the condition of being dead whilst alive: the ever-­advancing destruction of the creature’s moral and spiritual vitality, the absence of the aliveness which creatures enjoy by enacting their nature in fellowship with God. Regeneration sets an end to this old nature and course. The regenerate ‘once’ existed and walked in them (Eph. 2.2f., 5.8; 1 Pet. 2.10), but ‘now’ do so no longer. The author of regeneration is the triune God. God the Father purposes that there be a new creature; God the Son procures regeneration, recovering fallen creatures from destruction in his death and resurrection; God the Holy Spirit makes regeneration a creaturely reality, imparting new life, quickening creaturely powers and directing creatures to the fulfilment of their new nature. God is the first cause of the Christian condition; its instrumental cause is Christian baptism. ‘[B]y baptism a man dies to the old life of sin and begins to live the newness of grace’.5 Pietist Christians may worry that this attributes to the church’s action of baptism what ought to be attributed to God alone, encouraging reliance on rite at the expense of personal faith. But because baptism is the instrumental cause – not the source – of regeneration, its efficacy is derivative. Baptism, Aquinas goes on to say, ‘works through the power of the passion of Christ’.6 God alone effects 5.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIIa.69.1 resp. 6.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIIa.69.1 ad 3.

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regeneration, and does so applicatively through baptism, by means of which the divine gift of new life in Christ is distributed. Because baptism unites us to Christ and dispenses the benefits of his saving work, its effect is comprehensive; it is ‘the universal medicine’.7 Baptism makes the Christian’s unregenerate past into finished business: all sins are remitted, all pollution cleansed, all obligations to render satisfaction for past wrongdoing are discharged. Further, the baptized enter into a new state and are given a new nature with new capacities from which arises a new course of life. Baptism signifies both ‘the washing of regeneration’ and ‘renewal in the Holy Spirit’ (Tit. 2.5), and bestows new powers of life and activity: ‘the grace of the Holy Spirit and abundance of virtues are given in baptism’.8 Regeneration establishes (though it does not complete) a new order of being from which there comes a new course of life. The sequence is irreversible, regenerate nature preceding regenerate conduct. Regeneration is principally a ‘physical’ work – the establishment of the new nature or physis,9 and only by consequence a moral summons. The Spirit does not elicit the new nature by commending it to us as an object which we create by exercising it. Rather, the Spirit imparts the new nature by uniting corrupt creatures to Christ’s death and resurrection, in which the sinful self is crucified and the new self brought into being. This gift of the new nature includes a gift of powers and habits: ‘power’ in the sense of the ‘ability given unto us of living unto God’,10 ‘habit’ in the sense of the orientation, inclination or disposition of our new nature to regenerate living. Such powers and habits are not acquired by practice but infused by the Spirit, laid into the mind, will and affections, and preserved by God. Their presence indicates that regeneration entails obligation to a course of life, among whose chief acts are mortification and vivification.

III Mortification and vivification are necessary because the regenerate condition, irrevocably established, awaits completion. Bestowing the new nature in baptism, God introduces the baptized into a new condition and sets in motion a new manner of life. Baptism thus effects the alteration of 7.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIIa.69.1 ad 3. 8.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIIa.69.4 s.c. 9. On this, see Owen, Pneumatologia, pp. 307, 316. 10. Owen, Pneumatologia, p. 491.

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our nature and state and constitutes the point at which the regenerate person ‘begins to live the newness of grace’.11 Baptism founds and initiates the Christian life in which, over time, the image of God in the creature is steadily renewed. ‘This renewal,’ Augustine writes, ‘does not take place in the single moment of conversion itself, as that renewal in baptism takes place in a single moment by the remission of all sins . . . But as it is one thing to be free from fever, and another to grow strong again from the infirmity which the fever produced, and one thing again to pluck out of the body a weapon thrust into it, and another to heal the wound thereby made by a prosperous cure; so the first cure is to remove the cause of infirmity, and this is wrought by the forgiving of all sins; but the second cure is to heal the infirmity itself, and this takes place gradually by making progress in the renewal of that image.’12 Baptism communicates the remission of sins and inaugurates and empowers – but does not perfect – the fallen creature’s movement towards complete renewal. In Augustine’s attempts to check the perfectionist impulse of Pelagianism, much turned on the distinction between remission and perfect renovation. ‘It is not from the moment of a man’s baptism that all his old infirmity is destroyed, but renovation begins with the remission of all his sins . . . All things else, however, are accomplished in hope, looking forward to their being also realized in fact.’13 The ‘fault’ of fallen human nature is ‘already remitted’ by God’s healing grace, but ‘under the hands of the same physician nature as yet strives with its sickness’.14 The medical metaphor of a decisive intervention followed by extended recovery indicates both the alteration effected by baptismal cleansing and remission of sins, and the progressive, prospective character of perfection. Regeneration cannot be collapsed into an instant and does not render moral history superfluous. Our renewal, Augustine writes elsewhere, ‘awaits perfection’, our sanctification ‘is at present only growing day by day.’15 Or again: ‘not only all the sins, but all the ills of men of what kind soever, are in course of renewal by the holiness of that Christian laver whereby Christ cleanses his church, that he may present 11.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIIa.69.1 resp. 12.  Augustine, De trinitate XIV.17; Augustine finds the distinction of ‘first’ and ‘second’ cures in Ps. 103.3, which speaks of a double work of God who ‘forgives all your iniquities’ and ‘heals all your diseases’. 13.  Augustine, De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo parvulorum (NPNF 1.5), II.vii.9. 14.  Augustine, De continentia (NPNF 1.3), VII.18. 15.  Augustine, De perfectione justitiae hominis (NPNF 1.5), XVIII.39.

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it to himself, not in this world, but in that which is to come, as not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing.’16 This movement of the Christian life towards perfection is not the easy enlargement of the condition of regeneration: it is conflictual, a matter of warfare or combat. ‘Whoever wishes to please God and truly make himself an enemy against the adversary must wage battle.’17 Why so? After baptism, the Christian exists in a mixed condition, under a double determination of old and new, Adam and Christ. ‘In so far as we are born of God we abide in him who appeared to take away sins, that is, in Christ, and sin not – which is simply that “the inward man is renewed day by day”; but in so far as we are born of that man “through whom sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed to all men”, we are not without sin, because we are not as yet free from his infirmity, until, by that renewal which takes place from day to day . . . that infirmity shall be wholly repaired, wherein we were born from the first man, and in which we are without sin.’18 Moreover, because these two states are not intermittent but simultaneous, the Christian cannot escape internal division, the discord which Barth calls ‘a quarrel or falling out [Auseinandersetzung] with himself ’19: ‘already the new man . . . he is still the old.’20 Even after baptism unites us to Christ, concupiscence – inordinate desire inclining us to evil – ‘is not removed all at once . . . for not even to those who are of riper years is it given in baptism . . . that the law of sin which is in their members, warring against the law of their mind, should be entirely extinguished, and cease to exist.’21 Vestiges of corruption remain: and what vestiges they are! Compelling and persistent enough to drive the Christian into a wretched frame, harassed by contrary impulses and the proximity of wickedness; ‘I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am!’ (Rom. 7.21-4).

16.  Augustine, De nuptiis et concupiscentia (NPNF 1.5), I.xxxiv.39. 17.  Pseudo-Macarius, The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1992), XXI.9. 18.  Augustine, De perfectione justitiae hominis XVIII.39. 19. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), p. 570. 20.  Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2, p. 571. 21.  Augustine, De peccatorum meritis et remissione I.xxxix.70.

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Nevertheless, in this conflicted state the unregenerate and the regenerate do not possess equal power; they are simultaneous but incommensurate. Christians may be miserably in contention with themselves, but the dispute is not ambiguous or undecided so that Christians can enjoy no certainty about its final issue. Christians are conflicted, not because they still await the conclusive alteration of their condition, but because it has already been made and communicated to them, and is now realizing itself and moving towards consummation. No inner division by which the baptized are afflicted can call into question the Father’s work of determination, the Son’s work of reconciliation, the Spirit’s work of transformation. Paul ends his list of sinful persons in 1 Corinthians 6 – idolaters, the sexually depraved, thieves, drunkards and the rest – with: ‘such were some of you’ (1 Cor. 6.11). But, he goes on, ‘you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and in the Spirit of our God’ (1 Cor. 6.11). The Son and the Spirit bring about an entirely changed relation to our fallen nature even as its vestiges remain. Delight in the law of God is the Christian’s ‘inmost self’ (Rom. 7.21, 25); whatever ‘other law’ may be ‘at war with the law of my mind’ (Rom. 7.23), however determinedly it may harry the Christian and cause the Christian to stumble, is already ruined and marked for condemnation. A portrayal of the regenerate condition as ‘intermediate’22 – unalterably instituted by God, conflicted, and yet on the way to perfection – is very different from a perfectionist picture which maintains the possibility of the completion of renovation and the end of Christian conflict before death. Is sinlessness possible in this life? Augustine hesitates before returning a negative answer: the possibility should be allowed, lest we expect too little of divine grace, but, though there could be such sinless persons, in actuality there are none. ‘There are . . . on earth righteous men, there are great men, brave, prudent, chaste, patient, pious, merciful, who endure all kinds of temporal evil with an even mind for righteousness’ sake . . . [but] they are not without sin.’23 Perfectionism simplifies the regenerate condition by holding out the attractive but theologically and spiritually dubious prospect of early resolution of its mixed, conflict-­laden character. Regeneration does not effect cessation of sin but the alteration of the Christian’s relation to the sin which continues, by establishing a new principle of existence with which sin is out of conformity. This constitutes what P. T. Forsyth calls ‘the difference between the saint’s sin and the sinner’s

22.  Augustine, De nuptiis et concupiscentia I.xxix.32. 23.  Augustine, De peccatorum meritis et remissione II.xiii.18.

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sin’.24 ‘No one who abides in him sins’ (1 Jn 3.6) – not in the sense that the regenerate cease to commit sin, but in the sense that the sins which they commit have no deep ground since the regenerate are ‘in him’. Perfectionism treats regeneration as a visibly completed accomplishment rather than as a divine transformation which anticipates a conclusion. The cost of this early resolution of Christian conflict is not only a diminished sense of the Christian life as temporal process involving repeated confession and absolution (1 Jn 1.8f.), but also a failure to grasp that sanctification no less than justification is inseparable from faith, that is, from reliance upon an extrinsic life-­principle which is not identical with our persons and conduct. The present course and future outcome of Christian conflict are conditioned by the supereminent reality of Jesus Christ ‘who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father’ (Gal. 1.4). This deliverance comprehends both an objective change in condition and the renewal of creaturely nature and capacities. Christians engage in moral and spiritual conflict according to their regenerate nature, freed from accusation by the remission of all wrongdoing, and having the drive to sin diminished by Spirit-­bestowed habits of holiness. Further, Christian conflict is the arena for exercising the capacities which regenerative grace confers on those who are united to Christ at baptism. In their struggle to enact the new nature, Christians are not powerless. ‘By baptism a person is reborn in the life of the Spirit which is proper to the faithful of Christ . . . But there is no life if the members are not united to the head from which they receive feeling and motion. Thus it is necessary that a person be incorporated by baptism into Christ as a member of his. But as feeling and motion flow from the natural head to the members, so from the spiritual head, which is Christ, there flow to his members spiritual feeling, which is the knowledge of truth, and spiritual motion, which results from the impulse of grace . . . It follows, then, that the baptized are enlightened by Christ in the knowledge of truth, and made fruitful by him in the fruitfulness of good works by the infusion of grace.’25 The principal forms of these good works are mortification and vivification.

24.  P. T. Forsyth, Christian Perfection (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1899), p. 30. 25.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIIa.69.5 resp.

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IV What kind of creaturely practices are mortification and vivification? They may be described in terms of (1) their formal features, and (2) their material content. 1.  Mortification and vivification are practices in the state of regeneration, enacting the regenerate nature. They must to be understood in relation to their ground in the works of God and the conditions, benefits, movements, requirements and prohibitions to which these works give rise. Mortification and vivification do not effect regeneration (how could creatures cause themselves to be born anew? Jn 3.5 . . .) but endorse the regeneration which has already been instituted. Mortification and vivification are therefore bound up with recollection of Jesus Christ and fellowship with him. The daily dying and rising again which are the shape of Christian conduct begin with recall of the principal elements of the Son’s achievement into which Christians are incorporated: ‘Do you not know’, writes Paul with some exasperation to those who ought to know, ‘that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life’ (Rom. 6.3f.). By recollection Christians return to the foundation of their conduct and hold communion with Christ. John Owen speaks of believers continually ‘eyeing’ Christ, looking upon him, contemplating him and the efficacy of his regenerative work: ‘they roll it in their minds and spirits’.26 Recalling and studying Christ, believers set themselves and their practices in a right relation to their source. The practices of mortification and vivification are also bound up with wakefulness to the Holy Spirit, by whom the Son’s work of regeneration is applied and advances to completeness. It is of the essence of mortification and vivification that they are human undertakings authored and animated by God, practices whose energy and issue are not intrinsic but derived from the Spirit whom Owen calls their ‘great efficient’ or ‘great sovereign cause’.27 These practices are duties for whose fulfilment only the divine 26.  J. Owen, Of Communion with God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost [1657] in The Works of John Owen, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), p. 203. 27.  J. Owen, Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers [1656] in The Works of John Owen, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1967), p. 16.

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Spirit is sufficient. ‘All other ways of mortification are vain, all helps leave us helpless; it must be done by the Spirit . . . Mortification from a self-­strength, carried on by ways of self-­invention, unto the end of a self-­righteousness, is the soul and substance of all false religion in the world.’28 Deriving from and continually referred to Christ and the Spirit, mortification and vivification are, like all sanctified works, practices of faith, having their rise in knowledge of and trustful assent to the divine attainment. They are not a frantic struggle to maintain fellowship with God: that struggle lies behind the believer, finished on Easter Day. Christians do not persevere because they put off the old nature and put on the new; they put off the old nature and put on the new because in faith they trust that they will persevere. Faith refers creatures and their practices to the divine work which precedes them and brings them to life. Mortification and vivification are also practices of faith. To have faith in God’s regenerative work is not only to know and trust the new condition and nature, but also to recognize that this condition and nature have their telos in the renewal of creaturely life and activity. The Spirit heals our disrupted and weakened nature, restoring created powers of life and directing them in obedience to God. Mortification and vivification are the active unfolding and extension of the new nature in the exercise of its capabilities. Because this is so, mortification and vivification are creaturely movements moved by God, in two senses. First, they are not self-­initiated movements but movements which are consequent upon Christ’s death and resurrection. Second, they are proper creaturely movements whose integrity is not compromised but upheld by the work of the Spirit who causes them, invests them with power, accompanies them and brings them to fulfilment. In a mid-­seventeenth-­century treatise on the Christian life, The Trial of a Christian’s Growth, Thomas Goodwin wrote that, though mortification is ‘a work of God upon us . . . in this work of mortification . . . we are not mere passives . . . So as those means whereby God purgeth us are not to be imagined to do it as mere physical agents, like as the pruning-­hook cuts off branches from a tree, as when a surgeon cuts out dead flesh; but these means do it by stirring up our graces, and quickening them, and by setting our thoughts, and faith, and affections, a-­work against sin, and so to cast it forth.’29 Cultural and spiritual bad habit inclines us to oppose God’s moving 28. Owen, Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers, p. 7. 29.  T. Goodwin, The Trial of a Christian’s Growth in Mortification, or purging out corruption; and Vivification, or bringing forth more fruit [1643], in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1861), pp. 474f.

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and our moving of ourselves, fearing that acts caused by God are not properly ours. But ‘God is at work in you, both to will and to do’ (Phil. 2.13). God works ‘interiorly’, animating and preserving the exercise of created will and aptitudes; grace does not devastate creatures but rectifies them and sets them to work. Mortification and vivification are works of ‘evangelical obedience’, again in two senses. First, the obedience is evangelical because its root is lively apprehension of and attachment to what the gospel announces about God’s renovation of creatures. There are moralist counterfeits: natural habits of temperance and decency, laudable enough and in some respects formally similar to evangelical obedience; but they do not derive from Christ, ‘the head of influence, the spring and fountain of spiritual life’.30 Second, mortification and vivification are practices of evangelical obedience, because they are dutiful, loving compliance with the law which the gospel entails. The gospel is both declaration and exhortation: declaration first, but also – because it is the declaration of the rebirth of creaturely vocation – exhortation to walk in newness of life. In sum: mortification and vivification are good works: human practices which proceed from trust in ‘the completed good work of God’,31 which observe the law of the gospel, which have God’s honour as their end, and which cause creaturely nature to flourish. 2.  Mortification and vivification are practices which conform to the pattern and follow the example of Christ’s death and resurrection into which believers are incorporated by baptism. His dying and rising again provide both the principle and the basic shape of Christian conduct. The regenerate are ‘dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 6.11) and their continuing course of life has the corresponding form of putting to death the vestiges of the old nature and walking in newness of life. Is this correspondence between Christ’s saving work and the Christian life suitably designated ‘imitation of Christ’? The language may prove Christologically hazardous. It may elide the distinction between Christ and the Christian, envisaging Christ as merely the first in a series, as a dispenser of moral instruction, as a lawgiver or a model for emulation. It may detach Christian moral and ascetical practices from their ground in Christ’s office as redeemer, and may fail to grasp the drastic redrawing of the believers’ relation to their moral lives which redemption entails. Yet the language of 30.  J. Owen, Pneumatologia, p. 514. 31.  Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2, p. 589.

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imitation may still serve to indicate that Christology is both dogmatic and moral. Christology is dogmatic contemplation of Jesus Christ in his eternal deity, his divine humanity and his saving offices. As he fulfils his offices, he is both wholly outside and beyond us and also for us and in us, the cause and archetype of moral renovation. In his treatise On Perfection, Gregory of Nyssa notes that ‘our good master, Jesus Christ, bestowed on us a partnership in his revered name’, so that Christological questions and questions about the Christian life, though they ought not to be confused, may not easily be separated. We must, he suggests, both ‘understand reverently what we believe [Christ] is when he is called upon by this name’ and ‘learn clearly what sort of persons we should be shown to be as a result of our zeal for this way of life and our use of his name as the instructor and guide for our life.’32 Calvin, similarly, suggests that Scripture’s moral teaching commonly proceeds by enumerating divine works and blessings and finding in them materials for exhortation. ‘Scripture draws its exhortation from the true fountain. It not only enjoins us to refer our life to God, its author, to whom it is bound; but after it has taught that we have degenerated from the true origin and condition of our creation, it also adds that Christ, through whom we return into favour with God, has been set before us as an example, whose pattern we ought to express in our life.’33 Acquitted by Christ and conformed to him, the regenerate are summoned to creaturely reduplication of the moments of his redemptive work, without compromising its uniqueness and finality. In their conduct, Christians may ‘become like [Christ] in his death’ (Phil. 2.10) because (and only because) Christ ‘gave himself ’ for them and they ‘have been crucified with Christ’ (Gal. 2.20). Because ‘Christ lives in’ them (Gal. 2.20), they may ‘live to God’. ‘He himself ’ – unsubstitutably – ‘bore our sins in his body on the tree’ (1 Pet. 1.24), but in so doing he also left ‘an example, that you should follow in his steps’ (1 Pet. 2.21), ‘that we might die to sin and live to righteousness’ (1 Pet. 2.24). How may these practices of dying and living be described?

V 1.  By mortification is meant the disciplined practices in which renewed creatures, reconciled to God by Christ’s meritorious death and moved by 32. Gregory of Nyssa, On Perfection, in Ascetical Works, FC 58 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1967), p. 96. 33.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.vi.3.

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the Holy Spirit, repudiate, resist and do away with the remnants of the old ‘earthly’ nature which has been disqualified but which nevertheless persists ‘in’ us (Col. 3.5). By vivification is meant those habits of life in which renewed creatures, made alive and empowered by the Spirit, amplify their new nature, actively disclosing, confirming and exercising it. Mortification and vivification are simultaneous, not sequential. Mortification is not an initial stage which at some point in this life is left behind, for our mixed state will persist until paradise. Vivification, however, has material priority, because mortification is a practice of negation, opposing old habits of life, traces of which remain in the present but have no future, having been condemned and terminated by God. Mortification is not a permanent, essential practice of the regenerate nature but an interim necessity, and once its goal of clearing away the diseased remainders of the old nature is reached, it will no longer be required. Vivification, by contrast, is the implementation of the new nature and stretches out to perfection. In vivification we begin to perform the new nature which will endure and so complete and resolve itself that there will be no necessity for mortification. 2.  ‘Put to death what is earthly in you’. The object of mortification is the sin which remains in regenerate persons. ‘Sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, [God] condemned sin in the flesh’ (Rom. 8.3); by virtue of this divine work, the regenerate are ‘not in the flesh’ (Rom. 8.9). But though sin is wholly alien to the new nature, it continues to ‘cling closely’ (Heb. 12.1). Sin is not simply external to the regenerate: it intrudes upon them and inhabits them, ‘dwells in [their] members’ (Rom. 7.23). Mortification directs itself against this illegitimate and persistent intrusion by that which God has proscribed. Because it is directed against what trespasses upon the renovated creature, mortification is not an assault on created nature but precisely the opposite: an assault on the sin which opposes created nature’s regeneration. Against the Manichees, Augustine argues that in Christian conflict, mortification does not take up arms against nature but against ‘the fault’ (vitium).34 Christian conflict ‘is not a mingling of two natures caused by contrary principles, but a division of one against itself caused by the desert of sin’.35 And so mortification is not hatred of embodied life but opposition to death-­dealing vice, its purpose being not nature’s destruction but the ordering and forming of regenerate conduct. It is not ‘hostile persecution’, 34.  Augustine, De continentia VIII.19. 35.  Augustine, De continentia VIII.21.

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but ‘healthy chastening’ which intends the recovery and flourishing of nature.36 The first act of mortification, undergirding and accompanying all other acts, is faith in Christ, consideration of his completed work and his infinite present resourcefulness as the merciful and faithful high priest (Heb. 2.17f., 4.15f.). John Owen’s treatise on mortification is deeply stirred by the thought that Christ’s priesthood is fundamental to ascetical practice, reassuring believers with the expectation that mortification takes place in the domain of Christ’s mercy, tenderness, fidelity and assistance. ‘I shall freely say, this one thing of establishing the soul by faith in expectation of relief from Jesus Christ, on account of his mercifulness as our high priest, will be more available to the ruin of thy lust and distemper, and have better and speedier issue, than all the rigidest means of self-­maceration that ever any of the sons of men engage themselves unto.’37 Mortification is a work of continence. Continence is much broader than sexual abstinence; it is restraint of all sinful appetite and the setting aside of wicked practice.38 By continence, the regenerate resist the propensity of vestigial sin to continue to rule conduct. Sin’s persistence depends upon consent. Sin is not natural, some irresistible element of creaturely life, but an interpolation which holds out the prospect of pleasure in order to win compliance. Mortification refuses to acquiesce, and by withholding consent it despoils sin of its pretended power and clears a space for the operation of the new nature. ‘When through continence consent is withheld, the evil of the lust of the flesh, against which the lust of the spirit fights, is not suffered to harm . . . Continence also itself, when it curbs and restrains lusts, at once both seeks the good unto the immortality of which we aim, and rejects the evil with which in this mortality we contend.’39 Continence puts to death patterns of life in which the regenerate once walked but do so no longer: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, covetousness, anger, wrath, malice, slander, foul talk (Col. 3.5-8; cf. Gal. 5.19-21). And this, because regenerate life is governed by a relation to Christ which already excludes 36.  Augustine, De continentia XII.26. 37. Owen, Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers, p. 82. 38.  Classical fourth century ascetical writers such as Basil or Gregory of Nyssa consider the Christian life a kind of virginity, understood as a way of conducting life in the world which ‘pertains to all things’ (Nyssa, On Virginity XV). ‘Our whole life, conduct and moral character should be virginal, illustrating in every action the integrity required of the virgin’ (Basil, Ascetical Discourse, p. 208). 39.  Augustine, De continentia II.5, III.6.

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such practices. The regenerate ‘belong to Christ Jesus’ and so ‘have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires’ (Gal. 5.24). The enactment of this attachment to Christ is as yet imperfect. Continence operates in the situation in which regenerate persons are divided against themselves, and so it takes the form of self-­denial, that is, denial of that which the Christian once was and is no longer, but which, despite its abolition, continues to disturb. ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Mk 8.34). An invitation to pathological self-­destruction? No, because self-­denial derives from faith’s contentment with and joy in the new nature bestowed by divine love. The ‘self ’ which is denied is worthless, and can be lost without peril; indeed, to lose it is to save one’s life (Mk 8.39) by ridding oneself of an enemy. Christian self-­denial entails the renunciation of created goods when they serve as instruments for the persistence of sin and the occlusion of the new nature. Despite their new condition and nature, the regenerate continue to love evil things, or to love good things immoderately, and as they do so they consent to the falsehood that they will only be fulfilled, at rest and intact, if they maintain these loves. Renunciation breaks such attachments, freeing believers from the entanglements which may be contracted by the use of the world, and so freeing them for service of God. Renunciation severs ‘the bonds of this material and transient life’ and by it ‘we render ourselves more fit to set out upon the road leading to God’.40 Because its spring is contentment with God and God’s gift of the new nature, renunciation is pursuit of happiness. But because we are not converted in an instant, we need to be unfastened from what leads to sorrow. This detachment from cherished goods and deep-­seated habits is rarely painless. Regenerate life involves the bearing of the cross and brings affliction. ‘Renunciation is nothing but the evidence of the cross and of mortification’, Cassian instructs the ‘renunciants’. ‘And so you must know that today you are dead to this world and its deeds and desires, and that, as the apostle says, you are crucified to this world and this world to you. Consider therefore the demands of the cross under the sign of which you ought henceforth to live in this life . . . We must therefore pass our time in this life in that fashion and form in which he was crucified for us upon the cross so that . . . piercing our flesh in the fear of the Lord, we may have all our wishes and desires not subservient to our own lusts but fastened to his mortification.’41 40.  Basil, The Long Rules (FC 9), IX. 41.  Cassian, Institutes (NPNF 2.11), IV.34.

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Self-­denial may deal with aggravated attachments by cultivating indifference. ‘Let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it’ (1 Cor. 7.29-31). Indifference is not numbness; still less is it absolution from the duties of life in common. Paul’s ‘as though’ is not selfish inviolability, but refusal to ascribe such unconditional value to created goods and relations that our welfare becomes unthinkable without them. In practice mortification takes the form of a regime of training, disciplining and forming bodily, intellectual, affective and social life so that regenerate conduct eradicates the vestiges of the old nature and amplifies the new. Mortification is not simply directed to the body, for ‘bodily training is of some value’, but instrumental to growth in ‘godliness’ which ‘is of value in every way’ (1 Tim. 4.8). Training in godliness pertains to intelligence, emotions and social relations as much as to bodily life. Although the anatomies of mortification found in early ascetical manuals, such as Basil’s Long Rules or Cassian’s Institutes, deal with bodily concerns (sleep, dress, sex, food, posture, possessions, use of medicine and the like), they are more concerned with regulating elements of common life (speech and silence, keeping promises, laughter, gossip, relations between old and young, hospitality, engagement in trade, the conduct of disputes), and with the properly formed exercise of emotions like anger, sorrow or pride. Such training requires habits of self-­examination, since the persistence of the old nature makes us complacent, careless or quick to justify failure. ‘Let each one test his own work’ (Gal. 6.4). Self-­examination is not compulsive scruple, driving us further inside ourselves and inhibiting gladness at God’s gift of new life. It begins by looking beyond the self and its performance. The regenerate do not know themselves or judge themselves well, and can examine themselves only if first they ‘look into the perfect law, the law of liberty’ (Jas 1.25). Self-­examination is acknowledgement and repetition of and consent to the divine judgement upon our conduct, and so an instance of the proper use of conscience. Though mortification requires engagement in conflict, its end is peace, that is, the disposition of our persons and life-­course in a way which is orderly, collected and harmonious, enabling easy, unhindered enactment of the new nature beyond encumbrances and opposition. Sin disperses and perturbs us, keeping us ‘anxious and in a state of nervous motion’.42 42.  Pseudo-Macarius, The Fifty Spiritual Homilies V.2.

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The movement of mortification reaches out beyond present discord to rest and the full tranquil enjoyment of our new nature. ‘We shall then have perfect peace when, our nature cleaving inseparably to its creator, we shall have nothing of ourselves opposed to ourselves . . . that we may reign, in his perfect and eternal peace, without any strife of evil, and with the highest delight of good.’43 3.  As mortification proceeds, so does vivification, in the undivided and concurrent two-­fold course of regenerate life. Cassian lays out the process: ‘ “The beginning” of our salvation and “of wisdom” is, according to Scripture, “the fear of the Lord”. From the fear of the Lord arises salutary compunction. From compunction of heart springs renunciation, i.e., nakedness and contempt of all possessions. From nakedness is begotten humility, from humility the mortification of desires. Through mortification of desires all faults are extirpated and decay. By driving out faults virtues shoot up and increase. By the budding of virtues purity of heart is gained. By purity of heart the perfection of apostolic love is acquired.’44 If mortification eradicates the old nature, vivification enacts the new, which is mortification’s ‘meaning and intention’.45 Like mortification, vivification flows from knowledge of and consent to the Christian condition: ‘consider yourselves . . . alive to God’ (Rom. 6.11). It is intelligent, practical compliance with the aliveness conferred on creatures by God, and with the imperative presented by that gift: ‘walk in newness of life’ (Rom. 6.4). Regenerate aliveness is aliveness ‘to God’ (cf. Gal. 2.19) – that is, wakeful relation to God – by virtue of being ‘in Christ Jesus’. The regenerate ‘live to the Lord’ because they are ‘the Lord’s’ (Rom.14.8). Existing in the Christian condition, believers are set free from evil self-­possession; they no longer live ‘to themselves’ (Rom. 14.7), and so engage in true creaturely conduct, acting out the gift of life in intelligent moral movement. Vivification is not moral-­ascetical self-­cultivation. It begins from the confession that the regenerate are those ‘who have been brought from death to life’, and its most basic movement is ‘yielding to God’ (Rom. 6.13). Yet this yielding is not mere resignation; it is surrender to a divine movement which sets creatures in motion. This creaturely movement extends into human existence in its entirety: the domains of religion, charity and justice. Religion is ‘a relationship to God. For we ought to be 43.  Augustine, De continentia VII.17. 44.  Cassian, Institutes IV.43. 45.  Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2, p. 577.

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bound to God as to our unfailing principle, we must unceasingly choose him as our last end, and if we lose him through the heedlessness of sin, we ought to recover him by believing and professing our faith.’46 Sin neglects God; religion is aliveness to God, devotion active in contemplation, praise and confession. Charity and justice are rightly ordered relations in the Christian community and in the civil and domestic sphere. Sin damages relations between creatures, in part by habitual inattention to the good of others, in part by using our social nature as an opportunity for wickedness. Vivification takes a different course. ‘We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren’ (1 Jn 3.14). Much New Testament exhortation is dedicated to commendation of the various parts of love, by which creatures are bound together in perfect harmony (Col. 3.14): compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness, and much else (Col. 3.12f; Gal. 5.24f.; 1 Cor. 6.6f.; Eph. 4.25-32; 1 Pet. 3.8-12). To walk in newness of life is to ‘walk in love’ (Eph. 5.2).

VI In a culture ensnared by tawdry and ignoble conceptions of human flourishing, dedicated to hurtful appetites and unsure how to relieve its sorrow, mortification and vivification bear testimony to the gift of different possibilities by which creaturely life may be healed and enlivened. Dying and rising with Christ, believers exemplify a way to love life and see good days (Ps. 34.12; 1 Pet. 3.10-12). ‘Let us, therefore, pray that we may be put to death by his power and die to the world of the wickedness of darkness and that the spirit of sin may be extinguished in us. Let us put on and receive the soul of the heavenly Spirit and be transported from the wickedness of darkness into the light of Christ. Let us rest in life forever.’47

46.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.81.1 resp. 47.  Pseudo-Macarius, The Fifty Spiritual Homilies I.9.

Chapter 8 Sins of Speech

I Knowledge of sin is doubly derived, from knowledge of God and knowledge of created nature. Sin is known as God is known. Most proximately and impressively, this means that knowledge of sin derives from knowledge of the law of God. But the directive and critical force of the divine precepts and statutes is itself drawn from the person and acts of the one from whom they issue. The law is God’s law; it is the imperative extension of God’s being and works. If, therefore, knowledge of sin is to be more than a half-­understood emotion of shame or awareness of defect, it is to have its rise, first, in knowledge of those properties of God by which his inner and outer life is characterized – most of all, his infinite righteousness, holiness and veracity, as well as his benevolence and beneficence towards creatures. Only against these perfections can sin be set in relief and acquire profile and definition. Second, knowledge of sin derives from contemplation of the works of God. These comprise God’s inner works of willing creaturely being and disposing its nature and course, and God’s outer acts of creation, governance, reconciliation and perfection through which that will is put into effect, and creatures are brought into and held in being. These acts, and the being of their agent, are the first principle of created being, and therefore the law of created being, by which its proper enactment is prescribed and appraised. Christian teaching about sin, in short, is a function or extension of the Christian doctrine of God. Sin is known as created nature is known. This is because sin is a defect or failure of that nature. To say this is to make an epistemological and a metaphysical claim. The epistemological claim is that as defect or failure, sin can be apprehended and described only by reference to that of which it is a privation. The intelligibility of sin depends upon its being seen in relation to the good to which it is opposed; and so slander, gossip, lying and

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the rest remain inchoately understood without knowledge of the elements of just human communication. Behind this lies a metaphysical claim (one whose abandonment may generate much disorder in doctrinal and moral theology), namely, that sin is not another mode of creaturely being but an absence of creaturely being. In all its phenomenal vividness and harmfulness, sin is not nature but anti-­nature, and therefore to be understood as illegitimate, a trespass, wholly implausible. The cognitive principles of sin are, therefore, first, the being and acts of God the creator, preserver and reconciler of creatures, and, second, created nature, its powers and its ends. This entails that a theological ethics of speech is inseparable from a dogmatics of creator and creature. The object of Christian theology is God and all things in relation to God. This matter may be arranged into two divisions: first, a treatment of the knowledge of God and creatures, their natures and their relations (this is the concern of dogmatics), and, second, a treatment of the service of God, that is of the enactment of created nature in relation to God its origin and end (this is the concern of moral-­ascetical theology). The two divisions are not, of course, sealed against each other: much may be learned about the dogmatics of created nature by reflection upon the practices in which it is enacted, precisely because in an important sense to have a created nature is to answer a summons to perform it. Moreover, in the order of knowing, and in activities such as instruction, exhortation and judgement, the first object of attention may often be the practical. Nevertheless, there is a proper material order by virtue of which dogmatics takes a certain precedence over morals and ascetics. This material order corresponds to two principles of created being. First, we are, indeed, creatures, and so our nature is finally intelligible only by reduction, that is, by the movement of intelligence in which the mind traces given realities to their source in divine goodness. Second, to realize oneself as a creature is actively to appropriate an antecedent nature with a given form of which we are not the authors, and whose ends we are not at liberty to invent, adapt or subvert. The material precedence of dogmatics is, however, not to be misunderstood as an attempt by one theological sub-­discipline to assert its primacy over others: after all, theology is a single unified science, and sub-­disciplines are a late and largely disruptive interpolation. Rather, the precedence of dogmatics is an affirmation that – for example – an ethics of sinful speech is an integral part of hamartiology, and that it is in hamartiology (in its full scope as a theology of the divine law, the integral state, the fall and divine redemption) that ethics will discover its moral metaphysics. Knowledge of God and of our created nature is a casualty of the fall. After our forfeit of the state of integrity, such knowledge has become

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immeasurably more difficult; we understand almost nothing of God and of ourselves, and that only with great labour. More closely: knowledge of our fallen nature is scarcely available to us, because sinners cannot understand sin. Christian theology is no exception to this cognitive condition, sharing the limitations of all post-­lapsarian science. If theology is to proceed, it can only be by repeating in its intellectual operations the pattern of mortification and vivification which is to characterize all parts of Christian existence. Mortification and vivification are the primary characteristics of the form of human life which flows from the repair of our existence effected in Christ and made applicatively real by the work of the Holy Spirit in Christian baptism. Baptism bestows a new nature and prescribes the pattern for its enactment, including its intellectual enactment in the work of Christian theology. If that work is to become a matter of understanding, much needs to take place to cleanse, repair and renovate intelligence: the chastening of our pretended knowledge of ourselves, our nature and powers, and the setting and direction of their exercise; renewal of a sense that we are creatures, those who have being and knowledge solely by divine generosity; glad awareness of the divine gift of a new nature after the depredations of the fall; attentiveness to divine instruction; illumination of the mind by the Holy Spirit; under the same Spirit, the renewal of will and affections, and of the moral, spiritual and intellectual virtues needed for steady intelligence. As these things take place, the mind is quickened, and Christian theology is possible.

II What might theology say about the speech of creatures? 1. Humans are creatures. This means, in rather formal terms, that we do not possess the property of aseity, but owe our being and movement to a being and movement which, unlike ours, is unconditionally original and causal of all other being. To be a creature is to be a being which might not have been, but, by virtue of God, is. That the creature is and is not not is the work of God’s perfect goodness, because that goodness is of itself communicative, and so productive of other being. This productivity is not divine self-­dispersal, but the ‘introduction’ of other being ex nihilo, pure creativity crossing the absolute gulf between being and non-­being, so that where once there was nothing, something now is. Among the creatures of God, human creatures are (a) teleological. That is, we ‘have’ our given nature not in its completeness but as historical or

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discursive beings, whose nature is not yet fully achieved but is realized over time. We are, further, (b) rational creatures, though in a way which is inferior to God and the angels of God. We are capable of reflective – though not total or intuitive – apprehension of the world, and as a consequence we are capable of interiority, deliberation and the governance of instinct, desire and will. We are (c) social, that is, in part constituted by relations to other creatures. These relations are not simply those of adjacency, but rather of irreducibly common enactment of our nature in its tendency to certain ends. We are composite, and therefore co-­operative, creatures. Finally, we are (d) communicative, in two senses. First, our nature occurs as we give and receive goods of various kinds; such goods are not only external goods but those internal goods which pertain to our being and well-­being. To be the creatures we are is to share in sets of exchanges through which our nature is extended towards perfection. Second, more specifically, we are verbal. The communication of goods by which we are sustained in life takes place either through linguistic signs or with the accompaniment of such signs. In nearly all cases, bodily, emotional and intellectual goods are acquired, enjoyed and dispersed through language. 2. Human speech is creaturely and so not a se. It has its origin in another speaker, God, who within himself speaks his own silent language and who also speaks into existence creatures who are thereby themselves established as speakers. ‘Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures’ (Jas 1.18). Moreover, God’s creative speech to creatures is complemented by his continuing address of them. ‘The word is very near you’ (Deut. 30.14; Rom. 10.8), providing direction and illumination (Ps. 119.105; Prov. 6.23). Because God speaks, creatures speak. 3. Human speech is directed to God and to neighbours. Human relation to God is realized and sustained in the intellect, the affections and the will, all of which take form and are active through verbal signs – praise, lament, petition, confession, vow and so forth. In its address of God, human speech is governed by the requirements of religion, that is, of devotion to the one to whom we are bound absolutely by reason of our original and continuing derivation from him. Human speech to God will be righteous, that is, if it is observant of the first commandment. In its second domain, that of the address of neighbours, human speech is governed by the requirements of justice. It must arise from and further establish good order in human common life so that goods are properly shared and the community moved nearer to the perfection of its life.

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4.  In considering a little more closely the governance of human speech by the demands of justice, we may begin by noting two related elements of human speech: its causal power and its irrevocability. Human causality is not simply efficient, as when the archer sets the arrow in flight; it may also be articulate causality, movement of oneself and another by speech. This may take place in at least three ways. First, speech is causal in that it sets the speaker in a particular frame by shaping or giving form to inner affections, desires and intentions, so making them available to others. Words are effective, and so potentially harmful, Aquinas notes, not because they are sounds but because they are ‘carriers of meaning’, and ‘such meaning depends upon an interior attitude’.1 Speech is performative, settling and proposing a view of the world. Second, accordingly, speech represents the world to others and invites them to appropriate that representation and to conduct themselves in its light. This, for example, is why defamation inflicts damage: false representation is effective. Third, therefore, speech establishes (and may adversely affect or even destroy), relations between persons. Speech establishes a ‘real’ relation between the speaker and the one addressed, a relating, that is, which is a determinative property of each. This last feature of verbal causality is closely connected to the irrevocability of speech. What is said may not be unsaid; speech sets up a representation of the world which may not be retracted. It may be recanted, withdrawn or renounced, and its generative power in some measure diminished; but it may not be unsaid, because that which has been said is irreversible. If I am called a fool by someone, I am one who has once been called a fool, that person is one who once called me a fool, and the world is a place in which I was so addressed. ‘Death and life are in the power of the tongue’ (Prov. 18.21). This being so, how is speech to be ordered so that created goods are fittingly communicated and common life caused to flourish? First, good human speech is characterized by its integrity, by the transparency with which it manifests the good intentions of the speaker. Good speech is ex animo, ‘done . . . after the purpose of the mind’;2 good speech is the utterance of the well-­framed heart and intention. ‘The mouth of the righteous utters wisdom and his tongue speaks justice. The law of God is in his heart’ (Prov. 37.30f.). Because it possesses this integrity, good speech is a ‘dispensation of knowledge’ (Prov. 15.2, 7).

1.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.72.2 resp. 2.  Augustine, Contra mendacium (NPNF 1.3), VII.17.

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Second, in good human speech there is a right relation of sign to thing signified which sets up truth in human communication. ‘There is a specific aspect of order in keeping our spoken words or observable actions in their proper reference as signs to the thing they signify’, Aquinas writes, ‘and thereby a person is perfected by the virtue of truth’.3 Good human speech is trustworthy, non-­manipulative communication of truth. Third, therefore, good human speech arises from, contributes to and so confirms due order in the relation of the speaker to other persons. It is an act of justice, which recognizes its hearers as neighbours, which honours them as such, which does not deal with them simply in terms of the speaker’s own desires, but intends simply that these neighbours should come to enjoy the goods that the speaker has to share. Fourth, good human speech is moderated, in accordance with the place and vocation of the speaker and the needs and capacities of the hearers. It involves prudent attention to circumstance and occasion. Moderation is the governance of the expressive impulse so that the speaker’s pleasure in speaking is not allowed to become inordinate, and goods are not dispensed wastefully and indiscriminately, without loving attention to their recipients, but shared in such a way as to be of benefit to them. Fifth, in good human speech, justice to others is animated by religion. ‘Whatever you do, do all for the glory of God’ (1 Cor. 10.31; cf. Col. 3.17). Good human speech glorifies God by an inner conviction that God is ‘the God of truth’ (Isa. 65.16) who ‘looks for truth’ (Jer. 5.3), and by indicating and conforming to God’s perfect wisdom and rule in the order of human signs.

III Sin lays siege to this right ordering of human speech; in fallen creatures, the ‘little member’ of the tongue (Jas 3.5) effects damage of remarkably disproportionate severity and scope: ‘So the tongue is a little member and boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is an unrighteous world among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the cycle of nature, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by humankind, but no human being can tame the tongue – a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we

3.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.109.2 resp (ET altered).

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bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brethren, this ought not to be so’ (Jas 3.5-11). An immediate qualification is necessary, however, if a theological account of sins of speech is not to miss the mark. Disordered speech does not – cannot – wholly overwhelm and replace right communicative order. This is because sin cannot uncreate the creature; neither the substance nor the form of creaturely existence are ours to eliminate. We may occlude them by failure to realize them or to give them practical effect; but, in the midst of such privation, the speaking subject and the subject’s vocation remain, inert but not obliterated. Moreover, against the attack which sin launches on our verbal nature and vocation stands the unhindered work of the divine Word and Spirit through which created nature is subject to renovation and so re-­established and confirmed. These dogmatic principles about the supereminence of creation and reconciliation over depravity need to be operative in any moral anatomy of sins of speech. However penetrating and vivid its account of the ways in which sin ravages practices of human communication, such an anatomy must not fail to make clear that sin is only an absurd extended episode, one which may claim no validity or permanence, which is already exposed and overpowered and has its terminus set. Sinful speech, like speech in its natural ordering, may be divided into those communications whose object is God and those whose object is our neighbour. Against God are such sins as blasphemy and cursing of God, as well as those sins of defect in which we do not heed the command to confess, praise and invoke God but remain locked in silence. Against our neighbour, sins of speech may conveniently be classified according to setting, as those which occur in a court of law (in iudicio) and those which occur in the course of ordinary conversation (in communi locutione), whether in speech to others or about others. The former include such sins as making false accusations, bearing false witness or pronouncing an unjust judgement. In the latter category are those ways of speaking which seek to damage or destroy the neighbour’s reputation: defamation, detraction, gossip, ridicule; those which undermine common life by deceit: lying, hypocrisy, boasting and flattery; and those which are quarrelsome and sow discord.4 4.  Aquinas arranges the material in this way in Summa theologiae IIaIIae.67–76; a similar arrangement may be found in post-Reformation exercises in ascetical theology such as W. à Brakel’s exposition of the ninth commandment in The Christian’s Reasonable Service, vol. 3 [1700] (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 1994), pp. 227–35.

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Further, sins of speech may be considered in terms of their origin and their effect. Words are signs, and when they function well they signify not only that to which they refer and to which they direct the hearer, but also the speaker’s inner life or intention from which they flow. Sins of speech originate in an evil heart: ‘the mouths of fools pour out folly’ (Prov. 15.2); ‘What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts . . . false witness, slander’ (Mt. 15.18). Evil speech expresses and serves the realization of evil intention. In his treatment of lying in the early treatise de mendacio (c. 395), Augustine notes that ‘the heart of him who lies is said to be double: the one, of that thing which he either knows or thinks to be true and does not produce; the other, of that thing which he produces instead thereof, knowing or thinking it to be false’.5 Lying is not error but deception – as he puts it in the later Contra mendacium, ‘A lie . . . is a false signification with a will of deceiving’.6 The principle here is that appraisal of acts of verbal communication must include inquiry into and assessment of the speaker’s intention. ‘Words harm not in so far as they are sounds but in so far as they are carriers of meaning. Now such meaning depends on an interior attitude, so that what we have to look at above all in sins of word is the attitude behind them’.7 Speech is not instinctual or involuntary but deliberate, the expression of conscious design. In understanding sins of speech, therefore, we are to unearth the inner purposes disclosed. Coming to understand such sins requires skill in the discovery and exposure of what the speaker hides: ‘He who hates, dissembles with his lips and harbours deceit in his heart; when he speaks graciously, believe him not, for there are seven abominations in his heart; though his hatred be covered with guile, his wickedness will be exposed in the assembly’ (Prov. 26.24-6). Similarly, sins of speech are to be weighed according to the damage which they inflict. The damage is various: that caused to those about whom sinful words are spoken, that caused to those to whom sinful words are spoken, and that caused to the speaker. The injury inflicted on those about whom sinful words are spoken is the loss of social goods (such as reputation) and possibly of material goods. By way of example: flattery – evil intent masquerading as affability – deprives the hearer of opportunities for 5.  Augustine, De mendacio (NPNF 1.3), III.3. 6.  Augustine, Contra mendacium XII.26; see also Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.110 resp. 7.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.72.2 resp; see also 73.2 resp; 75.1 resp.

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fraternal correction (the flatterer will not displease the hearer, even when such displeasure would be an act of charity seeking to help the hearer set aside some evil); flattery also invites the hearer to relax proper self-­ command and so lays the hearer open to exploitation by the speaker who may be intent on personal gain. Again, the damage inflicted on all to whom sinful words are spoken is the unleashing of malevolent forces which disfigure life in common: ‘With his mouth the godless man would destroy his neighbour’ (Prov. 11.9). Most specially, sins of speech furnish occasion for whatever powers oppose human flourishing to provoke disorder and conflict, as in Paul’s catena of quotations in Romans 3: ‘ “Their throat is an open grave, they use their tongues to deceive.” “The venom of asps is under their lips.” “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.” “Their feet are swift to shed blood, in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they do not know” ’ (Rom. 3.13-17). Finally, sins of speech inflict damage on the one by whom they are spoken, by prompting the largely indiscernible but steady acquisition and reinforcement of unrighteous intentions and vicious habits of communication. ‘If once we grant it to have been right’ to tell a lie, Augustine says, then ‘little by little and by minute degrees, the evil so grows upon us, and by slight accesses to such a heap of wicked lies does it, in its almost imperceptible encroachments, at last come about that no place can ever be found on which this huge mischief, by smallest additions rising into boundless strength, might be resisted’.8 With these general observations in mind, we may turn to some remarks on two examples of sins of speech: blasphemy against God and defamation of neighbour. 1.  The creature is unconditionally obligated to speak God’s praise and to render thanks to God. ‘I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart; I will tell of all thy wonderful deeds’; ‘I will sing of thy steadfast love, O Lord, for ever; with my mouth I will proclaim thy faithfulness to all generations’; ‘It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to thy name, O Most High’ (Pss. 9.1, 89.1, 92.1). This first duty of religion is not external and statutory, but internal and natural. The obligation, that is, arises from our given creaturely nature: praise and thanksgiving are the first realizations or principal performances of our nature as those who have and are sustained in life and movement by limitless divine goodness. In 8.  Augustine, Contra mendacium XVIII.37; see also Ambrose’s acute observation of the way in which evil words wound their speakers: De officiis I.4.15–16.

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praise and in the rendering of thanks, we do not satisfy an irksome extrinsic requirement laid upon us, so much as give glad assent to our particular mode of being and deliberately and articulately direct it towards its perfection. Because praise and thanksgiving are modes of speech which correspond to our situation as creatures of divine beneficence, we may engage in them without resentment, with unfeigned delight and singularity of purpose, so moving to complete on our side the fellowship with our creator in which we are fully alive. Praise and thanksgiving are necessarily verbal, moreover, because it is our nature to move and express the mind and the affections by external signs. ‘Vocal praise of God is necessary’, Aquinas notes, ‘not for his sake but for our own, since by praising him our devotion is aroused’.9 Blasphemy stands in opposition to this work of latria, the vocal confession of divine goodness. ‘To blaspheme is to cast insult or abuse at the dignity of our creator’.10 To blaspheme is not simply to lament or even to rail against God in misery; blasphemy does not express sorrow at the apparent absence of divine consolation. Rather, blasphemy is determined disparagement of God, sometimes in the form of denying his excellences, at other times in the form of attributing to God what does not befit his perfection. Its root is not spiritual struggle but detestation of or disgust at God. Spiritual sorrow arises because of a seemingly irresolvable contest between two realities by both of which the sorrowful person is commanded: the infinite goodness of God announced in the gospel, and the misery of life in the world. Lament in the midst of sadness does not entail repudiation of the bond to God which is fundamental to creatureliness; indeed, it is only because that bond stands that sadness is acute and drives the believer to cry out in lament. Even in wretchedness, lament honours and confesses God, whereas blasphemy scorns and reviles him, and so gives voice to detestation of the ‘religious’ relation of creature to creator. It is the impious person who reviles the divine name (Ps. 74.18). Blasphemous speech arises from irreverence towards or derogation of the creator, preserver and redeemer of creatures. Such irreverence will not allow that it is not only the duty but also the delight and dignity of creatures to give honour to God in words, and so it directs its communicative energies into malediction. By such words – indignant, contemptuous, unrestrained – the impious person seeks to injure the divine reputation or name. No such injury may be inflicted, of course, because God’s worth is infinite and 9.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.91.1 resp. 10.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.13.1 obj. 1.

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eternal, complete in itself apart from any creaturely attitude or expression of reverence, and no word from the creature can add to or detract from its majesty and fullness. What blasphemy does effect is deep disruption of the ordered relation of creature to creator, replacing confession of God’s excellence by contumely. This is why blasphemy is a mortal sin: by it, the speaker is ‘cut off . . . from the first source of spiritual life’.11 2.  Charity among creatures is realized in part in justice, in which the will is inclined to maintain the goods of common life by firm and constant respect for our neighbour’s right, and so to render to each person what belongs to them. Among the goods which justice maintains is reputation. Reputation is the honour or credit which attaches to a person by virtue of the truthful estimation and recognition accorded to them by others. Reputation is important because it is a condition for social dignity. Those who possess a good name are able to bear themselves in society in such a way as to enjoy access to goods such as respect or trust, goods which are very great: ‘a good name is to be chosen rather than great riches’ (Prov. 22.1); ‘a good name is better than precious ointment’ (Eccl. 7.1). Justice requires that we so act and speak as to give honour to the good name of others, that is, to recognize and, as occasion demands, to give a good report of that name in conversation, so bearing witness to our neighbour’s fame. Sin contends against this. Its opposition to the goods of society includes the use of words to try to damage and lay waste the neighbour’s good name, and in so doing to inhibit the neighbour’s ability to move in society easily and in a dignified way by commanding respect. Among the forms of this sin are defamation, detraction or backbiting, and gossip. All stem from the fallen creature’s rejection of the co-­constitution of our nature in neighbourliness and from the consequent governance of society by competition, suspicion, jealousy, vengefulness, spite, dissimulation, contention and the rest. Defamation is public slander of another, whether in the form of angry reviling or of smooth and clever calumny. It effects its malice by denying the excellences of character on which the neighbour’s good reputation rests, or by drawing attention to and magnifying faults – real or invented – which detract from that reputation. Defamation uses verbal signs to represent the neighbour in an evil light, in order to persuade others that the neighbour’s fame is false and that the neighbour lacks entitlement to occupy a position of respect in common life. 11.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.13.2 resp.

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The power of defamatory words lies in their abuse of the fact that reputation is a public reality. Excellence of character is objective; it precedes its recognition by others and remains even when unrecognized. Indeed, we may ascribe special dignity to one who possesses excellence of character but has not been duly recognized. Reputation is public esteem or acknowledgement of excellence. Though such esteem is not essential, it adds to the splendour of a person’s excellence, exhibiting and confirming merit. Well-­ordered speech in relation to our neighbours includes the declaration and praise of worth in order to establish fame. Disordered speech distorts this process of public regard into one which seeks to disgrace the neighbour by false accusation and report: ‘wicked and deceitful mouths are opened against me, speaking against me with lying tongue . . . they beset me with words of hate, and attack me without cause . . . so they reward me evil for good’ (Ps. 109.2-4). Backbiting and gossip are less open but no less malign. Unlike defamation, they work indirectly and covertly, not by open attack but by seeking to cause others to entertain a bad opinion about the neighbour. They share some features in common. They are, for example, usually accompanied by inward delight in possessing and distributing apparently damaging information about a neighbour – ‘the words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels’, Proverbs tells us (26.22). Back-­biters and gossips take relish in lifting the veil of secrecy, and enjoy the ensuing humiliation of the neighbour. They lack respect for truth, exaggerating matters or claiming as certain things which are uncertain or merely suspected to be the case. They are cunning in the use of suggestion, flirting with their hearers to incite curiosity and captivate them. All this may be accompanied by a demeanour or verbal tone which promotes the impression that the back-­biter or gossip is reluctant to detract from others, and is acting out of concern for common welfare. Defamation, detraction and gossip are socially ruinous in two ways. First, these sins of speech require that the category of ‘neighbour’ be inoperative, because that category represents the claims of justice, facing social agents with an irreducible verbal responsibility and restriction. If the category of ‘neighbour’ has any force, there are things which must be said and things which must not. Verbal injustice ‘wants to split friends’12 – Aquinas’s remark comes in the course of his observations on whispering against others, but it has wide application. Defamatory sins of speech take

12.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.74.1 resp.

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away the reputation which is the ‘precondition for being counted worthy of friendship’, and so robs us of having friends, ‘the most precious external good we can have’.13 This is why revilers – and, by synecdoche, all who speak against their neighbour’s good name – have no inheritance in the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6.10). Second, in depriving others of a neighbour’s good name, defamation and the like deprive the entire community of a common good. Public recognition of a neighbour’s excellence communicates a good from which all profit, both by exhibiting eminence of character for emulation by others, and by reinforcing wholesome patterns of public speech. Defamation is, therefore, injustice not only against its object but also against its hearers.

IV The domain of sin and its irreligious and unjust habits of speech is opposed by regenerate life, that lovely and wholesome form of creatureliness in which vocal society with God and neighbours begins once again to flourish. The opposition of these two realms is not one of competitive co-­existence of like realities, because they are incommensurable. The domain of sin has already been judged, that is, exposed, condemned and overcome (‘disarmed’, Col. 2.15); it is now manifest as an interloper, without authority and without future. The domain of regeneration has already been established by the sovereignty of divine goodness, effective in Christ’s work of reconciliation, manifest in his resurrection from the dead and now through the Holy Spirit amplifying itself as the future of creation. Sin and regeneration exist on no common scale; the contrast between them is that between old and new (2 Cor. 5.17) or between death and life (Eph. 2.5). The domain of regeneration owes itself to the limitlessness of God. In it, the ‘surpassing grace of God’ (2 Cor. 9.14) is to be found; here the abundance of divine grace, its ‘all the more’ character, is operative. It is a wholly legitimate domain, established by the eternal purpose of God the Father (Eph. 1.4f., 9-11) and ruled by God the Son who sits at the Father’s right hand ‘far above all rule and authority and power and dominion’ and under whose feet are all things (Eph. 1.20-2). Believers have been placed in this sphere of rule: ‘He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son’ (Col. 1.13). Further, this domain has a social coordinate or extension, which is the church. As the 13.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.74.2 resp.

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one who is ‘before all things’, the Son is not isolated but appointed by the Father to be ‘the head of the body, the church’ and ‘the first-­born’ (Col. 1.17f.), and so at his side there is the company of the elect: ‘You, who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled’ (Col. 1.21f.). Because the domain of regeneration is one in which human nature is restored and the human vocation reinstituted, it is a moral domain, a field of the service of God by good works. Regenerative grace vivifies creaturely action. The first cause of good works is God the Holy Spirit, in whom they are begun, continued and brought to completion. Good works are creaturely; they are neither self-­original nor self-­moving, but wholly reliant upon God. The anthropological principle of good works, that is, is faith. But the Spirit’s lordly action does not take the form of a wholly extrinsic force; the Spirit works by bestowing powers upon creatures and by moving and governing their use of these gifts. By the Spirit, the creature is stirred into moral history. And because this history is genuinely moral, it is not arbitrary: its form is determined by the divine law, so that created works are good insofar as they are congruent with divine instruction about our nature and its ends, and with the divine precepts in which that instruction has imperative and regulatory effect. Service of God in the condition of regeneration sets creatures against themselves; moral history involves conflict. This is because the new condition, though established by a divine decision and act which cannot be annulled or repealed, is not yet filled out on the creaturely side or brought to its human perfection. It is inaugurated and directed to a term which it has not yet attained. Remission of fault and bestowal of the new nature are complete; recovery and renovation of life-­course are progressive and prospective. The movement of creaturely life towards perfection contends with vestigial corruption, and though the outcome of the contest is already secured by the regenerate creature’s entirely changed relation to its fallen nature, movement to that outcome is agonistic. The speech of regenerate creatures is caught up in the prolonged struggle which arises from our present ‘mixed’ condition. In speech, too, there takes place the repudiation of the old and the active appropriation of the new condition, made possible by the Spirit. Like all forms of human goodness, good speech is ex gratia.14 Divine grace enables abandonment of the old and putting on of the vocal new nature in relation to God and neighbours.

14.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.177.1 s.c.

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1.  In relation to God, the mortification and vivification of speech is exemplified in the renewal of thanksgiving. Consider the apostolic injunction: ‘Let there be no filthiness, nor silly talk, nor levity, which are not fitting; but instead let there be thanksgiving’ (Eph. 5.4). Why counter obscenity of act and gesture, frivolity, clever raillery and banter with thanksgiving? Because such behaviour and modes of speech are excluded in the condition of regeneration; they fail to correspond to it, and to engage in them is to attempt to suspend the order of reality in which the regenerate stand and to which their communicative acts are to be conformed. In this new order of reality, the giving of thanks is supremely ‘fitting’ or seemly for the ‘saints’ (Eph. 5.3), that is, for those who have been separated from ‘immorality and all impurity’, and summoned to active, vocal holiness. Verbal gratitude is, therefore, part of the creaturely realization of the relation to God into which believers have been introduced by the grace of Christ, one of whose primary acts is ‘always and for everything giving thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father’ (Eph. 4.20; cf. Col. 3.17; 1 Thess. 5.18). 2.  In relation to neighbours, speech is to accord with the pattern of life in which corruption is being set aside in the wake of the new nature. ‘Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you once walked, when you lived in them. But now put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old nature with its practices and have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator’ (Col. 3.5-10). The new nature brings with it a set of new social relations, determined by a state of affairs which is at once metaphysical and moral: ‘Christ is . . . in all’ (Eph. 3.11). By setting us in this state, regeneration promotes a new attitude to others – that is, recognition of their placement and status as neighbours and ‘fellow members’ (Eph. 4.25) in the social sphere of regeneration – and a new intention to act in accordance with that recognition. Or again, in slightly different terms: by divine election and establishment there is a social reality, ‘the brotherhood’ (1 Pet. 2.17) whose internal relations are to exhibit ‘unity of spirit, sympathy, love of the brethren, a tender heart and a humble mind’ (1 Pet. 3.8). These relations in turn, are displayed in and carried by new speech practices by which spiritual and social goods are shared: ‘Do not return evil for evil or reviling for reviling; but on the contrary bless, for to this you have been called, that you may obtain a blessing’ (1 Pet. 3.9).

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Neighbourliness, membership of one another, the common life of the brotherhood, are communicated in speech; our spoken dealings with one another both express and effect life in common, and are basic to its enactment in due order and justice. We may notice in this connection that James exposes injustice between believers by exposing to view examples of wicked speech by which the injustice is realized. ‘[I]f a man with gold rings and in fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while you say to the poor man, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?’ (Jas 2.2-4); ‘If a brother or sister is ill-­clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit?’ (Jas 2.15f.). In the ‘assembly’ (the gathering of the regenerate), others are not those whom we are entitled to ‘place’ by pronouncing sentence and assigning rank; they are ‘brothers and sisters’, to be spoken of and to as such. This being so, mortification and vivification are therefore necessary in verbal communication in the Christian society. In our imperfect state, remnants of the old nature cling to our speech, and we make many mistakes in what we say (Jas 3.2). Our speaking to others is not yet instinctual or wholly natural; it must therefore be enjoined by precept. Two such precepts may be mentioned by way of example: those which pertain to edification and to moderation. (a)  ‘Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for edifying, as fits the occasion, that it may impart grace to those who hear’ (Eph. 4.29). The conversation of the regenerate is to be so ruled that it builds up common life. This requires, negatively, the setting aside of evil speech (Ephesians gives the examples of ‘clamour and slander’, 4.31), and, positively, its replacement by improving and apt speech through which our hearers partake of grace. Edifying speech confirms the reality of regeneration by, for example, moving the affections to love of divine truth, or by exemplifying and commending modes of relation between persons which perfect society, such as affability or truthfulness. Most particularly, speech edifies by instruction. Words of teaching and exhortation communicate knowledge of the community’s condition and help make that condition fruitful. The community’s speech and so its teaching are principally determined by the fact that it is indwelt by the ‘word of Christ’ (Col. 3.16), that is, by the actively communicative presence of Christ the prophet through the proclamation of the apostolic gospel. This word is not

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barren; its productivity is not, however, immediate but effective through the speech of human teachers, by which the grace of divine instruction is distributed and spiritual life caused to flourish. ‘The gratuitous graces are given for the profit of others . . . Now the knowledge a person receives from God cannot be turned to another’s profit except by means of speech. And since the Holy Spirit does not fail in anything that pertains to the profit of the church, he provides also the members of the church with speech, to the effect that a person not only speaks so as to be understood by different people, which pertains to the gift of tongues, but also speaks with effect, and this pertains to the grace of the word.’15 (b) Speech imparts grace when it is moderated: measured and adapted as condition and occasion demands, not precipitate or heedless or distorted by excess or defect. ‘Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak’ (Jas 1.19); ‘If anyone thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, that man’s religion is vain’ (Jas 1.26; cf. 3.2). Restraint (‘bridling’) is not simple suppression so much as command, formation and direction of speech. It involves both an understanding of the proper vocation and use of words in common exchanges, and a disposition of the self which is free from the anxious need to assert ourselves over others by words. One whose speech is moderated seeks so to speak as to secure goods in common, and is patient, waiting with confidence on God’s providence and judgement. There is, therefore, a proper Christian taciturnity, cautious lest speech should offend, and more ready to listen than to speak. Moderation differs from culpable silence, however, because it knows that some occasions demand speech. In the Pastoral Rule, Gregory gives the instance of the way in which immoderate silence can aggravate or prolong discord after disagreement when what is required is reconciling speech in the form of reproof: ‘if [those who have suffered wrong at the hands of others] love their neighbours as themselves, they should by no means keep from them the grounds on which they justly blame them. For from the medicine of the voice there is a concurrent effect for the health of both parties, while on the side of him who inflicts the injury his bad conduct is checked, and on the side of him who sustains it the violent heat of pain is alloyed by opening out the sore . . . The tongue, therefore, should be discreetly curbed, not tied up fast’.16 Moderation is an element of 15.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.177.1 resp. (translation from Fathers of the English Dominican Province [London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1911]). 16. Gregory the Great, Pastoral Rule (NPNF 2.12), III.14.

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well-­directed, just and charitable communication, seeking to share goods by using the best words in the best way to best effect.

V Believers and their words are no longer in servitude to ‘the present evil age’ (Gal. 1.4) from which they have surely been delivered; but they await full realization of that liberty. The sanctification of our speech in this not-­yetperfect condition remains a matter of continual invocation of God: ‘Let the words of my mouth . . . be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer’ (Ps. 19.14). Calvin comments: ‘David asks still more expressly to be fortified by the grace of God, and thus enabled to live an upright and holy life. The substance of the verse is this: I beseech thee, O God, not only to keep me from breaking forth into the external acts of transgression, but also to frame my tongue and my heart to the obedience of thy law. We know how difficult it is, even for the most perfect, so to bridle their words and thoughts, as that nothing may pass through their heart or mouth which is contrary to the will of God; and yet this inward purity is what the law chiefly requires of us. Now, the rarer this virtue – the rarer this strict control of the heart and of the tongue is, let us learn so much the more the necessity of our being governed by the Holy Spirit, in order to regulate our life uprightly and honestly. By the word acceptable, the Psalmist shows that the only rule of living well is for men to endeavor to please God, and to be approved of him. The concluding words, in which he calls God his strength and his redeemer, he employs to confirm himself in the assured confidence of obtaining his requests.’17

17.  J. Calvin, Commentary on the Psalms, vol. 1, pp. 332f.

Chapter 9 O n t h e T h e o l o g y o f t h e I n t e l l e ct ua l L i f e

I In order to lay out a theology of the intellectual life, it is necessary first to lay out a theology of the intellect, because to understand how to exercise a power we need to understand its nature; and to lay out a theology of the intellect it is necessary to say a little about the object and task of theology. The object of Christian theological inquiry is God and all things in relation to God. This integral object can for purposes of analysis be broken down into two topics. First, theology is inquiry into God in himself, into the eternal, perfect and eternally blessed life of God the Holy Trinity in his inner works. Second, and derivatively, theology is inquiry into the economy, that is, into the outer works of God as creator, reconciler and perfecter of creatures, and so into the unfolding of created realities as they come from and return to God. Even though these two topics can never be segregated from each other, there is a proper material order to be followed in any treatment of them. God in himself precedes the economy, for he is the uncreated creator who wholly transcends the creation of which he is the principle and which derives its being entirely from him. Yet within this order, neither topic can be left to one side: not God, for creatures are unintelligible without reference to the one by whom all things were made, and not creatures, for the uncreated one is indeed the creator of heaven and earth, to be considered also in his outer works. It follows from this that theology is comprehensive in scope; it is the science of all things. Theology is about everything; but it is not about everything about everything, but about everything in relation to God. For theology, this ‘in relation to God’ is fundamental to understanding any created reality. The being and activities of creatures can only be adequately understood when understood in their relation to the one by whom they were made and are preserved. Part of the task of a theology of created realities is thus to offer an evangelical metaphysics – an account of the

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nature of things which acquires its orientation and content by contemplating the gospel’s announcement of God as the origin, preserver and end of creatures. A theology of the intellectual life is an element in this theological-­ metaphysical task. What is the special responsibility of theology in this matter? Theology is a work of the regenerate mind directed by God towards God; it fulfils its vocation as it is instructed by the divine Word and illuminated by the Holy Spirit. Theology, that is, comes to know as it is taught and enlightened by God. Properly undertaken, theology relies on the presence of Word and Spirit, sent by the Father’s love to heal the ignorance of creatures and conduct them into knowledge of the truth. The presence of the Word and the Spirit is communicative, bringing about in finite minds a creaturely replication of God’s infinite knowledge of himself and all things. This communicative presence – these loving divine missions which, through the embassy of the prophets and apostles, generate knowledge – is what is meant by revelation. God himself speaks and sheds abroad his light, and so knowledge arises in the creaturely realm: ‘You have been anointed by the Holy One’, the apostle John writes with some astonishment, and ‘you all know’ (1 Jn 2.20). As theology receives this divine instruction, how does it build up an account of the natures of created things, including the created intellect? Here are two accounts of that process, one rather formal in tone, a second which is more direct in its use of primary Christian language. First, theology seeks to understand created things in terms of their principles.1 By principles we mean those realities and powers by virtue of which other things exist and can be known. Principles are foundations; to know things in terms of their principles is to trace them back to the prior realities on which they rest and by which they are shaped. In Aristotelian terms, this is ‘knowledge by causes’: we come to know that something is, what it is and how it is by tracing its cause, that from which it comes and by which it is held in being. The idiom of principles and causes proved deeply attractive to some classical Christian thinkers, especially the mediaeval and post-Reformation scholastics, above all because it enabled theology to articulate a set of profound metaphysical and spiritual convictions: realities other than God are not free-­standing, self-­subsistent realities; such realities do not have their being in themselves and do not persist of themselves, but 1. On this, see K. L. Schmitz, ‘Analysis by Principles and Analysis by Elements’, in The Texture of Being. Essays in First Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), pp. 21–36.

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owe being and persistence to the being and action of another; to understand such realities we must therefore make reference to the one from whom they come and on whom they depend. In short, the idiom of principles and causes is a way of spelling out a theological metaphysics of creation and created nature. It is important not to allow the formality of the idiom to distract or frustrate us, for it is simply an abstract rendering of the spiritually perceived and wholly delightful truth that all created things come from God’s generosity. God’s generosity is his love turned outwards to bestow being on that which is not; it is the abundance with which he who alone has life in himself purposes, makes and preserves all things. The movement of divine love is the principle and cause of creatures and their movements; to come to know those creatures is to come to know that movement by which their movements are moved. This takes us to the threshold of a second, more material, description of the same matter. All created things, including created intellect, are to be understood in terms of the history of fellowship between God and creatures. This history is the long, complex yet unified movement of God’s giving, sustaining and consummating created life. Created reality is as it participates in this history with God. It is a history with three principal moments, which correspond to the three great external divine works. There is, first, the moment of creation; God the Father, maker of heaven and earth, brings creatures into being out of nothing, and bestows on them their several natures. To human creatures he gives a nature which is not fully formed, one which unfolds over time, which is enacted. There is, second, the moment of reconciliation. Human creatures reject the vocation which their given nature entails, and seek to be what they are not: self-­originating, self-­ sustaining, self-­perfecting. Yet such is the goodness of the creator that creatures are not permitted to ruin themselves. God destines the creature for perfection, and is not hindered. In the history of covenant grace, at whose centre lies the incarnation of the Word and which embraces creatures now in the Spirit’s quickening power, God arrests the creature’s plunge into destruction and turns the creature back to himself. And so there is, third, the moment of consummation, inaugurated but awaiting completion, in which the creator ensures that creatures attain their perfection. All created reality is caught up in and determined by this history. For the Christian gospel, there is no secularity, no nature and time not referred wholly to God, because there is nothing other than God that is not a creature, and there is no creature which is not shaped by the works of God. This being so, metaphysical ambition is not only permitted but required of Christian theology: theology is obligated to search the gospel for an account of the nature of things. Modern theology has commonly shied at this task,

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persuaded by its detractors that the territory of the metaphysics of nature and history is territory over which theology has lost control and can claim no jurisdiction. By consequence theology has often contented itself with a reduced role, restricting itself at best to a theology of the benefits of Christ, at worst to a science of Christian piety. The gospel concerning Jesus Christ permits no such retractions, because its scope is universal. ‘In him all things were created . . . all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things . . . he is the beginning, that in everything he might be pre-­ eminent’ (Col. 1.16-18). Because Jesus Christ is this one – the arche, ‘the author and restorer of all things’ as Calvin has it2 – then Christian theology will have much to say about the things of which he is author and restorer, including created intellect; to this we now turn our attention.

II To talk of created intellect, we must observe the proper order of things and begin by talking of God’s intellect in which created intellect has its principle and cause. God is pure intelligent being, in whose mind is all knowledge and wisdom. The divine intellect is infinite: unrestricted in the scope of its knowledge, and knowing all things not by laborious acquisition but in a simple act of intuition. God’s uncreated intellect differs qualitatively, not merely by extent, from the intellect of creatures. The mind of God, says Augustine, is ‘so greatly abounding in knowledge’ as to be ‘exceedingly wonderful and very astonishing’.3 Yet though the incommensurability of divine and human intellect is fundamental, it is not all that is to be said. The God whose intellect is boundlessly exalted is also author and teacher of finite intelligence. By virtue of God’s work of creation and preservation, there exists a certain correspondence between the intellect of God and the intellect of creatures; there is an element in the being of the creature which is a coordinate to God’s own mind. Further, it is to this creaturely element that God addresses himself, for he who knows himself and all things also wills to be known by creatures, to become at his own behest and by his own instruction an object of created intelligence. If this is so, what is to be said of the created intellect by which God wills to be known? 2.  J. Calvin, The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians, p. 311 (on Col. 1.18). 3.  Augustine, Confessiones (NPNF 1.1), XI.31.41.

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Intellect is essential to human creatures (and not just to those human creatures who consider themselves ‘intellectuals’, for the intellectual life is simply a modification and intensification of something true of all human creatures). The intellect is the human creature’s power of apprehension. It is the capacity for the kind of knowledge, understanding and thought which differentiates humans from beasts, and which is intrinsic to all our dealings with reality. Our relations to ourselves, to the material, animal and social worlds, and ultimately to God, all take place by virtue of our possession of an intellectual nature. But how do we possess it? We have this intellectual nature as creatures. Creatureliness is basic; we have our being and exercise its powers in a particular way, namely not in ourselves but by virtue of God’s being and activity. We live, move and have our being in him. This does not mean that we are not really alive, that we lack substance or endurance. It means that the substance that we have – including the intellectual substance that we have – is of God. Two things follow from this. First, to have intellect is necessarily to stand in relation to God; the very possession of intellect locates us coram Deo, before God. This is because to have this capacity is to have received this capacity, to be – as Calvin once more puts it – ‘clothed and ornamented with God’s excellent gifts’.4 Created intellect is an endowment whose possession places us in relation to the one by whom we are endowed. This relation is one in which God is not only the ultimate origin of created intellect but also the one by whose quickening and empowering intellect is sustained. Second, to have intellect is to exist under a particular determination or vocation. Intellect is a capacity for operation; ‘possession’ and ‘exercise’ belong together. To have intellect is not just to possess a power but to execute a movement. Yet what kind of movement? A movement which is stirred and sustained from beyond itself, though no less our own movement because of that. The movement of creative intellect is moved by God so that not only the origin but also the exercise of intellect has God as its principle. This does not mean that the work of created intellect is not our performance; it means that the condition for our performance is God’s work on us and in us. Calvin again: God ‘fills, moves and quickens all things by the power of the . . . Spirit’, and does so not in violation of the integrity of the creature but ‘according to the character that he bestowed upon each kind by the law of creation’.5

4.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.ii.15. 5.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.ii.16.

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So much by way of general description. What may be said in more detail about the created intellect at work? Created intellect works discursively. It does not understand intuitively, in an instant, but comes to understand by a process of learning. Aquinas put this in formal terms, by saying that the intellect of creatures is a ‘passive power’,6 in the sense that its operation proceeds as a movement from potentiality to actuality. God’s intellect has no potentiality; it is a pure, fully realized act of understanding. Not so with creatures: creaturely intellectual activity is a matter of acquiring knowledge, coming to understand, reaching judgements. Created intellect takes time. Alongside this, however, it is important to recognize that this coming to understand is not a process in which the intellect has nothing to do, as if objects of knowledge simply impress themselves on the intellect. Created intellect is not a purely receptive medium; quite the contrary. As Aquinas again puts it, by its operation the intellect ‘makes things actually able to be understood’.7 Coming to understand is a work, not a simple surrender. But what kind of work? Perhaps we might say something along these lines . . . Created intellect is awakened to activity by sense experience: we see, hear, touch things, becoming aware of their presence to us. The intelligibility of these realities happens as we move beyond mere consciousness of their surface phenomena. By the intellect’s operation we begin to assimilate a pattern, to generalize and compare, to abstract from sensible particulars: in short, to understand what something is. This act of intelligence is not ‘poetic’; it is, certainly, an act of ‘making’ but not of ‘making up’. Say it is an act of establishing an intelligent relation to something which precedes the intellect, something which is inherently intelligible. Intellect discerns intelligibility, follows the intelligible as the law by which it operates. This discernment takes stable form by representation: the intellect forms an idea of the reality which endures beyond the instant of apprehension, and which enables us to rehearse and reproduce that reality, to preserve things in thought, and by the operation of memory to retrieve them. This, in the crudest terms, is the intellect’s work of making things actually intelligible. The intellect, of course, does not do its work in isolation from other elements of our creatureliness. It is inseparable from the body, for though intellect is not executed by any specific bodily organ, it is not executed apart from the body’s acts: to know, I must breathe. Further, the

6.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.79.2. 7.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.79.3 resp.

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intellect sits alongside the emotions or passions, those movements of inclination towards or aversion from realities which present themselves before us; and it sits alongside the will, the power of appetite which impels us in a certain direction. We are intellectual creatures in and with our being embodied, emotional and volitional creatures. But within that complex, intellect has the task of governance. Human creatures fulfil their nature when their performance of themselves is ordered by knowledge, and knowledge is seated in the intellect. The intellect directs the body, the emotions and the will, restraining them from taking command, and ensuring that they are fixed on proper objects. Intellect apprehends the law of our nature which we are to love, seek and enact. In such ways the gift of created intellect fulfils its vocation. But vocation can be resisted, and given powers can become instruments of ingratitude and treason against our nature and its loving creator. How does this happen? What sorrow and damage is brought about when intellect becomes vicious and depraved?

III In making the turn from considering created intellect to considering the intellect in its fallen state, two matters should orient our reflections. First, however grave the depravity of the intellect, it is not something absolute, and must be enclosed within and limited by the more primary reality of the intellect’s regeneration. The deformation of the intellect is never more than an interim reality, an interval between the intellect’s integrity at creation and its perfection in the world to come; its defection from its calling has already been arrested by the Word and the Spirit. There is a vicious intellect, and intellectual vice; but, even more, there is ‘the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator’ (Col. 3.10). God remains the intellect’s Lord. Second, we would be unwise to think of the depravity of the intellect as a peculiarly modern occurrence, a collateral effect of the naturalization of our view of ourselves. It assumes peculiar modern forms, such as the association of the intellect with pure human spontaneity and resistance to the idea that the movement of the mind is moved by God. But these are instances of perennial treachery; if our intellects are depraved, it is not because we are children of Scotus or Descartes or Kant, but because we are children of Adam. What intellectual defect do we inherit and repeat? Sin is betrayal of our created nature and refusal to live out the vocation which that nature entails. Life in, with and under the creator involves three elements: glad consent to

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the nature and powers which in his love the creator has bestowed on us; employment of our given powers in ways which move us to our creaturely fulfilment; fellowship with the creator. To take these in turn: (1) Unlike beasts, human animals have a conscious, deliberate and consensual relation to their nature. We are not simply instinctual creatures; we are reflectively aware of our nature, and so we are able to make it our own rather than merely act it out in an unconscious way. This power is the freedom in which we possess our nature; it is the power of awareness of and consent to being the sort of creatures that we have been made to be. (2) Having our nature in this way, we are to perform it. Our nature has a teleological structure; to possess it is to be required to engage in a movement in which our nature is fulfilled. Our given powers are powers to fill out our nature in certain ways, and not in others, to give our lives this, not that, shape. Not all uses of our powers lead to the fulfilment of our nature; some are wicked and destructive; once again, we must deliberate and direct ourselves. (3) As we fill out our nature by deploying our powers, we do so in relation to God. This means that we are to use our powers in accordance with the purpose of the creator, and in dependence upon the creator’s grace. Only in relation to him can creatures come to enjoy their good. The children of Adam do not do these things. They despise and oppose their given nature and fail in their vocation. The freedom to consent becomes the freedom to dissent, to act against the purpose of the creator. We give ourselves permission to use our powers to fill out our nature in ways which the creator has not left open to us; as we take that permission, we come to think of ourselves as grand beings, rich and fascinating makers of possibilities. As so we edge ourselves away from life in obedience to the creator’s purpose and reliance on the creator’s goodness; we fall into evil self-­responsibility. In all of this, we cannot, of course, unmake our own nature: even the most depraved exercise of creaturely powers cannot undo the work of the creator. But we can disrupt the performance of our nature, and indulge ourselves in the belief that we have brought something original into being. Yet what is that self-­made nature? Nothing but corruption, a vain essay in the unmaking of ourselves. Adam gains nothing from the fall except guilt and misery, and what he loses is very great. How is the intellect caught up in the corruption of Adam’s children? As with our created nature in general, so with our intellectual nature: sin cannot eradicate what God has made. But the performance of our intellectual nature is deeply distorted, and our movement towards perfection halted in its tracks. We may listen to Calvin’s instruction on this point. Calvin firmly resists any notion that our intellectual powers are destroyed by the fall: ‘something of understanding and judgment remains

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as a residue’,8 he writes; creatures retain a power of perception and ‘some sort of desire to search out the truth’;9 even sinners continue to be captivated by love of truth. Yet the intellect is gravely damaged; it is ‘weak’, ‘plunged’ into such ‘deep darkness’ and so ‘corrupted’ that all that we see of created intellect are ‘its misshapen ruins’ (deformes ruinae).10 Intellect as a capacity or disposition remains, even though in severely impaired form; what is lacking is the intellect’s purposeful and well-­directed execution of itself. It ‘cannot come forth effectively’ (efficaciter emergere nequeat),11 Calvin says; the ‘longing for truth, such as it is, languishes before it enters upon its race because it soon falls into vanity. Indeed, the human mind, because of its darkness, cannot hold to the right path, but wanders through various errors and stumbles repeatedly, as if it were groping in darkness, until it strays away and finally disappears. Thus it betrays how incapable it is of seeking and finding truth.’12 After the fall, the intellect descends into what the apostle calls ‘futility’, a failure to run its proper course. Of the many symptoms of this futility, we may select one to which the Christian tradition has often drawn attention, namely curiosity. We have grown accustomed to consider curiosity either innocent or virtuous; for the earlier Christian tradition, however, curiosity is a vice. It is vicious because it is a corruption of the virtue of studiousness. By studiousness is meant the strenuous application of the powers of creaturely intellect in order to come to know. Indeed, studiousness is an element in all the works of intelligence, being basic to the implementation of our intellectual nature. The intellect’s power is known in its eager, assiduous, concentrated deployment. Yet there is a measure of ambivalence in studiousness. Fittingly enacted, it is a good, because pursuit of knowledge sets the powers of our created nature to work. But in pursuit of that good, intellectual powers must be applied properly, that is, to fitting objects, in due measure, and for fitting ends. Such is the intellect’s futility after the fall that this does not happen; studiousness is corrupted in to curiosity.

8.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.ii.12. 9.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.ii.12. 10.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.ii.12 (CO, vol. 2 [Brunswick: Schwetsche, 1864], col. 196). 11.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.ii.12 (CO, vol. 2, col. 196). 12.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.ii.12 (ET altered).

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Curiosity happens when intellectual activity is commanded by crooked desire. We may note some of its manifestations. (1) Curiosity applies the power of the intellect to improper objects; it is the intellect reaching beyond what is legitimate, and so refusing to give consent to the limitations of created intelligence. Curiosity, Augustine says, ‘snap[s] the reins of prohibition’ under the pressure of the desire to know as God knows.13 Curiosity is the intellect defying divine limitation and exceeding divine permission; in it, the intellect seeks to be unbounded, and precisely so fails to fulfil its created nature. (2) Curiosity directs the power of the intellect to knowing created realities without reference to their creator. The curious intellect stops short at corporeal properties of things, lingering too long over them and not allowing them to steer intelligence to the creator. Curiosity is greedy for ‘new experiences through the flesh’, Augustine once again says,14 and its very eagerness halts the movement of intelligence. (3) Curiosity is a deformation of the proper manner in which created intellect is called to operate. Curiosity involves inordinate appetite for new knowledge – a craving for intellectual novelty which is addictive and which swamps intelligence. As such, it is indiscriminate intellectual greed. Curiosity craves the excitement of acquiring new knowledge, caring nothing for the worth or otherwise of the objects of intelligence. Moreover, curiosity is entangled with pride. Gratification of any inflamed appetite expands our pleasure in our own powers and makes us satisfied with ourselves. Curiosity does this, and so erodes the lowliness of spirit and teachableness which must accomplish the proper exercises of the mind. (4) Finally, curiosity pursues knowledge for improper ends: to increase self-­esteem, or to accomplish some evil purpose, or to feed a prurient appetite for the new. Curiosity is a telling instance of the intellect’s declension and disarray in the wake of the fall. But like all such instances of intellectual defect, it is decisively countered by the mercy of God in the reconciliation and regeneration of the mind. Adam bequeathed to his heirs futility of mind, darkness of understanding, and alienation from the life of God because of ignorance (Eph. 4.17f.). These vices and deformities are beyond any repair which creatures might of themselves attempt. Such is the intellect’s incapacity that mere exhortation to temperance will not suffice; nor will rules for the direction of the mind, 13.  Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, in The Works of Saint Augustine, vol. I/13, On Genesis (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2002), XI.41. 14.  Augustine, Confessions (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955), X.35.54.

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or patterns of formation through catechesis, which cannot of themselves have any permanent effect, because they are powerless against the alienation from the life of God which lies at the core of our intellectual disarray. What is needed, the apostle tells us, is ‘renewal in the spirit of the mind’ (Eph. 4.23). This no creature can effect; but God can do so, and has done so in the loving missions of the incarnate Son of God and the outpoured Spirit. It is the mission of the incarnate Son to put an end to the enmity between God and the creatures of God, to effect reconciliation. At the behest of the Father, and in fulfilment of the Father’s unshakeable purpose of fellowship with his human creation, the Son of God takes to himself the creature’s fallen condition in all its squalor and shame. In taking it to himself, he takes it away, freely submitting in his own person to its destruction, and so actually destroying it, making it the ‘old’ nature. And more: in our stead he lives the true life of the creatures of God, gathering us to himself so that we come to be new creatures in him. In all this, he constitutes and effects the ‘new’ nature by reconciliation. Because he is who he is – the one ‘in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell’ (Col. 1.19) – he ‘reconciles to himself all things’ (Col. 1.20). This ‘all things’ includes in its scope the created intellect: those who were ‘once estranged and hostile in mind . . . he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death’ (Col. 1.21f.). By virtue of the Word made flesh, that is, there arises a new created intellectual nature. It is the mission of the Holy Spirit to realize and preserve this new intellectual nature. The Holy Spirit is the Lord and giver of life; he so works upon and in reconciled creatures that the new nature comes to be their own. Intellectual dispositions which had fallen asleep are awakened at the Spirit’s approach; powers which had ebbed away and dissipated are restored and concentrated; desires which had scattered into chaos are directed to what is good and holy. And so the intellect begins once again to move, and by the breath of the Spirit there arises a new intellectual life corresponding to the new intellectual nature. We turn to some reflections on the characteristics of this new intellectual life.

IV So far we have examined three components of a Christian theology of the intellect: the nature and operation of created intellect; the intellect’s devastation as a consequence of our disloyalty to God; the reconciliation and regeneration of the intellect by the works of the Son and the Spirit. Christians engaging in intellectual work do so in the realm of regeneration,

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as those to whom the Holy Spirit has imparted a new principle of intellectual life, new powers, and a new vocation. What does the living of this life look like? What human forms does it take? Before sketching the outlines of an answer, three preliminary matters should be dispatched. First, when we turn to speak of the intellectual life, we do not cease to speak of the grace of God. Life in the realm of regeneration conforms to the character of creaturely being, namely, that we have life and movement as we are vivified and moved by God. The first law of intellectual life is, therefore: ‘All this is from God’ (2 Cor. 5.18). Second, in the intellectual life this ‘from God’ does not eliminate but establish and sustain our proper intellectual nature and movement. As he imparts a new principle to the intellect, the Spirit makes the intellect alive and active. This is perhaps hard for us to see, because we have been schooled into the assumption that divine and human action are in competition, so that to speak of the Spirit’s moving of the mind is to erode the mind’s own work. Not so: God the Spirit moves not extrinsically, as an alien causal power, but intrinsically, as the mover of our movement. Only by God’s moving does the intellect move; but by God’s moving the intellect does, indeed, move. The second law of intellectual life is, therefore: ‘God is at work in you, both to will and to work’ (Phil. 2.13). Third, the life into which we have been born anew awaits consummation; and so the intellectual life of believers, though regenerate, is not yet brought to completion. Christian intellectual life participates in the comprehensive alteration of our state by God; it is ‘born . . . of God’ (Jn 1.13). But the new principle which this establishes does not instantaneously propel the intellect to perfection; rather, it sets the intellect within the history of sanctification in which, by the empowerment and illumination of the Spirit, believers have to inhabit and actively to fill out the new nature given to them. They do this by a double process of detachment and appropriation: detachment, because they need to separate themselves from the old nature which is no longer their own; appropriation, because they need to make their own the new nature which is their own. How does this happen in the sphere of the intellect? In the realm of regeneration, the basic elements and operations of created intellect remain: its discursive character, its making things intelligible by representation, and so on, continue unaltered. Yet there is much that is new. The renewal of the intellect effects an entire alteration of the manner or conduct of the intellectual life. Life in Christ and the Spirit brings with it a characteristic way of understanding the life of the mind, one which distinguishes it from other ways of living that life. A number of matters present themselves for reflection.

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1.  There is in the performance of regenerate intellectual life a pervasive sense that this life has emerged out of a decisive alteration of our condition and capacities. Persons engaging in this life are deeply mindful that the life of their natural intellectual existence has been broken; that they have been ‘brought forth by the word of truth’ (Jas 1.18), awakened and enlightened by the Spirit; in short, converted. This sense is to suffuse all intellectual activity, generating a distinctive mode of intellectual life. It manifests itself as a set of the mind which takes the form of gratitude – that what was once in ruins is now being rebuilt, that fallen ignorance is being checked and overcome, that exhausted and damaged natural powers are made to live and act again by a second gift of the creator. 2. Regenerate intellectual life exhibits docility. It takes place in the domain and active presence of the divine instructor, by whose instruction intelligence is healed. Can human intellect be taught of God and retain its dignity and proper energy? Kant opposed enlightenment and tutelage, considering the latter to be servility and lack of resolution in the life of reason. To look for intellectual direction from another is to say ‘I need not trouble myself, I need not think’.15 But for regenerate intellectual life, this is not so; in the school of divine instruction, intelligence flourishes. It does so because the one who teaches is not some hostile dictatorial pedagogue, but the loving, creative divine wisdom which repairs intelligence. His teaching heals and restores. ‘Those who are diseased in soul’, says Clement of Alexandria,‘require [an instructor] to cure our maladies, and then a teacher, to train and guide the soul to all requisite knowledge’; and such we have in the divine instructor who ‘guid[es] the sick to the perfect knowledge of the truth’.16 3.  The performance of regenerate intellectual life requires the exercise of both intellectual and moral virtues. The required intellectual virtues are simply the mind’s natural powers, given by the creator and renewed and strengthened by regeneration. Without their exercise, the intellectual life will not happen. Alongside this, regenerate intellectual life also requires the exercise of certain moral and ascetical virtues. The operation of redeemed 15.  I. Kant, What Is Enlightenment?, in Kant on History, ed. L. W. Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 3. 16.  Clement of Alexandria, Paedogogus, in A. Roberts, J. Donaldson, ed., AnteNicene Fathers [ANF], 10 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1867–73; reprint, Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), vol. 2, I.1.

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intelligence calls for powers in addition to intelligence; it stipulates that we become certain kinds of persons. We do this not by self-­cultivation but by the Spirit’s cultivating work; what the Spirit effects is a set of character which becomes the moral and spiritual climate within which the life of the intellect can prosper. Here are a couple of examples: (a)  The intellectual life requires a concentration of the will on intellectual vocation, and ready compliance with its requirements. Serious and sustained intellectual resolve is necessary; this work cannot be entered upon casually, and cannot be pursued indolently, intermittently or in a distracted way. The necessary resolve includes being prepared for the losses which will most likely be sustained: of bodily ease, perhaps, or of society, or of easy acceptance of much that surrounds us. And the resolve also entails acceptance of the sheer labour of acquiring facility with the means and skills of intellectual life. Such resolve is rarely natural to us; to exercise it, we must become pliable and obedient; and pliability and obedience are matters of the Spirit’s grace. (b)  The intellectual life requires the ruling and right use of the body, a regime in which care for the body serves and does not hinder the intellect’s vocation. We may shy from talking of the subservience of the body, considering the body a great good, and scolding earlier Christians for failing to realize the fact. The body is a good, and its care is a duty; but its goodness consists principally in its service of other goods, of which the intellectual life is one. And so – again under the Spirit’s superintendence – intellectual activity demands discipline of the body in such matters as food, speech, rest and movement. The examples indicate the kind of virtues which issue from conversion and shape intellectual disposition. To do its work well, the intellect needs to be unimpeded;17 but because we are still climbing out of our sinful selves, many impediments loiter around inside us, and we often cherish them. Moral and ascetical virtues are a way in which the Spirit moves us to remove such encumbrances and make intelligence ready for truth. 4. Regenerate intellectual life is undertaken conducted with calm awareness and embrace of the limitations and opportunities of its present situation, and therefore undertaken freely. We are where we are, in our own bit of the history of human culture, in certain institutions and in the society 17.  Aquinas, Commentaria in octo libros Physicorum VII, lect. 6, n. 927.

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of certain others; we are not elsewhere. Nostalgia for where we are not, or bitter hostility to where we are, are equally fruitless. But because the principle of our intellectual life is the presence of God in his Word and Spirit, we are given a liberty both from and for our circumstances. Our present condition constrains us: certain resources have been forgotten or are difficult of access; common prejudices hold us back, questions press themselves on our attention with great insistence, habits of thought may hold us in their thrall. Yet the same situation also affords opportunities, opening up possibilities we would otherwise not enjoy, prompting us in unexpectedly fruitful ways. In all this, regenerate intellectual life must prove its freedom. Heeding the gospel’s instruction, it can adopt an uninhibited posture towards its setting. It does not think of that setting as fate, sweeping everything before it; it can seize the opportunities without being bound by the limitations. It can, therefore, take place in a manner which allows that the present is the object both of God’s judgement and God’s provision, not resigning itself to the sour thought that the present is all that there is. 5. Regenerate intellectual life devotes itself to the study of created things in order to ascend to contemplation of God, for in contemplation of God lies our true happiness. There are two objects of intellectual consideration: creatures and God. We study creatures in the natural and social sciences and the humanities – ‘creatures’, note, not nature or society or human culture as if these were complete in themselves and did not refer us to God. For the regenerate intellect there are no secular studies, because there is nothing which is not to be traced to God as its principle. Say, therefore, that in our study of natural and social and cultural objects we study the ‘works of God’; that is, we treat such objects of inquiry as objects which have their own natural integrity but which in that very integrity point us to the creator. The fallen mind, trapped in curiosity, does not permit study of creatures to prompt consideration of the creator; instead, it arrests the movement of intelligence by fastening on natural surfaces, and does not penetrate to the depth beneath the created sign. Regenerate studiousness, by contrast, inquires into creatures – with ardent attention, respect and well-­tempered delight – in order to be drawn also to knowledge of God. Created things, Augustine says, are like steps that lead us ‘towards immortal things that abide forever’.18 To study them as such is not to pass over them 18.  Augustine, De vera religione, in Augustine. Earlier Writings, ed. J. H. S. Burleigh (London: SCM Press, 1953), XXIX.52.

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inconsiderately, as vain and shallow matters scarcely fitting for the regenerate mind; it is, rather, to study them in such a way that intelligence is stretched out to God. ‘The ultimate fulfilment of the human intellect is divine truth’, Aquinas tells us; ‘other truths enrich the intellect by their being ordered to divine truth’.19

V For Christian faith, the intellect and its operations are not pure natural elements but created realities, to be explicated by reference to God’s loving work of origination, preservation, reconciliation and perfection. Only as we are brought to know that divine charity is the setting in which we enact ourselves do we come to understand our own nature, including our intellectual nature. But God’s charity and its formation of our lives are only indirectly perceptible, known only in the course of making our answer to divine grace. Because this is so, Christians cannot escape a measure of estrangement from their neighbours who do not make the Christian confession; the estrangement is such that those neighbours may sometimes view Christian conceptions of the intellectual life with amusement, disdain or even hostility. There is no surprise in this: it is an axiom of Christian faith that ‘the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God’ (Rom. 8.7), and Christians trying to map the world with a firm eye on their confession will endure a share of that hostility. It is important to respond to this state of affairs prudently: neither anxiously nor with belligerent zeal, but with tranquil confidence that the gospel outbids the world, with modesty, because the gospel can look after itself, and with charity, because the gospel seeks our neighbour’s good and not just our neighbour’s defeat. To this end, calm exposition of first principles serves the gospel best; the truth will establish itself, we must simply let it run on its own path.

19.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.180.4 ad 4 (ET altered).

Chapter 10 G o d , T h e o l o g y , U n iv e r siti e s

I Christian faith talks about the nature of theological intelligence, about universities and about the place of theology in universities by talking about God. Its understanding of theology and universities is an extension of its knowledge that the founding and encompassing reality for all creaturely acts and forms of life is the triune God in his outer works. The activities of theological intelligence, and the university as a form of common intellectual endeavour, are both to be understood in relation to God’s creative, providential, reconciling and perfecting acts, and to the accompanying divine instruction by which these acts are illuminated. In these acts, God brings into being and maintains intelligent fellowship with Adam’s race, restoring and completing that fellowship after creatures betray their vocation and cast themselves into guilt, estrangement, misery and ignorance. Theology and universities are elements in the unfinished history of the redemption of human intelligence. Accordingly, determining the place of theology in the university is not an exercise in correlating two quite separate spheres of reality, one sacred, one profane. Correlation assumes that the institution of the university falls outside the realm where theological description is entitled to operate, and forgets the scope of the intelligence of faith, whose compass includes all things sub ratione Dei. Reflection upon the place of theology in the university requires biblical-­theological description, that is, a theology of theology, and a theology of the cultural acts and institutions of the civitas terrena. Theological inquiry into these two realities – the movement of theological intelligence and the movement of human intellectual association in the university – understands both as creaturely. To inquire into a creaturely reality is not only to describe its phenomenal properties but to attempt to penetrate its depth, its reference to the source of its being, its motive power, and its end beyond itself. Theology asks: by what divine

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intention and movement are these creaturely movements of mind and society moved? In what ways do these creaturely movements correspond to the good purpose of the creator and to their given natures? In what measure do they enact or frustrate that nature? How may their imperfections be repaired, how may their flourishing be secured? By seeing the natures and ends of theological intelligence and universities in relation to God’s history with creatures, theology undertakes analysis by principles, attempting to discover natures and ends by penetrating to the principia of creaturely forms of life and activity. This, because created things cannot be grasped in se and per se, but only in relation to God, the causa universalis totius esse.1 Principial analysis of human acts and institutions has fallen from favour, sometimes considered merely utopian, sometimes repudiated as a denial of the self-­originality of those acts and institutions and so liable to impede their adaptability. The opposite is rather the case. Analysis by principles inhibits thinking about intellectual life and its social forms in contracted and uncritical ways which take currently ascendant, politically commanding, arrangements as given and perennial. Thought may be released from enchantment and quickened by placing elements of practice and experience in the deeper setting of their principia: to become aware of extrinsic causes and ends is to acquire liberty to judge present circumstances.2

II What is Christian theology? Here is one answer – contestable, but not without well-­established antecedents in the Christian tradition.

1.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.45.2 resp. See K. L. Schmitz, ‘Analysis by Principles and Analysis by Elements’, in The Texture of Being, pp. 21–36. On the importance of inquiry into first principles in thinking about the university, see J. Pelikan, The Idea of the University. A Re-­examination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 22–31. 2.  A corollary task, not attempted here, is that of historical analysis, which, conducted well, liberates thought by memory. For two impressive recent accounts of the history of the place of theology in the university which resist secular fatalism, see M. Higton, A Theology of Higher Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 13–140, and T. A. Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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1.  Christian theology is a work of created intelligence in the domain of the abundant grace of Christ; under the impress of divine instruction, chastening and sanctification, it devotes itself to the study of God and all things in God. Theology is directly and properly a work of religion, that is, an undertaking in relation to God to whom we are inescapably bound. Christian theology is not simply about the Christian religion; it is itself a work of religion. More closely, theology as religion is an act of intellectual justice by which intelligent creatures give due honour to God in his surpassing excellence; and it is an act of holiness, for it is ‘by sanctity that the human mind applies itself and its acts to God’.3 Christian theology is a work of latria and sanctitas.4 Theology’s principal act is well-­tempered studiousness, the close application of intelligence to fitting objects, in fitting ways and for fitting ends. This act of intelligence can be portrayed in terms of its object, its cognitive principles, its setting and its ends. 2.  The object of theology is God and all things in God. Theology is chiefly concerned with God the Holy Trinity, first in his inner works, his supremely abundant and perfect life as Father, Son and Spirit, and then in his outer works, the missions of the Son and the Spirit as they effect the Father’s purpose. Derivatively, theology is concerned with created things, those realities to whom God has given the gift of life. Its interest in created things is not simply with their natural properties but with their relation to God – the grounds of that relation in God’s purposeful love, its temporal course in the works of nature and grace which culminate in the reconciling and perfecting works of Christ and the Spirit, its consummation in the restoration of the complete fellowship of creator and creature. Theology is thus at once a most particular and a most comprehensive science: intelligence devoted to the study of the one from whom all things derive and on whom all things depend. 3.  The cognitive principles of theology are God’s supreme intelligence by which he has unrestricted knowledge of himself and all things, and finite creaturely intelligence which comes to know as it is moved by divine 3.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.81.8 resp. (Fathers of the English Dominican Province translation). 4. On the coinherence of intellect and ascesis, see A. N. Williams, The Divine Sense. The Intellect in Patristic Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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teaching. God’s knowledge is theology’s primary cognitive principle. This knowledge is unencompassed and simple, a single act of intuition in which there is no coming-­to-know; this divine knowledge is the principle of theological science. Theology thus has its primary cognitive centre outside itself in divine omniscience, not in any existing knowledge to which the creature can pretend or in any capacity which the creature may possess. Theology arises out of the fact that things are known by God, and does not rest on achieved or anticipated acquisition of knowledge by creatures. This reference to antecedent, infinite divine knowledge means that theology is an odd sort of science – a subaltern or subordinate science, whose cognitive principle is both extrinsic to itself and undemonstrable (modern regimes of knowledge generally judge this a fatal weakness). In theology, the causal order of the ontological dependence of creatures on the creator is mirrored in the order of knowing: to know is to be caused by God to know something which is antecedently and fully known by him. Theological intelligence is not cause but effect. Further, God’s intellectual nature is transitive or communicative. In boundless charity, God instructs creatures, drawing them to know, and therefore to love, the one by whom they are known and loved. This he does in the revelatory missions of his Word and Spirit. ‘The God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory’ gives ‘a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know’ (Eph. 1.17f.). These missions are served by creaturely assistants: chiefly by the prophetic and apostolic writings in which divine teaching takes scriptural form, derivatively by those charged to instruct the community of faith by repeating and applying divine doctrine. Revelation is accompanied by illumination, the work in which God the Spirit quickens creaturely intelligence and makes it capable of receiving and appropriating divine instruction. Creaturely intelligence, the subjective cognitive principle of theology, is creaturely: a set of capacities bestowed by God, through the exercise of which intelligent fellowship with God becomes possible on the side of the creature. These capacities are, indeed, to be exercised; creaturely intelligence is not merely receptivity or the absence of any hindrance. Yet as creaturely powers, their necessary exercise is not wholly spontaneous; it is kept mobile and effective by an anterior divine movement. The Spirit moves creaturely intelligence to become an active coordinate to the omnipotent, omnipresent radiance of God. 4.  The setting of theology is the economy of grace, in which God conducts creatures to fulfilment. Theology is not simply one element in the natural

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history of human inquiry. It is an element in the domain of redemption: of gospel, church, baptism, sanctification, invocation of God. Because of this, theology participates in the passage from alienation to fellowship with God which is the primary note of created history and activity caught up by God’s reconciling purpose. Estrangement from God brings with it the corruption and weakening of natural gifts of intelligence, from which come ignorance of God and idolatry, and a vain confidence that the examination of natural properties and movements is sufficient for knowledge of created things. In the domain of redemption, estrangement is overcome: objectively in the incarnation and the paschal mystery, applicatively in the regeneration and sanctification of creatures by the Spirit, of which theological intelligence is an instance. 5.  The ends of theology are contemplative and practical. Its principal end is contemplation of God, because such contemplation is the end of intelligent creatures: ‘We shall see him as he is’ (1 Jn 3.2). In all its inquiries – textual, historical, dogmatic, moral – theology moves towards that final end as an act of contemplative intelligence. This does not make theology any less a labour of intellect, or dispense theologians from strenuous practices of study; rather, it directs those practices beyond simple accumulation of textual, historical, dogmatic or moral knowledge. Such knowledge is delightful to theological intelligence, furnishing a great array of matters for the mind and the spiritual affections, whose acquisition is an occasion for joy. But, once acquired, this knowledge is not the termination of the work of theological intelligence. It is interim and dispositive, and its proper use lies in forming and directing the mind in its contemplative approach to God, the beginning and end of all things. In contemplatione quippe principium, quod Deus est, quaeritur.5 Contemplation impels and orders practice. The practical end of theology is three-­fold. First, right conduct in relation to God (in the works of religion, both interior devotion and external reverence), and in relation to our fellows (in the works of charity and justice). Theological intelligence is inseparable from ascetic and moral formation, or it is self-­deception (Jas 1.22). Second, instruction, for the theologian is set within the body of baptized, where gifts given to one are to be communicated, ‘for the common good’ (1 Cor. 12.7). Third, testimony, for the theologian is also set among those not yet in the company of believers, sharing with them the graces and 5. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob VI.61, in Moralia in Iob. Libri I-X, CCSL 143 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979).

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burdens of creatureliness, and obliged by charity to apostolic commendation of the good things of the gospel.

III Theology is a work of pious intelligence whose foundation and first moving cause is God’s loving communication of knowledge of himself to the saints, and whose end is the vision of God. Because it is an academic discipline only per accidens, it may seem that its pursuit is fitting only in religious studia. This conclusion is premature. Sequestration of the earthly from the heavenly city may satisfy the desire to make purity visible in present practice, but does so at the price of impatience with the incomplete, mixed character of history. Further, it quickly condemns provisional forms of natural life to secularity, failing to inquire into the ways in which they may anticipate – not simply frustrate – the Kingdom of God. What is needed is a theology of the university, which can serve to differentiate between forms of university life which are conducive to, and those which inhibit, the flourishing of creaturely intelligence and the pursuit of its proper ends as understood by Christian faith. For theology as a work of religion, this entails neither principled belonging to, nor principled withdrawal from, the university, but rather the exercise of prudence, of well-­formed discrimination and discernment of occasion and opportunity. How may the university be understood? Created intelligence is a very great good; it is that which specifies the way in which human creatures relate to God and to the rest of creation. Created intelligence is discursive; we acquire knowledge over time, not by intuition. Knowing involves coming-­toknow, and this, in turn, involves work. The operations of created intelligence take place in relation to the volitional, affective and bodily elements of human nature. Intelligence properly superintends these other elements, so that they serve the good of reason. But this superintendence is neither a natural condition nor instinctual; it occurs only deliberately, by the exercise of superintendence. This is rendered laborious by our fall into unrighteousness, for the right order of the elements of human nature is disturbed, and passion and bodily need can slip the leash. Intelligence, too, is injured by sin, its operation is impaired, and it falls into sins of excess (curiosity) or sins of defect (sluggishness). Unrighteousness is not, however, the last word: along with all the elements of created nature, intelligence is gathered up by God’s restoring work. A Christian theological account of human nature includes a soteriology of intelligence, one which is confident that, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, our ruined intellectual nature is under repair.

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The formation and exercise of restored intelligence is causally complex. Its primary author is the Holy Spirit, who realizes God’s reconciling work in the elements of creaturely nature. Its secondary authors are, first, the individual: the Spirit moves created intelligence to move itself. This creaturely motion is properly and inalienably the work of the individual, for no one can come to know for me. But though the work of intelligence is proper to the individual, it is not purely solitary, because it is necessarily embedded in forms of social relation. Such forms include tradition (stocks of learning, well-­tried habits of inquiry), modes of instruction, or the exemplification of intellectual virtue: in all of these, intelligence operates in the society of others. This social element may assume institutional form as a school or studium, a formal association of persons in pursuit of the life of intelligence. Of this, the university is an instance. The life of the university as studium may be schematized into three elements: study, instruction and formation. Study is the contemplative element of the university. Study is ‘close mental application to something’;6 it is not necessarily close mental application to something new. Study is not coterminous with research, which has to do with the acquisition of new knowledge. Study may be the application of intelligence to the absorption of what has been known, that is, to the inhabitation of tradition. Study of this kind is far from passive conformity; it is a ‘performance’ of tradition, neither wholly spontaneous and original nor wholly devoid of appropriation. Such study forms the powers of understanding and judgement which in turn serve discovery of the new. Only derivatively and secondarily is study directed to the purpose of bodily welfare. This is not to subscribe to the view that the acquisition of any knowledge whatsoever, however ‘useless’, needs no justification beyond itself: this is not well-­tempered studiousness but vain and disordered curiosity (the temptations of which universities have not always resisted). It is, rather, to restrain the desire for visible impact in or applicability to the material realm as the only register of the utility of study. Christianly understood, study of the arts and sciences is ‘natural contemplation’, the attempt to understand natural and cultural realities by discerning their relation to their underlying principles, and so to know creata as ‘divine effects’.7 The primary end of 6.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.166.1 resp. 7.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.180.4 resp.; on natural contemplation in patristic theology, see P. M. Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy. Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 315–35.

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study – all study – is contemplation of the creator of all, and in it ‘there should be no exercise of vain and perishing curiosity, but a step should be taken toward immortal things that abide for ever’.8 Instruction is the active element of the university. The art of contemplation, though it draws upon natural capacities, is perfected through instruction, which forms, exercises and extends those capacities in the relation of master and apprentices, doctor and incipientes. The task of the master is to conduct the apprentice into a tradition of inquiry so that the apprentice may become an active, reflective participant in that tradition, knowledgeable about its substance, able to exercise the habits of mind which it requires, and eventually able to extend its common store. In this way, instruction is a particular form of fellowship, one which intends the communication of goods and the cultivation of intellectual and moral excellences. Instruction takes place in the shadow of the fall, and so it involves correction, arduous to master and apprentice alike, and sometimes attended by conflict and resentment. ‘Education’, Barth remarked to his students in his lectures on ethics, ‘means that someone wants more or less skilfully to take from me one of the many horns that I invisibly carry on my forehead, and of which I am as proud as a stag, and to put some kind of strange hat in its place.’9 All the more reason, therefore, for the university to strive for peace in its common life, since the unhindered operation of intelligence requires tranquillity. Formation in justice is the moral element of the university. In its work of instruction, we saw, the university serves in the shaping of persons in whom created intelligence is edged closer to perfection. This is itself a good, but not an exclusive good; when it becomes exclusive – in the form of intellectual self-­perfection – it discounts the common element of the human good. Like other institutions, the university serves this common good by the formation of just citizens, whose intelligence perceives what is required for the good of all and directs practical life in its pursuit. In all its undertakings, the university trains in, exemplifies and commends the virtue of justice, the right direction of dealings between persons so that the common good is enacted with constancy and defended against the unrighteousness by which it is harried. The comprehensive setting for the contemplative, active and moral life of the university is divine creation, providence and redemption. The 8.  Augustine, De vera religione XXIX.52. 9. K. Barth, Ethics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), p. 365.

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university draws upon, and is an arena for the exercise of, those powers which are bestowed upon creatures by the creator and sustained by his providence, which suffer the depredations unleashed by the fall, and which are the objects of God’s renewing grace. As the university does its work, it necessarily participates in that history with and under God, sometimes consenting, sometimes resisting, and nearly always in the absence of reflective awareness. The final questions to be asked are: to what extent does any particular set of institutional arrangements and self-­definitions in the modern university enact or resist its vocation? And: under what conditions may theology as an exercise of religious intelligence be pursued within these varied institutional settings?

IV There is, of course, no such singular entity as ‘the modern university’: better to think of a heterogeneous set of institutions, widely divergent in geographical, political and economic context, internal history, professed and implicit ideals, and much else. What follows is shaped chiefly by the recent history of universities in Britain, though analogies with what is happening in some continental European and North American settings would not be hard to find. Much recent literature on the state of universities is censorious and nostalgic by turns. There are, undoubtedly, things to censure or lament. But both rhetorics can be seductive, stultifying reasoned judgement and reinforcing discontent and discouragement. A theology which sets the university within the history of providence and regeneration has good reason to avoid intemperance, and will seek rather to illuminate both the inhibitions suffered and the opportunities enjoyed by the institution in its present settings. The inhibitions to the university’s fulfilment of its vocation are of two kinds. One, an immediately pressing set of constraints which is the object of much exasperated comment, concerns the erosion of the corporate character of the university under a variety of pressures: bureaucratization and managerialism; a culture of performance assessment; the dominance of a narrow conception of utility; neglect of la longue durée in favour of rapid adaptability to circumstance. The pressures derive largely from political intrusion into university life; the rapidity with which they have reordered the culture of university institutions, and the ready compliance with which they often have been greeted by some university leaders, are both remarkable. Under such constraints, it has not proved easy for

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universities, and especially for the humanities, to retain confidence in their contemplative, active and moral vocation. A second set of inhibitions is of much longer standing, and requires a much more sophisticated historical and theological analysis than can be attempted here. These inhibitions may be gathered together under the concept of the naturalization of scientia which has embedded itself deep within the self-­understanding of the research university for at least the last two centuries. By ‘naturalization’ is meant the elimination (explicit or tacit) of the category of ‘creatureliness’ in defining the objects, procedures, agents and ends of intellectual inquiry and its institutional forms. Naturalized inquiry concerns itself with the elements of nature and culture, not with their underlying principles, their unity or their capacity to signify a transcendent order of being and causality. Intelligence concerns itself with disparate phenomena, and does not attempt to ‘reduce’ them (that is, to trace them back) to a unifying first cause.10 This naturalism or phenomenalism engenders in theological intelligence an uneasiness about its standing in the university. Indeed, the fate of theology is a primary indicator of the naturalization of scholarly inquiry, as could readily be seen in the disputes about the admissibility of theology to the new University of Berlin. A principal consequence of this naturalism has been that theology’s inclusion in the university’s curriculum has brought with it a requirement to assimilate theological inquiry to the concept of scientia espoused by the (to use older parlance) philosophical faculty, thereby pressing sacra doctrina to regularize itself as an academic discipline. Theology, that is, finds itself cajoled or invited to move away from being a positive science integrally related to a confessional-­ecclesial setting, to detach itself from ascetical and religious practices, and to become the historical-­cultural science of religious objects and activities. The virtues required to pursue theology so understood are simply those of unassisted natural intellect; the term of theological inquiry is knowledge of the natural phenomena (history, texts, practices) of religion. Phenomenalism is a defection of created intelligence from its calling, and opposition to the rule of Christ and the Spirit in the intellectual order. It has proved remarkably alluring, especially to the biblical and historical sub-­disciplines of theology which can more easily be conformed to 10. See here J. Milbank, ‘The Conflict of the Faculties. Theology and the Economy of the Sciences’, in M. Nation, S. Wells, ed., Faithfulness and Fortitude. In Conversation with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), pp. 39–57.

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critical-­historical investigation of the natural objects of religion. Its appropriation affords theology the satisfactions of finding itself in the inner circle of a culturally prestigious institution, releasing theology from the dishonour of pursuing sacra doctrina in a setting committed to a quite different set of virtues from those required of the intelligence of faith. Prestige comes at a price, however: the conversion of theology into analysis of natural elements, the uncoupling of scientia from religio. Those who consider the price excessive suggest that, in present circumstances, theology risks too much when undertaken in the university: fuga mundi is a necessary condition for the pursuit of theology as an act of religion.11 This view of things ought not to be dismissed too briskly. It is undoubtedly the case that to take with full seriousness the ascetical demands of the theological vocation is to feel the tug of withdrawal from the world and its institutions. Theology which has ceased to register this pull may well have settled down, forgetting its exiled state and the persistence of disorder in intellectual institutions. Yet there may be a troubling perfectionism about the isolation of theology, one which quickly extracts the civitas terrena from God’s dealings with creatures, maximizing its fallenness, liable to overlook signs of preserving grace, and so, in the end, leaving undisturbed the university’s secular self-­definitions. By way of contrast, what might be involved in a free, discriminating association of theology with the university? The freedom with which theology may associate itself with the university derives from the fact that theological intelligence is an already-­established actuality in advance of any possible validation of its scientific character which the university might furnish. Theological intelligence exists and operates by virtue of God’s loving communication of himself, teaching, illuminating and empowering the redeemed mind. Recognition by the academy is a purely contingent matter; the possibility and reality of theology is secured by its relation to divine intelligence and instruction: ‘Thou hast taught me’ (Ps. 119.102). Though theology may benefit greatly from some form of association with the university, the university is not necessary for its flourishing (one need only bring to mind how much of the most compelling theology of the last century emerged, not from universities, but from religious houses). Further, theology determines the nature, limits and possibilities of an association with the university on the basis of its understanding of the 11. See, for example, G. D’Costa, Theology in the Public Square. Church, Academy and Nation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

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university as an element in the firmly-­established but still imperfect regnum gratiae, variously subject to both the judgement and the promise of the gospel. As an institution of the earthly city, the university bears all the marks of hostility to God’s end for human life and intellect. But such hostility, however grievous, cannot restrict the infinite scope of God’s ‘Yes’ to creation in the gospel. All human life takes place in the evangelical condition which exposes and nullifies that which seeks to oppose it, and which includes a gift of capacity to creatures. This gift embraces human institutions, which, even in their limitation, ambiguity, ingratitude in face of the divine generosity, wasting of divine goods, and liability to judgement may nevertheless signify, and in fragmentary ways anticipate, the righteous order of created life: ‘just as the royalty of Christ dominates the order of nature and the order of society, so also it dominates the order of the intelligence’.12 As theologians try to discern the extent and limits of association with any particular set of institutional arrangements for the intellectual life, they have need of prudence, ‘the knowledge of what is to be sought and avoided’.13 Prudence applies right reason to action in human affairs where positive law provides no simple determination of when and how to act or refrain from action: theologians must never lie, but whether they undertake their work in a university setting is a contingent matter. Exercising prudence involves both knowledge of universal principles (natures, ends and laws) and also clear-­sighted cognizance of singularia,14 that is, of the elements of a particular situation – the opportunities and obstacles which that situation presents, the strengths of mind and character for which it calls. Prudence is a good deal more than natural self-­protective shrewdness, because it is a part of goodness, concerned with devising fitting ways to obtain good ends, and so it rests upon the shaping of understanding, will and affections by the Spirit. Exercising prudence in the matter of association with the university, theology asks, on the one hand: what signs of divine goodness and creaturely gratitude can be discerned in the university? What openness to intellectual variety and to the unity of truth? What expectancy that theological intelligence can extend and enrich the life of the university? What occasions for charity in teaching and testimony might present themselves? What possibilities for fruitful exchange and common work 12. E. Gilson, ‘The Intelligence in the Service of Christ the King’, in A. Pegis, ed., A Gilson Reader (New York: Image Books, 1957), p. 35. 13.  Augustine, De libero arbitrio, in Augustine. Earlier Writings, I.xiii.27. 14.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.47.3.

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might lie open? What opportunities may there be for renewed contemplative engagement with theology’s proper res? What curbs to theology’s retreat into self-­absorption, formulaic repetition, laziness or loss of intellectual appetite? Theology asks, on the other hand: will association with the university limit theology’s pursuit of its proper ends by excessive oversight? Will theology find itself in some measure compelled to conform its ends and modes of inquiry to those of disciplines which the university holds in greater honour? Will regimes of funding and patronage press theology to pursue certain avenues of study and set others aside? Will theology be directed, gently or brusquely, to set its love on something other than its good? Theology also brings wider principles to bear upon this kind of consideration of particulars. Some of the principles are of the most comprehensive sort, concerned with the ways in which all believers relate to the world: fidelity to the Christian profession, seeking the will of God before all things, disdain for worldly prestige and advancement, keeping oneself unstained from the world. Alongside these, and more specifically, the exercise of prudence in this matter requires a well-­formed, coherent and operative sense of theology’s identity, integrity, vocation and ends, for two reasons. First, this prevents theology from allowing its sense of its own dignity to be contingent on the university’s conferral of approval: whatever justification and worth theology has is in the last analysis conferred by God. Second, more practically, it enables theology to make discriminations about institutional arrangements and modes of intellectual inquiry based on their coherence or otherwise with its given object and calling. Theology will be more confident in resisting the enticements of naturalized literary-­ historical methods, for example, if it is able to judge that they do not promote the ends to which its work is directed. Prudence is ‘engaged with doing things for the sake of an end’.15 Its deep causes are, objectively, the Spirit’s gift of counsel, and, subjectively, love of God. Prudence involves inquisitio rationis,16 reason’s deliberate inquiry into contingent circumstances in order to command action well. But for this to happen, created powers of mind, damaged by the fall, may not be self-­ reliant; they must be moved and taught by the Spirit. And so ‘inasmuch as their minds are quickened and instructed by the Spirit about what to do . . . the sons of God are endowed with the gift of counsel’.17 Further, prudence 15.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.52.2 s.c. 16.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.52.1 resp. 17.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.52.1 ad 3.

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is directed by love. In it, Augustine says, we see ‘love making a right distinction between what helps it towards God and what might hinder it’.18 Without love’s adherence to good ends, prudence becomes merely the cunning needed to survive (succumbing to this vice is entirely possible for the theologian). If theology does determine that its end is served by some kind of association with the university, it then will need to consider what virtues and practices are required to sustain its well-­being. Theology will need to exercise those virtues which are especially pertinent to Christian action in a mixed, imperfect setting and which enable discernment of the proper mean of commitment to, and detachment from, civil institutions. Such virtues include: fidelity to Christ’s kingship in the order of intelligence; hope in the form of expectancy that, such is Christ’s rule, the university will betray signs of divine goodness and afford occasions to fulfil theology’s vocation; magnanimity in which we extend ourselves to great things and refuse to be cramped by circumstances; charity in the form of benevolence and beneficence towards those with whom we are set in association; vigilance about possible incursions upon theological integrity (‘it is the part of prudence to keep watch with most anxious vigilance, lest any evil influence should stealthily creep in upon us’19); readiness for lack of recognition and for a measure of dishonour; longanimity in face of the delay of a fully satisfying setting for theological work; perseverance and patience arising from dedication to Christ’s call to serve in a particular place. Such virtues are bound up with the practice of religion, which is intrinsic to theological intelligence, not a mere external accompaniment.20 Most generally, this involves the devotion of theological intelligence to ready fulfilment of all that concerns the service of God. More specifically, it entails the inseparability of theological work from those activities in which we take from God the communications of his grace in Word and sacrament in the fellowship of the church, through which the life of faith is nourished, as well as its inseparability from those activities in which we subject ourselves to mortification so that sin may be chastened and the Spirit’s quickening power made more fully manifest. Most of all, the survival of theological intelligence in the university – or in any other setting – 18.  Augustine, De moribus ecclesiae catholicae XV.25. 19.  Augustine, De moribus ecclesiae catholicae XXIV.45. 20. See here Higton, A Theology of Higher Education, pp.  143–69; D’Costa, Theology in the Public Square, pp. 112–43.

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necessitates prayer, in which we confess creaturely need, turn to God as the author of all good, and ‘submit . . . [the mind] to [God] through reverence’.21

V Having a clear view of its nature and calling in the divine economy, fortified by divine gifts of virtue and by devotion, theological intelligence may venture a free association with the university. What gifts does it bring? What benefits accrue to the university by its inclusion? Much indeed: theology offers a metaphysics and morals of human intelligence. First, by way of metaphysics, theology articulates and governs its own activity by a unified account of intelligence and its institutions, of schools, scholars and scholarship. Theology ‘alone can teach us what is the last end of nature and intelligence’.22 Theology, that is, prompts the university to consider that there is such a thing as the universe, not simply indeterminate variety, and so to consider that, by consequence, there is the possibility of a unified enterprise of human understanding of natural, social and cultural reality. Theology offers this view of things by engaging in ‘evangelical clarification’,23 inquiring into gospel instruction about how temporal realities are to be understood sub ratione Dei, in accordance with their unified first cause and final end. To attend to the gospel is to attend to the ‘one God, the Father from whom are all things and from whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist’ (1 Cor. 8.6). That to which particular acts of inquiry direct themselves is not some chance aggregation of topics assembled in one institution by mere artifice, but a set of created realities constituting an ordered unity. The university’s inquiries are governed by the fact that ‘the reigning order in things established by God’s creation manifests the unity of the cosmos. This is because of the single plan ordering some things to others. For all things coming from God have a relation to one another and to him.’24 The university is, among other things, a social exploration of the integrity of truth. Modern universities are rarely informed by any such conviction: phenomenalism is inherently fissiparous. If, therefore, theology 21.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.83.3 ad 3. 22. Gilson, ‘The Intelligence in the Service of Christ the King’, p. 44. 23.  C. Ernst, ‘The Significant Life of a Dominican House of Studies’, in Multiple Echo. Explorations in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1979), p. 152. 24.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.47.3 resp.

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is to indicate an underlying unity in face of widespread disavowals, it must exercise considerable metaphysical ambition, tempered by recognition that, in its affirmation of a unified order of things, it remains in the incomplete realm of the ectypal, so that the order which it confesses it may not necessarily be able directly to perceive or describe. Yet, without metaphysical ambition, a primary element of theology’s vocation will be left undone.25 The public vocation of theology in the university includes the sharing of a divine gift of wisdom, that ability ‘to judge and set in order all things by God’s rules’.26 Second, by way of morals, theology exemplifies and commends the right ordering of the contemplative, active and formative tasks of the common intellectual enterprise. It does this, for example, by promoting studiousness and resisting curiosity, by witnessing against the promiscuity and dissipation of intelligence. Again, it does this by promoting the priority of contemplation over utility. Or again, it does this by pursuing charity and justice in the activities of teaching and governance. The presence of theology in the university ought to include the presence of human goodness in its affairs. For theology to be able to fulfil this public vocation, it needs confidence in the possibility of art and science outside the confession of faith, and confidence in theology’s capacity to enrich the university by giving an account of this possibility out of theology’s own resources. The condition for theology making its contribution to the university, in other words, is that it remains theology; the condition for theology remaining theology is the existence of sanctified theologians; the condition for the existence of sanctified theologians is the Spirit’s grace. 25.  Justifications of theology’s inclusion in the university on pluralist grounds entail the retraction of its metaphysical scope. See, for example, N. Wolterstorff, ‘The Travail of Theology in the Modern Academy’, in M. Volf, C. Krieg, T. Kucharz, ed., The Future of Theology. Essays in Honour of Jürgen Moltmann (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), pp.  35–46, or G. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Similarly, the account of the university offered in D. Ford, ‘An Interdisciplinary Wisdom. Knowledge, Formation and Collegiality in the Negotiable University’, in Christian Wisdom. Desiring God and Learning in Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.  304–49, advances no first principles of intelligence; the ‘wisdom’ which theology provides is not the Spirit’s gift of setting all things in order under divine instruction, but, at best, a resonant vocabulary of terms of value and a commendation of collegial practices, most of all, conversation. 26.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.45.1 resp.

Chapter 11 I n t e l l e ct ua l P ati e n c e 1

I What follows is an anatomy and commendation of an intellectual virtue whose presence contributes much to common pursuit of intellectual goods and whose absence inhibits their acquisition. It arises from persuasion that one of the chief parts of divinity’s apostolic office in the university is the articulation of a metaphysics and morals of intellectual inquiry, presenting and enacting a version of the good intellectual life. Alongside and in the course of pursuing their other scholarly tasks, divines are charged with inquiry into inquiry – with giving an account of the origin, nature, settings and ends of intellectual activity and of the ways in which that activity is fittingly and fruitfully to be undertaken. Such matters are, of course, also treated by other disciplines from time to time; but in divinity they have an especial salience, because of divinity’s often ambiguous and sometimes conflicted relation to the university since the middle of the eighteenth century. Alone of the four mediaeval faculties, divinity had to struggle to find acceptance in the modern university as it was reconceived in the wake of the German Enlightenment. The struggle may be read in a number of ways, but one of the foremost matters of contention concerned the nature of intellectual inquiry: is divinity to be numbered among the sciences, or is it simply the domestic thought of the ecclesial community? Often enough in the last two centuries, divinity has secured acceptance in the university by compliance, assenting, whether enthusiastically or half-­heartedly, to one or other version of a naturalist metaphysics of inquiry, and reinventing itself as the historical and literary science of religious phenomena. The magnificence of the scholarly harvest from such an arrangement can scarcely be 1.  An inaugural lecture as Professor of Divinity at the University of St Andrews, May 2014.

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over-­estimated, though it came at a heavy cost. But another stance has been and still is possible, one less immediately accommodating but ultimately more generous, and one, moreover, which regards the conception of intellectual inquiry in classical Christian thought, not as a liability to be shaken off but as an asset to be shared. Precisely in its unconventionality, a theological metaphysics and morals of inquiry will try to illuminate the life of the mind and provide intelligibility to natural experience and action. This it will do by tracing intellectual life to its source in divine benevolence, by which alone its nature and duties are disclosed. Alongside this, theology will also seek to diagnose inherited or deliberate disorders of our rational nature which prevent that nature’s full flourishing, and to suggest how they may be overcome. The cogency of such illumination, pathology and therapy of the intellect will be compromised, however, if divinity fails to govern itself by the metaphysics and morals of inquiry which derive from its proper subject-­ matter. Divinity’s modern history in this matter is, with significant exceptions, an unhappy one, commonly lacking in the large-­spirited confidence and munificence which arise from the knowledge of being in possession of an immense store of riches. Part of that store is a theology of the intellectual virtues, to reflection upon one of which we now turn.

II The prospering of intellectual life and institutions requires the exercise of certain virtues. The life of the mind is natural, that is, inherent in our nature and faculties as the kind of beings that we are. But, though natural, it is not instinctive but intentional, the result not of simple innate prompting but of deliberate, active cultivation of a potentiality of our nature. Because this is so, it may go well or badly, and, if it is to go well, it requires not only superior innate capacities but also traits of character which dispose us to intellectual excellence. Intellectual life requires intellectual virtue. A virtue is a stable property of character which disposes its possessor to operate well in some realm of human activity. Virtues are principles of the reliably excellent functioning which is required of practitioners in that realm. Moral virtues are those qualities of person which incline us to moral excellence; intellectual virtues are virtues exercised in relation to intellectual activities and goods. What may be said by way of further description? Some differentiations are worth noting. Intellectual virtues are different from intellectual faculties such as memory or reason. Faculties are innate, and their operation is generally not deliberate; intellectual virtues, by contrast, are acquired over time and require intentional exercise. Virtues direct the

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operation of faculties. Similarly, intellectual virtues are different from intellectual powers, that is, the set of capacities possessed by some person which make possible talented performance in a particular intellectual sphere. Virtues, once again, enable powers to be exercised in an optimal way. Intellectual virtues are different from intellectual skills, that is, the capability to perform specific intellectual tasks in expert fashion (read the score of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, translate the text of Beowulf). Intellectual virtues, by contrast, enable the cultivation, enhancement and use of skills. Lastly, intellectual virtues are different from intellectual practices. Intellectual practices are the operations in which intellectual faculties, powers and skills are put to work to accomplish intellectual tasks and so to acquire intellectual goods. Practices may be primarily individual – such as reading – or social and public – such as teaching and debating. Intellectual virtues, once again, are the qualities of person which enable discriminating, fitting engagement in intellectual practices. In short: intellectual virtues underlie intellectual faculties, powers, skills and practices, and animate excellent intellectual performance. ‘Excellent’ here refers not simply to technical proficiency, but to intellectual performance which moves in estimable ways to worthy intellectual ends: it is this which intellectual virtues empower. The supreme intellectual virtue, and the source and moving power of other intellectual virtues, is well-­formed love of knowledge, desire for intellectual goods which are worthy of praise. Intellectual life takes its rise in the appetite and the will. We desire intellectual goods – to understand the commanding moral and literary power of Balzac’s Human Comedy, or some such good – and we experience the satisfaction of that appetite when we attain such understanding. This attraction to knowledge and its rewards engages the will to pursue intellectual ends, subordinating or eliminating competing desires – if you want to figure out Balzac, don’t get too fascinated with Stendhal or Zola – and driving us into intellectual activity. Yet in itself love of knowledge does not suffice for intellectual excellence. Our desire to know may be prurient, attaching itself to unworthy goods; or it may attach itself to worthy goods for unworthy reasons such as self-­advancement or desire for celebrity. Desire for the goods of knowledge must be discriminating. Such discrimination is the fruit of the formation of desire; it arises from the right ordering of love of knowledge, so that love is set on fitting objects and pursues them in well-­tempered ways. Where such formation is lacking, love of knowledge risks becoming vicious – a greedy ungoverned appetite bent on the satisfactions of intellectual consumption. Rightly formed love, by contrast, is the root of the other virtues of the intellect. Formation is in large part a social process. We learn what constitutes

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an intellectual good, and how to pursue it fittingly, by being schooled, observing others who love truth and live the intellectual life in an excellent manner, appropriating the desires, intentions and behaviours of eminent practitioners of the arts of the mind, and so acquiring the habits which dispose us to similar excellence. The fruit of the formation of intellectual character is possession and prudent exercise of intellectual virtues. Enumerations and classifications of the intellectual virtues vary quite widely; here is a relatively simple arrangement. (1) There are those virtues which dispose us to labour to acquire intellectual goods. The principal virtue here is love of knowledge, the animating and directive power of intellectual life. The chief ancillary virtue is studiousness – assiduous, open-­minded, objective, consistent and well-­tempered application to the pursuit of new knowledge. Studiousness is earnest, ardent deployment of intellectual faculties, powers and talents, resisting premature satisfaction of intellectual appetite, and continuing to study until the desired goods are acquired. (2) There are those virtues which dispose us to receive the intellectual goods. These virtues include attentiveness (steady, observant direction of the mind to that which lies beyond ourselves); humility (awareness and acceptance of intellectual limitations); modesty (temperate estimation of one’s own excellence and resistance to the desire to be conspicuous); and docility or teachableness. (3) There are those virtues which fit us to contribute to and profit from common intellectual life: intellectual benevolence (the disposition to promote the intellectual good of others); intellectual generosity (sharing intellectual goods); affability (friendliness and approachability in intellectual exchange); impartiality (justice in intellectual conduct towards others); and gratitude (glad recognition of intellectual indebtedness). (4) There are those virtues which ready us to deal with difficulty in the pursuit of intellectual goods. These include magnanimity (the largeness of purpose which causes us to attempt demanding tasks); intellectual courage (firmness of mind in enduring what is outstandingly difficult); and, finally, intellectual patience, the analysis of which is our next task.

III We may begin with an anatomy of patience generally considered. Patience is that excellence of character by which, for the sake of some good end, we tolerate difficulties, and encounter obstacles to present happiness with equanimity, collectedness and steadiness of purpose. It is the quality of mind which overcomes aversion to extended labour and lack

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of fulfilment by composure and readiness to endure prolonged misfortune in order not to lose or desert good things. Patience has a secure place in the table of Christian virtues, appearing routinely in apostolic and early Christian paraenesis: patience enables believers to endure the interval before the promised return of Christ and the completion of history, to face present affliction, and to maintain peaceful common life. ‘Be patient . . . until the coming of the Lord’ . . . ‘may you be strengthened with all power . . . for all endurance and patience’ . . . ‘be patient with them all’ (Jas 5.7; Col. 1.11; 1 Thess. 5.14). In the Latin patristic tradition, patience is the subject of three widely-­influential treatises – those of Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine2 – and exhortation to patience is scattered throughout its exegetical, homiletical and ascetical texts. Though not a cardinal virtue, it is one of the principal moral entailments of Christian teaching, and an integral element in the present framing of life before God. Gregory the Great spoke of it as the ‘root and guardian of all virtues’3 – though others accord it a more minor status, subordinating it to courage: Aquinas is a case in point. Patience is also a common theme in the moral and spiritual literature of the Reformation and post-Reformation periods; affecting treatments of it may be found in English Puritan writers such as John Owen4 and Thomas Goodwin5. Texts on Christian patience often address the question of what it is that marks out distinctively Christian patience, ‘the patience of the saints’ (Rev. 13.10; 14.12). Classical treatments of the virtue, aware of the overlaps between their moral world and that of late antique paganism, are nevertheless often insistent on this distinctiveness. Here, for example, is Cyprian, writing in Carthage in the middle of the third century: ‘Philosophers also profess that they pursue this virtue; but in their case the patience is as false as their wisdom also is. For whence can he be either wise or patient, who has known neither the wisdom nor the patience of God?’6 True patience, on the other hand, is on Cyprian’s account an excellence only of the ‘servants and 2.  Tertullian, Of Patience (ANF 3); Cyprian, On the Advantage of Patience (ANF 5); Augustine, De patientia (NPNF 1.3). 3. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in evangelia 35, in Gregory the Great. Forty Gospel Homilies (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2009). 4. See, for example, Owen’s treatment of Hebrews 6.12 in An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, vol. 3 (London: Tegg, 1840), pp. 330–5. 5.  T. Goodwin, Patience and Its Perfect Work, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1861), pp. 429–67. 6.  Cyprian, On the Advantage of Patience 2.

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worshippers of God’, those who give ‘spiritual obedience’ and so demonstrate ‘the patience which we learn from heavenly teachings’.7 Cyprian’s point is not merely a bit of moral one-­upmanship; it is more that for the servant and worshipper of God and the recipient of divine instruction, the world is a different place, one which requires and makes possible a distinct manner of life of which patience is a part. We might elaborate this point along the following lines. Patience is, primordially, an excellence of reconciled creatures. It is an excellence of creatures, that is, of those who owe their being and movement to the creator’s goodness in communicating life, causing them to be, bestowing on them a specific nature and summoning them to its enactment. Yet that nature is ruined, because of creaturely defiance of both nature and its maker; knowledge of it is available to us only in fragments, intermittently glimpsed but nothing more; its full enactment would demand resources which no longer remain in our possession. Full knowledge and activation of our nature are therefore dependent upon its rescue. The rescue is effected in the works of divine benevolence: in acts of providence which preserve our damaged nature by preventing its collapse and preparing it for completion, and, supremely, in the acts of the divine Word and Spirit which bestow and direct a new creaturely nature. Christian moral teaching, including teaching about virtues, concerns the ways in which the renovation of our nature is appropriated, made a matter of active consent. If this is so, then to make Christian sense of a virtue we need to grasp its setting in the history of creation and reconciliation. Reflection upon that history generates not simply incentives to neglected duties but a metaphysics and an anthropology of morals. These articulate the principles of attitudes and actions which are not to be confounded with attitudes and actions of similar appearance but possessing quite different grounds. Understanding patience, in short, requires attention to what Tertullian, in the first great Latin treatise on patience, called ‘the divine disposition of a living and celestial discipline’.8 We may briefly set out some of the constitutive differences of a Christian metaphysics and anthropology of patience, before moving to reflect on patience in relation to intellectual life. Patience Christianly understood has distinct causes and acting subjects. It is not a straightforward effect of human nature. This is because, on the one hand we are creatures and so only live and move through another’s love, and, on the other hand our created nature has suffered such depredation 7.  Cyprian, On the Advantage of Patience 2. 8.  Tertullian, Of Patience 2.

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that, though some aptitude for patience remains as a residue of our integral state, its completion is out of our reach. Of necessity, therefore, human patience is an effect of a divine cause. This means, most basically, that God is the ‘author’ of patience: ‘from him patience begins; from him its glory and its dignity take their rise’.9 But patience is a divine effect because it is a divine property: God is the source of patience because he is patient in himself. Divine patience allows creatures time to enact their lives; in the face of creaturely rejection, it does not terminate the creature but continues to grant to the creature further opportunities and possibilities. This divine patience is not suffering but long-­suffering, longanimity: not passive waiting upon creaturely purpose but the enduring exercise of government.10 Within this patient divine order, creatures enact their lives: ‘Where God is’ says Tertullian ‘there too is . . . patience’.11 Patience, then, is a divine property and a ‘gift of God’,12 generative of, and exemplary for, human conduct. Its exemplary force is known supremely in the life of Christ in which it is embodied and commended. Cyprian, for example, looks at the entire course of the incarnation from heavenly descent through passion to exaltation as divine-­human illustration and pattern of the excellence of patience. ‘[H]e maintained the patience of his Father in the constancy of his endurance’;13 and so, ‘let us walk by the example of Christ’.14 God’s authorship of patience is both creative and exemplary, making possible and in this way evoking creaturely patience. Divine causality is not simply efficient, propelling our moral lives from outside (how then would they be moral?): God moves by love and so does not stifle but bestow life. In patience, as in all things, God so moves us so that we live and move. Yet – precisely because they are moved by God – our life and movement are not some instinctive abundance original in us. Human patience is not innate strength but what Augustine calls ‘the patience of the poor’, received from the ‘Rich One’ who is its giver.15 From the Spirit comes love of God, and with it the ordering and formation of right desire, from which, by the 9.  Cyprian, On the Advantage of Patience 3. 10. See K. Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, pp. 410–14; Augustine, De patientia I.1. 11.  Tertullian, Of Patience 15. 12.  Augustine, De patientia I.1. 13.  Cyprian, On the Advantage of Patience 6. 14.  Cyprian, On the Advantage of Patience 9. 15.  Augustine, De patientia XV.12. In this connection, much may be learned from A. MacIntyre’s attention to vulnerability as basic to the human condition in Dependent Rational Animals, esp. pp. x–xii, 4–8.

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Spirit’s further grace, patience arises: ‘of whom cometh in us love, of him cometh patience’.16 Such are the causes of patience. What of its objects, the matters about which we need to be patient? Patience is endurance of difficulties and resistance to the dejection which those difficulties generate. Classical Christian moral literature picks out four related kinds of difficulty to which patience directs itself: (1) the active presence of hostility and persecution, and the possibility of martyrdom; (2) the deprivations encountered in pursuing monastic and ascetical vocation; (3) the demands of social relations in the Christian community; (4) Christian experience of distress, arising either from our fallen natural existence or from the unresolved and contested condition of the Christian pilgrim. Christian patience reads these afflictions in a distinct way. Sorrow persuades us that adversity is an eruption of disorder, the onslaught of malignant fortune. Patience suffers the same sorrow, but sees the afflictions which give rise to sorrow as contained within the divine providence. Afflictions, that is, are purposive occasions for divine goodness, instruction, correction and consolation, as well as opportunities for the enactment of virtue. Patience is not resignation to calamity, because calamity is not a Christian category; patience is, rather, composure in adversity derived from knowledge of divine order and protection. This, in turn, is because Christian patience has a specific end. Its goal is a good deal more than preservation of equanimity in tribulation, for patience directs itself to the cessation of tribulation and the completion of our nature – in simple terms, heaven. Christian patience arises from knowledge of and trust in a future good already secured but at present not enjoyed. Patience, on Augustine’s definition, is ‘that by which we tolerate evil things with an even mind, that we may not with a mind uneven desert good things through which we may arrive at better’.17 What of the operation of Christian patience? Having this cause, these objects, this end, in what attitudes and behaviours is it displayed? Much might be gleaned from the literature of moral analysis and pastoral exhortation: about conformity to Christ’s patience; about willing endurance of affliction as discipline; about composure and joy in tribulation; about tolerance of and gentleness towards others whom we find troublesome. Activities and behaviours such as these arise not simply from diligent application of natural capacities but from knowledge of the new nature and from affection for the 16.  Augustine, De patientia XXIII.20. 17.  Augustine, De patientia II.2.

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good to which it directs us. The point may be illustrated by a contrast which Calvin draws between Christian patience and insensibility or resignation. Patience is not, on Calvin’s account, a refusal to allow ‘the natural feeling of sorrow’18 when met by outrageous fortune; if we ‘make patience into insensibility and a valiant and constant person into a stock’, then ‘we renounce the pursuit of patience’.19 Facing affliction, truly patient persons feel bitterness and apprehension, but, instead of suppressing these emotions, incline to a certain forbearance. This forbearance is grounded in a condition in which patient persons find themselves, one which, even in contrary circumstances, displays the fact that God ‘does nothing except with a well-­ordered justice’.20 To suffer patiently is thus much more than to ‘yield to necessity’; it is, rather, to ‘consent [to our] own good’21 – and this, once again, because Christian patience reads the world differently. What of the vices which stand opposed to patience? Most obviously, impatience, refusal to endure affliction with composure. Impatience is manifest as restlessness: feverish excitement, frenzy, distraction, instability, irritability, those attitudes and behaviours which erode steadiness of spirit and longanimity.22 Impatience harms us more than any affliction to which it responds intemperately. This is because its fury so fills us that we become incapable of following suffering to its term, and we forsake the good in which affliction issues: ‘the impatient’, Augustine tells us, ‘while they will not suffer ills, effect no deliverance from ills, but only the suffering of heavier ills’.23 Lastly, what of precepts of Christian patience, injunctions to its exercise? Precepts have their origin and force in conceptions of the way the world is; they are the imperative force of being. Christian precepts to patience rest on and give expression to all that has been said so far about the causes, agents, operations and ends of patience: because there is this God and this 18.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.viii.10. 19.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.viii.10 (ET altered). 20.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.viii.11. 21.  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.viii.11. 22. See, for example, the contrast of patience with frenzy in Shepherd of Hermas II.5.ii, and Gregory the Great’s admonition to the impatient (Pastoral Rule III.9): ‘The impatient are to be told that . . . while they neglect to bridle their spirit, they are hurried through many steep places of iniquity which they seek not after, inasmuch as fury drives the mind whither desire draws it not, and, when perturbed, it does, not knowing, what it afterwards grieves for when it knows.’ 23.  Augustine, De patientia II.2.

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world of his making and remaking, because there are these creatures, then act in these ways, strive for these excellences, including the excellence of patience. Precepts to patience seek to elicit and direct the exercise of our renewed nature, status and calling. And, more than anything, they are precepts of divine grace, accompanied by promises of divine assistance and consolation. This portrayal of Christian patience may perhaps strike some as isolationist. But to draw attention to what differentiates moral worlds and practices is not to betray a sectarian mentality. Rather, it is to recognize that all accounts of virtue, theological or non-­theological, necessarily rest upon a reading of the world. If this is so, then to describe a moral act is not simply to describe an occurrence to which a certain value is ascribed, but to indicate a whole anterior realm of moral nature and culture, of goods and intentions, to which the moral act gives practical assent and expression. The interesting – and contested – questions are these: Whose patience? Patience with what causes and objects? Patience for what ends? Patience out of what resources? Yet difference is not the end of the matter. The moral worlds of believer and unbeliever, divergent though they may be, are not wholly discrete. This is not because they are simply different brands of the same thing; it is more that they exist at different stages in the history of human renovation. A Christian theology of virtue does not treat pagan virtue as wholly devoid of worth. It tries rather to give it intelligibility by seeing it as enfolded within the history of divine judgement and renewal of creaturely life. Unhindered exercise of a virtue like patience requires piety and attraction to worthy goods, which are the fruit of conversion from self-­absorption to love of God. But even in its damaged state and its resistance to the end to which it was appointed, natural human life contains anticipations of its conversion, common graces which, however haltingly, stretch out to its completeness. Intellectual patience is one such anticipation. How may it be described? Intellectual patience is patience exercised in relation to intellectual goods; the occasions for its exercise are those afflictions which attend pursuit of these goods, inhibiting their acquisition and enjoyment. Intellectual patience is closely affiliated with intellectual courage. Intellectual courage faces the fears which arise when we seek to obtain intellectual goods – criticism, loss of honour, isolation from prestige, and so on – and does not allow the fears to paralyse us. Courage is not recklessness: the threats are real, and mere bravado is of no avail. Rather, courage is prudent, evaluating threats and determining when to be bold, when to exercise caution, when to withdraw from the field. Courage presupposes magnanimity, in which we aspire to undertake great endeavours and extend ourselves to an end

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which moves us to operate at full capacity. The pusillanimous person attempts little, content to contract and retreat rather than face vexation. By contrast, the magnanimous person – not the presumptive or over-­ambitious or vainglorious person – expands and advances. Yet in so doing, such a person finds the path strewn with obstacles; patience is an element in preventing collapse of intellectual purpose in the face of possible injury or loss, and in pressing ahead to completion. Exercise of intellectual patience is demanding, because in varying degrees we are alienated from our created nature in its integrity, and our customary condition is intellectual impatience. Why is impatience so close at hand? Because we have become covetous, seeking to treat intellectual goods as something other than a divine gift. Covetousness fails to acknowledge that, because we are creatures, ‘nothing is ours’24 – everything is received but not owned. Assent to the condition of being a creature involves coming to see that the fragility and indigence of our being are not a matter of dishonour or peril; they are intrinsic to the way in which we come to enjoy the good things of divine provision. Dissent from the creaturely condition fails to see our intrinsic poverty against the backdrop of God’s infinite generosity; it does not understand that the economy of our lives, including our intellectual lives, is characterized by what Tertullian calls ‘bestowing and communicating’;25 it prefers to think that only possessed goods are stable and satisfying. When in the course of intellectual activity we meet afflictions with this framing of our affections, the result is impatience: agitation, defensiveness, discomposure. Patience is part of the ascetics of intelligence, necessary for the repair of intellectual nature and the rectification of intellectual appetite. Intellectual patience is a distributed virtue which encompasses both the individual and the social domains of intellectual life, in each of which affliction may be encountered. We look at each in turn. 1.  Two elements of individual intellectual life are the objects of intellectual patience. First, patience is required in view of the temporal character of created intellect. Our knowledge is discursive, acquired over time, rather than innate or intuitive. We come to know by learning, and our learning is never complete. Not so divine knowledge, which knows all things in a simple comprehensive act of intuition. Intrinsic to the creaturely intellectual condition is the necessity of suffering the process of coming-­to-know: human intellectual activity takes time. Because of this, intellectual life requires the 24.  Tertullian, Of Patience 7. 25.  Tertullian, Of Patience 7.

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virtues of longanimity and patience. Longanimity is the excellence which perseveres long as we direct ourselves to some future good; it is, Aquinas notes, ‘that quality by which we have the spirit to strive for a distant aim’.26 Patience is the excellence which deals with the reality that, in the damaged condition of our nature, the temporal remoteness of the fulfilment of our intellectual appetite is a source of a double misery. First, the injuries which our nature has sustained include loss of powers, making the acquisition of intellectual goods and the satisfaction of intellectual appetite much more laborious (one – crucial – episode apart, Adam thought more quickly than his heirs). Second, we chafe at these labours, and at the delays by which they are exacerbated. Intellectual patience is that part of fortitude which enables us to retain a proper focus, which preserves us from looking for shortcuts to effect deliverance, and which keeps us in a sedate and hopeful temper, in anticipation of the perfect intellectual rest which awaits us. Patience is also required in view of creaturely insufficiency and dependence. To be a creature – to exist out of nothing – is to be other than self-­sufficient, complete in oneself. We are contingent beings whose nature only flourishes by way of dependence: in receiving from and giving to other creatures, and, most of all, in relying upon infinite divine generosity. The human intellectual condition always involves pathos, being subject to constitution from outside.27 Our intellectual life is by nature and operation always an undergoing, even a surrender, as much as it is an acting.28 And our injured nature, forgetful of the infinite abundance of love of which pathos bears the impress, treats pathos as something threatening, revealing not only the limitation and incalculability of our intellectual undertakings but also, more deeply, our ‘hanging upon’ and subjection to another reality. Intellectual patience is acknowledgement and embrace of this condition. Yet it is not abandonment of responsibility for aiming our intellectual lives: no one can know for me, no one can think on my behalf. Patience is a condition for intellectual operation, not its relinquishment. Patience is trustful bearing of intellectual insufficiency, sheltering our intellectual lives from the malign identification of dignity and autonomy. In this way, patience 26.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIaIIae.136.5 resp. 27. On this, see R. Hütter, Suffering Divine Things. Theology as Church Practice (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), especially pp. 29–34, 124f. 28. See M. Heidegger’s meditation on Gelassenheit in ‘Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking’, in Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 58–90.

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liberates creatures from the ideal of entire intellectual adequacy: we know in part, but we may still know well. Such intellectual patience is formed and directed by the two fundamental enactments of creaturely dependence: attention to divine instruction and prayer. Much modern intellectual culture despises these acts as evasions or corrosions of responsibility. In distorted and debased forms, of course, they may be. But they may be much more: acts in which the repair of our intellectual nature takes present form, exercises in which we recall our integral state and anticipate our coming completion. 2.  What of intellectual patience as a social virtue? Intellectual life, though often individual, is never purely private. Even in its most extreme introversion, it is a mode of life in society. At every point it involves the communication of intellectual goods, and it is almost unthinkable without public, institutional forms – schools, funding arrangements, systems for assessing and rewarding intellectual performance. Excellent engagement in these public realms requires a set of interlaced virtues: charity, generosity, humility, tolerance, docility, and patience. Consider a couple of social extensions of intellectual patience. Patience is exercised in teachableness, disposing us to readiness for learning. Most immediately, this means learning from our contemporary intellectual neighbours and companions. A little more distantly, patience involves deference to traditions of inquiry, the remains and echoes of companions long gone. Both involve the chastening of self-­sufficiency, a certain loss of autonomy, as we come to terms with the fact that the intellectual life is neither from itself or de novo. Others are already here, still others have been here in the past. Coming to see that inquiry is a social practice, and learning the difference between intellectual originality and untutored spontaneity, requires a mortification of the affections away from self-­command and their renewal through patience, because impatient persons learn little, having cut themselves off from sources of learning. ‘Through this vice of impatience . . . instruction, the nurse of virtues, is dissipated . . . Everyone is shown to be by so much less instructed as they are convicted of being less patient.’29 Patience is further exercised in the exchange of intellectual goods, especially in practices of public speech and debate. From its inception, Christian faith entailed new rhetorical practices and new modes of intellectual communication which set aside those which enjoyed cultural 29. Gregory the Great, Pastoral Rule III.9.

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prestige: ‘Where is the debater of this age?’ (1 Cor. 1.20 – divines have often been lamentably reluctant to take the point). Patience in public communication of intellectual goods arises from acknowledgement that those goods are not property to be grasped, defended or consumed but gifts. Property confers status and generates competition and conflict, and status, competition and conflict threaten peaceful, generous and friendly pursuit of truth in common. Patience faces these threats and disorders with composure, knowing that tranquil speech serves to commend the truth, and with prudent forbearance, having a well-­formed understanding of occasion and opportunity which knows when to withdraw and when to continue. Patience in view of the irritability and hastiness of public speech has a three-­fold source. Its first fountain is deep attachment to intellectual goods, which are of such desirableness and splendour that we may not allow ourselves or others to desert them in strife. Second, it springs from humble recognition that we ourselves not only suffer but also inflict suffering. And third, in its Christian modulation, public intellectual patience is sustained by remembrance of divine forbearance, the ‘perfect patience’ (1 Tim. 1.16) which has set an end to contests and established peace as our proper condition.

IV By way of conclusion . . . Lament at the threats faced by university institutions is a well-­established genre of academic writing; sometimes the results are perceptive, at other times self-­indulgent registering of complaints. That universities face externally-­imposed inhibitions to their full flourishing is indisputable, though hardly a novel state of affairs. However, such vexations are a sub-­set of the perennial vexations of the intellectual life. Two things are required by individuals and institutions if those vexations are not to clog the performance of our intellectual nature. First, it is necessary to interpret these threats by an act of intelligence, for to know and understand a threat to the best of our abilities is already to contain and move against it. Coming to understand threats to intellectual well-­being, however, requires more than a reaction to the surface elements or phenomena which cause anxiety or distress; we need to understand their causes. We require, in other words, some sort of well-­ordered, coherent and plausible account of the first principles of intellectual life and activity; if we would make sense of our troubles, we require a metaphysics of the intellect and its undertakings. One test of the vitality of an intellectual institution is whether it has the appetite to think about and discuss such

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matters, and sufficient freedom from distraction to do so fruitfully. Divinity is well placed to encourage and participate in such conversations, because it is able to draw upon a long tradition of thought about the inescapably moral and spiritual character of pursuit of intellectual goods, and because it has access to a fund of concepts and arguments about the intellectual life possessed of remarkable illuminative and explanatory power. A theology of the intellectual virtues is part of that store. Second, engaging threats to the pursuit of any good, intellectual or otherwise, requires understanding and practice of the virtues. Talk of virtues, however, presupposes that there is such a thing as human nature, and that it brings with it a good which beings having that nature are to pursue in order to flourish. Modern political, economic and sometimes intellectual regimes regard such a presupposition as at best primitive, at worst an obstacle to pure spontaneous self-­creation. Once again, divines find themselves under a particular obligation here: to explicate how it is that the intellectual life is part of the good life, and how the good life is that life in which our given nature comes to be realized. To grasp that nature, to observe and understand its inherent direction and to follow the vocation which it carries within itself, we need to grasp its creatureliness, its absolutely conditioned character. To be human is in every element of our being to be referred to a source of life; and that reference is not dark heteronomy but the deeply happy reality that, though we might not have been, by divine generosity we are and live. It is this which makes intellectual life possible, and which sustains it when harassed by difficulty. Action and emotion are rightly ordered when they follow being or nature; virtues are excellences which direct and preserve this following of nature. Patience is the virtue which directs and preserves by checking distress at adversity as we wait for and persevere towards nature’s completion, and so imparts quiet vigour to our often harassed undertakings.

Index of Names Aletti, J.-N. 18 n.24, 22 n.30 Ambrose 89, 91, 97 n.45, 101, 131 n.8 Aquinas 35, 54–5, 62 n.21, 68–70, 73–6, 78–84, 89–101, 106–8, 111, 121, 127–30, 132–6, 139, 146, 154, 156, 158–9, 163, 168–9, 171–2, 177, 184 Aristotle 71 n.8, 97 Augustine 38–40, 53, 62, 69, 71–2, 75–80, 83, 88–9, 93, 102, 108–10, 116–17, 120, 127, 130–1, 144, 150, 155, 164, 168, 170, 177, 179–81 Barth, K. 11–13, 20, 25, 35, 37, 56, 58, 109, 114, 120, 164, 179 Basil of Caesarea 105, 117 n.38, 118–19 Bengel, J. A. 7 Blowers, P. M. 163 n.7 Bonhoeffer, D. 12–13, 16–17 Boston, T. 88 n.1 Bowlin, J. R. 89 n.5, 92 Brakel, W. à 129 n.4 Calvin, J. 25, 37–8, 43–4, 105, 115, 140, 144–5, 148–9, 181 Cancik, H. 31 n.2 Cassian 118–20 Cates, D. F. 70 n.5 Chrysostom, J. 15 n.19, 47 Clement of Alexandria 153 Cyprian of Carthage 58–9, 177–9 Dalferth, I. U. 17 n.23 Dassmann, E. 31 n.2 Deigh, J. 74 n.14 Descartes, R. 147 DeYoung, R. K. 80 n.40 Dixon, T. 69 n.3 Dunn, J. D. G. 21 n.28, 22 n.31 Dupré, L. 33 n.6 Dürig, W. 31 n.2

Edwards, J. 56 Emmett, D. 61 n.18 Ernst, C. 171 n.23 Ernst, J. 14 n.18 Finnis, J. 36 n.13 Ford, D. 172 n.25 Forsyth, P. T. 110–11 Gilson, E. 168 n.12 Goldie, P. 74 n.14 Goodwin, T. 113, 177 Grässer, E. 22 n.30 Gregory of Nyssa 115, 117 n.38 Gregory the Great 89, 97, 139, 177, 181 Griffiths, P. J. 83 n.51 Grossman, A. 31 n.2 Hauerwas, S. 89 n.5, 90 n.10 Heidegger, M. 184 n.28 Helms, E. 31 n.2 Hering, J. 6 n.3, 9 n.7, 21 n.27 Heuser, S. 35 n.8, 38 n.18, 41 n.20 Hibbs, T. 68 n.2 Higton, M. 158 n.2, 170 n.20 Horton, M. 11 n.9 Howard, T. A. 158 n.2 Huber, W. 31 n.2 Hütter, R. 184 n.27 Jordan, M. 69 n.5 Kant, I. 36, 46, 51, 147, 153 Kierkegaard, S. 60 King, P. 69 n.5 Knuuttila, S. 69 n.3, n.5 Kraynak, R. P. 38 n.18 Law, W. 105 n.4 Leget, C. 69 n.5

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Lightfoot, J. B. 21–2 Lohse, E. 21 n.27, 24 Lombardo, N. E. 70 n.5 Loughlin, S. 78 n.30 MacIntyre, A. 64–5, 179 n.15 Marsden, G. 172 n.25 McCabe, H. 89 n.5 Milbank, J. 166 n.10 Miner, R. 70 n.5, 78 n.30 Mirandola, G. P. della 31–2 Nauck, W. 9 n.8 Nietzsche, F. 55–6, 66 Nussbaum, M. 73 Owen, J. 4, 6, 104, 107 n.9, 112, 113, 117, 177 Pannenberg, W. 43 n.21 Pelikan, J. 158 n.1 Pieper, J. 89 n.5, 90, 97 n.46 Pinches, C. 89 n.5, 90 n.10 Pinckaers, S. 70 n.5, 78 n.30 Pokorný, P. 22 n.30 Porter, J. 89 n.5 Pseudo-Macarius 109, 119, 121

Schleiermacher, F. D. E. 55–6 Schmitz, K. L. 142 n.1, 158 n.1 Schweitzer, E. 23 n.33 Schwöbel, C. 41 n.20, 45 nn.23–4 Scotus 147 Solomon, R. C. 74 n.14 Sorabji, R. 69 n.3 de Sousa, R. 74 n.14 Spaemann, R. 30 n.1, 63 n.22, 65 n.27 Sparn, W. 31 n.2 Starke, E. 31 n.2 Stump, E. 70 n.5 Sweeney, E. C. 69 n.5, 78 n.30 Tertullian 23, 177–9, 183 Thielicke, H. 36 Tinder, G. 30 n.1, 36 n.13 Turretin, F. 11 Ulrich, H. 13, 36, 38 Vanhoozer, K. J. 11 n.9

Quash, B. 11 n.9

Wannenwetsch, B. 19 n.25, 61 n.18, 64 n.23 White, K. 69 n.5 Williams, A. N. 159 n.4 Wolterstorff, N. 172 n.25

Roberts, R. 74 n.14

Yearley, L. H. 89 n.5, 90 n.10

Subject Index Acedia 80–1 Ambition 98–9 Analysis by principles 142, 158 vs phenomenalism 166–7 Anthropology, theological-moral 29, 33, 36 Apathy and impassibility 77 Audacity 94–6 Autonomy, 35–6, 41, 184–5 Baptism 15, 22, 61, 106–9, 111–12, 125 Christ 5–27, 51–3 cross 103 exaltation 41 reconciling work 8–9, 38–44 resurrection 22 Word of 18–20, 138 Christology 5–27, 41–2, 114–15 Church 20, 45–7 Concupiscence 74, 101, 109 Contemplation 12–14, 82–3, 87–8, 105, 155–6, 161–4, 172 orders practice 161–2 Continence 117–18 Courage 87–102, 176, 182–3 endurance 94 martyrdom 94 and prudence, justice, temperance 97 Creation 143–4 ex nihilo 34–5, 125 Creatures 30, 34–5, 73–4, 145 action 1, 62, 152 being and act 2–3, 11–12, 14–15, 26, 34, 68, 87 being and sin 129 the body 154 causality 127 characteristics 125–6 conjunction 73–5, 84, 87 dignity 29–47, 133–4

end 34–5 moral reason 11, 20, 27, 71, 114, 117, 123 praise and gratitude 131–2 relations 126 speech 123–40 Curiosity 134, 149–50, 155, 162–4, 172 Docility 153 Emotion 73–4 Fear 95–6, 102 God: activity 8, 56, 141, 143, 159 intellect 144, 160 mercy 52–8 patience 179–80 Gratitude 137, 153, 176 Habits 107 Indifference 119 Intellect 141–56, 159, 162–4 and sin 148–51 operation in social forms 163 regenerate life 153–6 regulative function 83, 146–7 and religion 170 virtues 176 Longanimity 184 Magnanimity 97–8, 182–3 Magnificence 97 Metaphysics 11, 15, 141–3, 171–2 Moderation 96, 128, 139–40 Moral ontology 11–14, 44, 51–2 Moral reason 5, 18, 88–90, 95

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Nature 2–3, 11–12, 24–5, 32–6, 68, 74–6, 88, 95, 103, 106–8, 123–4, 147–8, 187 integral state 74 end 52, 125–6, 148 Patience 100–1, 176–82 Presumption 98 Prudence 168–70 Pusillanimity 99–100, 183 Regeneration 82, 106–7, 135–6 Religion 120–1, 131–2 Reputation, 133–5 Revelation 71–2, 142 Sanctification 103–21 imitation of Christ 114–15 mortification 104 perfectionism 110–11 self-examination 119 vivification 104 work of Holy Spirit 112 Scripture 19–21 Sin 39, 63, 74, 106, 124 blasphemy 131–33 defamation 133–5 flattery 130–1 backbiting and gossip 134 knowledge 123–5 lying 130 Son of God 10–11, 40–4, 51–2 appointment 81 exaltation 41 humiliation 40–2

Sorrow 67–85 disordered 79–80 elements 74–5 godly grief 80 goodness 75 proper function 78–9 worldly grief 80–1 Studiousness 149, 155, 159, 176 Theology 1–4, 29–30 cognitive principles 159–60 definition 159 ends 161–2 and fellowship of church 170 moral 1–4, 67–8, 124 ontology and deontology 87 subordinate to exegesis and dogmatics 67 object 2 public theology 50 role in university 167–8, 183 scope 141–2 setting 160–1 work of religion 159 University 157–72 elements 163–4 naturalization of scientia 166 setting 164–5 threats against 186–7 Vainglory 99 Virtue 90 pagan virtue 182